Recently, I was involved in a life-changing series of events. I'm a lifelong agnostic apistavist, and have been since before I discovered a word to describe what I was.
I grew up thinking there was something seriously wrong with me. I could not find a religion I agreed with or even believed the premises of. I have been told for 20 some odd years that I am going to hell for any number of contradictory reasons. And I learned pretty quickly to only tell people I have known and trusted that I'm agnostic.
I have experienced confusion to outright rejection for merely using the adjective, and have been told it's simply not possible to "not believe in anything."
I have watched the utter hypocrisy of people who claim to be religious, but only when it suits them. And I kept it under wraps for a very long time.
I have friends, family, co workers and acquaintances who I deeply respect, who are religious enough I don't think I can clearly state my views around without damaging interpersonal relationships, putting my career at risk, or otherwise ostracizing myself.
This came to a head today, when during a vaguely related fight, I laid into my wife with the grievances and hypocrisy I see in her relatively mild Christian faith, and absolute horror and inhumanity the religion apologizes out of sight.
Without going into too much detail, I have always surrounded myself with predominately female friends (just get along with women better) and for some accursed reason have the type of personality that I can board a city bus, and someone will sit down next to me and tell me their life story, and close friends will reveal lurid details I could live a perfectly happy life without ever having been exposed to.
Suffice it to say, I remember being 13, knowing hell didn't exist, and having my best friend's little sister describe experiences that made me wish it did.
I don't know if I can hold my tongue any longer. For decades, I have watched and listened to horror stories that "turned out alright" because God, and because God will punish terrible human beings whenever he's good and ready and gets around to it.
I hate knowing that karmic retribution, hell and heaven are bullshit.
I hate knowing the statistics of sex abuse,
https://www.rainn.org/statistics
And that 97% of people who commit the most heinous, horrific, destructive act possible to another human being will go unpunished. And it was hard not to cheer out loud watching the end scenes of "Descent" with Rosario Dawson tonight.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(2007_film)
I have become more outspoken with friends and family, even when it complicates things. I have to endure constant ribbing and chiding from a close friend whose mother is dying, over "nihilism and anger at God," because I can't force myself to believe in the same nebulous deistic god he does, I don't want him to have to face facts.
But I'm fucking angry. I'm livid. At religion, at what it allows people to do to each other, because of a false cosmic do-over that I don't think exists.
I even hear it from my father. My lapsed catholic gnostic atheist father, who is pushing 60, grumpy as fuck, the embodiment of the "angry atheist" caricature religious people portray, and still wants to know "why I care what other people believe."
Because what some people believe allows for pain, suffering, and absolution of things no mortal deserves to be absolved of.
So I find it harder and harder to hold my tongue, from face-to-face, to Facebook, to friends posting pictures of sunsets as proof of God on Instagram.
And it's me. I'm the immoral one, never mind my nonexistent criminal record, who remembers the decades gone by where I held your daughter's hair back as she puked in the gutter from the drug addiction she used to get away from the images of her pastor father creeping into her room at night, an addiction so strong I eventually cut ties with her.
And I now sleep next to a woman who wakes up screaming several nights a month, stuck in the past, yet convinced there's someone else in the room.
And yet I'm the broken one, because I don't believe in God. The one who cried and prayed and begged to be shown what to believe in for countless nights on end.
And I just don't know if I can hold my tongue any longer. I just don't have enough faith to pretend I might wake up and believe one day, any longer.
I grew up thinking there was something seriously wrong with me. I could not find a religion I agreed with or even believed the premises of. I have been told for 20 some odd years that I am going to hell for any number of contradictory reasons. And I learned pretty quickly to only tell people I have known and trusted that I'm agnostic.
I have experienced confusion to outright rejection for merely using the adjective, and have been told it's simply not possible to "not believe in anything."
I have watched the utter hypocrisy of people who claim to be religious, but only when it suits them. And I kept it under wraps for a very long time.
I have friends, family, co workers and acquaintances who I deeply respect, who are religious enough I don't think I can clearly state my views around without damaging interpersonal relationships, putting my career at risk, or otherwise ostracizing myself.
This came to a head today, when during a vaguely related fight, I laid into my wife with the grievances and hypocrisy I see in her relatively mild Christian faith, and absolute horror and inhumanity the religion apologizes out of sight.
Without going into too much detail, I have always surrounded myself with predominately female friends (just get along with women better) and for some accursed reason have the type of personality that I can board a city bus, and someone will sit down next to me and tell me their life story, and close friends will reveal lurid details I could live a perfectly happy life without ever having been exposed to.
Suffice it to say, I remember being 13, knowing hell didn't exist, and having my best friend's little sister describe experiences that made me wish it did.
I don't know if I can hold my tongue any longer. For decades, I have watched and listened to horror stories that "turned out alright" because God, and because God will punish terrible human beings whenever he's good and ready and gets around to it.
I hate knowing that karmic retribution, hell and heaven are bullshit.
I hate knowing the statistics of sex abuse,
https://www.rainn.org/statistics
And that 97% of people who commit the most heinous, horrific, destructive act possible to another human being will go unpunished. And it was hard not to cheer out loud watching the end scenes of "Descent" with Rosario Dawson tonight.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(2007_film)
I have become more outspoken with friends and family, even when it complicates things. I have to endure constant ribbing and chiding from a close friend whose mother is dying, over "nihilism and anger at God," because I can't force myself to believe in the same nebulous deistic god he does, I don't want him to have to face facts.
But I'm fucking angry. I'm livid. At religion, at what it allows people to do to each other, because of a false cosmic do-over that I don't think exists.
I even hear it from my father. My lapsed catholic gnostic atheist father, who is pushing 60, grumpy as fuck, the embodiment of the "angry atheist" caricature religious people portray, and still wants to know "why I care what other people believe."
Because what some people believe allows for pain, suffering, and absolution of things no mortal deserves to be absolved of.
So I find it harder and harder to hold my tongue, from face-to-face, to Facebook, to friends posting pictures of sunsets as proof of God on Instagram.
And it's me. I'm the immoral one, never mind my nonexistent criminal record, who remembers the decades gone by where I held your daughter's hair back as she puked in the gutter from the drug addiction she used to get away from the images of her pastor father creeping into her room at night, an addiction so strong I eventually cut ties with her.
And I now sleep next to a woman who wakes up screaming several nights a month, stuck in the past, yet convinced there's someone else in the room.
And yet I'm the broken one, because I don't believe in God. The one who cried and prayed and begged to be shown what to believe in for countless nights on end.
And I just don't know if I can hold my tongue any longer. I just don't have enough faith to pretend I might wake up and believe one day, any longer.
