u/jmeyer73

EDIT: I'm asking this in good faith. I am a (admittedly very bad) Catholic and I'd prefer to live as a good Catholic, but I find it very difficult. I'm clearly being downvoted because nobody believes that I have good intentions so I guess I need to clarify that. Downvoting stops people from seeing my post and I want to have a good faith discussion with people which I can't do if people aren't charitable and assume that I'm dishonest.

Getting to heaven requires so much effort and it involves so much suffering that I don't even know if it is worth it. I think primarily because it is a matter of faith; if heaven exists, there is no way to prove it. There is also no way to comprehend what it is like without experiencing it firsthand. The things that I can experience in this life aren't a matter of faith and they don't have to be proven, because I can know them through experiencing them. I don't have to have faith that the stove exists, that it is hot, and that touching it will burn me. I can prove that it objectively does exist, that it is hot and that heat burns my flesh which causes me to experience pain. I don't have to exercise faith to prove that pain exists, because I can directly encounter it.

How should I believe that heaven is worth its price in suffering if I can know the self-evident reality of suffering but not of heaven? I can experience and know what this life is like but I can't experience and know what comes after. I know what I can do to give myself relief from suffering in this life but I supposedly get punished with more suffering in hell for doing that. Why would I be punished for not doing what I don't know?

I'm very confused. Lae'zael keeps bothering me to free Orpheus. But why would I ever do that? Isn't Oprheus being imprisoned protecting my entire party from being mindflayers? Wouldn't freeing him just be an instant game over? Why would I betray the emperor anyways? He seems to be telling the truth and it seems obvious that he's protecting us.

Am I missing something? Also why would I even care about the Githyanki queen anyways? Don't we have bigger problems to worry about like this giant brain that's going to destroy the world?

Will God understand if I just take a break from religion? I'm very mentally ill and I'm getting professional help, but it will take months, maybe even years for me to be treated. I love Catholicism and I want to keep being a Catholic but religion has been very damaging to my mental health and I think it's best if I walk away from it for a while.

Unfortunately priests aren't trained on how to deal with mental illness, so they don't understand how to help somebody with it or how to give advice with it in mind, and I can't afford a Catholic therapist, and a secular therapist won't be able to help because they won't know anything about Catholicism, so there seems to be no way for me to learn how to be a practicing Catholic in light of my mental illness for the foreseeable future.

I've been turned away in confession twice so I stopped going to confession for almost a year, but today I met with my priest because I wanted to confess but I didn't think I was able to so I wanted to ask him about that.

I've been severely depressed for a long time and when he asked if I intended to stop sinning I said no because I've given up and I feel hopeless. That's why I wasn't absolved previously, because I don't have intention to amend my life or avoid it in the future. He told me that's a problem and that I need to change that, but then he said that since I'm sorry for my sins he will give me a conditional absolution.

Afterwards I asked him if it even works that way and he said that it does and that I should trust that I'm absolved, but I'm worried he didn't understand me because he didn't let me say everything I wanted to and he can't read my mind or know my intentions.

Also he didn't have me list any of my sins and I asked him why and he said that I didn't have to, and he didn't give me a penance either. What is a conditional absolution and Is this normal?

I hate my life. I go to bed every night hoping I don't wake up. But as a Catholic I'm forced to keep my miserable self alive. I don't have any possibility for my problems to be cured so the only way I can continue to bear this without killing myself is if I somehow stop caring about my life. How am I supposed to do that?

My physical experience, what I feel see and hear, these are all I know. I don't know what heaven is like. All I know is what I can experience. How am I supposed to deny myself when my self is all that I have?

I really do love God and I want to believe and really hope that God will have mercy on me despite all of the bad things I do. But this verse terrifies me. I'm mentally ill and suicidal and have been for a long time. I had a dream where I was next to a river by myself, and I was holding a crucifix and praying, then I put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger. I went to heaven and I saw Jesus, and I got on my knees and cried and apologized and I told him that I love him and want to be with him, and he said "Depart from me, I never knew you," and walked away. The horrible despair felt so real and I thought I was going to hell before I woke up. I feel the same way about John 14:15. I read "If you love me, keep my commandments" as another condemnation. It tells me that by failing to keep God's commandments, my words are empty and my love is meaningless.

For a normal person this would probably make them want to change, but it does the opposite for me. When I read these verses, they make me feel like I have no hope. I've accepted that I'm almost certainly going to end up committing suicide at some point, my mental state keeps getting worse and eventually I'll cross the point of no return.

I've stopped praying and have been banishing thoughts of Jesus from my mind because I don't want to deal with his condemnation. Wanting to be with God but being turned away by him is a worse fate than giving up hope and accepting hell. It feels like it will be easier to give up hope than to trick myself into believing in a false concept of God's mercy just so that it can be torn down in front of me.

I shot a turkey, it was the first animal I've ever killed. Unfortunately I missed the head and ruined half of the breast. It also took a lot longer to die than I expected. It flailed around for a while before dying and I had to wring it's neck, it's definitely not like they show in the movies and people don't talk about the hard parts of killing an animal. You also could hear it's mate calling for it in the distance. I felt really sad about that part, but I know they can find a new mate, and it would have a far worse death being eventually torn apart bit by bit by coyotes or starving to death.

When I was harvesting the meat, some horrible smelling greenish brown liquid came spilling out of the chest cavity. It smelled so bad I had to look away and hold my breath lol Does anybody know what that stuff was? I think I might have punctured the liver or gallbladder and bile or something spilled out. I also was pretty weirded out about how warm it was. It was like cutting into a person which was a little disturbing but I got used to it pretty quickly.

It was getting dark out and all I had watched were videos so I wasted a bunch of the meat which I felt bad about but I assume that's not abnormal for somebody who is brand new.

Overall despite some difficulty it was a good life experience that I would do again. I'm going to try pheasant hunting next.

I tried LLPSI and got hard stuck on chapter 6. I was never able to do the pensa, either in LLPSI itself or in the Exercitia, and I didn't understand what was being said in the neumann companion. I bought multiple other books too, like Latin Demystified, in which I couldn't do the quizzes no matter how many times I read and re-read. I bought english grammar for learners of latin because I thought maybe my english understanding of grammar was the problem, and it was too confusing, I would read an entire page and my mind would be blank.

I've read and watched videos during a period of three months hours upon hours of stuff and I still can hardly tell you the first thing about how latin grammar works. I just can't do it. My brain can't process it. It goes in and leaves without sticking or even comprehending. I've read about what a direct object is dozens or maybe hundreds of times and I still can't tell you what it is. I'm currently halfway through an online class and I'm completely lost and am too embarrassed to ask the stupidest questions possible because I know the teacher already went over it and I just didn't comprehend it.

Is it this hard for everybody or am I dumber than I possibly could have imagined? I dropped out of school, I've never been a smart person. But this is the hardest thing I've ever done and I think it's impossible for me.