Spoon-fed dogma - it's a bitch.

The more I learn, the more I find my views becoming, and I quote someone I live with, "heretical."
But here's the deal. You really can't depend upon church teachings. From the earliest years of the church, scripture has been interpreted and reinterpreted, translated and retranslated, and in most modern churches has been taken so far out of context and deviates so far from its original meaning that we're basically just using an approximation of true scripture and historical fact and saying that that's good enough.

Fascinating theories have been utterly abandoned or stamped out because of this. Whole texts have been lost (though many have been recovered thanks to the find at Nag Hammadi back in the 40's <3). People make wild assumptions about the Quran because of stuff like this. As someone who's read the Quran (admittedly, in English translation), a lot of the stuff people claim is in there ISN'T or has careful parameters. It makes me so angry when people who clearly know nothing about Islam run their mouths. Anyways, when it comes to establishing your faith, you have to depend on your own analysis, discuss it with others to glean insight, turn it over in your own mind, do your own reading. You can't expect other people to spoon feed you and blindly accept it.

That's stupid. That's like being a-okay with 2+2=5 being imparted to the masses at the hands of Big Brother in 1984.

Have we really lost the ability to question? As children, we questioned everything. As rebellious teens, we questioned authority. And now, we're suddenly "above that" and cleaving to a dogma upon which our fates literally eternally rely?

I'm really getting tired of being told, even at a ridiculously liberal school, that my adoptionist stance is heretical. Just because "the church" told you something, that doesn't mean it's true or right. It may mean that a lot of people have been taught that for generations, but that doesn't make it correct. Clearly, even popes can be wrong and they continually have to acknowledge that the actions, doctrines, and edicts of past popes must be reconsidered or even apologized for (*cough*Galileo*cough*Spanish Inquisition*cough*Crusades*cough*), so substantiating that in spite of the failures of supposedly infallible leaders, your beliefs that they substantiate are not only correct but even HISTORICAL FACT is utterly ridiculous.

So let me learn and grow as I choose. I walk by faith, not by sight, and by that I mean I'm not going to accept what other people demand to be true based on "sight," sight standing as a metaphor for what the world at large (with its often well-meaning but misinformed believers) tells us, but I'll let myself be led by my faith and try to fulfill my own spiritual quest in my own time.