Cinematic Belief

I think I'll add a bit more on faith and such, especially with regards to cinematic influence and recent events.

I was raised a Catholic and went to Catechism through First Communion. Then, due to my status as an outsider, I decided that I didn't want to go to Catechism anymore. Why torture yourself by attempting to learn about stuff you can barely comprehend at that age anyways. It seems like indoctrination and mind control to me.

So, I became an atheist pretty early on. It was when I was 16 that I first did a really big question of my lack of faith, when I saw The Last Temptation of Christ. The movie put the stories I had heard about in Catechism into a context which I could deal with and actually think about believing. It's whole idea was that Christ was fallible, and he was actually a human being with human emotions and human problems. He struggled with them, and he dealt with them. The whole "He could be a nutjob" scenario may have been addressed (I don't really remember), but I finished the movie thinking that maybe religion is actually a decent thing. Maybe I could be religious.

This, to me, is the mark of a great movie. Something that challenges your beliefs, whether you're an atheist or a Catholic, as it was (and still is) a controversial film from the Christian religions.

I basically am still atheistic, with more of a sense of some sort of universal force. A Karma-like force that drives the universe and keeps it from destroying itself.

I saw The Passion of the Christ last night, and it reinforced my religious beliefs more than anything else in the past has. It made me despise Catholicism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and any other sort of religion with blind faith substituting for logic. It sends these people to do horrible things to other people in the name of some silly belief that may or may not be true.

And, perhaps I do need to believe in something. Maybe I should believe that there is somebody/something looking over us. And, perhaps that is what this Karma-like force is, a religion of my own sort. One that isn't fully attached to anything, but definitely has some holistic value to it.