My mother’s heavenly father

My family is one of the most important aspects of my life, and I don’t talk to them as much as I should. I’m sure a lot of people feel the same way. Like any other family, we have problems and disagreements: one issue is religion.

I’m a devout atheist, my parents are devout Christians, and my sister is just certain that the universe had to come from something, even if she’s admittedly not sure what. I’m not sure what my brother believes; we don’t discuss it. (He’s smart to stay out of trouble that way.)

Coming out to my family as an atheist was in some ways tougher than coming out as gay. While my parents love, respect and understand my homosexuality, they see my atheism as my way of acting out like a petulant child.

My mom fights me about it more than anyone else (I think my dad tolerates my thoughts on religion as a young-adulthood phase). My mom has used many of the tired tricks of the trade to get me to find a fallacy in atheism and attend church with her. There are many, but I’ll sum them up with two examples.

One is the old Pascal’s Wager. “What’s to lose in believing in god and turning out to be wrong? Nothing. But what’s to lose from not believing in god and turning out to wrong? Only HEAVEN, Rob.”

I believe there is harm in believing in god when it’s a cause for discrimination. According to my mother’s own statement, god will discriminate against me for being an unbeliever, and throw me in hell. In the bigger picture, many manifestations of religion have and continue to discriminate against the LGBT community, amongst other oddballs of humanity, chucking them all into eternal darkness right with me.

I don’t want to go on a tangent about these things — I could probably go on for pages and pages.

The second way my mom tries to “convert” me are sly ways of sneaking my inadequacies into a conversation as being related to me not being a believer. I recently went through a short period of depression/anxiety symptoms. My mom asked if I thought it could be reading evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, triggering my emotional turmoil.

I’m not innocent in all this — I get frustrated and angry when my family and I don’t agree, and we all think we’re the ones who are right when it comes to our particular belief or nonbelief in a supernatural being. When we argue I get loud and red-faced; my mom gets the bonus of looking calm, cool and collected, in the name of Jesus and
her church.

Atheism shouldn’t be judged the way it is — most atheists are caring, compassionate people who don’t need a god to tell them that volunteering at a soup kitchen on the weekends is a righteous thing to do. They also don’t have a list of specific people to exclude from their private afterlife party. They get to eat meat on Fridays, wear what they want, enjoy a certain amount of sexual freedom and don’t need to worry about someone judging their entire life when they’re done living it. They’re people. They believe differently from the majority of Americans, but they’re people all the same.

My mom and I probably won’t ever sway each other, and that’s okay. We’re working on being more respectful of the other’s beliefs — and god or no god, that’s got to be putting some good juju in the world.