Reply #46: I was baptised a Catholic, spent a year at a Catholic school, as a six-year old,

[Joe Chi Minh]

then returned to "Come day, go day, roll on Sunday" C of E/agnostic schools.

In my secondary school, as is common enough, I fell away, falling for the line that it was just hypocritical mumbo-jumbo, and simply a matter of where you were born/who you were born to.

However, atheism was impossible to me, as I had felt God's presence far too strongly in my primary school. But the further I drifted away from the faith, the more angry and bitter I became - in fact, obsessed with finding the true meaning of life, which palpably wasn't not necessarily a function of worldly success/status, etc.

In a pit of despair, I chanced upon Aldous Huxley's essay on comparative religion called The Perennial Philosophy, the content of which was an extraordinary revelation to me - most notably that spiritual truths are inaccessible to the purely analytical intelligence. In fact, he went on to say that without the brain our unitive intelligence would have us in a kind of perpetual, contemplative trance. In other words, that the brain was actually a reducing valve, straining out much of our spiritual sensitivity, to enable us to focus on this world and survive. I can't remember who he ascribed the theory to, which imo makes perfect sense, but it might have been the philosopher, Bergson.

Huxley claimed that, if you're going to be a Christian, it makes sense to go for the 'brand leader', Roman Catholicism, but for hm, there was too much wrong with the human institution for him to be able to stomach it. And even now, I can understand his point, writing at that time, as while we owe the Church's very survival, proximately anyway, to the good people in it, I believe it it had some iniquitous aspects and thus, inevitably, plenty of bad and indifferent members as well. However, I view Vatican II as an amazing blessing on the church from God.