FAITH

 was the sister of my first babysitter. And that whole family sure had a surfeit of it. Often of a Sunday I would be sent next door to wallow in the strange family stink and then be dragged to church. 

You know the family stink? It's different in every family, and not always noticeable if your respective dead skin cells smell similarly. When they don't, though...hoo boy. It takes about seven minutes for your nose to acclimatize and while that's happening you have plenty of time to wish you were anywhere else. I've come to understand that if I walk into your house and don't smell anything off, you're at least provisionally part of my tribe. 

Martha, her sister Faith, her brother Mark, and their parents John and Lillian were not.

Nor was their church. I remember nothing of it, not even its denomination. It was probably a Catholic church, because my mom was Catholic and I'd been baptized into that faith as an infant...but I'm not 100% sure, because I forgot everything about every service three minutes after the benediction. Attending another church when you're Catholic is for some reason regarded as a mortal sin. But my mother, like every other Catholic I've ever met, picked and chose her strictures and her Scriptures. 

I didn't know any better growing up but I came to detest Catholicism. 

Kathleen Madigan gives one good reason here. Okay, so if we're supposed to take this God stuff seriously, I should talk to Him. But like Kathleen I was explicitly told NOT to do that: in the Catholic faith that seems to be a faux pas. You can contact anything else: your guardian angel, the saint in charge of whatever it is you're pissed about...you can even pray to Jesus's Mom, if you've a mind to. Catholics love talking to their idealized portraits of Mary (while gleefully shitting all over every other woman in history)...they've stripped all the humanity out of her along with her sex. 

Catholicism has this creature called a Pope, and when he's speaking on official matters of faith and morals -- they use Latin to scare you and say ex cathedra -- well, then he's perfect. Infallible. Unquestionable. 

Whatever.

The Bible isn't too keen on public prayer, but in Catholic school you'd better Hail Mary, Our Father and Glory Be with the rest of them. Later on, before you marry (another Catholic, of course, what are you, hellbound?) you must take a premarital course covering sex and children, taught to you by a man prohibited from having either.  And in the meantime you can show your faith by not eating meat. Okay, only on Fridays (and Ash Wednesday). Too tough? Then you can abstain from meat  only on the five or six Fridays of Lent. And if that's still too onerous, you can eat meat all you want and refrain from eating something else.

Amateurs. If you're going to have a food prohibition, be consistent with it, would you?

 My second baptism never should have happened. Well, to hear them tell it, my first baptism was invalid for some reason nobody ever bothered explaining to me. I was baptized again at about 14. I had no say in this. I should have had a say in this. I firmly believe no child should be baptized into any faith, for the same reason children shouldn't have sex: they can't consent. No, it's not a parent's responsibility to create little wine-and-wafer carbon copies of themselves...and if you think I'm wrong, I frankly don't care. 

By high school I had completely abandoned church; by university I recognized some sort of hole in my world and tried again to jam God into it, this time the Lutheran flavour of God. Tastes like chicken, it's finger licking god!

 I read the Bible -- excepting a few begats -- and studied it fairly intently. 

There's something in there, to be sure, but it has been endlessly distorted, mansplained, agenda'd, and, when all else fails, manufactured. Hell is not the only widely accepted Christian invention that doesn't actually exist. If you really want your mind blown, the original Christians met in people's homes and there is no command anywhere in the Bible to attend, let alone build, a church. 

Both Catholic and Protestant churches have you recite the Nicene Creed (the sucker dates from the year 325 CE)  as a statement of faith, and I can't do this without gagging on just about every....gosh darn....line.

We believe in one God, 

just one? Lotta gods out there. Why just this one? I imagine this creed will give us some clues

the Father, the Almighty, 

Almighty, yeah, fine, every god needs its ego stroked, but why not the Mother? Serious question.

maker of heaven and earth, 

of all that is, 

seen and unseen. 

Now when I create something, be it dinner, a piece of music, or this blog post, did I do that? Or did God do that through me? That's a whale of a question...a Free Will-y question, you might say. New Agers and others say that we are God experiencing Itself. That jibes with that passage where Jesus asked his followers why they were amazed at his miracles. "These things, and more, shall you also do", he said, and if that's not co-creating I don't know what is.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, 

Christ is a title: it means 'anointed one'. Jesus is the only Christ we know of to have been called the Christ, but he wasn't the first man so titled. It used to be the honorific for the High Priest of Israel in Judaism. Lord, of course, narrows it down. I believe Jesus the Christ existed; I don't feel a need to call him Lord.

the only Son of God, 

Gee. You don't have to go very far into Christianity before you find a verse telling you we are ALL sons (and daughters) of God.

eternally begotten of the Father, 

Just DETERMINED to erase anything maternal, notice?

God from God, Light from Light, 

true God from true God, 

begotten, not made, 

of one Being with the Father; 

through him all things were made. 

Five times in five lines the insistence that Jesus was not created, but simply is the essence of God. This is clearly critically important to the faith and completely meaningless to me.

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, 

This above all else rubs me the wrong way about Christianity, this "salvation" nonsense. Most sects are very strict about it: you're "saved" through faith plus or minus good deeds...and what exactly do I need saving from? The God who supposedly created me in the first place? Sure, dude, whatever. 

was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary 

Good luck finding an actual reason the act that propagates the species is disgusting to Christians. I can't do it. At this point I'd lay money that the only thing 'virginal' about Mary was all the prophecies written about her and her little godling ahead of time.

and was made man. 

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; 

he suffered death and was buried. 

On the third day he rose again 

in accordance with the Scriptures; 

You'll forgive me if I seek some sort of, oh, I don't know, explanation for Zombie Jesus. And no, "it's a miracle" won't cut it. I get it, this is a god thing, we're supposed to just accept it. I won't. 

he ascended into heaven 

and is seated at the right hand of the Father. 

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, 

Nope, sorry, bzzzzt, There's one of your bigger clues man created god and not the other way around: this "god" is deeply HUMAN. Judgment is a human trait. Divine love has no place for it.

There's more, but I've already blasphemed myself out of contention nine times over. Really and truly, I couldn't care less about Mary's intact hymen or even Jesus's popping back up three days after he snuffed it. What matters to me is what Jesus taught and how he modelled his teachings. Like I said, there's something there. But sorting out what's original and authentic from the sheaves and sheaves of manipulations and additions requires years of diligent study. Seems to me any god worth his Lot of salt would make it a little easier.

So if I don't have faith in the Christian God, in what do I have faith?

I've long had faith death isn't the end of existence. Science is slowly catching up to me, although of course it merely says death takes longer than we thought, but we are aware we're dead after we die. This is a matter of faith, because I have no evidence for it, but I feel certain something must persist. Time is far too huge for three score and ten and CUT.

I am aware of the secular humanist take that life is what we make it (I believe that to be true, in fact) and one life is all we get. I just don't think it's true, and admittedly all I've got are feelings, so feel free to mock me. At least I know if I'm wrong here, I'm far from alone.

I'm not sure what else I can say I have faith in. Faith is supposed to be belief in the absence of evidence, and I have evidence for the power of love, you know?

Then again, there's always St. Thomas Aquinas: "For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without faith, no evidence is possible". When you get mucking around in the eschatology, you need to continually redefine "evidence". You need to think poetically and mythically, not literally. You need, above all to remember all of us speak, each in (their) own tongue.