My family knows, but I can’t talk about it to them. And yes, they pray for me.
My childen know and are fine with it, but only one has chosen Atheist for themselves.
My wife’s family does not know and I am not allowed to ever bring it up or hint to it in anyway.
I am also very careful at work to be non-committal as it just isn’t worth it.
I was raised far right, ‘non-denominational’ (essentially independent baptist). My brother has a masters in theology from Bob Jones University and his wife has one in something from there, my sister is in school there. Yadda yadda yadda.
I’m not a hard atheist and would classify myself more as an agnostic at this point. (maybe someday I’ll do a thread on my journey there) I told my brother and sister in law last year but haven’t discussed it with the rest of my family. They know I don’t attend a church so probably have some idea of my position. They are concerned for my soul, but that was the case because I’m gay…adding non-christian at this point wouldn’t really change much.
I was raised in a Reform Jewish family, but most of my extended family are Conservative or Orthodox. They all know everything there is to know about me, and coming out as an atheist has been much more difficult than coming out as gay. For many of them there’s no distinction between Judaism as a religion and Judaism as a heritage. I don’t deny my heritage, but I do not believe in any religion. They have trouble understanding that we all have the right to define ourselves.
Maybe a good idea might be to look into Unitarianism as a stealth cover for you with families who think that being teh ATHEIST is teh EVIL.
Gotta say…I feel bad for you guys with super fundie parents and relatives.
Antinor01, you’re VERY brave, coming out as gay in a Bo Jo family. I had a lot of trouble accepting myself as gay…and I’m from a very libral family.
For what it’s worth, every time I have in some way revealed that I’m an atheist to anyone, I got way less reaction than I expected. Sometimes people seem not to know what to say, but that’s about as awkward as it has gotten.
Well, my grandmother is pretty heavily Catholic. We got on the topic, IIRC, when she asked about us baptizing our daughter (and I said we weren’t going to, we weren’t Christians). She responded with something about everyone having to have faith in something, and I told her I don’t have faith in anything. She found that really shocking and sad, but didn’t know where to go from there. I believe she did say something like, “But what about trees?!” in the silliest example ever of the Argument to Design.
But my Grandma is a person who is so ensconced in her belief that it had hardly ever occurred to her that someone wouldn’t share it, so she’s not really up for an argument about it. I’m sure she worries about me and my kids (because her all-loving deity will torture them for eternity due to a decision out of their control), and she occasionally sends them religious-themed gifts, but we don’t live nearby so it’s not much of an issue.
My mom followed roughly the same trajectory as I did, around the same time - rejecting Catholicism, Christianity, organized religion, and theism. So that made a HUGE difference to my experience. My dad is, to all appearances, a cultural Catholic. He goes to mass every week, but he doesn’t discuss religion, and from some things he’s said to me, he appears to be a reductionist, which hardly squares with Catholicism. So I don’t get grief from them.
As for my extended family, I think it really helps that we grew up in New York and New England, where there seems to be much more a culture that you do your own religious stuff, and you don’t talk about it at large. My uncle’s wife also blazed a trail for me by raising her daughters as Jews - the family got used to not presuming we’re all Christians.
Anyway, it’s not always as bad as you think. Lots of people are live and let live, even if they have strong faith in their own lives.
I came out as a teenager to my very religious grandma and we fought about it all the time, especially Sundays.
These days, my mom and grandma pray for me and Mom sends glurgey emails. A few years ago, I decided to stop arguing with Grandma about this because she gets so upset. If she is ever dying and asks if I’ve accepted Jesus as my savior, I’ll be happy to tell her any lie she wants to hear.
Same here - although they won’t talk to me about it. Actually my parents will, but none of my extended family (with the exception of a distant cousin).
My parents aren’t really fundamentalists, but my extended family is. I’m guessing they just ignore the occasional atheist-related post I make on FB. Although, it was funny - I joined some FB atheist group and within a few minutes my aunt-in-law had joined 2 or 3 ‘jesus groups’. It could have been a coincidence…
Huh. This is fairly recent, yes? I thought I remembered a while back a post about you trying to reconcile your Catholicism with wanting to have sex outside marriage?
Very interesting that this thread is here. I was just having a private conversation with another SDMB member about this very subject.
I decided to reject my religion about 2 years ago, and 6 months later became an atheist.
Some background info is now required:
I was born and raised Roman Catholic (RC). My dad’s entire side of the family is also all RC. When my dad married my mom, mom converted. Most of my wife’s side of the family is also RC. In fact that was how Mrs. D and I met initially, at a Catholic youth rally.
When Mrs. D and I got married, it was in the RC church. We have 4 wonderful kids and also custody of our nephew, all of whom have been brought up in the RC.
Now, back to our story:
So I have been an Atheist for about 1.5 years. I came to this decision due to a number of factors, but basically it boiled down to rationality just making sense to me.
When I first made the decision, I thought I could just live with it and continue to go on with my life as I have been: Going to church, sitting quietly through the service, and just basically go through the motions. I’ve come to realize that I can’t do that for too much longer. My wife is very religious. She even teaches 1st grade religion at our church. Add to this the fact that my FIL is on the school board of the school I work at.
So I am now in a very hard situation. I have family all over the place that is very religious, and I fear coming out to them… partially because of the pain it would cause them (My Mom, Dad and Grandmother in particular) and partially because of the professional repercussions it would have on my career (FIL was very instrumental in getting me my job here at the school). The one that I worry about the most is my wife. We have been married for 16 years. With the exception of my recent de-conversion, she knows me inside and out. I just don’t know how she would take this if I told her. I don’t know how this would affect our children either. In 16 years, we’ve never considered the possibility of divorce, but I can’t help but wonder if this would be a deal breaker with her, and I don’t even know how to innocuously bring up the subject to feel her out.
So… yeah. I’m kind of stuck here in a real tough situation.
My parents know, but, like everything, they just treat it as a “phase” I’m going through that I’ll “grow out of.” It’s their way of keeping their heads in the sand.
I’m almost 42, so the likelihood of me “growing out of” anything at this point is pretty laughable.
My family knows I’m atheist, though they still assume that I’m going to agree with whatever religious or political point they make. In theory, I’m an atheist for them. In practice, in their minds I’m just the same as they are.
Wow. Good luck with that.
I was raised Catholic. Catholic grade school, all boys Catholic high school, alter boy, boy scout, etc. My mother is very religious, my dad less so.
I started losing my faith in high school, but didn’t actually realize what was going on until college. I never even heard the word ‘atheist’ until then. Everyone I knew was religious, it never occurred to me it was an option. I lied to my mom for a long time about going to church, and finally told her one day when I was tired of lying that I wasn’t Catholic anymore. Atheism followed a bit later.
She didn’t take it well, and I got a lot of grief from her. She still gives me the ‘Oh what happened to you make you lose your faith.’ and ‘What did I do wrong.’ and the ever popular ‘Why don’t you just try praying.’ from time to time.
A few years ago my brother and his family moved and joined a new mega-church and became uberChristian overnight. Up until this point he never really said anything about me be an atheist, and I thought he leaned in that direction himself. After that, he called me weekly to inform me that the only real unforgivable sin was the denial of the holy spirit, and how I should accept Jesus again, and how his church was the one true way. It finally took my father intervening to get him to tone it down.
My dear, sweet mother has essentially moved to the “well, when the time’s right you’ll convert back to Christianity” model, although it infuriates my Jewish wife when Mom has the following conversation with Buddhist me:
Mom: “So where are you going to have the baptisms when you have children?”
Me: “Nowhere, mom. No baptisms. Neither of us are Christian.”
Mom: “Oh, I have faith that God will guide you back in time for your kids.”
At this point I’m using a lot of resources from Parenting Beyond Belief, which while ostensibly about atheist parenting has a lot of resources both for freethinking parenting and for dealing with well-meaning Christian relatives.
I’m out. It was no big deal. I hardly see any of my family besides my parents and brothers and at family gatherings the subject rarely comes up. Being from El Salvador, they all provably believe in god but I don’t know how many take it seriously or actually go to church.
The only family member who is adamant about me taking up for Jesus is my 7 year old son.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that she’s having exactly the same thoughts as you.
Dragwyr,
I started reading “Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary by Ken Daniels” thanks to your post in another thread. Have you shared any of your reading material with your wife? It’s not a rare thing for the faithful to have doubts, even Mother Theresa did. Maybe present it as a struggle you’re having — which I think accurately describes your situation — and gently bring her into the discussion. Maybe she’ll “save” you, maybe you’ll “save” her.
If she’s a good christian and follows the scriptures, she can’t divorce you just for that. Repeat: Can NOT.
I forget where the reference is. One of those letters by Paul.
Although my understanding is that RCs don’t really rely on the scriptures that much.
This is kind of a big thing not to tell her, though. I’d level with her.
Yeah, you can have a good chuckle over that when you remind her. :rolleyes:
Sorry I missed this before. It has been interesting, which is why I hesitated for a long time to bring up the concept that I didn’t believe what I was raised with since it was just adding something else to the mix.
What is odd is I didn’t really know how far right we were for a very long time. Are you familiar with Bill Gothard? We were part of his homeschooling program for a number of years. For those that aren’t familiar with him, he is considered extreme even by most on the right.