Some light-hearted stuff first:

Quiz for Rachel, which she has done already
1. Salut, Natasha Traupman!
2. Song would be 'It's Only A Paper Moon' or 'Bath Water'
3. Vodka!
4. Mongoose Man!
5. You standing in the doorway of Chinese class looking hesitant and lost. Me sitting in the front seat, seeing you at the door and asking you to come on in.
6. Siamese cat. You've a refined air, and just like a cat you try not to let yourself be tied down.
7. What are the things that really make you think?

I just realised there are way too many exclaimation marks.

And on to the heavy stuff:
All the theology on Rachel's blog leaves my head spinning. For the record, I'm not a very good Catholic: I never went to Sunday School, I stopped going to church when I was 9 and I lost my copy of the Bible (;_;) so I have never read it fully.

But I have, however, had a very 'Catholic' education when I was much younger. And I rememer learning about a God that was supposed to be benovelent, who would forgive you if you were willing to repent, and who loved his children. Also, I was, for a very brief time, in a very supportive Catholic community, which was willing to band together to find out the right stuff to try and teach their children.

Of course, the distance of age may have lead to nostalgia, but that profoundly affects the me I am now. I have never lost my faith in God: I fully believe that he exists, I see Him in every leaf, every drop of rain. I still pray when the need is dire, and I hold Him in my heart.

If anything, I have lost my faith in the people. Sometimes people frighten me; how they read strange things into the Bible, how people could be burned for simply believing in something different. And I suppose that the fact I am a Catholic has affected how I view people reading the Bible: because Catholics are supposed to take the viewpoint of the pope, this affects how we read the Bible. Just simply looking at the viewpoint of all the different popes over the ages makes me all too aware of the frality of human interpretation. It just keeps changing.

Which is why although I hold to my Catholic beliefs, I temper it: I look for similarities in other religions. I value whatever insights other 'Gods' have to offer, even though I make no attempt to worship them. And I feel that this meshing of viewpoints, without judging which is better or right, helps me to have more faith in a divine being. It's just so that I chose my divine being to take the shape of the Catholic God.

It's also the reason why I never go to church anymore: I'm afraid of being pressurised into following the crowd blindly, instead of following the true path that God has for me. This is where my belief in original sin and the role of the church comes into play: I believe that by original sin, God is merely stating that humans are faliable to the lures of evil, and that we are born with this falibility (or this failing Rachel may term it as), and that the church is merely to help curb these needs, and to remind us to keep God in our hearts all the time. But God is in my heart. Maybe it's not obvious, but He is here.

And on the verge of sounding blasphemous, I shall diverge into how this human falibility links to fandoms.

I can't help it when I read comments by brilliant people I really respect taking different viewpoints where they insist, with eloquent words and much hand-wringing, that my viewpoint is really wrong and could I please stop saying what I'm saying? Because I can see why they think that, but I can't, for the life of me, deny that I still think that way, despite the fact that I don't say anything about it.

I like to think of myself as being very accepting, especially when canon dictates it so, but I can't deny that a part of me still roots for the outcome that I want. It's like the way I cling on to the belief that Snape is a good guy, or that Raven deserves Robin, or that Rukia belongs to Ichigo (My apologies Siu Qey). The truth may be different, but this will always be the way I'll read those stories.

And I wonder if that is part of human falibility: to be unable to see anything but what they believe in, despite evidence to the contrary. What makes us great believers have also rendered us susceptible to intolerance.

It's no wonder then, that terrorists are able to do the things they do. Because they just simply cannot see any other way.