INSERT:  Fallen Catholic:  My Search for the Real Jesus

This book is being written one page at a time, one day at a time. It is a compilation of my thoughts concerning Catholicism and all things spiritual. You could think of it as an atheist's search for redemption. I have no idea how things are gonna turn out. In a sense, you, the reader, have me at a disadvantage. You can page forward and find out how things turned out. I am stuck living it, one day at a time. Some of those days are awesome but some are very scary. This is one of those scary days.

It is raining and the rain prevents me from doing my job. So when it rains, I do things to further my career; things we all put off; things that produce no immediate income but promise to do so in the distant future.

I left the television production world a few months ago to take a real job. I was a freelancer, taking video and editing jobs, enjoying the feast and dreading the famine. Now I go to work every day as a roofing inspector with some of the nicest guys you ever met. It's more of a sales job than a technical job. I spend a lot of time with the clients, nursing them through their insurance claims. Most of them are just super. And that is quite a switch for me because I used to work with demanding, anal narcissists...you know...television stars. Thank God that is behind me.

I started writing this at the behest of my friend, Father Joe Breen. We are new friends, just getting to know one another. I think he looks at me as one of his projects. He is actively trying to save me. In a sense, I also believe I am helping him on his road to salvation as well. Anyway, I am so glad he nudged me. I made a promise to myself years ago that when I finally had something to say, I would write a book.

And I have a hell of a lot to say. One of the themes running through this book involves judgement. It is not the kind of judgement we usuallly examine. It is judgement of the Christian God and his unworthiness that haunts these chapters. If there is a God, he is certainly nothing like the one invented by Christians. And most Christians are so used to accepting the traditional ideas about God that they probably would consider this book to be blasphemous. It is not intended as such.

I have a lot of contempt for the people who promulgate the conservative notion of Jesus, the Nazarene. Their ideas would be laughable if they weren't so dangerous. The worst offenders are not Catholic. Catholics learned long ago to refrain from using the bible as a history book. But these southern Protestants are uneducated and belligerent about it. They are avowedly ignorant. And they take their beliefs to the extreme, contending that scientists are all conspiring to defend the atheist viewpoint; the devil's temptations. The scary part is that they are willing to risk our entire globe on ideas about the warming of our planet that fly in the face of reason. Our existence on this planet depends upon those of us with a scientific point of view prevailing over those determined to demonize the scientific community. So I refuse to be quiet when one of them holds court next to a water cooler.

That is why Catholicism is so important. It must stand as a reasonable alternative to the fundamentalists who threaten to hijack the Church of Jesus. That is why liberals must take up the cause and rail against conservatives who try to dominate the theological discussions. The liberal elements that were once so powerful have faded as conservative power has coalesced at the top. Conservatives speak as if they ARE the Catholic Church. They speak as if they are THE authority on all things dogmatic and doctrinal. But the reality is that they hold the minority opinion on almost every doctrinal issue.

Their fallback position is to say, “Yes, I admit we need to reform those other conservatives but we must have patience.” That patience has kept us from the business of true reform for thousands of years. We must stop being PATIENT!