I'm Christian....Kind of....? (Holly)

I grew up in a nontraditional Catholic family.   We did not go to church every week, but I did go to Catholic school through 8th grade.  I am baptised Catholic and have received the sacraments of First Reconciliation and First Communion.  Tim was pretty much raised the same way.  Both of my parents were raised in Catholic families, both attended church on a weekly basis and my father went to Catholic school.

My son is not baptised, and I could count on my fingers the number of times we have attended church since he was born.  I have taught him about God, about Jesus, and he knows all the basics.  He urges us to pray before dinner and he often asks for me to explain more to him.

I don't identify myself as Catholic...

When asked, I typically say, "I'm Christian."  I guess this is the label that most closely reflects my religious views.  I believe that God created the world and everything in it, that his son Jesus came and was crucified.  I believe that there is a heaven and but I'm not so sure about hell.  But I also believe highly in free will.  I don't believe that God punishes or rewards behavior.  In this I mean that I don't believe that a famine has anything to go with God punishing people, but that crops were planted poorly and the season was dry....



I don't believe that God will bless me with more children when he sees fit.  I think this is absolutely ridiculous mostly because, why would God see it fit for me to have a child at 17 but not now that I'm married?  Especially if I was condemned for having premarital sex to begin with?  I think that a lot of things that we were taught were the "Word of the Lord" were actually an attempt at get people to conform to some sort of ideal of how people should act.

I don't think that there will ever be a religion that each person can fit perfectly into because everyone has their own sets of beliefs...thus, opinions, about who or what God is or isn't.

But then again, maybe my beliefs are more out of fear than anything else.  To think that my daughter's life is just null and void, and that she is not in heaven looking down on me would be even more painful.