A Better Title

“Hi, sorry to disturb you, but may I do a survey?” she said as she approached the bench where I was doing my work moblogging.

“Um, may I know what it is for?” I know the usual tactics. If she had answered anything to do with insurance or some religious groups which I have no intention on joining, I would reply with a firm no.

As expected, she said that she was from Campus Crusade for Christ, and I quickly replied that I wasn’t interested.

“But this survey is only to see how people view Christianity.”

“Can I remain anonymous?” From experience, my friends who left their contact numbers are prone to being pestered over and over again. There was a friend who was pestered so much that she had to threaten to call the police before the calls stopped.

“Sure,” she said, and I agreed to do the survey.

And sure enough, I remained anonymous throughout the short interview-style survey.

However, the survey made me realise one thing: I should be more careful about how I identify myself.

She started by asking me how I felt about Christianity, how they practise the religion and how my view on my Christian friends in terms of character, etc.

During the survey, I revealed that I was a Roman Catholic.

Legally speaking, this was true. “Katholik”, or Catholic in the Indonesian language, is typed on my Indonesian IC (no, that’s not a typo, it is literally typewritten). Indonesians are required by law to belong to any one of the six recognized religions–Islam, Christianity (both Protestantism and Roman Catholicism), Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism. Of course, in practise you can belong to any other religions or don’t belong to any at all, but you need to have one of the six on your IC.

Personally though, I don’t feel as much Catholic as I claimed to be. I stopped going to church for a couple of years now. When she asked me to share more about the religion, on how it is different from other Christianity denominations, I mentioned that we place a higher importance on Mother Mary compared to the other denominations.

But when asked why the reason was, I couldn’t really answer. The only clue I had was from my religious studies teacher back in Indonesia (I was from a Catholic junior high school). The teacher told us that it would be more effective to talk to the son as well as the mother, who can then talk to the son again to reinforce the prayer. Whether this is officially acceptable in the Catholic religion is not clear.

Neither could I comment on her question on whether this implies that Mary is more important than Jesus, who’s supposed to be the one we can directly talk to when we pray.

Surprisingly, she wasn’t as pushy as some others that I know of–the very reason why I had asked to remain anonymous. She did attempt to say that the bible itself says that Jesus is the one who we should turn to as our saviour, those who believe in Him shall be saved. When I said I did not wish to comment on the issue, she didn’t persist.

When asked why I had stopped going to church, my reason was probably a personal one: it is because I believe that it doesn’t matter which religion you belong to or how you practise it. As long as you keep your moral values up, and you don’t give up hope whenever you’re in trouble, you will be living alright.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 8:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.