You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Spouts. Today is Tuesday, September 21st, 2021. Today is also the feast day of one of the four evangelists, one of the four men that were inspired to write the Holy Gospel. Today we are celebrating St. Matthew, who was a tax collector who walked away from his booth, from his life of prestige and wealth, to follow Jesus Christ.

Now, this week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are continuing our defense of the faith. Last week, we

proved that God exists. And this week, we're turning our attention to religion. Religion in

general, the set of beliefs that we have, that we share when we belong to a religion, but also

the way we worship, which our religion gives to us.

So today, we are going to talk about the idea, the wrong idea in the world right now,

that a person can be spiritual, but not religious.

Now, the reason it's important for us to talk about this is because

many young people, if you think about sort of people in college or a little bit after college,

many of them decide to walk away to leave behind their Christian faith.

They might have been raised to be Christian,

but for some reason they've decided that they don't need all of these rules,

or they don't need this set of belief or this specific way to worship God,

that they, sure, they believe in God,

but they want to figure out how to grow in relationship with him on their own. So they call themselves spiritual, but not religious. Now, how is this a problem?

Well, let's use an example. Let's say that you decided you wanted to be a

scientist, right, to study the natural world, whether it's plants or geology or whatever it is,

but you didn't, you wanted to be scientific, but not follow the laws of science that have already been discovered. You wanted to ignore

what other scientists have discovered, have researched and proved. You thought, well, you know what,

I can see the world around me. Why do I need to read what these other people discovered? I'm just

going to go out and discover it myself.

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