I don’t just pay this lip service,
but I actually live it. Without trying
to be or sound judgemental, lots of people make the same claim, but not many actually
live it.
Undoubtedly my non-conformity is the
reason I’ve never been pigeon-holed or labelled. It’s probably also the reason why the circle
of people I consider true friends (those who would drop everything and drive to
Winnipeg in the middle of winter if I called them and said I was there and needed
them) is fairly small.
When I was growing up my family
moved a lot...and I really mean a
whole lot! Sometimes I’d have two or
three schools within one academic year – my personal record being four high schools
within the first three months. As a
result, I was always the new kid. When
this is the kind of life you lead, a couple of things happen...at least they
happened to me: (1) I became extremely
self-sufficient and singular; and (2) I came to realize people were not
necessarily permanent in my life and that I didn’t really need many of them. Now don’t get me wrong, I was not lonely, but
rather I was quite comfortable in being alone.
There’s a huge difference.
This meant that peer pressure was pretty
much non-existent to me. There was no
way that anyone could influence me into doing something I didn’t want to do simply
because I didn’t care enough about their opinions of me if I didn’t do it. After all, the odds were good that I’d be going
to a new school in a few months or so anyway, so what did I care whether they
liked me or not. Truth be told, it’s
actually quite a liberating thing because having this kind of outlook from a
young age enabled me to look at things and question them because I wanted the
answers. I didn’t care what others
thought.
The greatest compliment I ever
received was one my stepmother told me that my dad had said about me. She’d been talking about me to someone and in
describing me, said that I marched to the beat of a different drummer. My father, on overhearing this conversation,
said, “No, she beats her own drum.” I
have to say it’s a moment of rare insight that I wouldn’t have believed my dad
would have come up with except that I believe my stepmother.
Although my family was Catholic, we
were largely non-practicing. I’d been
christened as a baby, made my first communion as a kid and had been confirmed
as a young teen, but always I had the questions. The older I got, the more interesting the
questions. What finally made me realize
that religion is a bunch of bull and really nothing more than a way of
controlling the mindless masses, was when I wanted to get married the first
time. My ex-husband had been married
before in an Anglican ceremony and had been divorced for years. In order for him to be permitted to marry me
(Catholic) in a church ceremony, he had to do a few things. The first was to agree to have any children
raised as Catholics. Now here’s the
weird, man-made rules part. His first wedding
was considered a pagan ceremony due to the fact that it was an Anglican
service, and therefore not ‘recognized’ by the Catholic church. That being said, they wanted him to write to
the Pope (really!) for his first marriage to be annulled and to obtain
permission to marry a Catholic.
That’s where I put my foot
down. I asked, rightly so I believe, “If
his first marriage is not recognized by the church, why does it have to be
annulled?” No one, at any level of
church management could or would answer that.
This is just one example of the hypocrisy that resulted in my giving up
the Catholic religion, indeed any real belief in any kind of “god”.
This type of opinion, however, sends
spears of rage through any religious church-goer.
People are all for “freedom of
speech, freedom of expression, and freedom of religion” so long as it conforms
to their own beliefs.
I don’t judge others for their
beliefs, so I’m often left shaking my head and wondering why I’m judged for
mine. If you really believe there is a
god, then just satisfy yourself that I’ll be judged by that god at some
point. If you think that nothing I could
say would convince you to change your beliefs, your faith if you will, then why
do you think that anything you could say would change mine? There are a lot of truly evil people out
there in the world who think that because they go to church every week, all
their transgressions against others are forgiven.
I live my life attempting to do no
harm to others. If someone has faith
such that they believe in a higher being, then so be it. Good for them. I try not to judge based on religion, beliefs
or race. After all, we are all part of
the human race. I believe that we should
be kind to whomsoever we meet and in return they may be kind to us. A lot of people preach without living their
beliefs. Some of us just live our
beliefs without feeling the need to preach about it.
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