I was home in Guelph this weekend, and I loved it. Although I didn’t actually call any of my friends that I really should have/wanted to call… I did have a relaxing week, which was in much needed order.

I thought I was going to write a long thought out post about my weekend, the political parties, the conservatives winning and my…. new appreciate for the green party (what!?) …I think I’ll go to sleep and leave that shocker for another day. …I keep thinking that one of these days I’ll get my life in order to the point where I’ll be able to post regularly on this blog, Edger, Eco-Chick, mine and Justin’s blog and still talk to all my friends. …But it’s not really happening. NOT YET anyway. Mwa ha ha ha.

I do manage to find time for video games though…

SPORE! PLAY IT!

Allen is doing this thing during Nuit Blanche against Harper wanting to cut $45 million from the arts. Now, I don’t particularly have anything against the Conservative government… (seeing as I may have voted for them…) but… here, just for him, this is the poster he’s handing out:

“BY CUTTING $45 MILLION FROM THE ARTS THE CURRENT CANADIAN GOVERNMENT HAS DECLARED THE ARTS IRRELEVENT.

IF YOU CONSIDER ART AND CULTURE TO BE IMPORTANT:

COME OUT TO NUIT BLANCHE ON SATURDAY OCTOBER 4TH. WHEREVER YOU ARE @MIDNIGHT

REMAIN SILENT AND IMMOBILE FOR 4 MINUTES AND 33 SECONDS.*
WHILE HOLDING UP THIS SIGN DISPLAYING THE WORLD “ART”
PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!

THIS IS A CALL FOR PUBLIC ACTION BY THE ARTISTS COLLECTIVE ORDINARY PEOPLE IN COLLABORATION WITH ORDINARY PEOPLE. ORDINARY PEOPLE INCLUDES PEOPLE FROM THE ONTARIO COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN AND INTERNATINALLY RENOWNED ARTIST ORLAN.

A VIDEO BY ORDINARY PEOPLE WILL BE SHOWN AT 100 MCCAUL ST. DURING NUIT BLANCHE. YOUR PARTICIPATION IS GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGED

*(JOHN CAGE, 4′33)”

There you have it….and of course I have to go because I’m his fag hag. Its not like I have copious amounts of homework/reading/writing/researching to do or anything. And it’s not like I’m sick as a dog and feel like shit. But, it’s all good. See you there.

I write a lot of negative things, and a lot of people get really pissed off at me thinking that for some reason just because I look critically at the Poster Boys of atheism and the militant sentiments that often fly off of them I for some reason am a christian apologist. That this means I’m a closet christian. That this means I just don’t understand how much religion is hurting our world. That this means I must be clueless to the fact that people in theocratic countries suffer because of religion every day. That this means I don’t understand the pain and suffering a child unknowingly goes through because of religious indoctrination. That this means I must think abortion is okay, because I love christians.

I do love christians. My mom, sister, step-dad, aunt, grandmother, cousins and best friend are all Christian. And I love them all, very much. I don’t support people who cut them down intellectually, emotionally and socially because of their faith. I don’t support people who don’t want to hear their side of issues, who don’t want them to be able to practice their faith or who think that talking to them is a waste of time. I don’t support the Rational Response Squad because of the horribly intolerant attitude toward religion. I am *not* intolerant of religion. I am intolerant of religion in my legislation, I am intolerant of religion controlling my decisions on birth, I am intolerant of religion starting wars, I am intolerant of religion being pushed onto children who have no choice, I am intolerant of religion in the class room, I am intolerant of my taxpayer dollars going to religious schools, I am intolerant of my gay best friend not being allowed to get married, I am intolerant of people thinking I have no morals because I have no religion, I am intolerant of the militarism that is portrayed through religion, I am intolerant of hate crimes…

I may be nice to christians, and I may want to hear what they have to say…and I may also not want to listen to atheists bitch and moan or listen to them talk about how stupid christians and religion is - but this in no way translates to “I’m a scared little atheist girl who is just so scared of the big scary world! I’m just not ready to tell religions to go away, and I just want everyone to get along!” … I don’t care if everyone gets along, as long as there are capitalists there is competition and as long as there is competition there is fighting. I’m totally cool with that. I just don’t care about what religious people do in the privacy of their homes.

It’s like sex… don’t force it on me or any children to do it and don’t do it in parliament or the schools or in public and I don’t care what you do. Do it in your own home, of building that YOU pay for with consenting adults.

I feel like my history has a lot to do with why I think like this, and why people never understand where I’m coming from. I am a previous evangelical Christian. I worked at a christian camp for years, where I met practically all of my friends that I was close with. I was a member of the “Clarkson Crusade for Christ” at my high school and would go to the flag pole to pray every morning at 7am. I went to church with my mom and my step dad (a minister), and at church I was an active congregation member. I sang in the church choir, I ran the 30 hour famine with over 40 students at the church, I went to retreats to learn how to further my relationship with god and I taught Sunday school classes to younger kids. I thought abortion was wrong, I thought that gays were a little off and I was against the evil media trying to put horrible ideas of sex, alcohol, drugs and consumption into my head. I wanted to travel to Africa to be a missionary, to teach others how to love Christ. I wanted to go to the honour academy in Texas so I could devote my life a youth minister. I even went to those horrible Acquire the Fire rallies in Hamilton (they mostly happen in the states) with host Ron Luce who would convince me that I was a horrible person. With my hands in the air, tears streaming down my face, I would sob to the “lord” to wash me clean of my sins. I would fall to my knees and beg Ron Luce, Jesus and God to forgive me for being such a horrible person.

The flip side of this is that I saw the beauty and wonder in the universe, that I also saw as god’s creation. I now see the beauty and owner in the universe in science, discovery and exploration, but that’s beside the point. I felt happy every single day, because I was important to god. It made it easier to deal with horrible things that happened in my life. It made it very easy to think I was doing good in the world by praying. I felt good.

One day someone asked me “what’s so horrible about TV? The bible is more violent than the shows I watch.” …I thought that was pretty valid. When I asked my Sunday School teacher he brushed me off, I didn’t like that. So I asked “Why is there suffering if there is a God? There must be no God.”…I got an evil glare and was asked to leave the class and go back to class. When I got home that Sunday I started reading. And within a few nights decided there was nothing wrong with being gay. Soon after I decided there was nothing wrong with abortion, TV, premarital sex, and that there was probably no God. At the time I kept a live journal and wrote that on there. It got googled and was found by my camp, I was asked not to come back. I lost all my friends. Soon I lost all my friends at school too, because they were C4Cers. I lost my faith, family and friends in a matter of 2 weeks.

The rest is pretty much - I did radio/writing/blogging/debating about religion, I found cfi and thought it was cool, I joined and now all my friends are atheist and I work there. (Only that happened over the course of like 3 years)

So now I’m left sitting in this post-christian life, and those of you who have never been in that religious life can honesty - never understand what I’m sitting with. I have deep internalized guilt about almost everything I do. I cry so incredibly hard sometimes because I am so guilty about my life. For some reason, I think that because I’ve left religion I am a horrible person. I have been indoctrinated with the idea of heaven and hell. I am worried that I will be in hell. I have been indoctrinated to think that the abortion I decided to have was killing something that had a path in life. I still, for some reason, cling to this idea of “a right to life” for all humans even before sentience. There is absolutely no logical reason I can think of as to why, but it brings up all kinds of sad, guilty and angry emotions.

So, why have I shared this? 1) I understand what christians feel, see and go through. I’ve been there, and for some people, it is a great thing. They need religion to cope, live and love. That’s fine. 2) The reason I am so incredibly against religion is because of what it does to children. I am a living, breathing example of a child who was indoctrinated with this bullshit and now has to attempt to deal with it in their day to day life. It rips me apart inside.

Hopefully this little rant can give people a little more insight into how I think, and why I write what I write. I am a critical person who takes criticism poorly. I am support of religion that says in the private life, because I know how much comfort it offers people. I am against religion being pushed on, taught to and slammed into children and confused teenagers. But to those who aren’t doing it? I refuse to call them irrational, I refuse to call them stupid and I refuse to attempt to take down their support base. As Voltaire said “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it.” I will also fight to the death to keep religion off of women’s bodies, out of children’s minds, out of science and out of politics. That is why I work where I work. …I spend every waking hour that I’m not at school at the Center for Inquiry promoting secularism, freedom of expression and proper political strategies.

I don’t think the poster boys are elitist. I just don’t think they understand me, religious people or what I stand for. So I don’t support them. The next person to tell me it must be “easy” for me to be an atheist in Canada… really needs to reread this. This is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through in my entire life, and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy.

Everyone knows that i don’t hold particularly high regards for the poster boy atheists. I’ve written about it, and been destroyed for my opinion in a few places (some worse than others) and everyone thought I was some anti-atheist without even taking into consideration the positive posts I had written before. After the whole “why atheists annoy me” thing I sort of shied away from writing about atheism all that often. I’ve long argued that to make yourself feel included and comfortable within a movement you need to find someone who you can relate to. Someone that makes you think “Yeah! That is so right on!” someone who you wouldn’t mind speaking for you anywhere at anytime.

Nica Lalli is a mother of two (two who sound intelligent, and adorable), a PTA mom, painter, has a master of fine arts and married to a man she met when she was 21. ( I love love.) She is also the author of Nothing:Something to Believe In, and an atheist. Most importantly (at least for the matters of this post) she is the first atheist who has come to speak at CFI that I’ve ever been able to relate to. Ever.

Although our back-stories are extremely different (she was raised secular by non-religious parents and has never been religious …I was raised Christian by Christian parents and a minister), what she has to say now resonates with me deeply. I knew as soon as she said “I didn’t want to be the voice, I just wanted to be one of many” that I was going to like her much more than the other “voice” I’ve heard. (that makes me sound crazy…) But what we both are, is “interested in why religion is interesting” to us.

At first I thought she was going to be a cope out because she was calling herself “nothing” instead of slapping the word atheist on her forehead. But once she described that she wanted something “outside the debate” it made a lot more sense. All the other words, atheist, agnostic, freethinker, bright [thats the worst], humanist, rationalist – all have a stigmata (heh) behind them from being inside the religious debates.

Her book doesn’t fit in, where her book is about living life as an atheist – raising kids, dealing with in laws and just being her the other books about atheism and religion. About why atheism is the be all end all marvelous anti-faith that is going to save us all from our narrowminded and blinded views. Dawkins et al don’t show their weaknesses or talk about their lives rather they’re more interested in telling everyone else how stupid they are. Where Dawkins and his posse make it very hard to like atheists, Nica makes it very easy to fall totally in love with her. The poster boy atheists are making it very hard to say “I’m an atheist” without getting a million nasty glares and grilled with a lot of questions based on the assumption that you think just like them. Nica tries to describe and help us learn how to live in this world, where we’re not quite liked yet. Unfortunately the poster boys are very good at describing what it is that makes us angry, so they go off and get angry. Everywhere. All the time. And look silly. But Nica is right in saying that it is good that we have someone expressing those views – I just wish it wasn’t the only “mainstream” (so to speak) view out there.

Near the end of her talk, she did it. She did what no other atheist speaker I have ever seen has done before. It was like she was sent from God to help me understand my non-belief. She described what she believes in. She describes it with a story where she is in New York, surrounded by people while she’s in her car. At that moment, she was thinking, that all those people are thinking something. Thinking, remembering, wishing, dreaming, hoping…and being an individual. That was so overwhelming to her, and it is to me too. Although I take this a bit further, and include the sheer overwhelming feeling that the universe in general gives me. The beauty and power of discovery, the inconceivable size of the galaxy and yes, like Nica, the amazing thought that everyone is here, thinking, being and living.

Nica wrote her book to show how normal she is. So believers and non-believers could read it and relate to what she had to say. And then, perhaps, turn to the person beside them, no matter what denomination, and share a story with them. Stop the bickering and build a stronger relationship with those around you. A relationship that goes beyond lables and the armor so that we can just be, and understand one another on a new appreciative level. It’s pretty pathetic when you can’t have a discussion because religion overkills. Nica, like me, is unwilling to say that all belief is bad. It is absolutely tragic that there is an automatic assumption that they hate us, and we hate them. Then the world just seems so much more fragmented.

It’s too bad that she isn’t tough enough for Americans. She isn’t spitting in people’s faces and tearing down the religious fundamentalists that threaten our lives, rights and countries. Instead she is too normal, so people pay far to little attention to her. She is not an arrogant scientist. She’s not stuck up. She doesn’t act like she has the answers. She isn’t untouchable. She is approachable. She is intelligent and well spoken. She is a good writer. And she says what is in my head. She is someone I can relate to, which makes it a lot easier for me to call myself an atheist, or rather…nothing.