Catholic guilt is a myth

I couldn't agree with you more.granjura The Catholic church gets it very wrong alot of the time and that is so sad and so bad for your family member that they felt the only way was to take their own life, that was just terrible.

Luckily for me it felt sooo wrong the thought that was planted in my head by my catholic up bringing that God is mainly sitting there waiting for you to do something wrong so that he can punish you and because it felt so wrong to me I chose to see God in my own way and that was that He just loves us and wants us to be good happy people, I guess I was just lucky that I chose to think against what I was taught

So sorry for the loss of your Aunty whom I hope is now in Heaven with our LOVING and CARING GOD.

Hi, Jadey. Hope to hear more from you! granjura I'm so sorry that your family's experience of churches has been so destructive.

Agreed Jadey, but it is not what the Catholic Church teaches, is it?

My dad's favourite sister committed suicide because she was gay - and she was taught it was an abomination. In the end, totally distraught, she chose the terrible 'sin' (not in my eyes) of killing herself, rather than disgracing her family, and much worse, the Church community, Priest and 'religion'.

One of my nieces is gay - and a Catholic, She has chosen to be celibate in order to be true to Catholicism, as even nowadays, she it told that being gay is an abomination. How sad and tragic.

Wellcome Jadey

Hi my name is Jade and I am new here. if its ok I would like to comment on this as I have been a Roman Catholic all of my life. I used to have loads of a type of guilt due to my upbringing but when I actually read parts of the Bible I realised that God just loves you and wants you to live a good life and his guide lines were just be a decent person.

My dad lived all his life with his guilt - the guilt of falling in love with a divorced Protestant who had a child by first marriage. He carried in his wallet to the day of his death, the letter from his sister saying that, although she thought my mother was a wonderful woman, he should forsake his love for her and put the true religion first. He was unofficially excommunicated for marrying my mother- in the Christian Catholic Church (a little bit like the Anglican Church here in Switzerland) and was shunned by the catholic community and his family. Two of the nicest people in the work had their lives made a misery by the Catholic Church and the fear of hell fire. So what a lot of cods wallop this article is. If people post that sort of stuff, why should people not respond?

Not so FlicketyB I had no such intention and actually apologised in advance. I don't have any religious leanings and beliefs. But I don't normally voice my opinion and wondered why other non-believers feel the need to do so? That's all.

Orca's last posting for one. and it is the impression I have got from reading discussions on religious subjects on Gransnet.

Always, Flickety - a somewhat sweeping generalisation!
In fact, I have frequently been told by believers, including Lord Hunt, the then Minister for Education, that I could not possibly give my children any correct morals if I were not a Christian. However, I will not make a counter accusation that 'all' believers assume they are morally superior, as that would be just as unjustified.

How do you make that out FlicketyB? What has been posted that might draw that conclusion? Seems a slightly random observation really.

Why do people who do not believe in any religion always assume such an air of moral superiority?

I think you answered your own question Orca.
"I cannot help wondering"

Religion is one of the major forces that has shaped the world's cultures, art, conflicts, literature, music, politics - not something that can be ignored, believer or not.

Without wishing to hurt anyone's feelings and allowing that everyone is entitled to their own belief, I cannot help wondering why so much thought and energy is put into arguments about something so patently unbelievable as religion, its gods and goddesses and doctrines.

So it's a good thing limbo has been abolished because, quite simply, it was disgustingly immoral. As I said earlier. No amount of jesuitical argument changes that fact. Well done whichever pope realised this and did the good deed.

And that interpretation still means that, to me, holding babies in some way unclean enough to enter heaven directly when they die, is immoral. If god made them in his image, he can't have done a very good job if he put in qualities that he then decided weren't good enough. The babies have not done anything wrong .

Besides a god worth his salt would have told everybody at once and not just started, again unfairly, with a tribe in the Middle East.

In short, it doesn't make sense to me. It never did; even when I was a small child the illogicality and the basic unfairness of the premises put me off.

Other people can believe what they like. I really don't have a problem with that. So long as religion isn't used as a power tool. Unfortunately, it too often is. That's what I seek to change by discussing such things. "Be the change you want to see in the world." Ghandi.

So... this is my current understanding: original sin is the deciding to do one's own thing without reference to god (i.e. not doing god's will; going against what the christian authorities tell you is god's will, or not seeking god's will through prayer, etc). Because humans do this naturally, we're all guilty of it, so Christ had to be a scapegoat (see Jewish stories in the OT; that's where that idea came from) and be sacrificed in some way to atone for our sins wilfulness (which is part of our nature, and the same god is supposed to have made us so it's his own fault!).

Well, the sacrifice has been made. We are cleansed. And god should have accepted that and moved on. No?

Not poking. Just being logical. Anyway, that's how I see it. Not that I actually think it matters any more than the interpretation of any other ancient human myth. But's it's interesting to ponder what makes religions tick and why they exist.

I can see that my understanding of Catholic doctrine is totally out-dated as I left my convent school in 1956. I was already an atheist because I simply cannot accept the existence of any supernatural being but I wonder if the way I was taught accelerated my rejection of the faith? I was a clever girl so if I got the wrong idea I expect most of my fellow pupils did too.
I was certainly told that Jesus had died to pay for my sins and I could never see that I had done anything evil enough to justify that. I was also told that my beloved and very devout aunt who died when I was eight would have to suffer torment in purgatory to expiate her sins.
If doctrine can be changed to meet new scientific understanding why should any of it be believed?
l am rather contemptious of the way some people stick to the letter rather than the spirit of their own religion - for example rich Catholics enjoying expensive fish meals on Fridays and Jewish areas being ringed so that people in the ring can treat their entire neighbourhood as their home on the Sabbath.
Thank you to Lilygran and Micelf for continuing to reply with courtesy to our genuine queries. Like other atheists on Gransnet, I respect your right to believe anything you choose and I know you are equally accepting of our sincerely held beliefs.

On a slightly different tack.. As a non-catholic I found it perplexing when I was helping to appoint a headteacher for a RC Primary School. Two excellent candidates were not able to be appointed because they had married non-catholics though they had married in a RC church! They ended up appointing a rather dull person who was an excellent catholic but a mediocre headteacher! Apparently the other candidates would not have been able to sign the bishop's letter!

I never took the concept of Christ suffering for our sins personally and despite attending 6 different catholic schoola, I cannot remember hell and damnation forming a signifcant part of my religious educaton. It was more being encourage to justify ones salvation by doing good in this world, which has certainly driven my social conscience. Hell and damnation only came to those who committed mortal sins, and we were always reassured that as it was unlikely we would ever do that the concept was nothing to worry us.

I don't think that examining one's conscience about what you should/should not have done/do is solely the preserve of those who believe in god, or of particular generations. I do not think it is "foreign" to either group.

It is an interesting idea that catholic/Christian guilt is a secular construct - I am not sure that I or many others brought up in a Christian tradition would agree with that. I have vivid memories of chapel at school with gruesome carvings of the stations of the cross on the wall and being told that Christ's suffering was my fault. Boy was I scared!

FlicketyB I posted the OP because I think the perception of the part played by guilt in Christianity is an misunderstanding on the part of the secular observer ('don't worry, there probably isn't a God') and the research seemed to bear it out. I suppose thinking seriously and regularly about the things you should not have done and those things you should have done is foreign to the children of the 1960s and their children and grandchildren, as Joan suggests.

I have only just found this thread. I come from a good conventional catholic home and a predominantly convent education, including all my secondary education, but I never came across the concept of catholic guilt until I was in my early 20s and even then I think the subject was brought up someone who was not a catholic.

"Regarding the bit about original sin, am I right in thinking, then, that the essential problem is deciding things for oneself without reference to god's will? That the idea is christians should always try to do what they understand as god's will rather than their own, even when their own will conflicts with what they (or some theologians somewhere) interpret as god's will?"

I understand the idea behind the above (Bags' interpretation with the agrement of lilygran), but not sure how that relates to ORIGINAL sin. The concept of sin as being going against god's will (or what an individual or religion thinks is god's will) makes some sense, but it does not tie in with the idea of sin as something inherited as part of the human condition.

My interpretation of the idea of original sin is that it is an attempt by religion to answer the entirely reasonable question - "If god is good, why is there eveil in the world?). It is a story to try and explain this paradox. And I agree with the importance of myths and stories as a way of explaining deeper ideas that are hard to find words for - the trouble starts when these are not recognised for what they are and are taken literally.

It also begs the question as to what is god's will - no agreement on that so far. Different religions have different ideas.

Matthew Fox wrote an interesting book called Original Blessing - worth a look I htink.

Lucky you. I wanted to be an archaelogist I love ancient history.