My husband’s a PT and he had a patient who went to him for an extended period of time. My husband got to know her husband a bit because he brought his wife to all her appointments and they’d chat. A few months later, the woman came in for more PT. Her husband, in the meantime, had been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of brain cancer and was having a very rough time. The lady asked my husband to pray for him and my husband responded that he didn’t pray, but he’d be thinking about him and wishing him well.
A year or so passed and my husband were in the grocery store one night, perusing the produce section. The woman was also there and my husband introduced me to her and asked how the husband was. She went off at him, telling him that her husband had died and it was because he hadn’t prayed for him. She blamed her husband’s death on my husband. It was, to say the least, a bit awkward.
So, lesson learned - when someone asks you to pray for them, just nod and smile. I feel horrible for her and have nothing but compassion for what was without a doubt a horrible situation for her and her family. But it was still a very uncomfortable conversation.
When I was dealing with MRSA about three years ago, I had to have a pic line put in at a local hospital. The nurse (at least I think she was a nurse) who put it in managed to ignore me when I told her that they usually drew blood from the left side. It took her a number of tries and several hours to finally get it put in (on the left side, no less) and she asked if there was somewhere at work for me to hook up to the IV antibiotics in private. I told her I could either do it in my office or in one of the quiet rooms.
She was intrigued by the idea of a quiet room and asked what they were used for. I explained to her that they were set up with a bench, a seat and a phone and were private enough to make a personal phone call, use a breast pump or for some of the folks at work who have ritual prayers, to say them. She came back with the comment “Well, I guess EVERYBODY has to have THEIR rights.” Then she began ranting about “other” people who demanded things that us good Christian folk would never think to ask for.
I was getting uncomfortable at this point and not just with the medical procedure. I told her that I wasn’t among the “good Christian people” and that I kind of liked the idea of the quiet rooms. It was then that she pretty much begged me to change my wicked ways, told me that she would pray for my soul daily and so on.
I just wish she would have learned how to put in a pic line on the first try.
I am a civilian employee of the DOD. Deployed to Iraq in 2009, my military supervisor was a very vocal Christian. For this reason, I kept my atheism pretty much to myself when he was around. But not long after he heard me discussing religion and politics with friends, he announced that he was sending me home early, a disciplinary measure that would result in major career penalties to me.
The consensus of the rest of team, which included some very religious people, was that his actions were totally motivated by his antipathy of my atheism. He had claimed that he was sending me home because I didn’t have enough work to do, but he was forced abandon this claim when he couldn’t find anyone to take on the work I was doing. He relented and I completed my tour.
I considered taking it up with HR, but was told that nothing would likely come of it. It’s hard to prove such cases, and even harder to obtain justice when a military officer is supervising a civilian.
He was an asshole, and would have been whatever his beliefs. (There was a good possibility that he had cheated on his wife while deployed.) I won’t specify his denomination, which experiences its own share of discrimination. Also, some of the people who came to my defense (by refusing to fill in for me) were of the same denomination.
My dad went off and we haven’t spoken since he found out I was an atheist. I was cleverly hiding it by posting it on my FB. :rolleyes: I’d honestly forgotten he didn’t know. We spoke very seldom anyway, so no great loss.
I became an atheist during a period I was working at home, and then I moved overseas. People are sane about religion here (or lack thereof) so I haven’t had any encounters in the workplace.
This is a trait of some Christians that worries me somewhat.
You mean that your belief in a 2000 year old myth and a fear of horrible, horrible punishment from an all seeing deity is the only thing keeping you from lying, cheating and possibly stealing and even murder?
The gulf between where you live and where I do is seldom so apparent as when you post something like this. The idea that you could know this is just utterly alien.
I am agnostic not atheist, but I ran into all sorts of special hell when I lived in tidewater Virginia at the height of the whole CBN/Pat Robertson/700 club mid and late 80s.
Holy shit on a stick, you would think from the reactions of my neighbors my hobby was inviting small children over and sacrificing them to Satan.
I was perfectly willing to let anybody pray for me at the drop of a hat, I was polite when I turned down the offer of going to church - I was working nights and every extra shift I could manage, and my best time for picking up extra shifts was weekends and evenings so I slept days. So since nobody ever saw me in the day, I was a night living Satan worshiper.
I had the habit of burning a scented pillar candle on the middle of the kitchen island to help mask the smells coming from the neighborhood [cheap oceanfront slum area, actually. Dead fish, garbage and bikers. Yay.] A neighbor who apparently had no clue about my evil evil ways dropped by to mooch some sugar was aghast, you would have thought I was having a black mass.
:eek: :eek: :eek: Man, it was hard enough to hold still when I had my PICC line put in…on the first try. I don’t want to even think about having someone try it more than once.
My boss at the dress shop was absolutely astounded that I hadn’t had my daughter baptized. She knew that I was an atheist, but why wouldn’t I baptize my daughter? Uh, possibly because I didn’t believe in God, do you think? She just couldn’t wrap her head around this. And what did I tell Lisa about various subjects, she wanted to know? I said that I told her the truth. Lisa grew up just fine knowing that Santa Claus was a big fairy story, and so was the Easter Bunny. And she was willing to play along with the fairy tales.
This boss also believed that I should have forced Lefthanded Lisa to use her right hand when eating and writing and drawing and whatever. This was in the 1980s, mind you.
You’re too emotionally dependent on your intellectual choice to deny unsubstantiated claims of the existence of supernatural beings, and you seem to look for other people’s experience in their “good stories” to help justify your choice.
No gods exist. That much we know.
Emotional anxieties is a human norm and can be expressed and dealt with in a myriad ways.
I’ve had a couple of people defriend me on Facebook. No loss.
My mom told me that she considered herself a failure as a parent “in the area of faith” – which is pretty much the only important area to her, so I guess that means she basically feels like my entire upbringing was a giant waste of time? Whatever. She keeps trying to sneak religious books to my kids, but I tell them that the stories Grandma keeps giving them are made-up stories that some people like to believe, and so far they seem to be developing a healthy skepticism.
There was a time when I was a lot less emotionally distant about my mom’s response, but I’m sort of over it now. She chose religion over a relationship with me. That’s fine. Her decision. I have a lot of other good people in my life that more than fill the gap.
Thankfully most of my friends are atheists (both closeted and open) so I haven’t had to deal with too much flak for my non-belief. I get a little bit of it from my family (my dad’s side - my mom’s side are pretty much apathetic when it comes to religion). Really, the worst was back in high school (only a few years ago).
I tend to “handle” it with a smug sense of intellectual superiority that’s held me over pretty well so far.
Maybe I’m just lucky–or maybe because I live on the evil, left-wing East Coast–but I can’t remember ever having an unpleasant encounter with anyone due to my atheism.
Religion (or lack of same) just never gets discussed in social or work situations . . .
Yes. I like to hand out Church of Google literature to prepubescent females on planes. I have had it with these motherfucking Christians on these motherfucking planes!
My grandmother was shocked,SHOCKED that I didn’t have a Catholic wedding. My father left the Church in the 60s, my mom was raised a Baptist, my parents didn’t have a Catholic wedding, and I wasn’t - in any way, shape or form - raised as a Catholic. At least she didn’t approach me about it. All the fretting and fussing was directed at my mother, who couldn’t stand the woman anyway.
I’ve had somewhat intellectual discussions about it. I would not say “debates” because in a debate you kind expect to be able to persuade someone to your way of thinking. And just as I don’t think anyone would be able to shake me out of my agnoticism (unless they performed some miracles right before my eyes), I don’t expect to convince others that their beliefs are not compatible with reason.
I have had someone question the basis of my morality without having God in my life. I’ve never understood this. If fear of God is the only thing keeping you on a straight path, then something ain’t right. Because it means you are operating without a brain…that you are unable to make a decision without asking WWJD? Life, for me, just isn’t that complicated. I do things that make sense, won’t get me in trouble with the law or with other people, and seem fair and just. I don’t need a book to tell me how to do these things.
I’ve had people tell me that I should believe because I’ll regret it when I get to hell. There are many things wrong with this. Firstly, a person can’t make themselves believe anything. If you don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, no number of personal stories from others will make you believe in him…especially if their testimonies are just relayed “feelings” or “hunches” of his existence but not actual eye-witness accounts. Secondly, belief based on fear is a crazy belief–a paranoid belief. I want a belief in a higher power that I’m supposed to love to be based on more than such a primal feeling. Thirdly, if I’m going to hell for something I cannot help–not believing in something I have no experiential evidence of, then do I really want to believe in a God that would allow that to happen? No. Nor do I want to find fellowship with people who believe in that.
I’ve had people make snarky remarks around me. I once joked that I felt guilty for liking Nine Inch Nails because their music makes me feel like I’m going to go to hell, and someone was out of the gates with, “But I thought you said you don’t believe in that!” before I had a chance to even blink an eye. It wasn’t said in a joking way…I really think this person thought they had caught me in a “gotcha”. Um, no. Just because I don’t believe in hell doesn’t mean I can’t find the concept hilarious…and in fact, the fact that this person (religious) would be listening to Nine Inch Nails and not see the contradiction is also hilarious. And I have found it is best not to correct people who are religious when they are wrong about certain aspects of the faith (like saying Jesus was buried for 3 days as is tradition in Jewish culture :rolleyes:) because religious folks really do not like to schooled by non-religious folks…even if those non-religious folks have read the Bible many more times than they have and actually know some things about Christianity, having been brought up in the church way back in the day.
Pretty much the same for me on the west coast. I don’t run into many people who believe in gods. I do have one pretty good friend who is a Mormon; he has never said a thing.
