Originally Posted by
DragonStryk72
Well, my dad is still Catholic, actually. He never really lost his faith in anything other than himself. There was no reason not to be accepting, it's a preference, on he fought his whole life against, and that's just the way that God made him. He didn't change his voice when he came out, nothing. He's still the same former Marine he used to be (He was getting drafted into the Army in Vietnam, but decided he wanted a choice, so tore up his draft notice and enlisted).
I always sort of thought that people made too much out of Christianity, myself. Jesus always seemed to be talking about a more quiet, individual faith based on open acceptance and forgiveness of others. For me, I went through the Bible, and I weighed everything against the messages that Jesus gave, and if something didn't seem to balance with that message, I dropped it, because Christ came to change the way we were doing things, obviously because we had become out of balance with the True Word of God. Oddly, I think they had it about right in Dogma when Salma Hayek's character said, "It doesn't matter what you have faith in... just that you have it."
My Dad actually tested my faith, going part by part over the various beliefs that came from the doom and gloom crowd, about hell and everything. I say the same now as I did then, "The God I believe in wouldn't do that". At the time, he was incredibly shocked by it, and I did not understand why, because it seemed to be a simple, straight-forward answer, but that was just before my dad came to his decision to admit the truth to himself and my mother. I found out later, at his 30-year anniversary in AA (my parents divorced just after I graduated High School, much to the relief of us all) that what I had said back then was part of the reason that he came out during that retreat.