I feel your pain. Almost all of my family is religious though most of them just avoid the topic of religion. But of course some of them seem to think it's their personal directive from god to try and convince me that I'm wrong. I find it very frustrating because their tactics oscillate between attacking my views or points (for example I say "what if I believe in the Hindu gods? according to your logic that's totally reasonable" so he says "stop being stupid, you don't believe that") to getting all offended. I think you can either take it seriously, and I do believe it's possible as an athiest to have a serious discussion about religion with a religious person, or just find the humour in it.
Like when my cousin, brother and I got in to an argument with his dad. We're all athiests and he's on-and-off again (apparently hardcore on-again) christian. My cousin kept bringing up Star Trek "well in this one episode of star trek it was like the greek gods were really these aliens..." "oh ya that reminds me of this other episode of star trek when..." his dad would just freak out and not even let him finish talking it was hilarious. It didn't help that I kept bringing up seven headed space monkeys or the flying spaghetti monster.
I guess the key is, if somebody believes, you probably aren't going to change their minds in a day, same as if somebody talks to you or me about jesus, muhammed or whatever, I'm not going to change my mind.
Like when my cousin, brother and I got in to an argument with his dad. We're all athiests and he's on-and-off again (apparently hardcore on-again) christian. My cousin kept bringing up Star Trek "well in this one episode of star trek it was like the greek gods were really these aliens..." "oh ya that reminds me of this other episode of star trek when..." his dad would just freak out and not even let him finish talking it was hilarious. It didn't help that I kept bringing up seven headed space monkeys or the flying spaghetti monster.
I guess the key is, if somebody believes, you probably aren't going to change their minds in a day, same as if somebody talks to you or me about jesus, muhammed or whatever, I'm not going to change my mind.
