A Catholic Agnostic?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I truly believe. Do I even believe in a god that is the great conductor in the sky? Or do I say I believe because that’s what I was taught to do? Most of my extended family is Catholic and those that are not have immersed themselves in other Christian faiths with gusto. Heck I even have a cousin who has thought seriously about entering the priesthood.

And yet, I’m beginning to acknowledge that most of my religious observances are part of going through the motions learned long ago. Easter is coming soon. It’s also my husband’s birthday. I’d rather celebrate his birthday than the supposed resurrection of someone that I’ve been taught to think was half-god half-man….kind of like Hercules was. So ho much of Christianity, of all religion in fact is mythology that people believe as truth.

I continue to be struck by that idea of Christianity as mythology as I work in my daughters Faith Formation classes. Some of the stories we tell them are completely preposterous. I mean who did Cain and Abel marry if they were the only children of the first humans on earth. Oh, yeah, that other tribe just appeared. And what about the story of the flood? Every living thing on earth was destroyed, and the earth was repopulated from one family and pairs of everything else. Really? Then how the heck do we have all the different races and subspecies. Did Noah really pick up a pair of each of the millions of kinds of beetles in the world? I would say that life just evolved into other things from that point, but that would be cheating.

What I’m most struck with is the need that we all seem to have (myself included at times) to believe in something beyond what humans are capable of. Why does Christ have to be both man and god, why can’t he, and all the other holy men just be man? It seems to me that it is almost more extraordinary for a man, fully human, born of questionable parentage, to rise up and tell people stories that shifted their view of the world and continues to do so for thousands of years. Just a man telling people to love each other. Killed for his words. Inspiring generations. Why does that man have to be a god? Is the story more believable if he “rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures”?

Why does God have to be at the root of the story. If you think about it, really think about it. Jesus’s life is much more amazing if he did it all as a man born from the union of man and woman as we all are. Emulating that kind of man is also more attainable for the rest of us.