Or that saint, the protector of children?

Or that saint, the protector of children? But whats her name? In the end, I did not pray to anyone that night. My reason was that I did not want to offend anyone by not praying to them. But deep down, I had realized that there was something wrong about this religion. My parents invested a lot of money in my education, and chose responsible schools that honoured the beliefs of the Christian faith.

However, the principle of respecting the faith of the Greeks was more inspired to me in the History class, rather than the Theology class. We had remained Greeks and Christians after a devastating 400-year Turkish occupation, and we clearly owed that to the religious leaders of that time. So, although the Christian faith did not appeal to me, I felt it was my responsibility to show some gratitude by going to the church once in a while.

But I never believed that, just by standing there in front of an elderly man dressed in gold who was reciting for two hours was bringing me any closer to salvation. The huge gap between the message of the scriptures and their application on peoples lives was something that always made me very skeptical. For most of the times, I did agree with the teachings of the biblical stories. But the people around me did not practice what they learnt from the scriptures.

Instead, they had invented their own traditional rituals with a lot of symbolic elements, to the extent that everything in their faith remained just that: a symbolism, and not an everyday practice outside the church. I believed that all the Prophets mentioned in the Bible were indeed the Prophets of God, sent to deliver a divine message. However, this message is not clear in the Bible, and sometimes, it is dangerously contradicting.

For example, the Old Testament lists a large number of commandments which Prophet Moses conveyed to his people. The Prophet suffered a lot to deliver these laws and to convince people to follow them. But nowadays we are told that we do not have to follow these laws, as our love for Jesus would be sufficient for our salvation. But wouldnt it be unreasonable of God to make His dear Messenger go through all this, so that we discard His message today?

One has to only see the effect of the prohibited things in the modern world. People are born with perfect lungs, yet they destroy them by smoking. Families fall apart, wives get abused, children become orphans because of some pints of alcohol.