My Production Journal

Part 1 (The 1st Journal at the Start of the Course):
Religion has, as I suppose it has for everyone, influenced my life a good deal up to this point.
Technically speaking I was raised Episcopal, from my mother’s side of the family. My father was/is non-
religious as he was raised in a highly religious family that ended in poor relationship with his parents so
he rebounded to the opposite end of the spectrum. Plus he is a philosophically-inclined artist, a group
who tends to not be dogmatically religious.
I went to Catholic school since I was in Kindergarten so I was exposed to a rather lot of the
Catholic religion. Same with my sisters (one of whom converted). As such I consider myself to have
experienced much of the everyday good and bad effects that Catholicism can have on an average
community.
The bombardment of religious doctrine that I experienced put me off to the whole concept for
several years. I was always scientifically (and probably a little philosophically) bent since I was little and
most of the concepts seemed ridiculous to me when I was younger. I would’ve considered myself at least
an agnostic if not an atheist.
Towards the end of High school I started to soften my stance on the whole idea of organized
religion. I started to see the charitable works that the Catholic community I was in was spurred to doing.
My high school in particular (I went to a Jesuit High school, Loyola in Los Angeles) did a lot of work and
had strong community services programs. I started to appreciate part of the community building aspects
of the religion. I still don’t consider religion being for me, but I don’t hold any of the anti-religion or
religion is fundamentally oppressive, divisive, archaic or backwards that so many non-religious people
do. I also think religion gets a bad rap in the media and despite my non-religious stance I will tend to
jump to its defense.
As far as the God issue is concerned, I suppose I’d say I believe but I wouldn’t consider that a big
deal or hold myself to be particularly spiritual in any way. Mostly my stance is that I try not to concern
myself with the idea, seeing that I am not going to arrive at any resolute conclusion and finding that the
value with the whole idea (for me at least) is the struggle of considering it. For the last few years I would
say that I have been very successful in that stance and I don’t see any philosophical conflict arising soon.

Part 2 (The Project's Conclusion):