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Notes -
I had quite the throwback culture war experience this past weekend. While at a family gathering, my dad was cornered by an in-law and quizzed about my “agnosticism”.
He was asked if he had led me to this lack of faith, and was then informed that it’s the patriarch’s responsibility to “get his family into heaven” – a neat little double-duty insult of both himself and me.
I tend to be a very laid-back guy in meatspace, but found myself livid. I’ve been in this family for close to a decade, and the sheer cowardice and arrogance of this exchange was breathtaking. To circle around to one of my direct family members instead of having the cajones to challenge me directly was ridiculous (and in hindsight, what I should have really expected from these people).
We’ve been existing in what I thought was a reasonable detente. As a victorious participant in the Atheism culture war, I’ve been kinda-sorta prepared to have these skirmishes with my wife’s catholic family for a long time. The unspoken agreement was that I go to church for holidays, let you splash water on my children, and don’t bring up anyone’s hypocrisy/the church’s corruption, rampant pedophilia/the inherent idiocy in believing in god.
In exchange, I get to stay balls deep in my excellent wife and should be left alone.
I’ll be the first to admit the excesses of Atheism’s victory laps and see how “live and let live” can slide down the slope into a children’s drag show. But this indirect exchange reminded me that when the culture war pendulum swings back, I should be prepared for the petty tyrants and fools on the religious right to reassert themselves. We’re already starting to see the tendrils of this, even if some of their forces have been replaced with rainbow-skinsuit churches across the US.
For Christian motteziens - No disrespect intended. I'm aware of the hypocrisy of my arrogance in this post, and it's intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek
Do your in-laws know you're very hostile to their religion
an angsty interwebs atheist, a "participant" in the culture war victory over the great evil,or have you hidden that fact from them and instead gone through all the motions with catholic marriage, catholic child raising and baptism, etc.?If that's the case, maybe they just assumed you weren't very hostile to religion
weren't a fraud?you accuse in-laws of not have "the cajones" to challenge you directly when it appears you've lived ~10 years of your life taking the same route of "least conflict" despite a simmering angst just below the surface about this topic
edit: removed unnecessary antagonism by crossing it out
There seems to be a belief in this thread that I've been grinning and happy going to church, talking about how great catholicism is, and having my fingers surreptitiously crossed behind my back.
This is... not the case. It may be difficult to understand, but I can share most of my moral framework with a Christian while simultaneously despising organized religion as a fantastical tool of oppression.
And, this may be even more difficult to understand, but trumpeting my beliefs at every family gathering (especially those that, as we see from this thread, "hype people up") isn't very polite. I have found that routinely spitting in people's faces isn't good practice, personally or professionally. It may make me a coward, but I also don't spend my time trying to crush the idiotic progressive shit I hear from the HR team at work. My atheism-evangelizing days were left behind after 8th-grade graduation.
At the end of the day, I actually love my in-laws quite a bit. Just not this guy, so much.
Do your in-laws know you're very hostile to religion
an angsty interwebs athiestor do you just avoid the topic, participate sometimes in catholic ceremonies, etc., i.e., purposefully engage in conduct which is meant to allow other people to assume that you aren't what you are in order to avoid conflict?it's difficult to communicate an entire situation through short comments on the internet so we're left having to fill in the details; no one is having trouble understanding anything you're talking about, what they're having trouble with is getting an accurate picture of reality given your comments
edit: removed unnecessary antagonism by crossing it out
This thread is already dangerously close to doxxing me, and, even more importantly, being a fucking boring examination of my personal life. Whatever someone wants to think about me after this thread is fine, it's just a niche forum.
if you're worried about doxxing yourself on this niche forum, you could have left out the 3/4ths of your comment which is little more than you sneering at your in-law family and boo-outgrouping their religion (btw they have rampant corruption and pedophilia) and still made a post about being worried about what petty religious tyrants would do if they had power again
it appears most posts don't really have a clue what you even want to discuss and are prodding around trying to find something
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