Working in food service, or being a manager. Both gave me very strong perspective for people in those situations and it would be impossible for me to go back to who I was before I understood these circumstances.
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 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 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 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.
Psylocybin
I have been exposed to hospitals as a guy who worked on their software, as a friend to a doctor, and as the relative of a patient. What I have seen is that hospital staff are generally well intentioned but extremely overworked, to the point that they can overlook obvious signs of a life-threatening illness. You can’t just assume that if you’re in a hospital then you’ll be taken care of. The doctor can be too busy to pay attention to you or too tired to think clearly about your condition. The doctor might even just forget that you’re there. You have to make sure that you’re getting a doctor’s attention, even if that means acting in a way that makes you feel like an entitled jerk.
My grandmother went to the hospital a couple of years ago because every few hours her heart would stop for several seconds. After she was in the emergency room for a day without receiving any treatment, some hospital employee came and wanted to discharge her. She and I refused so she ended up in a hospital bed for a couple of days, still with no treatment. Finally my sister came from another state, and my sister is less shy than I am. She actually found the cardiologist and made sure he looked at my grandmother’s condition. Once he did, he immediately sent her to surgery. She had a pacemaker put in and recovered.
(In case anyone is curious, my grandma says that when her heart stopped for long enough that she lost consciousness, she felt a wave of heat go through her body, her vision faded to black, and then she passed out. It didn’t hurt. In her case, her heart started again on its own but I suppose that for someone less fortunate, that would have been what it felt like to die.)
I’ve gone through some fun heart stuff, mostly my electrical system is just funky, wore a heart monitor, the whole thing - but yeah when finally talking to a cardiologist they were like “it’s nothing” and I asked “okay, so how do I know when it’s not nothing”. “If you lose consciousness, that’s when it’s not nothing”. Glad she persisted and pushed for it.
