Any Questions?

Like many of my fellow Generation X'ers, I was raised in the church, and then promptly left it as soon as my parents could no longer force me to take part in what I saw as a farce.  In the Roman Catholic Church in which I was raised, our priest literally told me, when I asked him about dinosaurs, that they did not really exist because they were not mentioned in the Bible. At my grandparent's church, which I attended occasionally, the priest told me that my friend was going to burn in hell. I'd approached the priest to ask about homosexuality. A friend of mine had made a comment to me suggesting that they may be. And then that same priest, when the movie "The Last Temptation of Christ" came out, spent his entire homily shouting about the horrors of this film that was blasphemous to it's very core. When I asked him afterwards if he'd seen it, he told me that he didn't need to see it because he knew what it was. These and other experiences left me scratching my head. I was left perturbed as to why these men who I saw as church leaders could so readily refuse to act in a manner that I personally believed would be in the spirit and example of Christ.