06/12/2012

If you can't laugh at yourself being Catholic...

This is just how being questioned about being Catholic feels, sometimes...

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500"]this i don't believe - a dig at the catholic church this i don't believe - a dig at the catholic church[/caption]

Whilst being Catholic does sometimes feel like a millstone around your neck, it is your rock, your sucre, when things truly get you down...like Arbroath equalising in the dying stages of the third round of the Cup, for instance.

But then the light shines brightly at the end of the tunnel.

You make the last 16 of the Champions League and the SPL, which seems farcical with the Old Enemy languishing in the lower leagues for a well-deserved break, and everything falls into perspective.

Winning every argument, every game, is not what it's all about.  You've got to have something to believe in.  Surely this can't be it, can it?

Being Catholic ain't perfect, but it does give you hope


What's important is doing the best with what you've got.  Can you look yourself in the eye every morning while your dreams are being made as you're chained to the mirror by your razor blade?

If you can do that, get home and know you've not upset anyone during the day, you'll sleep at night.  To be sure, a tumbler of John Power's for good measure will send you off to dreamland in a trice, even if only for medicinal purposes.

Too many people take themselves - and their beliefs - too seriously and to the extreme.  The good thing about being Catholic is you go to mass, take your communion with your fellow parishioners, look the priest in the eye as you make The Sign of the Cross on the way out and you need say no more.

Yes, our beliefs are strong. But we don't go knocking on doors spouting our Gospel down uninterested parties' throats.  The Jehovah's have stopped coming to my house because I debate everything they throw at me on the doorstep.

Ask my wife - she hides up her own arse if our door knocker goes on a Sunday morning.  Around our neck of the woods, in The Black Country, I'd imagine Jehovah's get very short shrift.  The Hawthorns has its congregation at the Sandwell end, The Molineux at the Stafford end.

Apart from the mosques - the road to Birmingham can look like a scene out of the Arabian Knights on a sunset summer's eve - these football stadia are the most regularly attended places of worship for miles.

My beliefs are my own; I don't need yours


It's not so much other religions' beliefs I have the issue with. It's the way they try to force-feed everyone else and cajole others into accepting their teachings.  And they're so feckin' holier-than-thou and self-righteous about it.  That's what pisses me off, grinds my feckin' gears.

In this day and age, if someone has religious tendencies they exercise that right in the way they see fit.  They do not need to be shown the path of righteousness.  Simply, if kids do not accept the church during school years, conversion is never gonna happen.

Media-promoted idols, materialistic tendencies, never knowing what it's like to have had a job (300,000 households in the UK have habitants who've never held a job between them) therefore worshiping the dole cheque - these are the beliefs upheld by a huge swathe of the UK population.  Not even political ambition is coveted any longer, so corrupt have our members proved themselves to be.

So am I glad to be Catholic?  Despite some of the more controversial stances of Rome in the modern era?

I have to say yes, I am.  True, I'll never convert anyone, but I'll always hold my own.  Oops, that's banned in the cartoon, sorry.  And I do have moments when I'm glad I believe...in something. And genuinely do.

The thought of mortality being the sum of this ingenious spark that is life is something of an anticlimax, don't you think?

cartoon from atheistcartoons, shared on StumbleUpon.

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