For justprompts. What do you believe in?

I was raised Catholic, you know. I can tell you the Seven Sacraments. I can give you the Act of Contrition, the Lord’s Prayer, the Fail Mary and a grab bag of other integral mantras both in English and in Latin. I can give you the Holy Days of the calendar (It’s the second week of Advent, incidentally), the four gospels, and can name off the top of my head a dozen of Liturgical Rites. I can tell you, or at least give a general idea of the structure of the church. The Patron of lost things, of music, of the sick - I can give you them, if you like. I haven't got a religion; it's a compilation of facts.

In Catholic school, you don’t believe in God, per se. You believe in nuns, who are a lot more concrete about matters of faith than a lot of answers you get, or don’t get, I suppose, these days. But I’ll tell you, mine isn’t a faith so much as a habit. Hollow rituals that don’t mean much. If you go to church often enough, the motions become second nature: stand, sit, kneel, sing. You don’t spend your time thinking about God, or contemplating your place in the universe. You balance your check book, you go over your shopping list, you stand, sit, kneel, sing. Movement without thought, that’s what life in the Church – or any religion, I suppose – can do to you.

God is a distant and scary thing, and yet at once all-loving, and all-merciful. You find out that God sacrificed His only Son to save us, and protected the Jews and showed benevolence to the Gentiles. He also cast out an uppity child, bombed Sodom and Gomorrah for having a bit too much fun, and decided the best way to bargain with dictators is to decimate the population with plagues and frogs and vengeful angels. You learn that he’ll send people to an infinity of pain and torment for finite crimes. Usually, I’ve noticed, people will either imagine Him as just one or the other, because it’s rather hard to reconcile the one image with the other.

This is what I’ve come to believe: God cast out Adam and Eve after tasting the forbidden fruit, because once they’d had a taste of deeper knowledge, they’d next eat from the tree of life. Then they would be as gods, immortal. Like Him. He was afraid.

I believe that some time in the distant past, God left. Very quietly. Without anyone realizing he’d gone, so now we mouth prayers and sing hymns to an abandoning Father.

Like any truth Catholic, I believe God is dead.

But I’ll adhere to his laws, anyway. The ones that suit me. Because you need to have some sort of a center, don’t you? Like the greatest of religious minds, I find the Scriptures broad enough that they can be interpreted to mean anything. I’ll take the ‘no suicide’ bit, and the ‘honor thy parents’ bit… maybe skimp over ‘thou shalt not kill’, and ‘thou shalt not bear false witness’ because, really, so long as you get most of them down, it ought to count. And that’s all anyone needs, I think: solace. I sleep well.

Whatever gets you through the night, right?