Not keeping the faith: Catholicism and my right hand

Have you ever thought about how, in the era when Jesus Christ masturbated, He had very few… Have you ever thought about how, in the era when Jesus Christ masturbated, He had very few options for adequate lube? Well if you haven’t, maybe you should. It might just change your life. I know it changed mine.

Let’s hop in the Way Back Machine and revisit a time when I was just a little boy in Catholic school, Bible in one hand, big sack of naive innocence in the other. Embedded into my brain forever is the mental third-degree burn that scarred my seventh grade religion class – the day our teacher told us that masturbation was a mortal sin. For those of you not down with the Catholo-speak, mortal sins are the baddest mammajammas of all unholy deeds. Murder, for example, is a mortal sin.

Mortal sins stick on your soul for the rest of your life and can only be forgiven by God Himself through the blessed sacrament of reconciliation – or by sending $29.95 to Jerry Falwell.

For almost a year after that sexual Three Mile Island, I would stand nervously in the shower, afraid to “let my fingers do the walking” because I was certain that the floor would then immediately cave in and I would fall straight into Hell. Let’s just say one day the dam burst, but after I did the deed for the first time, I was so riddled with fear and shame that I almost rode my Huffy straight to church to beg for redemption.

Remember those old drug commercials with the egg and the frying pan? Kids, this is your brain – empty frying pan is shown. Well, this is your brain on Catholicism – Molotov cocktail is thrown into frying pan.

That’s pretty much what my halo-adorned head felt like up until high school, where sex wasn’t just non-taboo; it was flat-out celebrated. Health class was delicious blasphemy. It proved that rational, sane people choked the chicken regularly and that what my girlfriend and I did on Friday night wasn’t committing us to eternal damnation.

I’m scared to think about where I would be right now had I not started questioning my faith. For the time being, that questioning has caused me to flush my Catholicism down the toilet, along with the eight years of crap they fed my head. I don’t feel bad about tearing up the entire root system that was my youth because, well, it wasn’t my root system. It was the Church’s, or my religion teacher’s, or my parents’ – anyone’s but mine.

With books like “The Da Vinci Code” high atop The New York Times bestseller list, more and more people are experiencing various forms of religious friction. On the one hand, some are angry over facts contradictory to church dogma being talked about in the papers. Others are scared that the institution that they’ve followed their whole lives may be a sham. Most are at least a little confused.

But this is a good thing.

I learned at an early age while debating with my atheist friend that, if you have no faith, your tiny shreds of evidence would quickly disintegrate when under scrutiny. On the other hand, if you truly have faith, you’ll know it because it can stand up to even the harshest contradictory evidence. The two of us would wage our own private war over God for hours, only to be left frustrated by the fact that we could not jar the other from his standpoint. I felt proud of my rock-solid Catholic beliefs that could not be torn apart by the most persuasive of arguments.

For some people, just being confronted by opinions different from theirs is enough to confirm or deny their beliefs.

But I had to put my faith to the test. My Catholicism collapsed later not because anyone convinced me otherwise, but because I let it cave in. Dissecting my soul was scary at first, but nothing worth doing is ever easy.

Because of it, I now have a belief system, one that I’m happy adhering to – one that lets me rub one off guilt-free. Because I bet Jesus did, too. I bet He was boppin’ the bishop before there even were bishops. I mean, He was a guy, and do you know any guys who haven’t stolen their mothers’ hand cream and trolled the upper cable channels for scrambled porn? OK, maybe the Son of God didn’t do that.

Regardless of my creative-slash-disgusting views on Jesus, I still took the time to develop them on my own instead of just using the preexisting views of dead, old men who I don’t know. For some people, simply following what their parish tells them to do is fine, because they truly believe in their faith. But I found that I didn’t. Either way, each one of us should examine things on our own. There are just some actions that need to be handled personally. OK, I was actually talking about religion that time.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve been excommunicated. Excommunicate yourself at davidj@pittnews.com.