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| St. Mary Catholic Church, High Hill, Texas |
I have a very tenuous connection to the Catholic church. My father was raised a Catholic and I was baptised in a Catholic church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. My dad abandoned the church, I don't know why. His experience in WW2, his education in physics after the war and my mother's influence probably all played a part. My parents were scientists, so I was raised as an atheist. I became a Lutheran when I married my wife. It was painless, I may have had to recite some formal phrases but I do not remember what they were. We attended a Lutheran church for years while the kids were growing up, but we haven't been for a long a time.
There are a few bloggers I follow who are Catholics. I read them because I like what they say and how they say it. They write clearly and logically. Joseph Moore (Yard Sale of the Mind) and JMSmith (The Orthosphere) are a couple of my favorites.
Anyway, Joseph put up a post that is nominally a rant about something the pope has done, but he gives a brief historical summary of Catholic churches and the Catholic mass. I always wondered about Catholic churches, why they were so big and fancy. He gives us some background. It's pretty great.
I always found church services tedious in the extreme. I suspect it might be because I am a little too tightly wound. I am not good at sitting and relaxing unless I am stoned. Not everything I do is productive, solitaire games consume hours of my time. One thing I noticed about church was that after attending a service I was a bit calmer during the week. The calmness was nice, but it didn't quite outweigh the tediousness of the service. Maybe if I got stoned before I went to church it would be tolerable.
Joseph's explanation of the mass goes a long way to explaining why the Catholic church continues to be a large part of our civilization.
P.S. Word of the day: ineffable - too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words.
Don't understand the connection from Scientist to Athiest. The more one delves into science the more one would believe in an uncaused first cause, (God). And it was the members of the Catholic Church that invented the "Scientific method".
ReplyDeleteMy parents were scientists, meaning they believed in science and didn't believe in religion. They weren't looking for first causes, they were just trying to figure out how the human race could stop having wars. Religion was my mother's favorite bogeyman, as in 'more wars have been fought over religion than anything else', therefor religion was the culprit and bad and she didn't want to have anything to do with it. I'm a little more flexible.
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