Hi! I'm new and stuff

[Sterben]

Welcome!

Sorry your relationship with your father is strained. My relationship with my mom is much the same.

A long time ago I set a boundary for my mom, that if she crosses it---it's gonna get real, with the quickness. She chooses now not to cross that line, and our relationship is much the better.

        I had a similar experience with my mother as well, as she as gotten older thought she stop caring about my Dad and I being Atheists. It's become a general understanding that if we don't raid each others believes were able to have a healthy relationship.

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Welcome to board, you will many like minded people here, we all have different back stories on why we became Atheists, the fastest growing  method of thinking next to being a Muslim. Best of all were not assholes who shove it others faces. Unlike the people who knock on your door, or bother you in a parking lot....

Oh that reminds me, you mind if I tell you about my lord and savior, beating things with a hammer?

I don't have to worry about any rules besides not hitting people or other people's things!

            Sure, as long the hammers are shaped in a funny manor.

[godlessheatheness]

Welcome!

Sorry your relationship with your father is strained. My relationship with my mom is much the same.

A long time ago I set a boundary for my mom, that if she crosses it---it's gonna get real, with the quickness. She chooses now not to cross that line, and our relationship is much the better.

        I had a similar experience with my mother as well, as she as gotten older thought she stop caring about my Dad and I being Atheists. It's become a general understanding that if we don't raid each others believes were able to have a healthy relationship.

---

Oh that reminds me, you mind if I tell you about my lord and savior, beating things with a hammer?

I don't have to worry about any rules besides not hitting people or other people's things!

            Sure, as long the hammers are shaped in a funny manor.

They come in all sorts of shapes! including funny!

also be sure to make your hammering as annoying as possible for those around you.

[Sterben]

        I had a similar experience with my mother as well, as she as gotten older thought she stop caring about my Dad and I being Atheists. It's become a general understanding that if we don't raid each others believes were able to have a healthy relationship.

---

            Sure, as long the hammers are shaped in a funny manor.

They come in all sorts of shapes! including funny!

also be sure to make your hammering as annoying as possible for those around you.

    If I only had a hammer.... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKvpONl3No)

[Fred Hampton]

I guess I'll start with backstory. 

When I was young I was never taken to church, only when we went to my grandmothers house. My dad was big into preaching all the time but never practicing what he said. I remember trying to get my dad to go to church, even dragging my brother to a church down the street from us, and trying to get him to go. of course he never did. and I never actually had any interest in church I just wanted him to get out of the house. 

He refused and of course I made trouble and skipped school and did all kinds of other things to try and get him to pay attention to what was going on. 

I grew up and eventually moved with my mom. He became very super christian and started preaching to me harder, I tried. I really did. I wanted nothing more than to have something in common with him. I tried to believe. I prayed and went to multiple churches and according to his family when I confided in them I wasn't trying hard enough, or praying enough. I had too many questions and I have always felt like an outcast because of it. 

It never made sense to me and so I recently quit trying. I have found myself feeling better, and living a healthier lifestyle and happier since. 

I've also found something to submerge myself into and learn about and do everything to learn everything that I can so that when my dad finds out (and he will eventually) and he tries to debate me (this I know for a fact) I can win this time. 

I have become the thing he hated. A godless heathen. 

I won't be straw manned any more, and when I am I will be educated enough to fight back with logic and reason.

Hi godlessheatheness.  Since there is no God, all humans are, in fact, atheists, whether they know it or not.  Many, most don't, and it's not particularly anybody's job to "make" them know.  However, if you have not read these books already, they will give you a good deal of "ammo" in debating the "godly souls" that surround us all:

1) Richard Dawkins, "The God Delusion"
2) Christopher Hitchens, "god is not Great"
3) Sam Harris, "The End of Faith"
4) Lawrence Krauss, "A Universe from Nothing"

[trev22]

I guess I'll start with backstory. 

When I was young I was never taken to church, only when we went to my grandmothers house. My dad was big into preaching all the time but never practicing what he said. I remember trying to get my dad to go to church, even dragging my brother to a church down the street from us, and trying to get him to go. of course he never did. and I never actually had any interest in church I just wanted him to get out of the house. 

He refused and of course I made trouble and skipped school and did all kinds of other things to try and get him to pay attention to what was going on. 

I grew up and eventually moved with my mom. He became very super christian and started preaching to me harder, I tried. I really did. I wanted nothing more than to have something in common with him. I tried to believe. I prayed and went to multiple churches and according to his family when I confided in them I wasn't trying hard enough, or praying enough. I had too many questions and I have always felt like an outcast because of it. 

It never made sense to me and so I recently quit trying. I have found myself feeling better, and living a healthier lifestyle and happier since. 

I've also found something to submerge myself into and learn about and do everything to learn everything that I can so that when my dad finds out (and he will eventually) and he tries to debate me (this I know for a fact) I can win this time. 

I have become the thing he hated. A godless heathen. 

I won't be straw manned any more, and when I am I will be educated enough to fight back with logic and reason.

Political leaders these days ....... seem like very godly, godless heathens.

[TheoneandonlytrueGod]

After I got out of the USAF and went to college (during the mid 60's) I became a "hippy", long hair and all with definite liberal leanings my father nearly disowned me (he and my stepmother were John Birch members, at that time ultraconservative, so conservative they were convinced that anyone over 40 were to be eliminated when the Communists took the country over). He was so much against what I had come to see he even decided I wouldn't be able to graduate from college. We seldom talked, seemed to avoid each other.

Well I got a Ba in fine arts with a philosophy minor. He never acknowledged my accomplishment.

My situation wasn't as difficult as yours but it was still somewhat stressful. We later reconciled but that is another story.

In any case