Religion is interesting.
The other night I reluctantly had dinner with my parents and their friends. (I always have dinner wtih my parents, but its their friends that make me nervous. The last friend my mom had over, I jokingly said “i love george bush!” and she replied “me too!” but wasn’t kidding. FUN table talk.) These particular friends were from the church (my step dad is a minister) and I got talking to them about why the United Church is failing and the likely possibility that their church will be completely dead within the next 20 - 50 years because they’re not adhearing to the wants and needs of the youths in their religion.
Anyway, that’s all irrelavent for the point I want to make.
The point I want to make is how incredibly cautious I was of calling myself an atheist. In point of fact - I didn’t refer to myself as an atheist until over 2 hours into the conversation (and 4 hours since the dinner had actually started.) From how I was talking, you would have thought I was religious in some way. I spoke about attending church, and respecting religions and want to observe them. …But it becomes more clear as to why an atheist would speak like this when you find out I already have a minor in religious studies.
I ended up speaking about the Center for Inquiry and Carpe Diem, two atheist groups that I am involved in - and then eventually had to admit that I was an atheist.
I’m not sure why I didn’t want to say it. To my friends, I’m very open about it… Even around most public settings I’m very open about - especially at parties. (There is always that one mad crazy christian who’ll want to fight you.. .and its just too fun.) Maybe it’s that I didn’t want to “embarass” my parents in front of their friends, or I didn’t want these religous people to lose “respect” for me. I see now, that both of these concerns is extremely silly, but for some reason they were actual concerns at the time.
We did have a good part of the discussion about how stupid and silly creationism is, which was nice. And they all agreed that the church is in a pretty horrible state. There was a lot in common, religion wise, which surprised me. But it was an eye opener for me of how insecure I am about my particular lack of religion. I’m going to go ahead and blame that on the fact that I was raised by a minister and a mom who hearts religion.
The point of my story here, is that I’m going to more aware of this. And ensure that the next time I am put into a religious discussion with a room full of religious people who I respect, I will not be ashamed to tell them all I’m an atheist and disagree with all of them.
(And in light of this new goal to be more loud and proud of my atheism, I’m adding an “atheism” category.)
