Random thoughts and questions

A quick Google search would imply that it does in certain jurisdictions.

Why am I so terrified of churches? I think I'd probably like a UU church.

Were you born on the 6th of June, at 6 am?

Nope. June 28th at 12:13 AM. Is that too close?

For the same reason you don't feel at home sleeping in a cave and dressing in mammoth skins?

I'm uncomfortable in churches. But that's typically because my mental process is: "Wow, you seem to put a lot of effort into your fairytale. I'll try to be respectful, but I can't guarantee anything."

That being said, I love Christmas time late-night services. Some throw-back to my youth, I imagine, when it was a punctuation to the holiday (i.e. go to church, go home and eat, go back to church and sing in the choir, hang out with other kids from choir until it's time to go, late night presents or early morning presents, lots of food, etc).

Going to a church with my parents is an interestingly awkward affair where they try to get me to sing hymns, and I try to imitate the statue of Mary on the wall and not move a muscle. They think I'm just misguided and confused at the moment and trying to involve me in as many Catholic activities as possible will fix that.

I have to add that I do enjoy the Christmas services as well. Christmas and Easter are the only two times where I genuinely enjoy going to church.

I started going to church (against my will) very late in my childhood, and most of my terrible memories of it are due to the fact that I was introduced so late. I was often made fun of or outcast by other children in my Sunday school age group because I literally knew nothing about Christianity going into it. Ever since then, I've been extremely uncomfortable in them, save for the non-sanctuary bits of the churches I've worked/lived in (not doing religious work--the spaces were donated as housing and work spaces while I was doing community service projects).

I want to get involved in a UU church for the community aspects, and I've never heard a bad word about them, but I'm still terrified to go to a service. Hubby is also unwilling to accompany me, so my nervousness around large groups of people gets exacerbated by the fact that I know none of them. :/

I'm from a Protestant background so our Christmas services are dull and boring. I stopped going years ago. Being an atheist probably didn't help.

I'm used to church as a twice-a-year-with-Grandma affair. I'll willingly spend time in other denominations' churches, though, just because I think they're pretty.

Russian cathedrals? Whatever that giant sandstone affair was in downtown Granada? Gorgeous.

28

8-2 = 6

6

12:13

remove the duplicates

1+2+3 =6

6.6.6 YOU ARE THE ANTICHRIST!

Going by the Mayan calendar, Armageddon close.*

*I may have made that up.

You'll be amazed at the shit your co-workers tell you now that they know you're leaving.

Nowhere else I noticed to put something like this. If you like bitchy restaurant reviews, this is a good one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/d...uys-american-kitchen-bar-in-times-square.html

CURSE YOU GUY FIEDDI!

Happened to read this the other day, to push you there:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejo...e-things-i-love-about-my-local-uu-church.html

The Zhejiang Huayan Electric Company wants to hire me to be their national representative! A certain Mr Cheng Chen wants me to contact him at my earliest opportunity regarding the details. I'm not sure why they want me to be their Canadian representative, but I'm sure Cheng Chen is on the level. Why question fate?

I'm betting he can provide references from a number of members of Nigerian royalty.

Why do you ask questions when you know the answer?

I've been Unitarian since I was 10, but I did just move to a new city. My advice is this:

Stay for coffee after the service, that's when you meet people.

Get involved with something other than the services. I joined the choir, but there are a hundred committees and social groups, which allows you to actually get to know a smaller number of people instead of just seeing everyone once a week.

If there's more than one church in your area, shop around. The church right near my house is weird and unfriendly, it took four months before I finally got around to driving across town to try a different church. The difference is night and day.

Because the answer makes no sense to me. As bad as my experiences were, they weren't that terrible. It's not like I was the subject of an exorcism, or subjected to abuse. And even so, like you said, each church is different. I am frustrated that the thought of going is something that absolutely petrifies me, when I consciously decide that it's something I want to do and I have no rational reason to fear it.

My worst church experience happened behind my parents' back when I was pretty young. My cousins attended a Baptist church in a small town in Louisiana (the infamous Jena, as in "the Jena 6"); my family was Methodist. I went with my cousin to a youth activity that culminated in all of us being in the sanctuary and basically being railroaded into going down front to "accept the Lord Jesus as your personal savior" and freaking being Baptized. I had already been Baptized the Methodist way, and I got SERIOUSLY freaked out. I managed to slip out of the sanctuary before my row got called up.

There were no adults there other than the preacher and the youth minister - they were Baptizing kids without their parents' consent.

It makes perfect sense to me. There's a reason they call that time the "formative years." My brother didn't even go to church as a kid, he just got cornered by our manipulative aunt at a family gathering and told about Jesus, and that was enough to put him off religion for life. I don't find it weird at all that getting ostracized as a kid would cause a deep aversion to the place where it happened. A lot of Unitarians grew up in other churches, and have weird hang-ups about very specific aspects of a service that stem from experiences in their childhood. Not just talking about god or sin, but things like specific hymns or rituals that are too close to Christian rituals. Any time there is food during a service, it will absolutely not be distributed in a way similar to communion. And even then, some people won't come to church on that day anyway.

I don't really have any insight about overcoming mental blocks, that is far from one of my strong suits. The hardest part is the first time, though, and it gets easier the more you do it and the more you establish new associations to replace the negative ones from childhood.

I managed to dodge all activities involving my faith being officially confirmed or acknowledged by the Church officials back when I was a kid and my parents forced me to go. By the age of 10 my time in Church was spent sketching on the program pamphlets and questioning whether I was some sort of sociopath* because I clearly was not feeling anything or connecting with the religion on the same level as all these people that seemed to care so much. I never took part in communion, confirmation, and I don't recall ever actually telling anyone what I believed (the option there would have been to lie or risk causing a ruckus, so I'm glad I was never asked point blank), because while I was fine with being there to make my parents happy, it would have felt wrong to fraudulently take part in the rituals all those people considered so sacred. It wasn't all bad though, in exchange for being blasted with propaganda/attempted early-age brain-washing one hour a week, there was a youth group that did all sorts of fun stuff like hiking, large scale pond hockey and road hockey games, and games/movie nights. The adult youth leaders didn't actually make it all about religion either, there'd be the occasional prayer but it was mostly about having fun.

*I didn't know the word sociopath, it just felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with me for not caring when all these people around me did.

I was baptized at birth, thrown into communion at 6 and confirmed the same day... And then my parents told me at 13 years old that I would never be able to leave the church because I had agreed to all of this. I was 6 years old and would have agreed to ANYTHING my parents said, but that's apparently irrelevant.

No, of course I'm not bitter, why would you say that? It doesn't really matter now anyway. The only people who ever call me Catholic are my parents, and I don't identify as one.

I have a theory that if you could somehow prevent parents from brainwashing their children, religions would mostly die out within a couple generations. Churches are predicated on indoctrinating kids who are too young to know better. There are people who "find god" later in life but they are a tiny minority compared to the people who take their kids to church because their parents took them to church.

Roughly 10% percent of Americans consider themselves to be former Catholics according to a PEW study on religion.

I personally prefer the term Recovered Catholic (don't tell my mom).

I'm shocked that I never drank the Christian kool-aid, having gone to a heavily christian grade school and a Catholic high school. I guess I was just a cynical, over-analyzing bastard of a kid

I prefer to believe "thrown into communion" involves some sort of suplex.

We leave for Disney on Tuesday. As we're short on cash, we're driving. It's a 21.5 hour drive. Stressing on travel planning and lack of funds.

Going to need this Disney vacation just to get away from the stress of planning the vacation.

On the matter of Baptisms.
I was baptized when I was much younger; I know it was before I hit ten, but I don't know a specific age. WHOLE TIME, no one would tell me what would actually happen when I got baptized, just that it was this great thing and all of the family friends were invited.

and then my mother handed me a shower cap

She didn't tell me why, just handed it to me and said to wear it when my turn came up. All of us young'uns were told to stand in a straight line and filed upstairs into this kinda tight hallway. This was an ooooold church, so everything kinda...creaked. There were no windows, either, so it was kinda really dark. One by one, we were called through this doorway and didn't see the kids come back. So imagine my terror when it was my turn. They put this big white robe on me and waded me into waist-high water. Pastor says some things, then SUDDENLY FINGERS CLAMPING MY NOSE SHUT AND HANDS FLIPPING ME BACK AND AHHHH WHY AM I UNDERWATER FUCK INSTINCT SAYS TO INHALE?! NOW THERE'S WATER IN MY LUNGS.

on the other side of the second door were other kids just like me. dripping wet, shaking, looking horrified.


baptism is fucking traumatic for kids, i'll tell ya h'what.

I was a really religious kid, up until I was ten and decided to read the Bible for reals. With the black-and-white way a ten year old sees the world, I was horrified by what "God" had said and gave up religion on the spot. I didn't want to believe in someone who was that big of a dick. (Not the exact words I was thinking at age ten, but you get the idea.)

I feel uncomfortable in churches. I went to a UU church for a while, but everybody was either a senior citizen or else had young children. so there wasn't anybody for me to hang out with. Sad, because I liked the pastor, but I was mostly there to connect with other people and I didn't.

See, this is why (some of) the Protestants just do it much younger. A little splash on the head and everyone coos at the adorable little baby.

My kids have been neither baptized nor christened. I'm quite certain that my mother is mortified by this fact for two reasons. One, blah blah hellfire. Two, they're now far too big to wear the family christening gown that's been passed down for...generations? Generation, maybe. I don't know, it's frilly and white and hilarious and I will remind them of how lucky they are to have avoided such embarrassment at every opportunity.

I'm an atheist and the wife is a Christian who, so far as I'm aware, believes it's better to let them choose baptism/christening/confirmation for themselves.

That Catholic stuff makes me so happy my parents were washed-up hippies and very deliberately decided to not baptize me and my brother. They always told us that if we wanted to become a member of the Catholic church, or any other church, we could decide ourselves once we were old enough to make a thoughtful choice. Most people who know me would be shocked, but I when I was a kid I very much believed in God and I prayed almost every night. This was probably because of a lack of understanding, since I had little to no formal knowledge of Christianity. But that's kinda the thing, my parents didn't raise us 'atheist' or whatever. They raised us fully believing that we should be able to make our own choices.

I love my hippie-parents.

Edit: You guys are fast! SwitchKnitter 's story comes close to mine, really believing in God and then realizing that the Bible was pretty fucked up as it turns out...

Actually, that's Catholics mainly (and probably Anglican/Episcopalian.) It's the protestant type churches that do baptisms at an older age.

I'm glad that I thought to put "some of" in there, since Episcopalians are protestants. I wasn't sure where the divide was on full-body immersion vs christening. Seems like somewhat useless knowledge to me for some reason.

Apparently there were talks of having me Baptized at some point, but my dad was adamantly against it. He dropped organized religion the day he moved out of his parents' house. He thought that his family (and probably my mom's) would throw a fit because it was decided that I wouldn't be Baptized after all, but no one really seemed to give a hoot.

If I had been though, I could definitely see myself going through de-Baptism.

Which I imagine involves rubbing those little DO NOT EAT dessicant packets over yourself while listening to King Crimson.

There's probably a tumblr just for that.

Actually it involves a hair dryer but that sounds fun too!