With any luck, our PS4’s external hard drive should be here in… about a week or so, give or take, and then we can stop playing the “internal hard drive shuffle” for a long time! I didn’t want to get an extravagantly large one and then have to pay a lot of money for it knowing that I want to get more physical copies of games, but I wanted to get one realistic to our needs for the PlayStation 4. This one should serve us well.

I’ve also gotten into more debates over the course of the Lenten season (“the inquiry period for RCIA is for those who may be interested in converting to, or joining, the Catholic church”) and I actually had to go to Bub’s father’s church’s website myself and quote what their actual site says about the RCIA program. Needless to say, the wording of their very own site is not ambiguous about the fact that they are looking for people who are actively interested in conversion and joining, so if they continue to have the same RCIA instructors as they did when I… was a brief participant in the classes, it should come as absolutely no shock to anyone that they are not looking for someone who not only “actively questions religion” (probably their own way of putting it or reconciling it to themselves) or is only taking the classes because a boyfriend or the father of their child or grandmother of their child really, really wants them to take it, and by that I mean has actively coerced them into enrollment because then that makes it a lot easier for their son or grandson to get baptized Catholic because now both parents are Catholic and they have to adhere to Catholic doctrine regarding baptism now don’t they? (Except, as I’ve mentioned in previous entries, I honestly do not think that I would ever have gotten that far. Prior to becoming what is called a catechumenate, or someone who is actively interested in pursuing Catholic baptism, either the RCIA instructor(s) or the priest themselves interview you to ensure that this is what you really want to do and you are “fit” for the program. If I hadn’t been dropped from class enrollment after that first class, I would have been dropped at this point in time.)

There’s also this quote from another site:
“Ideally, this is a period of time that is to be ongoing. It is for anyone that has heard the good news of Jesus Christ from the living example of someone who has drawn them to the parish and they are interested in learning more.”

Literally none of that was true in my case, and I continue not to have any regrets about dropping out.

I’ve tried to open as much dialogue as I can, though, for those who have sincerely dropped out of RCIA, never returned, not looked back, never converted to or joined the Catholic church (or any other theistic church) in any way who are happy with how they are living their lives and do not intend on changing that. You hear a lot of stories from people for whom the reverse is true — atheists converting to Catholicism, people from other religions converting, people conversing about how they felt “the call”, but fewer people openly disclosing how the opposite was and continues to be true for them. It’s almost as though the very subject of that is taboo. Or you’ll hear people (almost always Catholics in this case) talk about how “they’ll convert when the time is right”. It’s been a decade now for me and, as I continue to read about Catholicism and theism, the more I realize that I was right in rejecting this doctrine and want nothing to do with it for me and mine. I am content not to have it in our lives. I want to see more unashamed dialogue here in general…