Reason Not Religion

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Reason Not Religion

Observations and inferneces from real life perceptions: My entire life

I have been a Catholic and have attended Church regularly with my

family, always believing in God and the stories and tales of the Bible

as pure fact that happened long ago, and of Jesus being the savior,

etc.

Just this past month I attended a Presbyterian church service with my

elderly grandmother in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The church was small to

begin with, and only about one-third of the seats were filled. I would

have to say that at least 95% of the people were all over 65, with very

few young couples at all. My grandma made a comment on the lack of

young people who attend the masses now, and she kept referring to the

fact that recently less and less young couples and families ever

attended church.

At first I thought that this church would then seriously have to close

its doors when the current majority of the parishioners died, but then

I realized another aspect of human behavior and psychology.

The characteristic that I see and hear so much about that many humans

tend to possess and practice, is the fact that they become "closer to

"god"" the older they get. Why is this? It is because of one of the

same big reasons that we even have to have religion in the first place:

fear about death and what happens to us afterwards. These people seem

to be turning to the kind of thinking that inspired the dichotic idea

of PASCAL^S WAGER. Even if these people were not very religious during

their younger years, we can now see a trend of a large section of our

country^s population starting to attend church more and more and become

more "religious" as they grow older. What inspires this shift?--plain

and simple, the fear of uncertainty.

"QUESTIONING" ONES BELIEFS MUST GO BEYOND JUST WONDERING

When I used to attend Church regularly their was a priest who was an

extremely good speaker and extremely

intelligent. Even though he was a Catholic priest, serving as the pastor

of an extremely large church, he had the

courage and brains to disagree with some of the rigid dogma setup and

enforced by the Vatican. I remember one

sermon he gave that has greatly influenced me since, and I am very happy

I was fortunate enough to hear it. In

this certain sermon he talked about his thoughts on it being good for

teenagers and youth to question the

existence of a God in their world. He talked at length about this

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