by rebel8 33 Replies latest jw friends
I'm atheist and not ashamed of it. However, it is so politically incorrect, especially where I live. I have a legitimate concern that being out of the closet too much will hurt my career or neighborly relations--I know for a fact it probably would.
I'm really cautious about who I tell.
How about you? Have you come out of the closet at work, etc.? How did it go?
I'm at the stage in my thinking where I simply have to wonder what all the fuss is about.
Why do we feel compelled to go around shouting to the rooftops what our personal opinions are?
Who cares what I think, hope, believe in the grand scheme of things?
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Does an ant proclaim it believes in humans? If it could and did, what difference what it make to the world at large?
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The worst displays of human hubris come when we really start to puff up with self-importance and declare we KNOW
this and that for an absolute certainty.
We DON'T know. Even our most reliable scientific facts are purposely constructed so that they can be falsified if/when
additional insight, evidence, and technology allow further grasp of details.
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I don't know who, what or if anything supernatural exists in the form of a person or mind.
Nobody knows. We are all hoping, guessing, projecting our needs, fears and anxieties into the shape of a superior authority.
Silly!
I take the position that I DON'T KNOW and neither does anybody else. The more people declare sureness, the more I shake my head
and wonder where they get the ego to fuel that smugness.
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Christianity has expressed its devout certainty by splitting again and again and again. There are presently 40,000+ denominations
disagreeing with one another!
Doesn't that create a loud clue about certainty being opinion?
Do I think everybody should think the way I do? Hell no.
Your mileage may vary and that's peachy by me.
Absolutely. I don't go around talking about it, but I do live in a very religious part of America. Whenever anyone brings up spirituality and religion, I politely decline the conversation twice. If they persist a third time I engage with them and explain, politely, why I don't believe in invisible, undetectable creature made of unexplainable stuff or place my face in 2000 year old goat herder stories.
I do feel for my American friends rebel8. Here in the UK there is absolutely no stigma attached to atheism - except in the minds of a small minority of religious fundamentalists.
I suppose the difference is that our easy to ignore minority is your vocal and influential majority.
Sorry about that . .
Here in Scandinavia, it almost ”a sin” to declare that you are religious. If you bring up the subject on a job interview, You are regarded as “nuts”. Almost half of the population in Sweden openly declare that they are atheists. No politician would dare saying that they have “a believe” . All religious believes are considerate superstitions.
Bugbear
I'm an atheist. And proud to be one...
But I'm not "out of the closet", because I have the chance to live in France, and it's very easy to me to say i'm an atheist... here, it's more when you begin to have religious thoughts that you are ashamed and want nobody to know :D
REBEL8 - maybe I'm wrong, but I thought you lived in NYC --- a place I would hardly consider atheist "unfriendly." I suppose there could be some neighborhoods with pockets of anti atheist sentiment. . . . Please set me straight if I'm wrong!
I like what you said Terry.
In the UK we do not talk to our neighbours or work colleagues about our religious beliefs or lack of them. People would think we are weird. It's a personal thing which is why it was hell trying to talk to strangers about it at the behest of a crackpot American religion. We do talk to close friends about life, the universe and everything, usually in a quiet moment with a glass of wine or a beer
My career path is not hurt by my openness of my atheism, but my relationship with my JW family probably would be. They put up with my fade to total inactive status, but to go further with an openness about how I feel about the Bible and God would be too much for them.
I think that where it might be difficult to be an atheist, I simply be an advocate for logic and science. They can maybe guess what that means about my thoughts on God, but without connecting the dots, how can they argue with logic and facts?
" how can they argue with logic and facts? " er.... but they do, all the time, to try to establish some support for their unsupportable beliefs.
I know what you mean though OTWO, and I do a similar thing when talking with my JW family, introducing facts and reason and logic into the conversation, and ignoring the silly comments they come out with, for example, I was speaking with one guy , a distant relative, the other day about how to solve some of the world's problems, and his JW wife chimed in with "But the answer is God's Kingdom !", I just carried on outlining my ideas.
