where do I get this stuff? I had lutheran and catholic catechism and was forced to take part in catholic rituals like confession etc. (which I found rather cool really, except I knew the father (priest) from school so it wasn't as random as you see in the movies, felt like a form of counselling)
religion class, took 4 years of intensive religion courses + 15 years of church hierarchy stuff with my family connections to all 3 church bodies, grew up with the fear of seeing my uncle being excommunicated because he was deemed too liberal to be a pastor and seeing the catholic part of my family ridiculed at funerals, sermons etc. I was going to be a missionary up until high school ( i would have been a different kind of missionary though, I don't see dogma too well, just the need for a better society/purpose driven life mainly through left wing social change lol, would have worked well in south america but oh well that's not my calling anymore).
Then I had a falling out (religious right part of the family, pastor was caught being a fraud, just got tired of the church politics, wasn't really dogmatic in an ever increasing dogmatic religious society). I come from a very religious family background of catholics, hardline right protestant lutherans and hippie left lutherans. I didn't go into Jesus in explaining just more church politics and how they view things which I was sadly a part of most of my life. Overall the catholics that are in charge view Jesus as an up down guy like the Old Testament, which is not the true essence of Jesus.
St. Louis Archbishop excommunicates churches that don't agree with him, he doesn't give communion to catholic democrats and removes himself from charity organizations that help kids with cancer because Sheryl Crow is on a children's board, who happens to be pro-choice. That's the catholic church I know, one of exclusion and yet they wonder (the hierarchy) why nobody goes to church anymore.. Anyway I'm not catholic, they can fix their own problems, which they never will because they live in a glass house.
