Wow...
The most amazing thing happened today.
But before I even get to that, let me backtrack a bit and tell you about my family. My sister and I were never brought up with any sort of religious values. It was completely absent. We were told that there was a God, that he loved us, and, if we're good, there's some magical place we go when we die. Now, that may sound like religion to you, but there was no practice beyond that. We never went to church. We were never taught about Jesus. We didn't even have a Bible in the house. It was basically a universalist upbringing.
Of course, it didn't take me very long to look around at all my friends and realise that there were other flavors of theism. Of course, I wanted to know why we believed one thing and other people believed another, and there was never an answer. After a while, I started asking even more interesting questions, such as the strange preference for monotheism over polytheism. Honestly, what's so implausible about the latter if we already believe the former? Again, no real answer.
So, obviously, I came to the conclusion that this belief that we had was tacked-on and completely unnecessary. And from that point on, it was kind of strange approaching the subject with my family, because it felt like I had walked away from something that everyone else seemed to value intensely, even though our brand of theism was as innocent as it was (universalism is about as secular as theism gets, next to deism).
So, today, my mother has the whole family over tonight, and we're talking over dinner. Now, my family knows that I'm an atheist, but nobody's ever really cornered me on it. ...until tonight, that is! And it wasn't at all what I expected. I expected a lecture. Since I have a tendency to speak out against believers, I expected to hear, "You shouldn't be disrespectful of people for having different beliefs.". ...but that didn't happen. Instead, my family totally came out to me. My mother, my sister, and my uncle all basically told me that they are totally agnostic.
Now, normally, I would groan at the term "agnostic", because of several run-ins I've had with certain internet agnostics. You know the types. The ones who think that it's arrogant for atheists to outright reject the alleged existence of whatever arbitrary supernatural being (in this case, a god) they think we ought not to dismiss. And yet, the same argument could be applied to other supernatural things, such as pixies, but nobody's agnostic of pixies. The notion of pixies is dismissed outright, as it should. Atheists simply argue that gods are in the same realm of unverfied claims as pixies.
Rather, the agnosticism that I encountered tonight wasn't that kind of agnosticism. Rather, it was a refreshing sense of indifference. In other words, to the subject of God's existence... eh... they could really give a damn. But there is a definite preference for people who choose to think about morality rather than fishing it out of an archaic book written by ancient sheep hearders. Better to be thoughtful than mindlessly obedient.
It was just so strange to hear this, because I never knew that unbelief was a progressive force sweeping through my family. For all I knew, they were still the same bunch of God-Lite believers that they were when I was a kid. I just assumed that I was the black sheep and they were just letting me have my little space and they politely disagreed. Absolutely not! Somehow.... somewhere... my family finally kicked away the final vestige of theism.
...of course, considering that we started out universalist, it wasn't exactly a tough shackle to shake free.
And then the conversation turned into this really funny topic about how characters from the Bible, assuming they even existed, would be in jail today. We speculated as to whether or not Jesus would be locked up, but we concluded unanimously that Moses and Abraham would definitely be in jail if they existed in today's society.
My mom even went on to state that Abraham, who is the founding figure of all three of the major religions, was clearly delusional or perhaps even eating shrooms on the day that he decided to sacrifice Issac. But thank goodness he had that second hallucination in which God told him to stop!
It was just a laugh-a-minute table conversation over dinner. It was good and therapeutic.
And best of all, the weirdness isn't there anymore.
Well, I'm gonna sign off for now. I'mma go watch TV. There's a special about the disappearance of Madalyn Murray O'Hair on Investigation Discovery starting... RIGHT NOW!
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mister_neil) wrote,
