(W14) My Views on Religion: The in depth look.

It is a struggle. When I was thirteen years old I lost a three year old nephew to cancer, my father had a heart attack, one of my sisters was diagnosed with cancer, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. When I was Fourteen, just as everything started to level out, my sister died of a blood clot.

I started to go to mass every week, and then my mother hip started to bother her, so we stopped going. Then the pastor, who I had started to learn about God from, was removed from the church for an incident that happened when he was in his early twenties. I have not entered that building in seven years, it no longer houses keys to the afterlife for me.

My nephew who was three, was a wonderful little boy. Without us telling him, he knew that he was to smile when a camera was out. There are mounds of pictures that follow him through his short life, more then half of which he was fighting death at every turn. He had touched the lives of everyone around him, bringing hope to the families of other ill children. The church was full of people, many of who I had never met or heard story of. All of them with a memory of a little boy that smiled and laughed and played whenever he got the chance.

My sister was twenty nine years old. She was a devote Catholic, she taught Sunday school for many years. She got her degree in education and was a school teacher for one year. To me she was like a mother. Our parents had gotten divorced when I was five, my mother had gotten a full time job and had gone back to college. My sister knew when I was having a bad day, my sister would get me to talk about stuff, my sister fought hard to teach me to read. Once again the church filled with people, once again there were many that I had never heard about and many that there was no story for. The one that I remember most, was a boy that she had taught that one year as a teacher. She had fought to teach him how to love learning, he knew how hard she had fought for him and he cried so hard that he buckled over and and his parents had to pick him off the ground.

Over the last seven years I have questioned over and over why they had died and I had survived, for the most part I felt guilty to still be alive. After I stopped going to church I lost faith in a higher power. How could there be a God? If there was a God things like this would not happen. If there was a God I would not feel this much pain inside of me.

The sister that lost her son, paved over her past. She has become a born again Christian. Her love for her church got me to sit down with her pastor. I asked him what his church was about. He told me that he taught that the bible housed the answers for everyone. He said "How could the bible not be the word of God, all of the stories told to different people come together so to give one message." He told me that Catholicism was not right and that every Catholic was just following a pattern that they were told they had to follow. Then he told me that I could not be saved by God unless I said the sinners prayer and then devoted the rest of my life to Jesus Christ. I asked 'What if I devoted myself to Christ but did not say the prayer?' And he replied "You will not be saved."

There were many things that I did not agree with in his statements. The first is that I have studied the bible from a stand point where it is the greatest wisdom story of all times. My Honors 101: Wisdom Stories From Antiquity. In the class I learned full well that the bible pieced together. We read in class two accounts that were not in the bible. The book of Mary Magdalene and the Book of Thomas. Both had all the same accounts that the ones that had made it into the bible did, but they placed Christ as a man. The to book described that they had witnessed accounts of emotions. We openly discussed the criteria that works needed to make it into the bible and that there was a comity that decided what books would make it into the bible. So when he said that the bible fit so well together because it was the Word of God, I could only think that it was the Word of God chosen by a group of Men, claiming they had the right to speak for God.

Secondly I did not believe that there was anything wrong with the current Catholic beliefs. Sure in the early history of Catholicism there was a group of corrupt men that sold rights of passage to Heaven. But that came to an end centuries ago. I can see that saying on prayer over and over could lead to nothing, but that is up to the person that prays the payers. The prayers are meant to make you think about God and reflect who you are in the eyes of God. The last rights is a ceremony for those that believe that they have made a mistake in their life; and for those that mean it, I see no reason they would not be granted into Heaven.

The third thing that I did not agree on was, I must say one prayer and follow one path; and that was the only way to be saved by God. This is where hatred and wars are made, not the road to salvation. If I was to believe that there was only one way to God, then I would have to think long and hard to make sure that I was following the correct path. Judaism, Christianity and the Muslim Religion all have one God, and there path is the only way to God. Christianity has a vast amount of sects, so many that if I were to stand on the roof of my house and count the crosses in the sky, I would be in the double digits before I started to strain my eyes. How could anyone of them claim that everyone else was going to die and not go to Heaven? What gave them the right to claim they were the only way to God?

Just last week I was talking to a man that I had prayed for. My niece was in pieces, she had a crush on this man and he had hit an eighteen wheeler that was hauling half of a double wide trailer, when his car swerved into the other lane. I prayed for him, because I knew that he had a little girl, I knew that he had been working too many hours to be able to sleep any decent amount, and I knew that my niece would be heart broken if he had died. Last week I talked with him and asked him what his survival rate was when the emergency crew had gotten there. "0%, they had called me dead. They life flighted me, but they were sure I was going to die. They could not call it until they had landed, but they knew for sure that I was going to die."

There was my proof of God, in black and white. The man that had 0% to live was standing in front of me, because I prayed for him. So I believe there is a God, I believed it before I prayed and I believed it whole heartedly when I prayed that day, and I would have believed it if he had said he was rated at 56% survival rate.

I am a Human, therefor I pass no right to claim that I have the answer to the path to God, but I know which one I plan to follow. I believe in God and the spirit of Jesus, but I do not believe in any written documentation about speaking to God or seeing Jesus. I do not believe that any man is condemned by the the religion he or she was raised in. I think that all go before God and are Judged. Weather or not one of the terrorist that flew a plane into the Twin towers on September 11th is going to go to Heaven or to Hell, is Gods choice alone. Personally based on what I know of the Muslim Jehudist Sect, each one of those men may stand a chance at going to Heaven, not because those actions were right; but because those were the only action that those men were taught. From the moment they are born they are told that they must kill themselves and countless others to make it to Heaven. If they had been offered a different choice and chose to kill any way then I would think differently about there chance at making it to Heaven.

I follow my path to God, you follow the one that you think is right, and we all will stand before God to be Judged.

-NK