How my experiment is doing - an update.

After being featured on the Friendly Atheist blog and reading through the 30+ comments after the post, I decided to make a few changes. The first change was to remove my political and religious views from my profile. It was dishonest to label myself Republican and Christian and my reasons for doing so were not noble. The second change I made was to remove my friend request from the cousin in question and let her make the decision of whether or not to friend me. Everything else is the same and I'm happy with the activity that I've gotten so far.

As of today I have 18 friends. Only 3 of them are not family members. There is no talk of God/Jesus/Christianity just yet but there nothing happening at the moment. No deaths, no one dying, no marriages, no births, etc. I plan to maintain my aloofness to religious talk as hard as that will be for me.

But this is why I have my other FB page. It's refreshing to be open and honest with people and for them to be the same back!

Being an atheist and a secularist has been the best thing that has happened to me. It's sad that the people that I should be closest to choose not to benefit from it because of fear and dogma.

You gotta love Dan Savage!

It is as simple as this.

Facebook experiment

As I've written before, my family of origin and my extended family seem to think I'm a baby-eating, immoral person totally incapable of having a normal, everyday conversation without bringing up the evils of religion and the horrible state GW Bush left our country in. They don't seem to realize that the only time I've brought these subjects up is when they, the family, interject the subjects into the conversation.

I will concede that perhaps when my uncle was hospitalized (see previous posts) that I should have respected the family and kept my mouth shut. Perhaps. The only thing I posted free from prompting was that the doctors and other staff should also get the credit for helping my uncle as much as they could. (He died, BTW.) My relatives acknowledged that I was right and so they prayed for the doctors/nurses too. Whatever. But one cousin asked more questions about my beliefs and it went downhill from there. It ended by her saying it was her duty to pray for me and that was the end of it.

So recently I tried to friend another cousin, who I thought I'd have no problem with, on FB and was surprised by her response. She said she will friend me if I promise not to discuss religion or politics. I was surprised by this response and replied to her that I wasn't sure why she was asking me to do this, then I replied again knowing that most of my friends are atheists so she was sure to read something that would hurt her fragile feelings and wrote that I felt being my friend wasn't a very good idea. I'm not sure if she got the email via FB because I blocked her from my page at that time.

The next day it bothered me so much that I felt there had to be a solution. After much thought I decided to make another FB page and label myself a Republican and a Christian and use my maiden name instead of the name most of my friends know me by. This is really just an experiment to see what kind of reaction I get from the family and also to stay in touch with the people who normally wouldn't give me the time of day.

I thought that I would feel creepy about this but I've managed to rationalize it in this way: I don't have much to do with this people but still want to maintain some contact with them. They have made it clear they don't want to know the real Tina so I'll give them a fictional character they'll feel good about having contact with. My cousin from the paragraphs above probably won't friend me since she is very, very fragile and she's got a very good reason for being so. She lost a young child in a tragic accident which I believe she witnessed and I'm sure she's hanging on the the belief she'll see him when she dies. Fragile indeed.

A Facebook exchange

My mother:

Charlie and i said a prayer of thanks giving for the Doctors and the hospital staff that pulled Norm out of this and more prayers to get him the rest of the way through this. Charlotte needs our "thoughts" also. The Lord put her in the right

Me:

I'm satisfied that you and Charlie have recognized that Norm would not have survived without the staff at the hospital. And because of modern science and the advancement of modern medicine he did not die. But that was not always true, and even today people die of this kind of injury because they don't get to the hospital in time. For example: Natasha Richardson died in March in a ski accident. Another example is Sonny Bono in 1998 died of head injuries in a ski accident.

A few minutes later another post.

My cousin:

I praise God for the doctors that had a hand in Norm's recovery. I don't believe that it would have happened without our prayers. I know from experience that the "critical hour" is very important in the outcome of these kind of injuries. As with Kim (another relative with a head injury), everything fell into place, and all the doctors and nursing staff where where they should have been to make this happen. That is God's hand!

Me:

I respectively disagree. There are many people who never make it to the hospital and die because of it. It happens to mothers of small children, old people, successful people, doctors who save lives, homeless people, and to ordinary people like me. It's random and tragic when people die because they didn't get to a hospital soon enough. It's also wonderful and inspiring when people do, that I will agree.

It's hard for me to process that people still think in this childish, backward, superstitious way. What do they think when other people have stories of family members who die because they don't get to a hospital soon enough? That God had a hand it it? That God saved their relative but didn't save the other person's because he wasn't important enough? How horrible is that? There's a huge disconnect to their way of thinking, as if they only think of their own situations and when death happens to others God isn't involved or that horrible excuse of "working in mysterious ways."

Most of my extended family is undereducated and their world is very, very small. They need a higher power looking out for them or else their little world becomes bigger and scarier. And heaven forbid if you rock their little world with a suggestion that their lives are random and meaningless. As I've mentioned before, I've been blocked by relatives and I've been disowned by some just because I disagree with them. My reply? "Whatever!"

I really heard this today

My very Catholic friend said today as I was explaining the Flying Spaghetti Monster concept to a group of people: "I'm not totally convinced we came from monkeys..."

Unfortunately I wasn't able and really had no interest in explaining how we know evolution did happen to humans.

The power of prayer...

Lately there’s been a flurry of activity within my religious family. An uncle has required several surgeries to survive and the family has rallied around my aunt for support. When I mistakenly thought my uncle had been life-flighted to Houston I called my aunt to offer my home and services to help her, which she appreciated and acknowledged. But this post isn’t about that, it’s about the craziness these super-religious people engage in when a crisis happens in their lives.

The first wave of emails (which I was surprisingly included) stated the nature of the injury and first attempt towards the recovery of my uncle. Seems my elderly uncle went four-wheeling and had a fall several days ago. While on a driving trip he experienced slurring speech and vomiting which prompted my aunt to take him to a hospital immediately. The injury was so severe that he was life-flighted to a bigger hospital that could handle this type of surgery. This email also included this request:

PLEASE PRAY FOR GOD'S WILL AND PRAY FOR (aunt) TOO. PLEASE PUT (uncle) ON YOUR PRAYER LIST AT CHURCH.....THANKS, (super religious aunt)

I got this email several time during the day, which is alright. My family is a bit computer illiterate and can’t be bothered to read the “sent to” list at the top of the email. A trait I find that seems to be synonymous with religiosity. (Sorry, I’m snarky right now.)

The next email states that my uncle’s condition has not improved and he has gone through another surgery. Another prayer request goes out:

WE WILL KEEP YA'LL POSTED AS WE HEAR ANYTHING...KEEP THEM ON YOUR PRAYER LIST PLEASE.

As the day progresses I get emails from a different person. Although this person is also religious, she doesn’t invoke prayer requests or God/Jesus in anyway. She just reports the facts. Refreshing.

But the other aunt, the one that goes bullshit for God, sends the last email. This one I get from several other relatives first that my uncle is recovering nicely but she can’t stand that she doesn’t know whether I’m getting them or not, so she sends this exact same email directly to me. I’m honored and I know why it was so important that I got it directly:

THIS IS WONDERFUL NEWS......OUR PRAYERS ARE BEING ANSWERED...PRAISE GOD FROM WHOM ALL BLESSINGS COME! I KNOW (aunt) IS ELATED!

This is the email in its entirety. No mention of the doctors and nurses. No mention of the science and medical advances. No mention of my aunt who had the foresight of getting my uncle to the hospital as soon as possible which saved his life. I wanted to email a snarky answer to her but I blocked her emails instead. That felt good.

Tina’s world is getting better and better.

(Note: this super religious aunt is Janice's mother. See yesterday's post. Also I found her email in my spam folder so she might have sent it to me when she sent it out to everyone else. How my name got on her email list I'll never be certain but it seems dubious at best. It's the only email I've gotten from her in years. LOL)

My family and Facebook. Another rant.

Over the years, and I’ve documented much of this on my blog, I’ve had to deal with the religiosity of my family of origin and also that of my extended family. About 5 years ago there wasn’t anything in my life that caused me to claim my atheism. I didn’t believe in god and prayer and the religious nature of my family didn’t bother me. I guess I didn’t care enough to really notice. Then my father got very sick and died four months later. During his fight to live the religious craziness hit a crescendo. I felt I was among children with their wishful thinking and irrational requests.

Also during this time I was involved in an email list that my father had started up with our extended family. Everyone except me is super religious and conservative. It was about a month before Dad’s death that my sister was involved in a minor roll-over accident which she reported to the family via the email list. Now my sister is no dummy so I was surprised that she attributed the mildness of the accident to God/Jesus. Everyone agreed except me. I think I wrote something to the effect that God should have interfered about 30 seconds sooner to avoid the accident all together. Oh the shit storm that followed!

It wasn’t that bad I suppose, mostly reminders about mysterious ways and all, but one cousin was offended in the most profound way. The only way I can describe what she did to me through emails was what Xians call “witnessing.” This cousin, who I’ll call Janice, ended the brief exchange (which was filled with misspellings, bad grammar, and all text being capitalized) by blocking my emails to her with a statement that read “Since I have to have the last word I am now blocking you from answering me.” I wish I was kidding.

My father died the next week and the confrontation I had with her at the wake was ugly and disgusting. It was also orchestrated by her to get the maximum amount of Christian righteousness for herself front of my mother and her mother. In my silence, out of respect for my father, the Christians did damage to my good reputation.

I must add that I’ve never been close to my mother or father. It’s been a strained relationship ever since I can remember. As much as I wanted to be close to my sister, she has taken advantage of me for years and after my father died there was no reason to let it continue. She’s made it very clear she wants nothing to do with me now and I’m ok with that. My mother feels the same way. She has remarried, moved to another state, and is happy being closer to her new family than to her own children in TX. Whatever.

But this essay isn’t about my sister or my mother. I’ve withdrawn from them in a big way and they no longer have the power to make me feel small. This is about Janice, my super religious, fundamentalist, ultra-conservative, Christian whack-job cousin. She has blocked me on Facebook and I think she’s told my other relatives to ignore me as well. I feel victimized by her all over again. My lesson when I found out: I don’t like my family and I wish I could disown them.

There’s a happy ending to this story. I gathered all the names of those relatives who can’t find it in their little Christian hearts to friend me or at least make an effort to contact me and I blocked them. All of them and I felt good doing it. Now they won’t see me and I won’t see them. Out of sight, out of mind. Ahhhhh.

The world of Tina is right again.

I'm pissed off, but why?

I'm pissed off at my family on Facebook, but I suspect I shouldn't be. I responded to a relative's post about her being against gay couples adopting children. I did it in a positive way by commenting that I know of gay couples that have healthy, well adjusted children just as I know straight couples with children who have turned out to be terrible people. It stayed on her post for a few minutes before she deleted it and that's what pissed me off.

But I also understand that she can't handle an opposing view because of her religious beliefs. I also understand that it's her right to delete said opposing views if she feels she doesn't want anyone to view it or if it offends her. She also has the right to ignore me and/or delete me if she feels it's the correct thing to do for her. I understand all that; what bothers me is that she can't handle it.

Fortunately I also have that right. I went the other post of hers that I responded to, the one about her opposition to abortion, and deleted my comments from it. I suppose she won't notice but it did make me feel better. Now she won't be offended by my words about how education is important to reduce the amount of abortions in our country and how I find life just as precious as she does.

arrgghh....

A dying friend

A few days ago I found out a very dear friend is dying of cancer. I knew her and played tennis with her several years ago when she went through her first bout with breast cancer. She was so positive and courageous that I immediately looked to her as an example to follow when my father became terminally ill and died of lung cancer. Whether she knew it or not, she was a source of strength for me during a very hard time of my life.

Today I found out that my friend is no longer eating and is drinking very little. Her family has asked for no visitors and I suspect the end is very near. Although I'm sad I haven't been able to say goodbye to her this isn't something I'm devastated about. She's my friend and I will honor her wishes and express my grief in other ways.

Now for the atheist in me to discuss a few things surrounding her impending death that is bothering me. When I say this is bothering me I mean that I've had to keep my opinions to myself and be respectful of some of the strange things mutual friend Ruth has said to me about this dying friend. Ruth is in her late 70's and is a life long Catholic. That is the context. She mentioned that our dying friend will be a source of comfort and will be able to take prayers when she is on the other side. I tried to convey my thoughts in a different way, by voicing my love for her as she is in this world, in this reality, and not in a supernatural way. I mentioned that if I wasn't able to be here (if she died while I was gone visiting family) then I wanted Ruth to know that I will be here in spirit and to convey that to others if appropriate.

The Joys of Swearing

One thing I love to do is swear. I drop f-bombs everywhere and I don't care who hears me. In fact I've had people tell me to stop and I ignore them. Fuck 'em, I say. Swearing is wonderful and good comedy. It releases tension and it just feels good. Swear away I say!