Jade ponders religion

[I apologize in advance for this not being the most well though-out or executed discussion, and in fact, it tends to be excessively vague, as I myself am so good at being. I need to get back in some English classes to tend to my rapidly deteriorating ability to write eloquently and interestingly.]

I think this could be something interesting to address. I have a friend who I've know now for quite a few years, who was homeschooled till her sophomore year of high school. Ok, legit. I have another friend, he was also homeschooled. In any event, I haven't talked to the first friend in a while but the other day received a quite out-of-the-blue messege from her. It started out pretty normal, how are you? then it became a messege about God, and wishing I would, basically, accept him into my life.

I honestly know next to nothing about religion in general. My parents never took us to any sort of church service besides our baptisms. I was baptised Catholic and so far as I know most of my ancestry is Catholic with the exception of the Mayvilles and their set who got to being Methodists. I know both sets of grandparents are still somewhat religious, at least my Schmitt ones and my Grandma Mayville is and has been, but generally not to the extent of my ancestors.

To a certain extent I have been interested in learning more about religion (and I think when I use this word throughout here I am generally referring to Christianity). The main reason is the ancestral component. In doing research, the best way is to fully know your subjects. I try researching my family history but a major component of their lives, all of them was religion. Since I don't know anything about it, I can't quite relate to them fully. I know the straightest of basics from history classes, stuff I've come across randomly in general life/movies, and things I've seen at funerals (thy will be done, thy kingdom come.. give us this day our daily bread, so on, so on). I've thought about trying to learn more but have never quite gotten around to it.

I did find, sometime earlier this year, something quite interesting. Thomas Jefferson edited and clipped out the most important and straightforward parts of the Bible, and created this:

http://www.angelfire.com/co/JeffersonBible/

I started to read through some of it and I'm not sure that I have a particular opinion on it but it is something interesting that I'll try to finish someday.

In any event, I was never raised with any sort of inclination towards there being a God. If anything my parents very much left us to fend for ourselves, especially after the divorce. I don't ever remember being taught a lot of things. Like brushing my teeth? I never did that right, because my mom never told me. She'd always say "go brush your teeth!" and I would sit there wondering what the right way to brush my teeth was. So in that sense, I have no idea how I came out of childhood with any sense of morals other than from Grandma Mayville, I think, because we were always at her house, so I always have spent a lot of time talking to her about our family history, and anything else. She loves to talk and I am one of a few in the family who don't mind listening to her.

This is getting extremely tangential. I generally don't know anything really about religion so I have always answered the "Do you believe in God?" questions with, "I don't know enough about religion to be able to make an accurate judgment on if there is or isn't a God." I still haven't had the chance to look into this, and I don't know if/when I will. From my outsiders' view, though, I don't know if I can logically wrap my mind around it, I don't know if I can- after being raised to think independently and think critically about facts. I am an historian, and facts and exact dates and proof are important to an historian. I am also trying to become an athletic trainer, again something where logical, sequential mechanisms and events are evaluated for facts in order to sort out the puzzle of this or that injury.

So, logically I have a problem with what little I have heard about Christianity. I vaguely know about some miraculous things such as Jesus rising from the dead, and I don't know what else. I don't understand this. I don't get the pomp and circumstance of some ceremonies I have been party to... in general they seem dragged out and like there is a lot of needless stuff going on. The overzealousness is also a turnoff, some of it just seems, for lack of a better, word, silly or corny. But that is, I think, mostly my being ignorant to the underlying components of the ceremony, etc.

I also happen to be a component of Evolution. Evolution makes a lot of sense to me and is quite common sense, so I don't feel that I need to explain it here, of course. That would be a bit superfluous, I think. Personally, for anyone to argue against archeaological evidence and say that the world is only a few thousand years old does not seem logical. I have always been into anthropology and archeaology, and that sort of stuff tends to make a lot of sense. It's stuff like that that makes you wonder, well, if science eventually convinced people the world is round, not flat, and that the sun is the center of the universe, not the earth, what other held-fast dark age notions of human superiority can also be disproved?

A coincidental incident, which also made me stop to think about this topic, is that my brother has become amorous of a verse from the book of Matthew, and wants to get the tattoo of a cross on his chest with this particular verse on his chest. I don't really understand this mostly because I don't understand people who get a bunch of tattoos. I also don't understand because he, like I, has received no religious education. He says that it has meaning, but I'm not quite sure what it is, even though he tried explaining it to me.

I pride myself on being accepting of whatever people want to do with themselves. They're really religious? Fine, that doesn't bother me. My brother wants to get a tattoo all across his body... ok, fine. There's never any particular reason for me to be vested in what other people want to do with themselves, and I think that stems from my annoyance at people who like to nitpick at me about certain things I do or don't do. Who gives a crap? I do what I want, and everyone else should to.

So, as this has reached epic proportions of digression, I think I'll head out.