I was a altar boy in my teens. One time in winter we had to attend a funeral. First we were in church, so I put on the white rope stuff during the mass. But then we had to go out to the graveyard for like half an hour more and stand there in the cold.
I told the priest that I would just quickly put on the jacket underneath because it was freezing outside. But he forbid in and said I should have thought of it before the mass and had it on under the ropes in church all the time because now there is no time for that. He forced us out without jackets into the freezing cold.
Right there I started thinking what kind of a priest do we have who cares more about dead people and make it convenient for them instead of the living. And if the priest represents god here in our community because he talks to him and can forgive our sins in his name and so on, then this is also gods will. So what king of a God am I worshiping here?
Anyway, I think that was the start of me stopping believing in God. I stopped being an altar boy, later stopped going to church and started actively researching those deeper questions around organized religion and god. Over time it led me to became an atheist who hasn’t seen any evidence for existence of any god.
I was a altar boy in my teens.
i was expecting this to turn a different direction.
Once I volunteered for a nonprofit fundraiser type thing. It was early spring and cold as hell. My friends got taken to the hay rides and the fire pit and they stuck me at the highway, pointing people towards the highly visible parking area. I marched in circles and designed ten thousand signs that could do the job that I was doing. I vowed then and there to never, ever be a cog in some Boomers vanity charity event ever again.
Service clubs tend to treat volunteers like slaves and then lament that no one wants to volunteer to be their slaves.
I was raised catholic and went to a catholic primary school. At one point we had a class where we would visit the local catholic church once a week and the priest would explain things about how things worked in church.
On one such occasion he pointed out a red light near the altar and said that the light indicated that god was present in church. (Apparently it’s called a ‘sanctuary light’ in English). I spent an entire week trying to figure out how this god-detector worked. I had several designs worked out in my head, like it having an unreachable switch that could only be pressed by god himself.
The next week we arrived at church a little early and I caught the priest putting a candle in it and lighting it himself. That’s when I started to realize the whole thing was one big scam.
We had the same sanctuary light (thanks for the name) in my school chapel.
But it was made with a simple LED and resistor circuit (probably made in the school ‘techno’ class).
A friend and I got kicked out of catechism for removing the battery of that LED circuit.
It wasn’t a big loss anyway, I remember the teacher being all pumped up when we asked “so God is the God of all Gods?”. He made us write that down, which is a totally false affirmation for a monotheistic religion (God if the only one, there are no others).
Anyway, I was happy to be kicked out of catechism 🤷🏻♂️
I am an atheist myself but sometimes I comfort myself thatbthere may be someone who enables a afterlife for the sake of the dead. Also - a priest doesn’t talk to god in the catholic church; Only prophets do.
Just want to suggest: The entire mass got there with jackets, etc. He could indeed have postponed going outside in order for the staff to put jackets on.
But he did teach a boy a lesson: Think for yourself and think ahead. Among the dead are people who may have suffered tremendously. In order to respect them you had to be brave and strong.
Your story doesn’t contain lost fingers due to frost bite. And it cuts short of the things afterwards: He may have invited his staff for hot chocolate afterwards.
It formed you in some way and you could cherish that. And respect for the priest that he stood his ground regardless of his wrong doing: He tried to convey his point - Though I agree that it was shit-tey.
I did plan ahead, the plan was to get my jacket in between when everyone was walking out of the church to gather at the graveyard.
Also if we are nitpicking then everyone can talk to god in the catholic church, including the priest after he listens to all my sins, but god for some reason only responds to the prophets.
Anyway, those nuances are for the scholars, not for a teenage altar boy.
respect for the priest that he stood his ground regardless of his wrong doing
What…? Why would we respect the priest for doubling down on being wrong? The venerable, mature thing for him to do would have been to acknowledge the situation of the child and show some understanding and mercy.
Without knowing anything else, this instance makes him sound petty, or at least negligent, and not like anybody deserving of unconditional respect.
I was a plaintiff in a civil lawsuit against a huge company. It was so rigged. The judge had overseen the class action lawsuit that we opted out of and acted like we were ungrateful little shits. But never in front of the jury; in front of the jury, he was all perfect law and order. But when they weren’t there, he was so obviously biased. I lost basically all faith in our justice system (USA). And I only had money on the line; for someone in a criminal case, it would be sooo much worse.
Yeah. Found myself in the system due to a misunderstanding. I was helpful and cooperative, they gave me the maximum sentence.
This would probably be the gist of my answer as well, both as an observer as well as someone in a dispute.
I’ve watched my best friends fight battles one could say are incredibly unnecessary, from the guy best friend having his family torn apart by the CPS based on false accusations before they went after his mom to harass her since they couldn’t successfully arrest her like they could with his dad on a false basis, to his GF (my other best friend) constantly having friends pulled away from her, to what me and my BF have gone through often (it should be noted what we consider the actual issue and what their active ingredients are has differed).
Ironically I generally don’t have the negative relation with officials that these other experiences would imply I would have. I’m more accurately described as someone the people always seem to be after, not the officials in a society, albeit it might be said semantics don’t do that justice until it has been paraphrased a few times. Another way it’s been explained is that I incur “guerilla dissatisfaction” and that even seeming technicalities have some element of that, even when I’m being productive in its face, with their “three weapons” being denial, justification, and pretending to not understand.
On the authoritarian side of things, it has only been recently (as in an epiphany that dropped out of nowhere some weeks ago) realized that an enormous amount of what could be called covert targeted bias against some of us, especially when the individuals who the bias is in favor of have the bias in favor of them as a form of some sort of social prestige, has been or is boiled down to secretly wanting to “humble” the person the bias is against.
Example:
A superior might say out loud “you acted in self defense against a killer, but it was still assault, so I’m going to give you a bigger sentence than the person who killed your dog.”
In their minds: “maybe this is the perfect tool to humble them, they never seemed humble to me and an extraordinary large sentence might serve as a good character builder, not actually given to punish them.”
My country is currently doing a big anti-crime campaign and I was there for a family members trial as moral support. It became grossly clear that anti-crime just means prossecuting everyone and anyone regardless of guilt to pump up conviction numbers. The prosecution was given 6 months to prepare, the defense was given a single day; the prosecution was explicitly allowed to present evidence in any context including oppenly censored conversations, the defense wasn’t even allowed to present evidence unless it was deemed relevant by the prosecution.
Totally shattered what little faith I had in my countries legal system, I always knew it was rigged in favour of the wealthy but to see just how blatantly tilted it is in favour of convictions was a big shock.
leaving my home country for the first time.
all the “immutable facts of life” are a plane ticket way from becoming weird rituals or disagreeable foreign affairs.
That is a very good point, but it only works of the world is somewhat open to immigrants. I migrated 3 times in my life, starting from practically one suitcase each time. I’m very lucky to have ended up in times and countries which allowed me to stay and to contribute to their society. Sadly that seems less and less a given.
overall, it seems to be getting easier to travel, with longer-term visas being offered and most visas offered through online applications.
there are more routes for legal permanent residency in countries as well these days, although i prefer itinerance.
I think you’re talking about permanent residency, which is inherently more bother than living somewhere else or traveling full-time.
Yes indeed, and it might still be OK, but the world moving to the right and the right being so against immigration I forse a future where permanent residency is not that easy anymore. Especially if you’re not like me a white fairly well educated male from Europe. People like me seem to have huge privileges in many the parts of the world.
My very best friend in the whole world mentioned a trans person, shook his head, and remarks that “we need a purge”.
I really, truly thought that different ideologies could get along until then. With that comment, I realized that, no, I cannot get along with an ideology that believes that marginalized groups “should not exist”. Because, deep down, a belief for their “non-existence” is a belief for their death. And I now refuse to have friends who believe things like that.
Civility is compliance. I kicked him out of my house, my final words to him, as he angrily screamed at me, being “bye, bitch, bye!” It hurt me so badly to lose my closest friend that day, but my life really did improve after that. Now he might actually have to pay for the therapy he so desperately needs. God knows, he won’t, because he believes that “mental health excuses are just pussy shit”, but considering he’s howling that no one has wanted to fuck him for the last x amount of years shows that his anger and bitterness are still holding him back. He’s insufferable.
Fuck any belief that punches down. Y’all deserve to exist peacefully and not be fucking bothered by dickheads about how you live your life.
I recently got introduced to a new friend group with plenty of trans people. It was quite eye opening. Not that my views changed, but rather upon hearing their stories, realizing how much senseless hate there is towards them. Imagine not getting a job after a successful interview, because some asshole looking at your ID sees that your appearance doesn’t match your birth assigned gender. It’s one thing to be indifferent or not get queer people, it’s another to actively fucking harm them!
I especially hate the project2025 rhetoric of “Economy bad” followed by “Let’s spend our entire budget, murdering the queers”. These people are monstrous…
I have a good friend like this. He says quite extreme things like that from time to time. I don’t attack him for it. Instead we talk about it. I ask him questions, share my view on the matter etc. more often than not he then walks back what he said and openly admits that he shouldn’t generalize and understands that the few bad apples he has had to deal with don’t represent the majority.
People change. I did too. I used to say horrible things about gay people myself too when I was younger. Then I grew up and realized I’d actually like to have some of that dick too.
Your friend on the other hand probably only holds down to those beliefs even stronger now because of how you reacted. These are the people who vote for Trump to “screw with the libs”
2016 and the yeas since, but especially the US presidential election that just happened, have absolutely destroyed my faith in the people of my country.
Always figured the govt was fucked, but that the average Joe had a shred of good in him. After the bullshit of the 2016 election, the 4 disastrous years after, and the 4 years following of nonstop Nazi rhetoric from Trump… 74 million of my neighbors decided he’s the guy who represents them; and another 90 million or so decided not to lift a fucking finger to intervene.
No. Good people are a minority. I’m surrounded by hateful bigots who will go as far impairing their own quality of life if it means they can can harm others by doing so. This country and the majority of its inhabitants are evil. We deserve what’s coming.
This was a moment of disillusionment for me as well. I had faith that the country would pull together and do what I perceived as the right thing, but it seems greed and hate won in the end. Something shifted in me as the results came in. Something I can only describe as a loss of hope. Like I knew that whatever greater good we were working toward as a society was just thrown away for trivial reasons. Ever since I’ve had a more “glass half empty” feeling about the U.S. and the world as a whole and the outlook is just bleak.
Did you consider voting for Kamala the right thing? Because, IMO, it was BARELY the right thing. She offered nothing other than Not Trump to her voters. To me, it was expected that people didn’t vote for her because she had no vision and ENTHUSIASTICALLY promised to continue the ongoing genocide. She even sent Bill Clinton to Michigan a week before the GE to tell the Muslims there that they should be OK with innocent pacifist members of their family being turned into a pink mist because of where they live.
If one of the only two possible parties that is supposed to be left leaning refuse to stand by leftist ideas, a two party sham election system is going to inevitably push any country with Citizens United straight into fascism.
With all due respect, the Gaza genocide is a moot point as it’s likely to get turbo charged under a Trump admin. If you talk to most American voters they want this, as well as us to stop funding Ukraine. I don’t agree with these positions but that’s what most people here think. They believe that those funds will be allocated back to them via tax cuts and/or economic stimulus payments.
For me; my issues surround the environment, healthcare, education and workers rights here in the USA. Protection of the BWCA and the CHIPS act are of grave importance to me. A Harris administration would have protected these things. The Trump campaign specifically targeted these things. So while it’s nice to imagine a just government that cares about every specific group of disaffected people in the world, we simply do not have that here, and likely never will.
For sure, I grew up in a rural conservative area. I thought i knew these people. I thought they were just like me and I could understand their perspective even when I disagreed with it. But 2016 went against everything they claimed to believe in, and they just started making less and less sense, they just started getting more toxic, more hateful and spiteful , more anti-everything and everyone. No. No I can’t.
Maybe I’m falling for the echo chamber effect also, maybe I’m falling prey to those who would keep us divided and at each others throats, but I’m finding it difficult to sympathize, difficult to even want to understand them again. Difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are decent people being manipulated with base emotions. No, this is them
