Shaken Spirituality

I haven't blogged here recently for a few reasons. I've decided however to just be my average annoying self and put a personal unacademic blog up. Feel free to stop reading if this bothers you.

The Unending Polemics
I was watching an interview with my favourite Comedian Dave Chappelle where he admitted to being Muslim but stated that he does not mention it in public because he doesn't want his personal flaws associated with the religion. I can identify with this as the main reason I've stopped blogging here this month. My faith has been shaken and is very weak right now. I feel like if I'm honest about my spiritual life, Protestants will use it to smear Catholicism as a whole and triumphally parade about how much better their religion is than mine (But I'm sure I've done the same to others alot as well).

The Reality of the Situation
I've not been able to take the Eucharist for the last 6 weeks because I haven't been to Confession, and so the only spiritual imput I've had has been the pro-life rants of our ESL priests or shallow humanistic sermons about 'being nice to everyone so we can go to heaven'. And of course the bold emphasis of phrases that people don't even understand like EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE!!!!#$#!#%#!. I especially enjoyed the rant one priest gave about how Catholics don't believe in the Sacrifice of the Mass anymore and then didn't actually explain the doctrine to anyone.

I've been trying to keep my mouth shut for the sake of mother Church but honestly 80% of what I encounter there is a shallow cocktail of Humanism/Pelagianism and Legalistic Social Conservatism.

I have to also add though that I encountered in Evangelicalism, people saying the "Sinner's Prayer" for Candy at a youth event, and a pool party where people were baptized without really knowing it. So there's not really any church I've seen as great.

Feelings
I feel like a Deist who prays out of habit. I really love Jesus and the Church but I feel like they could both care less about me. The Church makes me jump through a series of ridiculous hoops before I can even get in, and I don't feel like God has any thoughts towards me at all. Maybe Pelagius was right, because I swear that I pray and pray and nothing happens, utter silence. Sometimes I feel like I have partners in my doubts in the Bible though, the other day I was reading Ecclesiastes and Solomon flat out says that he has seen the righteous suffer, and the wicked succeed and that one shouldn't be too righteous, in blatant contradiction to Jewish theology elsewhere in the Old Testament. I've read in Lamentations when Jeremiah says that Good and Evil come from God, as well as Job's question "should we accept good from God and not evil?". So here's the 3 solutions.

Protestant
Martin Luther, Calvin, and others in their commentaries on Romans 9 - 11 and their writings on Predestination regarded everything as completely as a result of God's predestination, Judas was just as much following God's plan as Jesus was, etc. I read either Melancthon or Bucer saying that Evil too was ordained by God which was interesting but horrifying. So there's your super predestination answer / Luke 13 , answer of God makes everything bad and good because of his arbitrary sovereign will.

I hate that answer, if you can live with that God, then may you live happily ever after, but I can't. Aristotle then knew more about justice than God.

Catholic
It would probably involve making you feel guilty about masturbating and then result in "your own human sovereign free will caused all your problems" or something about not being devoted enough to Mary. I'll keep it in mind.

Deist
Why is there evil? why doesn't God seem to care about you? Because he doesn't. Simple but disturbing.

God help me.

Sorry about the awkward personalness of all this.