The Church's teaching isn't an official statement, but the cumulative understanding of all the people who have loved and experienced Jesus through time.

Jesus showed us how to be courageous and sacrificial while we die for our beliefs, not while we kill for them.

It is tragic that some Christians have been so battered with stories of a prideful, vindictive God that they have fled from Jesus' fold.

The Church is the safe place to be. I can safely believe everything the Church teaches. It will not harm me, and in fact it will equip me to grow and grow and have a better and better ability to experience that direct presence.

As a teenager and a student, I totally cast away the Christian faith. I just believed it was stupid, and only stupid people could believe it. I actually became an anti-Christian, and very antagonistic.

People just don't realize how much peer pressure, the desire for peer acclamation, influences them.