You have gone backwards CC. Let's not forget religion is NOT a pick up and put down, pick and mix philosophy. It's about your soul either being eternally damned, or eternal life. Choosing another sub-sect of the cult could, by your beliefs, result in eternal hellfire. Let's not forget that every single country which adopted Protestantism in Europe rapidly out-accelerated the older faith. Catholocism is closer to Islam in as much as it prizes the church as a quasi-state.
I'm sorry that you made this conversion, because when you see the pope in his gilded palaces, the monumentally huge problem of Catholic priests abusing childen (with verified cover-up in which the pope, God's representative on earth, was complicit) you do wonder what the poor carpenter of Nazareth who preached giving up your worldly possessions and protecting the innocent would have thought.
Catholicism is pure, unadulterated sophistry, in my opinion. Big on theory but no different in it's magical thinking to pagan fairy stories. At least Lutherism and Protestantism attempted to rid the church of the hocus-pocus of the deeply corrupted Catholic structure in Europe, it's a crying shame it's big, hollywood iconography and mentally palatable philosophy took you off the path of reason into a deep stupor of the puppet show.
Well, one thing Christianity is not, and that's an ideology. It can not be separated from the Church. At the heart are a set of dogmas
contra logic that were worked out over the early centuries by the Church. As for the Church itself, like all human institutions it's imperfect... perfection is the ideal. Actually, it's incredible the Church has lasted a thousand years... maybe it something to do with Providence.
The reformers ended up being revolutionaries in the end [though Erasmus, the prime reformer, stayed with the Church]. The newly created state churches just continued to splinter down through the years to the point where today many Protestants find themselves in the desperate situation of being believers but without a church... they effectively become their own 'Popes'.
Having faith and belief is also a question of authority. The problem with pure 'unadulterated' reason is it seeks its own autonomous authority... it seeks to self-legislate. But it also recognizes itself as just speculation, which leads only to doubt.... and this comes to undermine reason itself in the end. It's like the world today has been indoctrinated into doubt, the exact opposite of faith, and so each individual comes to live an isolated life devoid of all meaning. No wonder a few people start to crack.
But faith is the most natural of all things [if you reject the dehumanizing 'will to doubt', and free yourself from the 'dogma of proof']. One could start small. Believe in the reality of your self [as irreducible spirit]. Believe in your mind, and imagination. Believe in your senses. Believe in the reality of the world.. its poetic qualities as well as its scientific ones. Believe in language and grammar. Believe in love, people, society, God. One starts building up a pattern of belief [and so too one's intellect and mind]. Everything is what it is and not another thing
contra reductionism. And soon you are able to appreciate and believe in history, and in art, and in culture... perhaps even the gospel as reported by the Church.
