Atheism

The nuns “fixed” my dad and he has the worst handwriting of anyone I know. My mom went to public schools and writes excellently with her left hand.

Both my brother and I are left handed. It boggles my mind when I see people trying to change children’s inborn traits.

Its origins in worshiping the fish god "Dagon" are... interesting to say the least.

But it is by far the only example.

Easter is reputedly (I heard - ofc really who knows) the name of a mesopotamian sun god's wife, where the worshipers would have an orgy with temple priestesses/prostitutes and then the next year do human sacrifices of the babies born from the previous years orgy. Exodus 23:13 be damned (“Do not invoke the names of other gods; do not let them be heard on your lips." emphasis added). Notably, b/c Easter herself was supposedly visited by her dead husband (now the sun god) and in so doing turned a nearby bird into an egg-laying rabbit (or... vice versa? or something?), they would take the blood from the sacrifices and dip eggs into them. To this day the South American celebrations of Easter will only color their eggs red, not pastel as is done in many Western areas... and supposedly they have little idea why - it's just their tradition started sometime in the past and now mostly forgotten.

And the link between Christmas and the yearly winter solstice - worshipping a tree, the date of December 25, etc. - is very well-known.

If even 1/10th of any of this were true, that would be strong support for what you said - a LOT has been added over time. The Bible itself, even the Old Testament, while it does single out left-handedness as being "odd", often presents left-handedness as an ADVANTAGE (or strength and riches), or at least not terribly cursed - e.g. Judges 3:15-21, Judges 20:16 1 Chronicles 12:2, etc. Then again, the "tradition" of Catholicism (which I grew up under) is that people should never read the Bible, b/c we are too dum-dumbz to understand it, and the people should trust the priests to ~~fondle the children~~ explain everything properly.

So yeah, you probably are better off, even if you develop a relationship with them as an adult, to have avoided that indirect indoctrination as a child.

You can jerk off all you want as long as you don't eat meat on Fridays. But you also have to eat Jesus meat on Sundays.

It seems so weird to me when people think that their beliefs and practices come from words on a page.

That's just not how culture works.

It's a living thing, like language. What we do and what we think it means is passed down, influenced by events and neighbors, sometimes changing slowly over time, sometimes proving incredibly durable, sometimes undergoing rapid mutations.

Religion doesn't come from the bible anymore than words come from the dictionary.

It's old Roman superstition, basically. The Latin word for left is sinister and it had negative connotations even then. Predates Christianity by a decent bit yet that didn't stop the Romans who later turned Catholic from perpetuating their superstitions as dogma.

My favorite extra-biblical notion in Catholicism is their weird veneration of Mary. Catholics have this belief that Mary was this divine demi-god that was not only a sinless, flawless, human being, but also stayed a virgin her whole life. Despite the fact that the Catholic Bible literally says that she had other kids with Joseph and that Jesus had brothers.

It's this super bizarre JK Rowling-ization of the Bible that a council unilaterally declared, like, 400 years after Jesus. There's no mention of any of the shit they claim Mary did in the actual Bible yet all Catholics I've ever met vehemently defend these belief.

The reason for eating fish today is money making in the past.

"Fishermen were hurting. So much so that when Henry's young son, Edward VI, took over in 1547, fast days were reinstated by law — "for worldly and civil policy, to spare flesh, and use fish, for the benefit of the commonwealth, where many be fishers, and use the trade of living.""

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