My introduction to Catholicism

In my young life, I was quite involved in Catholicism. I was raised this way by my mother, who wholeheartedly believes in it. In contrast, my father is not religious, and only goes to church for special occasions like the Christmas Eve mass, because I would be there participating in the Nativity play.

I was homeschooled by my mother from when I was seven all the way until I started university. One of the lessons she taught when I was younger was about her religion. She'd read a Bible story to me and my brothers, and we'd talk about it a bit, and then we'd draw a scene that happened in the story. You've probably heard of these stories before. Think Noah's Ark, Tower of Babel, Jonah and the whale, Joseph's many-coloured coat, and the Parting of the Red Sea.

I actually have no recollection of these lessons, and if you just told me they'd happened, I'd deny it. The only reason I know this happened is she talked about it with me last year and showed me the workbook containing my drawings and what is indisputably my handwriting. Okay, I guess that happened then.

I would also be taken on trips. We would be driven a few hours away to a scenic destination, like Tekapo with a beautiful lake view where it's cold enough to snow. During the drives, we had a box of books in the back to keep us entertained, and especially when I was younger, she would play religious music CDs, by which I mean songs with simple lyrics and rhymes and very clear meanings that were designed for children. If you've heard it, you know what I'm talking about.

My mother also brought me to church every Sunday. Catholicism has a fascinating rite of passage for children attending church: Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation. The child is baptised when they are an infant, but the others occur later. My First Communion was when I was nine. It felt to me like the rituals surrounding it were designed so that the child, now old enough to understand, could properly take in the importance and gravity of Holy Communion. There was a lot of fuss and celebration about it.

Later, there was Confirmation. I think this happened when I was around 14 or 15. It involved a weekend-long religious camp with many other children somewhere rural, with a variety of activities. One of the activities was a walk through the bush, which I don't think had anything to do with religion, it was just to keep the kids busy. Another activity was a discussion led by an adult to a small group after sunset around a campfire. He talked to us about profound religious experiences he'd had, like when he'd really felt a strong presence of God or felt like God was guiding him and giving him advice. I liked hearing him talk about how he felt and the story of how he'd become so passionate about his religion that he'd dedicated time from his life to sharing it with others. It was humbling to listen to and I really appreciated the insight he gave.

I already mentioned I participated in the Nativity play, but I was also an altar boy. I attended several after-school religious groups, like Sunday school and Boys Brigade. I don't have much to say about these experiences, it just shows I was very deep into the whole thing.

My withdrawal from Catholicism

I'm sure there were a lot of factors involved, but I think two key events played a particular part in making me stop believing in this religion.

Boys Brigade was a weekly two-hour meeting led by an older lady. There were generally 6-8 children in attendance. I remember one time we were sitting around a table and the leader was talking about prayer. She explained that you could pray to God to talk to Him about what was going on in your life, and to ask Him for guidance or assistance in your struggles, or aid your neighbours in theirs. She gave a very lengthy personal anecdote about how someone she knew had lost their beloved pet cat. She prayed to God on behalf of her friend that the cat would return safely. Then, the cat returned safely. She told us this story as an example of how God listens and cares about all of us.

She then went around the table and asked each of us in turn what we would pray for. Most of the children said something predictable and uninspiring, like "I will pray that Dad recovers from his sprained ankle soon."

Being autistic as fuck, I had my sights set a bit higher: I asked if I could pray for all the children dying in impoverished African nations every single day. At this time in my life, this was the biggest tragedy I was aware of, and I was truly baffled and frustrated as to why there weren't more people seeing the bigger picture. If it's possible to use prayer to make a difference, then it's only ethically right for people to be trying very hard to pray for this, because it would address a needlessly cruel situation faced by humanity! I was confused and frustrated trying to understand why adults were not doing this, why were there no concentrated efforts to do this, and instead the person leading the prayer class was talking about a lost cat, a relative grain of sand's worth of importance compared to the magnitude of a beach.

I didn't say all that out loud, because I felt like it wouldn't be well-received, but I did ask if I could pray for the starving children. To her credit, the person giving the lesson didn't bat an eye, she just said "yes you can pray for that too."

Looking back, this is pretty funny, but it was also a big contributor to my disillusionment in how a loving God could exist. I now know that this is a well-trodden argument (look up problem of evil) but at this time I was trying to reconcile it on my own. There is so much tragedy in the world happening to so many people who don't deserve it, on small and large scales, and I'm told over and over again that God loves me and listens to me and is all-knowing and all-powerful. God sees what is happening to us and hears our desperate pleas for respite, but we continue to suffer under His watch. How can this be happening? How can a powerful, loving God stand by and watch this injustice persist?

The other big contributor was that I couldn't stop comparing the entire concept of the way the church is to the entire concept of how Santa Claus is.

Putting aside the literal connection between Christmas and the birth of Christ so we can focus on the externalities, they have a lot in common. Think about it:

The adults are trying to tell me that there are two magic men in the sky. Each is loving but fair, each will give you rewards if you're good, if you ask nicely for things you'll receive them, and if you're bad you'll be punished for it. You give them thanks for the goodness you receive.

There are entire organisations dedicated to the concept of these fantastic men. We build churches to celebrate God, we build Santa's Grotto to celebrate Santa. We go on pilgrimages to spread the word of God, we go on Santa parades to spread the word of Santa. We sing songs to celebrate God, we sing carols to celebrate Santa. We worship God in the churches and we worship Santa with 40% off clearance discounts in the department store.

If anything, Santa is a bigger concept in society than God is! You don't see Christian goods in shops outside of special dedicated Christian shops. You don't hear worship music on the radio outside of special dedicated Christian stations. But Santa isn't exclusive, he's everywhere: a pervasive, inescapable, unstoppable, collective force.

And Santa gave me things! It was direct evidence that he was real! Society built up this concept of the man, and he's real! It happened! How could I possibly disbelieve this! If I wake up each year on Christmas morning and find all sorts of treats waiting for me and I have a wonderful day with my family and I look forward to it again next year, it's very clearly a fulfilment of the promises of what would happen! Santa Claus did come to town! It was all true!

You can apply Occam's razor if you like. In this situation, the most obvious and simplest thing to believe is that Santa really is real. To have a cover-up of these galactic proportions would take an enormous, focused, secretive effort to go to this much trouble of celebrating an entirely fictional concept through places, buildings, activities, festivals, games, even evidence of his physical existence like his own gifts and the freaking NORAD Santa tracker — think about it. The simplest solution here is that it's all real. How could you possibly deny all of these factors, and moreover, why would everybody collectively go to this much trouble?

Meanwhile throughout all of this God is chilling up there too, I guess. That's still cool! Two big reward men in the sky. Sure, why not.

So imagine my surprise. IMAGINE my FUCKING SURPRISE when I am informed that exactly one of these men is not real.

And the one that's supposed to not be real... is Santa? The more pervasive one, the one backed by more evidence and celebration, the idea of him was so strong in my head and they took him down! They took him down just like that!!

But I'm supposed to believe the other man in the sky is still real though...

Let me tell you. After that? God does not have a fucking leg to stand on.

The concepts of these two men weren't the same in my brain, but they shared the same foundation, like branches of a tree, or houses on a rock. And the tree was cut at the roots, and the rock sunk into the ocean. There was simply no way for me to maintain belief in the other invisible man. How could I? It felt like any other make-believe story where I was supposed to suspend disbelief and go along with it.

And I did go along with it. I went to church, I was an altar boy. I was hanging out. But I couldn't shake off the feeling that it was merely an elaborate fantasy.

So I fell out of this in my late teens when I realised that I don't actually believe this to be real. Over time, I started going to Mass less and less. It felt like a natural cessation. My mother didn't fight me or push back at all on this.

Around this time in my life, I had also chosen to leave a few other extracurricular groups, such as Scouts and the St John youth programme, as I realised that I didn't enjoy them. It was like a lot of other things around that age: I'd never really expressed a desire or a refusal to be involved in them, it was simply what I'd found myself doing. They were things I'd always done, and I was going to them because it felt like what I was supposed to do, like it was the done thing. It was natural and neutral to me. It took a long time for me to realise that it was my choice to participate in them, and I could say no if I didn't want to any more.

And I didn't want to any more, because I didn't and couldn't believe God to be anything real in the real world. Invisibility isn't real. Telepathy isn't real. The mysterious powers that God commands do not exist in real life, they are only things from the fiction stories I read. If I cannot see, feel, or notice effects of the invisible man, the simplest solution is that there is no invisible man, and I can't make myself believe in one.

A note on homophobia

On the internet, I often hear people say that Christians tend to be against LGBT rights. Apparently they advocate against gay people getting married and trans people existing, and they may use the Scripture to justify their stance.

Personally, I haven't encountered any of this myself. I have never been to a church that's spoken about LGBT people in a negative light, and I've never been turned away for being transgender. I don't know whether I've been exceptionally lucky regarding the churches I've been to and the place I live, or whether the network effects of the internet have amplified the negative cases into seeming more common than they really are. But I just want to mention that for me, there's no connection between my sexuality or gender identity and religion. Being transgender hasn't been a factor that's turned me away from the church or made me more wary of attending in the future.