Reply to Coming back to Christianity for the wrong reasons

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[quote=Anonymous]OP, as I've told my questioning kids, people have made careers out of trying to figure out the existence of God, or if God exists, if he is a personal god, etc.  This is nothing new.

Anyone with 1/2 a brain is going to noodle over this question.  I don't think you have to figure it out in order to join a church.

Here is something from philosophy:  Imagine I said to you, "For the next full minute, believe that the sun isn't going to rise tomorrow."

Well, you can try, but you can't do it.  The concept here is that you cannot choose to believe what you believe.  At least not like that.  You think the way you think based on your experiences and cannot just flip a switch and think the opposite.

But then imagine that you turn on the TV and every station is going on about how a meteor knocked the earth off its slant a little and in your region, the sun wasn't going to rise tomorrow.  You turn on the radio and hear the same thing.  You may find your belief about the sun not rising changing.

So the key to changing beliefs is new information.

So, one idea is to go to church, listen to some great priest/minister, and maybe some of that will be a novel way of looking at things which will help your faith.

Next: My kids were at a great Catholic school, and the principal was this awesome super-smart nun. She said it was good to plant the seed, because young people turn away from religion, but if they have the seed, it gives them something to come back to when they have kids.  It helps them get into a community.  I can't remember it all, but her assumption was that as teens/young adults, it's not surprising that they leave, and as they become parents, it's not surprising that they come back.  But the idea was to give the kids that seed so they can come back.  From that, it sounds like you're on track.

Finally, I'm pretty pragmatic, and I see religion as a tool to be used to help me, and help my kids, be more grounded, have a moral compass, be better people and be happier overall through learning gratitude.  I use it to the extent that it helps, and leave those elements that might be toxic to me. So yes I'm a cafeteria Catholic.  (There are other tools that can accomplish this; I use many tools to achieve this.)

(As an aside, I feel compelled to say I'm purposefully not inserting anything about the recent Catholic scandal here because it's not the purpose of your post)[/quote]

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