What She/Someone Wrote A While Back...

I think I finally understand something about religion. I think trying to find a religion that fits you is like trying to find a pair of pants that fit you right and you like.

Different people need different pants, but they're all still right about which pants are right for them. So even if someone thinks that someone else's pants are ugly, they can both be right about the pants.

When you're little you just wear whatever pants your parents put on you because you don't know or care. But when you grow up you have to figure out which pair of pants fits and looks best on you. And that's the most confusing time. Then once you figure it out you can wear the pants that you like all the time.

This is, unless you change (loose weight etc.), and then you might have to buy different pants but you can still get them in the same style. It kind of sucks to have to go and buy new pants because then you have to shopping, and you know how I feel about that.

I guess the important thing is that it doesn't matter what kind of pants you wear as long as you don't make other people wear the same kind of pants since the pants only perfectly fit them self. And we can't all wear the same pants cause they won't fit and it would be really boring if everyone looked the same. And I guess people just have to remember that even if some pants are really ugly in their eyes, what do they care? because their own pants look good on themselves, and who cares about someone else's pants.

I don't know what you'll think of this. but I always make big problems small things, 'cause otherwise I don't understand them, but I do understand pants. Maybe you could ask your Bible teacher or whoever might have a good opinion about this idea for me.

Faith married Hope and they were both so disillusioned they named their daughter Disregard

How does faith persist? Really mom? That is what you want to ask after all this?

How could faith not persist? I mean how can a person, who is not omnipotent not have some form in faith. I mean, if you start with the most basic, you have to at first when you wake up believe that you are indeed awake and a person. When your pillow feels like you remember it to feel, and your toes wiggle upon command, there is a logic to give credence to the idea that you are, in fact, alive. In a way it is then our reason which gives legitimacy to our faith (and strangely enough doubt that undoes it). A faith in the patterns that we live by.

Yesterday I saw a sign on a church with a picture of Mary holding Jesus. Across it was written: "Pregnant?....... Don't Worry!"

What I want to know is how people come to believe in/ have faith in such strange/sad things. And was this church insinuating that your child could have been immaculately conceived, or that: It's okay, Jesus was a bastard too!?

What I'd Like to Know With a LIttle Help From My Friends

I don't want to ask the same old questions: Why do religious people profess goodness, practice hate? Why do people of varying religions not see their communality instead of their differences? Why do people believing in God take so much of life and death into their own hands?

I guess what I would like to know is what makes some people capable of belief, others not. How do so many people believe such ludicrous stories; what makes the legends of the Bible, the accounts of the Koran, more respectable than the stories of Achilles and Zeus, Cupid and Athena? How, in this age of reason, does faith persist? I don't mean "Why does faith persist?" but "How?"

Residual Questions Lingering

So what now? What to do with all these experiences of religion? What to do with the knowledge that most of the world's people practice some form of religion, profess belief in some form of God, pray to some metaphysical notion of power?

When I was a teenager I used to assault the night's darkness with my questions: How can I believe in God? Why can everyone else, and not me? If there is a God, why would I be refused belief? Aren't the prayers of the innocent somehow special? Isn't it said, "Seek, and ye shall find? Knock, and the door will be opened to you?" The door in front of me remained unrelentingly solid and impenetrable. So many years later, I do not knock anymore. Will I be taken by surprise maybe? Now especially, that my own mom, a woman of great, unshakeable faith in the selfsame God who spurned me, is dying, actively dying, a protracted and horrible and certain death? Will her vision of eternity illuminate the night for me, maybe, finally?

I don't think so. I don't expect or seek light from this quarter any more, not even a thin line of that famous white light from around the edges of the resolutely chained door. But if I did see such a light, wouldn't I try that old door again, wouldn't I tug at its heavy tarnished locks one more time? Oh, you betcha I would; I am far too nosey not to do so.

I see religion as one of the world's greatest problems. The more I know about religion, the more I feel abhorrence. It makes people resigned. It builds contentment. It builds self-righteousness, from which eventually comes its steady partner, intolerance. It is said that both the greatest goodnesses and the greatest evils in our world have always had their strongest roots in various religions. Well, I don't think that's true. Stalin? Hitler? What extreme goodnesses? I don't see the truth of either side of this statement, which is used, in general, as a sort of universal shrug-off whenever religion is seen to be intolerant or wicked or at the basis of the wars and crusades and campaigns of intolerance, the places where hatred flies its sorry standard and flies it without shame.

What is my follow-up question? I don't really know. What is your follow-up answer?