A different view of my holiday

**Disclaimer: This blog is not meant to offend or hurt any one in any way. This blog is solely based on my own thoughts and beliefs. These thoughts and beliefs are my own. I am willing to share, but I will never impose them on anyone. They are mine alone.**

I got to thinking the other day about the holidays and of course religion crops up too. This is the holiday season and it is circled around religious events. Christmas is the birth of Jesus, the son of God. Hanukkah is the festival of lights. What it really seams to boil down to is the season of gift giving. A time for giving and receiving gifts. I still can quite figure out where the tradition of gift giving came from, but I’m regressing. To me Christmas is about family, a time where we can get together and share time and love together, and yes the occasional gift given from the heart. It is, fortunately or not, no longer about religion for me.

Let me go back to where this has started for me this holiday season. Corey and I were at dinner the other night, and we saw a couple pray over their meal. It got us talking about religion. Corey grew up having to attend church with his father as a child. He “witnessed” the “saving grace and healing touch of God” through theatrics and bad parlor tricks. I was raised Catholic. Born, baptized and even confirmed catholic. I went to catholic grade school, even catholic high school. Prayer was an every day thing at school as well as attending church on the weekends (for the most part). We sat there at dinner, for a brief time, talking about religion and what it was like to us as children.

After that conversation, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about religion, God, and what I believe in life. I’ve come to the short conclusion that I’m not sure if I do believe in God or not. I don’t believe that 90% of the world’s population is delusional for believing in one form of God or not. What it boils down to is, while I may or may not believe in a God, it does not stop me from understanding that so many other people out there in the world believe in one form of divine being or another. I do not believe that there is one true God and that all others are false. I believe in tolerance, love, compassion and kindness (among many other things).

This part of my thinking process brings me to religion. I’m thrown into terrible turmoil this year. I was talking with my mom about going to church on Christmas Eve. About who will go and who will stay home with the sleeping little ones. I think about going to church as being the proper thing to do, but there is this part of me screaming no. I don’t really know what to do. I can’t support an institution at this point in my life that says most things I believe in are wrong and evil and not an act of God. Yes the church teaches us to love one another that all things are created equal, and we are all created in God’s image. But that’s not all the church teaches us. It teaches us intolerance, hate and bigotry. How can an institution proclaim to be the house of God and teach us these things? I’m talking about the church teaching people that using birth control is a sin, a woman choice to have an abortion is a sin, but mostly teaching that a child of God, built in his (or her) image is a sin if that person is gay. How can someone who is built in the image of God be a sin? How can it be wrong?

I believe the church has lead people to think it’s okay to hate people hate and discriminate against them because of their sexuality. Freedom of speech is one thing, but protesting at a soldier’s funeral saying that “Iraq is a punishment for America's tolerance of homosexuality” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21566280/) is so immoral and just… I don’t even have the words for the anger inside me. And where is the church when this happens? Supporting these protesters, and I’m so saddened to see, the picture in the article link, are children, children who were taught to hate not only by their parents but by their church. It makes me so upset to know our children, the future of our human race is taught to hate because someone is different.

I’ve taken about a week here to think this through. Are these thoughts that I really want to post for anyone to see? I’ve come to the conclusion that yes, I am okay with it. It is okay to have an opinion, it is okay to share them. I don’t ask for acceptance from any one on the way I see things, but I do ask for respect for actually having the courage to share these things. I do ask for people to be able to see the other side of my story, to see it, to respect it, to understand that this is how I feel. To see how important this is to me, and to maybe understand my turmoil.

I have not given up on the quest for my beliefs. I will continue to search, to learn, to love. Someday I may realize that this is a quest from God, and some day I may learn that it’s not. Each day is a step in one direction or the other. I just have to trust that these steps lead me in the right direction, to the right decisions.