Religion

I have an odd thing going on when it comes to religion and my sons. For starters, we're not really raising them in a religion. Both Amy and I were born and raised Catholics. We were married in a Catholic church and both of the boys were baptised Catholic.

Now, since some time during my grade school years of going to Catholic school, I've been pretty laissez faire about religion. When I was really young, I was very much into it...and had my mother reminding me that it would be pretty awesome if I grew up to be a priest. Even before hitting the teen years and finding out that my enjoyment of sex was (supposedly) a deal breaker, I had already ruled the profession out. That happened when I realized that most every priest that I knew was pretty much a hypocrite (with a few exceptions).

At one point, my crazy 6-foot-8 brother went on a religious kick and dragged me around with him as he "experimented" with religion. The downside is that eventually his craziness led him to some kind of Christian cult and I had to deal with some crazy people hanging around the house for about six months. The upside was that I got exposed to a number of different religions and churches...and got to see that they all have holes in their dogma. From that point on, I stopped worrying too much about organized religion and just kind of went by what I was thought was right.

In actuality, I'm more or less an agnostic. I'm not good at having faith. However, I'm also a perpetual waffler, so I don't want to not have faith. Since I didn't see another religion that made much more sense to me, I just stuck with the one from my childhood.

Amy was the one that was the more religious out of the two of us...but then life happened and she started questioning some things and, well, she became a little more like me than she probably ever planned to.

Which has led to some confusion with our kids. With two lapsed Catholics as parents, the boys then went to a Lutheran church's day care. Then they moved into a home daycare where they have been exposed to a group of people that go to the same church.

This has led to them picking up only some parts of the whole religion scene. That leads to things like Marty telling me that one night that he doesn't like the Bible. I had to ask for more information. His reasoning was that there's a lot of violence in the Bible, a lot of killing and people doing bad things to each other, and he doesn't like that. I asked him about the other parts...the parts about love and compassion. "Well, I do like those parts...but I don't like the others."

That might not sound like that big of a deal, but in a small Christian town, telling people that you've decided to pick and choose what parts of the Bible you want to believe in can be a bit of an issue.

He also has decided to add some religion to his scientific beliefs, which can be interesting. He'll be relaying some facts that he's learned about the changes to Earth over the billions of years and then just randomly throw God into that. One time, he was asking me about how the Earth had changed to have the atmosphere that sustains life. I told him that different people have different theories about how it happened and addied that some people just believe that God did it. "I'll just go with the God one," he said.

Casey on the other hand has an absolute belief in whatever it is that he believes in. We don't really know what he believes in. Unlike his deep thinking brother, Casey doesn't bother discussing such things. But, rest assured that he is absolutely sure that whatever he chooses to believe in is right. That might be why he was voted in preshchool, "Most Likely to Have a Messiah Complex."