Outing myself as an atheist: the etiquette issue

It won’t be a surprise to anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis to find out that I consider myself an atheist.  It’s just my personal mindset, developed over a lifetime of consideration, and I’m comfortable with it and all that it implies.  When I die, for example, I’m quite sure I’ll just be dead, and it’s okay.  I don’t feel that I’ll ever reunite with my deceased relatives, and I’ve made peace with that.  I don’t belong to any atheist organizations and I don’t really even think about it much, unless someone else brings religion into the conversation.  Even then, I rarely raise the issue… if someone says, “God bless you” to me, I usually just say, “thank you”.  I don’t want to make a big thing about it—I understand that support and good thoughts are being offered, and that this type of thing isn’t necessarily about religion.

During the past two months, I’ve started to develop friendships with two people who’ve turned out to be quite “loud and proud” about their religious beliefs.  One is a person I met in the course of receiving medical care, and we started to email each other after being acquainted just as patient/provider.  The emails started out normally, but now I’m the recipient of frequent email “chain letters” (those mass email forwards), and and the subject is always about being blessed by God, or receiving love from Jesus, or needing to forward the email to a dozen friends if I want my prayers to be answered.  Just like the “God bless you” example I used above, I understand that the emails are sent in kindness.  However, they have no other meaning for me, and in some ways they’re presumptuous (they all assume I’m Christian, for example).  I sat down and tried to write a response to one of them, to attempt to say that if nothing else, I wasn’t a Christian so perhaps the messages would be better suited for another recipient, but I couldn’t think of any way to say it without being rude.  Perhaps I’m just too passive, but I feel like it’s easier to just delete the emails than to say anything.  On the other hand, I feel like I’m lying, or committing a sin of omission (irony intended, I suppose).

The second person to raise this issue with me is a sports celebrity of sorts, someone who has overcome a lot of personal hardships and whose struggle I admire and often identify with.  I wrote this woman a “fan letter” a couple of months ago, and she recently sent back a hand-written, lengthy reply.  I’d asked her some specific questions about her experiences and the problems she’d overcome, and her reply was a big, long advertisement for religion.  At least she waited until the second paragraph, but she pretty much implied that she overcame all her struggles because of her close relationship with God, and suggested I try the same thing (she said she wasn’t “preaching”, she was just saying what she honestly felt).  She suggested Christian authors to read and Christian music to listen to, and talked about her daily struggles “fighting the devil”.  The thing that struck me was that even though her life totally revolves around her faith, she seems really unhappy—her days seem like more of a struggle than mine do, and she’s not dealing with health or money problems.  I felt like the door to communicating with her was left open by the letter, and she wanted to know more about things like the animal rescue work we’ve done, but I don’t know how I can reply to her without saying that I just don’t believe in a God, and that’s not going to be the way I solve my problems.  However, I again don’t know how to say it without feeling rude.

So, what sayeth you?  If I just ignore all the religious references and continue to correspond with these two individuals, am I doing them (or myself) any favours?  Is it better for me to be honest with them, or to just change the subject?  I know that many people of faith think that atheists come from a place of intellectual superiority (and I know some atheists present themselves that way), but I don’t feel “better”, I just feel “different”.  I don’t want to change their minds about what they believe, I just want to stop talking about it so we can discuss stuff that we do have in common. 

Maybe the issue isn’t about outing myself as an atheist, even… maybe it’s just about how to tell someone that you’re not what they assume you are?  Would I reply to either of the women I mentioned about and say that I was Jewish?  I guess I probably would, because we’d still have our “personal relationship with God” in common.  I know I’d easily tell them I was gay if they thought otherwise, but I worry that saying I’m an atheist will offend them.  Neither of them worried about offending me, but they both had the benefit of seeing me as a blank slate (that they then cast in their own image).

I know that if I lose potential friendships over this issue, then I didn’t have real friendships to begin with.  I know that you can’t have a real friendship with someone if you have to hide your feelings and beliefs.  What I don’t know is how to best present my beliefs.  If you’ve been on either end of this scenario and have advice, I welcome it.

Signed, godless heathen who knows she don’t need to capitalize “God”, but who does it anyway because it just looks correct

p.s.  It’s my 11th year anniversary with the daily-blogging Flippy.  What percentage of the people who donated money to get gay marriage banned in California have been together this long?  I’d bet not a majority of them, not even the Mormons.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 11/15 at 03:31 AM

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  1. How are you, Leigh Ann.  Are things any better?  I think of the both of you often.  Still trying to win the lottery!

    Posted by Jody  on  11/15  at  02:18 PM

  2. If it were me I probably wouldn’t say anything, but I tend to take the path of least resistance with stuff like that. I always delete religious forwards and such without replying.

    Happy anniversary! Are you going to do anything fun to celebrate?

    Posted by Helena  on  11/15  at  02:47 PM

  3. Short answer: I probably wouldn’t say anything one way or the other.

    Long answer: I’m not ashamed of who I am or how I feel, but discussions of religion (and politics, to a degree)too often are not exchanges of information or different viewpoints that wind up being interesting and beneficial to both parties.  Too often they - and I’m sorry for the banality of this analogy compared to something major like religion - wind up being like fans of rival sports teams.  “UGA! UGA! UGA!” “UGA sucks! Gators rule!” “Gators suck! Dawgs rule!” and on and on ad nauseam. Commonality being, there’s nothing I can say that will change that person’s point of view and there’s nothing they can say that will make me say, “OMG, you’re so right! The dawgs DO suck! I can’t believe I’ve been wasting my life this way!” (which of course I’d never say because of course, Notre Dame football rules!) Er, but back on topic - if it were something about which we could agree to disagree, again I’d be more likely to be forthcoming, but part of the nature of the Christian beast is that too often believers don’t want to leave it at that - even if you’re not an atheist or a Buddhist or gods forbid, a Catholic - if you’re Christian Type A, they feel the urgent need to convince you that Christian Type B is the only way to go (or D or G or F, I’m no Bist!). Sorry for the long-winded comment but I guess my summation is, my experience has been that discussion too often leads nowhere and ends badly, so I wouldn’t bother.

    Posted by Helly  on  11/15  at  09:43 PM

  4. Happy anniversary! To those who don’t support same-sex marriages, I say %$%#@, you lousy $#%%#$s. (I said it slightly more politely on my blog recently, but only slightly.)

    I, too, am a godless heathen. My mother-in-law has been sending me god-related chain e-mails for ages, even after Scott reminded her that, like him, I’m not the least bit religious. I just delete them. In the case of personalized religious messages, I would explain politely that I’m not religious but that I’m glad to hear that faith is a source of strength/comfort/whatever for the other party. Then I would change the subject to, as you mentioned, things that you DO have in common. Like you said, if that makes the friendship crumble, it wasn’t much of a friendship to begin with.

    Posted by Calamity Jen  on  11/16  at  01:44 AM

  5. Thank you for all the wonderful input :)  I normally wouldn’t worry about this kind of issue, but both the individuals I mentioned don’t seem to be able to discuss much of anything except religion.  It’s weird that the onus is on *me* to not rock the boat, yet I agree that it is if I want to a) be polite and b) take the high road.

    Jen, thanks for your suggestion of what to say to the person who claims that her faith has been the answer to all her problems.  I don’t feel that she left me any choice but to say something, and I was frustrated with myself because I couldn’t think of how to tackle it.

    If anything exciting happens as I continue to talk to these two folks, I’ll let you know.

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/16  at  11:36 PM

  6. I forgot to write about our anniversary… we didn’t have any specific plans, but I made a poor person’s dinner and unfortunately spent the evening being ill.  Flippy was fine, so it wasn’t my cooking!  In case you wonder what to give your partner as an 11th anniversary gift, Flippy’s research apparently points to books and navel rings with little cat charms dangling from them :)

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/16  at  11:45 PM

  7. Jen, I took the liberty of editing your comment because you left out the word “don’t”—I hope you don’t mind.

    And sorry to everyone for the “comments on approval” thing, btw… I’ve had so much spam lately, all of it written by hand, and comment approval is the only way I seem to be able to stop it.  I don’t ever want to give spammers any assistance.

    Posted by Leigh-Ann  on  11/17  at  01:05 AM

  8. Flippy’s research as a poor person with a small Amazon g/c in her account.  Had I been swimming in cash…hmm, I probably still would’ve given books and little cat charms.  Never mind.

    Posted by Flippy  on  11/17  at  01:05 AM

  9. Ooops—“don’t” is an awfully important word. Thanks for correcting that.

    No need to apologize about the comment approval issue. I do the same thing on my blog, since spam is everywhere.

    Posted by Calamity Jen  on  11/17  at  08:10 AM

  10. The forwarded emails are just spam, whether they mention God or not. I’d write and just say “please take me off your spam email list.” I have done this before. While the mention of God gets me to write sooner than crap without God, it’s still Crap and I don’t want it in my email!

    For the record, I believe in God- it’s his baggage from previous relationships with which I have trouble. But it’s none of my business what anyone else believes, anymore than it is my business what happens in anyone else’s bedroom.

    Posted by Georg  on  11/17  at  04:40 PM

  11. Happy Anniversary!  You seem like such a well-matched couple. :-)

    As far as the religion question goes, you sound exactly like the voice in my head.  I feel in the closet about that, except with my closest friends - or less close friends who also happen to not be religious.  I’m always afraid that it will put up a difficult barrier between me and a person I need to get along with.  Will provoke a conversation I don’t want to have, or will lead them to believe I’m not a good or moral person - since I was raised to believe that you couldn’t be those things without religion.  I don’t want to have to defend myself.  And the last thing I want to do is persuade someone else to change something about themselves that makes them happy.  So I just keep it to myself.  Smile and say thank you, nod in understanding, whatever.

    Posted by Nancy  on  11/22  at  03:31 PM
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