Finding God & Age

[Kitsune]

I have had many discussions with a person named Emperor Solo on another board. He is as Catholic as you can be, seeming to accept just about everything the church states without question. Form one of the discussions with him, I discovered that he was only around eighteen.

I also have read "Misquoting Jesus" by Bart Ehrman. He talked about how he was enticed into becoming a Born Again Christian and he was fairly you when that happened, in his middle teens if I remember correctely, and talks about how he had a void in his life at that time. He writes that all teenagers have that same void. Of course, later he realized through reading the Greek versions that it is not as he thought.

I am wonder if this is pretty common. They catch people while they are you and just try and keep them in the fold?

[TithonusSyndrome]

I used to go to a church group when I was around the age you're describing, and they don't have much use for subtlety when they're proselytizing. Most of the people there suffered from the usual high school foibles and just happened to see the Church as the place they wanted to hang their hat on rather than drugs, music, or the usual suspects. It's a canny move on the part of a member-hungry organization whose survival rests on netting miserable people in search of love and acceptance.

[General Zod]

We have the same poster over here I believe, with just two numbers in his name being different. He's about as bog standard as your blinders on high Catholic apologist can get. There's other more rational Catholics on the board, so I'd take everything he says with a grain of salt. He's not exactly known for doing much in debates beyond blindly quoting scripture and regurgitating the crap that the Church says as a truth.

[PainRack]

Why not? Think about it. Church offers identity, position, prestige and security.
And all it takes is that you don't critically think and criticise, something that we been teaching children for years.

[Stark]

I dunno - ever since I was very young, religious people struck me as disturbing and strange. Things like the more 'modern' chanting and waving and speaking in tongues stuff would have made that even easier.

I don't see any plus to being 'born again' aside from less sex, huge holes in the brain, and hanging around with frankly insane people. Maybe it's codependency? You know, how some people just have to be dating SOMEONE their whole lives so they can tick that box and get the security.

I guess religion isn't for independent or confident people.

[FSTargetDrone]

I dunno - ever since I was very young, religious people struck me as disturbing and strange.

I've always found religious youngsters particularly disturbing too, almost moreso than adults. There's just something so disheartening about it.

[Ravencrow]

I was more fundielistic when I was younger. Ignorance and easily dazzled at the time, I guess.

I've observed that religious teenagers seem more easily depressed and beat themselves harder than non-religious ones. I don't do it to any extreme but I know the feeling. Every bad thing and feeling was punishment from above, keep thinking about how unworthy one is. When a good thing comes along, one is paranoid about 'temptations'. The up and down cycles, the sense of self and place being affected by random happenings that are common in life -- it is really not a good thing.

[Kitsune]

We have the same poster over here I believe, with just two numbers in his name being different. He's about as bog standard as your blinders on high Catholic apologist can get. There's other more rational Catholics on the board, so I'd take everything he says with a grain of salt. He's not exactly known for doing much in debates beyond blindly quoting scripture and regurgitating the crap that the Church says as a truth.

Same person, I am sure, but I was wondering how much of his stance is due to being so young

[Darth Wong]

When I was a teenager, I tried to reconcile religion as primarily a system of morality rather than science (it helped that I hadn't actually read the Bible at this point). This made it seem like a worthwhile institution to me, but that was just the ignorance of youth. As I learned more about religion (and particularly after reading the Bible), that misconception evapourated pretty quickly. It's nothing more than a series of "our tribe KICKS ASS and all the other tribes SUCK!!!!!" rah-rah stories and speeches, along with a lot of rules that conveniently happen to provide massive benefit to the priestly class.

Teenagers in general seem to seek out black and white worldviews. They need to replace the mindless "follow what Mommy and Daddy say" thinking of childhood with something that is just as concrete and unquestionable, but which they can call their own. So they seek out polarizing worldviews, such as religious absolutism or other extremes such as nihilism or Randism. And then they act as though they've discovered the secret of life.

As people get more mature, they should begin to recognize that the world is not really so easily divided up into black and white, but that depends on how intelligent they are. One of the most important revelations that people have to make, however, is that one's sense of morality can be totally distinct from one's religious beliefs. That's the leap in intuition that many religious people never make; they simply cannot conceive of morality being distinct from religion.