The Blog Pound

Saturday, November 15, 2008 , late morning

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 11:31 AM
The Litterbox • (11) Comments • Permalink