A Religious Understanding

This is another older piece I wrote a while back (I’m trying to go through some of my backlog that has yet to be posted). To put this essay into context, in the past I have had debates with friends of mine on “Facebook”, who are atheists, on the subject of religion, they can get daily heated. I’m Roman Catholic, and while I will never profess myself to be overtly religious, I do believe in the teachings, but have a different opinion than most Christians.

This particular essay came from one of those debates, and it goes into how I see my own religious beliefs. Surprisingly, my atheists friends had no negative opinion on this, and now I leave it up to the rest of you to form your opinions.

Thanks, and enjoy! :

I won't deny that Christians have not been violent, history has shown Christians use their religion as an excuse for violence, persecution, and war. The Crusades, for example, were at their heart a trade dispute. They have been as violent as members of religions. I also admit that I have not read the Bible all the way through, I have read passages, but even with that I think I can get a clear picture of what it is trying to tell me.

The Christian Bible is divided into two sections, "The Old Testament" (aka Torah), and the other is "The New Testament". First section is the history of the Jewish from the beginning of the world to the time of the Romans. The Second part is the history and teachings of Jesus Christ and his apostles. Again I have not read all of this, however from what I can tell is that a lot of it is allegory, and metaphors and not to be taken literally at face value. God doesn't want someone to cut off his arm, but remove that which causes the problem. 

While the Bible is an integral part of Christianity, if not at the heart of the religion, it's more than the book that, in my opinion, that defines the religion. It is how people act upon the words written in the book. The problem is a lot of people use it as way to persecute others and commit terrible acts, but the same could be said about any other religion. So in some way, yes on the surface, Christianity is no different than other religions, there are good and bad people who shape our image of the religion. Unfortunately, a lot of times the bad is what makes a louder bang. In a lot of ways you could compare religions to the loyalty to operating systems, on the surface Mac OS and Windows are not two different from one another, but when you ask someone why they chose Mac or PC, there are down to the smallest part, features the people like over the other one and many times they grew with one particular OS in their household, same with religion.

The one thing that I am not the most familiar with is the history of the early Jews and how they came to worship the one God. Maybe it did form out of previous polytheistic religion or it was some great revelation. All I know is that I believe in God, but that doesn't stop of me from wanting to uncover all the mysteries and accepting science, I am probably one of the few Christians who accept evolution. I happen to think science is a means of figuring out how God did it. I think God is a great writer weaving together a great story and we are the characters and we don't know how it is going to end or how it began, we are figuring it out a long the way. I guess that is one way of thinking about it.