The Catholic faith was always the center of my world, until I went to high school. There were so many things that formed what I believe in the world each day I learned more about the Catholic faith. I learned that my judgments about the world were originally made by the Catholic middle and elementary schools I attended as a child. I had a religion teacher who defined the word Jihad as "holy war" simply showing that she had not done her homework on the Muslim faith and that she simply believed what someone else had told her like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. Ms. Murphy was a turtle like woman who wore thick glasses and turtle necks. She was painfully Irish and was simply ignorant. When I got to high school I took a comparative religions class where we had a Muslim speaker who simply told us that Jihad is defined as "struggle." This changed my view of Islam drastically because before I had learned that all Muslims were crazy terrorists who were fighting for "Allah" but now I know that those are extremists just like the Christian faith has extremists and terrorists are not all middle eastern people. The fact that somehow I acquired this knowledge as a child does worry me and the fact that I assume that at the same time people are truly believing these things and passing them down through family and other communities. The other thing that happened to me in Catholic high school is that I lost my belief in Catholicism. Everything that I was taught about the faith had an almost direct contradiction to other things that I had been taught. The fact that the Catholic church went out on crusades to kill Muslims just proves that each religion has to develop and make their own mistakes before they come to equilibrium and are mostly not crazy.
I, similarly, went to a Catholic elementary school and had somewhat similar response to the Catholic religion after going on to a public middle and high school. Just like all religions, Catholicism claims to be the one true religion that couldn't possibly do wrong. As a little kid without knowledge of other religions, you don't realize this. I cannot say that I know longer believe in Catholicism, but I can say that I now pick and choose and take everything I hear with a grain of salt.
ReplyDeleteI think its quite remarkable how society would so readily define someone else as "threatening"(for lack of a better) just because they look different and its convenient. As much as I mistrust Catholicism as an institution, perhaps some aspects may be worth reexamining just like some aspects of Islam was worth reexamining.
ReplyDeleteI think no matter what society a person is in there will be biased based on what the general population believes in. This isn't exculsive to religion either but to almost everything whether it be patriotism, or even on a smaller scale such as choices in food. People tend to see the best in what they are comfortable with and often overlook many aspects in order to see a subject in a positive light.
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