While you were singing about vales of doom, I was singing, "Leaping the mountains, bounding the hills, see how our God has come to meet us! His voice is lifted, His face is joy!" Much of my Catholic upbringing was about living life in the here and now--not the hereafter.
Is it that God is so mysterious, or is it people think they know God based on how they, personally, see the world--and how they, personally, feel a God should act?
1. I was NEVER singing that. As a child i remember just moving my lips sometimes to avoid being questioned why I am not singing this shit. I experienced that as deeply embarassing.
I really don't want to appear as a high nosed egghead, but at the age of ten (I can date that because it corresponds with all this stuff of the first communion) the obligatory mass on sunday morning was something I feared the whole week.
Normally I withdraw insíde myself and built model planes inseide my head. In detail. I was that good with it, I managed basically flawless the repeated stand up-kneel down-sit-stand up- kneel down procedure just by mimicking the hipocritical bunch around me more or less subconciously.
I don't want to say that I was an atheist at ten, but I felt that there was something wrong as hell.
And I couldn't believe it. As child you are forced to recite a stupid childish prayer before bedtime, I think that is common. It was a pain in my ass, even when I was younger than ten. To recite this unbelievable dumb rhymes, loudly because it was controlled, made me cringe inside every time.
Actually this was child abuse, that my parents didn't know better is no excuse.
2. Maybe you US guys have different songbooks. Lot of things you consider catholic is definetely not original. Otherwise you- would not have all this funny farm like TV churches which derived from catholic and protestant churches.
Sometimes I watch this stuff when I am bored for a kind of disgusted amusement, or freak show if you like. We don't have that here. Well there are the Jehovas witnesses sometimes standing at street corners, trying to give away the phantastic enlightening "watchtower" magazine. Plus some rare small "Anglikaner" (I don't knw how to translate that) churches who are something like Amish, only without the dress code and horses plus they don't live in secluded areas.
3. Of course people want their god to act as it would fit best into their personal lifes.
This is what it's all about. All of this monotheistic religions have attributed the craziest contradictory
characters to their gods, so that everybody can be satisfied by cherrypicking.
There is nothing mysterious about it. Its just mass psychology. And they are really good with it.
Thousands of years of experience shouldn't be underestimated.