flower, you asked in your thread about beliefs in God:
What if you meet someone but the topic of religion doesnt come up until after you fall in love? Its not possible for an athiest and a believer to marry and have a meaningful relationship..is it? Can athiests and believers even be close friends? How do you all do it here? I've noticed that the athiests seem to be closer with one another than with others.When I met my husband he knew I was an ex-JW. I knew he was catholic. It came up and comes up regularly. We discuss it. I respect his opinion and he respects mine.
You ask if it is possible for a believer to marry and have a meaningful realationship with an atheist. Yes, it is, I have been married 14 years. We have had many discussions on this and will continue until one of us dies.
Our relationship does not depend on an invisible being to make it work. I love and respect him. He loves and respects me. We work out disagreements before they become fights and talk about our future. Our future does not include Armageddon. He does not believe it, nor do I.
If I spent time worrying about where we came from and what will happen after I die, I would not get a whole lot done in a day. What is the point? You are alive. Enjoy life and think about all the things you can see and do now that you left the borg. Go on vacations to relax...not sit at an assembly. Take an art class. Take a science class and disect a frog. Read books...any kind. The freedom to think is invigorating.
What the Pope says does not interfere with our life. We pay all of our taxes, give 5% of our income to various charities, don't cheat on each other, use birth control and try not to hurt other people.
This is easy stuff to do. I do not need faith in a higher being to just be an average person trying to live a decent life.
I have many friends who are religious. I have told them my tale of growing up in the borg and the harm I feel it caused. I tell them I do not believe in God. They understand and respect my view. I respect theirs. We discuss religion. But not often. What is the point? I am not trying to convince them of my opinion and they are not trying to convince me of theirs. We are simply trying to understand.
That is key...as a JW we were told that we HAD to try to let people know how wrong their view of religion is and the JW's have the only truth. My friends and I try to understand the other view without making the effort to save the other. It is a way to make a friendship grow.
As a JW, I learned to not trust. Period. Perhaps that is why the people who do not believe in God seem to get along. We feel we can trust each other. We are not going to be banged on the head with a sermon on Jesus and why we need to believe he died for our "sins."
The bottom line is that I do not trust any religion. To me they are ways for men to control other people. The Muslims do it, the Catholics do it, the Hindus do it and the Mormons do it. Why give the control of my life to a stranger? At least with government, I can vote an official out of office to try to get the group to conform to my way of thinking...on how my taxes should be spent.