Throughout my 20s, I thought I was independent in that I was living on my own and supporting myself. When it came to morality and beliefs, though, I didn't like to think about it much, because it shined a light on my weaknesses and vices. So I would just go with the flow of those around me. Well, there's a scary problem with that:

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

I was raised Catholic but didn't learn enough about it to defend it. So, like a poorly rooted tree, I was knocked right over when I left the shelter of home to go to college. I began to disagree with one teaching of the faith, and then another, and then another, like dominoes. The problem is, I barely had a grasp on the Bible or even what the teachings were! What little I read I ignorantly treated purely as a scientific book, and I didn't actually dig into how the Church interpreted certain verses and why it taught what it taught.

I was letting others tell me about Catholicism who knew just as little as I did. I used the Church's sexual abuse scandal as an excuse to abandon my entire belief system. Of course those abuses were wrong and terrible, yes, but those actions are not what the faith teaches. While the Church is trying to move towards perfection, it isn't there yet.

The Church was never meant to take a pristine, easy path to perfection. If it was, why would Jesus have picked Judas Iscariot, the traitor, as one of his twelve apostles? At the time though, my already weak faith was fractured when I witnessed sin infiltrate the Church's leadership.

So over the course of eight years, my faith began to wither away, and I gradually danced closer and closer to the devil. I...