Religion is a Rorschach Inkblot, but not to the "True Believer"

In 1888, a postcard depicted a now famous image that was two faces in one. Depending upon how you look at it, the image on the postcard reflects either a young woman or an old hag. Known today as “my wife and my mother-in-law,” the postcard illustrates how different people can look at the same thing and see two very different images. This ability to use our creativity to interpret different images in different ways is known as “pareidolia,” and serves as the basis of the Rorschach inkblot test, in which inkblots are interpreted in different ways. My brother is a Catholic priest. And because he is, he has devoted his life to denying this reality when it comes to his own Catholicism. He admits that people can and do have the ability to see different images while looking at the same thing, of course, whether it be a postcard from 1888 or cloud formations or even his Catholicism. But for him, there is only one "correct" way to look at his Catholicism, and all other ways of looking at it must therefore be "corrected" (think Delbert Grady telling Jack Torrance about he "corrected" his girls when they tried to burn down the Overlook hotel). Like that postcard, there are at least two ways of looking at his Catholicism. One way is that it is true, and we are all guilty of being born sinners, and the other is that it is false, and we are merely born accused and convicted of a crime/sin we did not commit. For him, it is a far better plan that we should accept we are born guilty than that we are born innoencent, even though he had only ever been taught to believe this was "true" from birth, and was never given the option to consider the alternative. For him, this talent human beings have for seeing different and even opposite things in the same image, which reflects our infinite creative capacity, MUST be interpreted as an error in human perception whenever that creative capacity is used to interpret his Catholicism, for which the church (i.e., himself) is there to "correct," is anything less than 100% true. (Ironically, he hates the current pope's “interpretation” of his Catholicism, which he likewise is convinced needs to be "Corrected.") Point out that the over 40,000 different brands of Christianity suggests his "belief" is untrue, as is his disagreement with how his own pope is interpreting his Catholicism and the centuries of torture and execution the church relied on to "correct" and impose conformity to its sole interpretation – which was the very same thing the Sanhedrin did to Jesus, by the way – and he is only convinced that these differences simply prove his point, rather than the other way around. Point out further how often people feel traumatized by being told they are born sinners (despite the total lack of evidence that shows infants are born sinners) that must serve a life sentence begging for forgiveness to avoid the fires of hell, and he insists this is either simply false, or that if such people feel “traumatized” by being taught such "truth" it is either their own fault, or that we should expect that when God creates a vaccine to inoculate his “children” of their original sin it will likely cause an allegoric reaction to some of those children. But we can never blame God for this, he argues, but instead must blame those sickly children for being so malformed in the first place. Asked why doesn't that Catholic "vaccine" for sin, in the form of so many God-created sacraments, prevent Catholic priests from raping children, he argues nothing's perfect, not even God's ability to create a sacramental vaccine that actually does what it was designed by God himself to do. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Thanks for straightening that out for me. I’ll be converting to Catholicism next week. I’m so exicited!