Is anyone else an atheist with BC besides me?
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Ananda8, That sounds like a great plan! Make sure you remember it if any Jehovah's Witlesses show up on your doorstep.
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Love all of the memes! Every time my religious family & friends credit prayers for a piece of good news, I want to ask them to talk to their god about why I got cancer in the first place. I mean, if he can control the outcome of my imaging, then surely he's the one that gave it to me in the first place, right? I bite my tongue though because it's probably not worth the fight.
Is anybody else kind of dreading Thanksgiving with religious family? I love my family, but I am very much in the minority around them and it just makes holidays stressful.
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lovepugs77,
My family is also very religious. They know I am not but I haven't told them that I am an atheist. I do think they suspect, though. They used to do all sorts of god talk, but that has seem to fade over the years. Perhaps because I don't make the sign of the cross or bow my head in prayer when they say grace, they have realized that their efforts weren't going to change anything. I never confronted them; I am just always myself. I don't talk politics, either.
Prior to Obama and the growth of hard right news programs on radio and television, I don't think we ever thought of talking politics. We certainly don't talk politics now.
I always considered religious talk as a cultural phenomenon of a tribe I wasn't part of. I observed but didn't judge. Put your anthropology hat on and try it. You will relax and that may make them relax and start talking about football.
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"I could deal with our different religions. I could put aside our different political views. And it never mattered to me that our skins were different colors.
But then I saw you wearing a Packers jersey. This can't go on."
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oh man, I’d rather talk about religion or politics than sports! My family is pretty evenly mixed between atheist and liberal religious people, so I don’t have to worry about that (fortunately). My priest-BIL always gives the Thanksgiving dinner blessing but he makes it very generic without a direct reference to god. I appreciate that about him.
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My husband is both wise and hilarious. When he hears that a breast cancer patient had a good outcome after treatment, or that someone lived through a terrible catastrophe that killed other people, and the survivor says that he/she was "saved by Jesus" or "God was looking out for me," he says, "ARE YOU KIDDING? YOUR GOD TRIED TO KILL YOU! HE HAS BAD AIM, AND HE MISSED!"
The notion that there's a puppeteer Up There deciding who gets ALS, who loses a child to disease, who suffers and who gets to live, like some weird roulette game is totally horrifying.
ananda8 YES, I also put on my anthropology hat. I sit back and think about how humans have always had different ways to find inner strength and explain confusing things.
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That reminds me of the Wolf Blitzer interview after that massive tornado touchdown in Oklahoma.
Blitzer: "So do you? Do you thank the lord? For that split-second decision?"
Survivor: "Um, actually, I'm an atheist."
Blitzer, you ass, 24 people died in that event. And you think god was playing favorites?
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Blitzer's mistake was, since he was in the Bible Belt, he assumed everyone he met was an evangelical Christian.
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Alice: I played your fart video. It came on so loud at work and I could not stop it. We were all laughing. Thanks for the best giggle ever.
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TB90, glad it brightened your work day!
I hate hate hate when disaster survivors are interviewed on television and say dumb shit like "Mah Lorrd an' Savyur was lookin' out fer me an' Bubba an' we is jes so blest ta be alive!" Just once, I want a reporter to ask why other people (including children) died. Just once.
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I’m with you there, Alice. “My god sent this horrible disaster, destroying homes and lives, killing people and animals. But I survived, so I love him and thank him even more.” The cognitive dissonance is deafening.
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I remember watching an interview with a woman who was in a car that got stuck on a train track and was hit by a train. Her brother and husband were also in the car and were killed. She talked about how the Lord had protected her and how thankful she was for his grace. I yelled at the TV, “Wow, God must have really hated your husband and brother then!
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Yes, yes yes. Why do the people in these interviews think they were chosen to live while others were chosen to die? What makes them think they were more worthy? It drives me insane. Wanderweg, I always want to ask people like that if their god was protecting them, why didn't he keep their car from getting stuck on the track in the first place.
I also despise the "god needed Billy Bob with him" talk after someone dies, especially when they die young. Its no consolation, and I just want to tell them to STFU.
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lovepugs, I know someone who was 7 yo when her mother died of bc and the nuns told her that “God needed her mom more than she did.” She is close to 70 now and this still haunts her.
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Nuns can be evil! I remember my son's catechism classes ... A lovely nun read the apocalypse to 7-year-old children ... a paragraph about devil and being careful and alert. My son had nightmares for weeks ... Needless to say, I will never send him to a religious school again.
I believe in God, but I don't believe that God is what religions say he is. I agree that the idea of the puppeteer who decides on life and death is appalling
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My mother died when I was 4 and I was told that God wanted her in heaven. Later when they told me in Sunday School that God loved me, my thought was that he sure had a funny way of showing it. I had a discussion with my boss in a mental health agency and saying I preferred to believe in random chance rather than someone who would squish us individually like ants. He agreed I had a point.
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wanderweg that reminds me of when our son had liver cancer as a toddler, he was saved by modern medicine, chemotherapy and surgery, not by any god. People said to me, God must have saved him because he has a purpose for him in life. I didn't know what to say to that, especially after spending months getting to know the parents of other children who sadly did not survive. Did they imagine God couldn't think of any 'purpose' for those children? I find such thoughtless comments by religious people, totally repugnant.
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My cousins oldest kid fell in a pool at 18 months old, nearly drowned. A few more seconds she would have died. Should have. Would have been better. Had the brain of a 3 month old. When it happened cousin organized prayer chains. God will heal her if we pray hard enough long enough.
She lived to be about 21, fully grown, brain totally dead. Their god didn’t heal her, I couldn’t understand why not. Prayer is supposed to “work”. Why would a loving god let this happen, to an innocent baby?
That did it for me.
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And there are some theologies that would say that she wasn't healed because her (or the congregation's) faith wasn't strong enough. What a crock of victim-blaming shit.
Worry - when my son was a toddler we discovered he had to have urgent brain surgery for a chiari malformation in his skull that allowed part of his cerebellum to herniate into his spinal column. I remember when we were waiting for the MRI results that would tell us what was going on, people at work would tell me they were praying for him and everything was going to be fine, the results would be negative. I pointed out that whatever was there or wasn't there had already been decided, we just didn't know yet. No magic was going to change that. Not so long ago, it would have been a fatal condition. I am indeed thankful (he graduated from college last year!)- but my gratitude went to his skilled neurosurgeon, modern medicine and the devoted staff at Children's Hospital.
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I am watching the mini-series, "Rome", on Amazon Prime. It is supposedly very accurate in the depiction of the culture of Rome around the time of Julius Caesar. People of that time worshipped their gods with as much faith and as little understanding as people do now. Religion will always be with those who need it. Too bad they keep trying to force it on others.
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I saw a huge cloud the other day, and in the center of it was a donut hole with what looked like a giant cat head looking through. Now we know who is really running things.
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Religion is the opiate of the masses. Karl Marx
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Alice - I can just picture that cloud w/cat. Thanks for the image & the chuckle.
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MinusTwo, I was expecting to see a giant paw come through that cloud hole and start batting cars around. But I can turn the most mundane things into bizarre head movies.
To everyone with the good sense to hang out here, I hope you have a nice Thanksgiving. I think of it as a harvest feast, and my gratitude is to the earth and its stewards..
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HAPPY THANKSGIVING y’all.
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Happy Thanksgiving to you all! May you enjoy wonderful food and wonderful company.
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Thought this quote from the Nevada Barr book Boar Island was particularly appropriate.
"People tended to either keep their crazy to themselves, or gather with others sharing the same delusion. Churches, synagogues, temples, covens, mosques: If enough people believed a thing, it was declared sane. One person speaking to invisible beings was a nutcase. A thousand was a cult. Ten thousand, a religion"
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I wouldn't say I am an atheist but I don't believe in organized religion as they feel more like God clubs to me where people can have their power trips.
I do believe in more intelligent life “out there." I am conflicted over life after death, but since that can only happen after death, I guess someday I will find out.....or not!
My oldest sister passed away after having breast cancer and lymphoma at the same time, getting both into remission, then getting MDS from the treatments for the other two.
I feel her presence and real or in my mind I don't care because it helpsme, so whatever, it's good. Example, the short version, below.
When I had BC in 2003, a year before my sister was diagnosed she sent me a clear stone with a silver angel inside. I carried that stone with me in my pocket to all my appointments, through chemo, radiation, follow ups. It reminded me that I was loved by many and by my sister.
I work in a middle school and gave away that stone to a sixth grade student who suffered from panic attacks. It helped her tremendously and years later she told me she was taking good care of that angel.
I never regretted giving the stone away but years later I searched and searched for another one like it. I could never find one, some similar but not like it.
Then last fall after my mammogram and ultrasound that showed an area of concern, as I sat waiting for copies of my films and reports, the nurse navigator handed me a little gift bag and inside was a stone exactly like the one my sister had given me. I felt my sister's presence and knew She was with me.
Now one can logically explain that event, but the feelings were real.
While I do not consider myself to be religious, I do think my moral standards, the core of who I am, were shaped by my religious upbringing.
I majored in science, so I tend to lean towards science, but I don't think one has to cancel out the other. I am acutely aware that for everything I know, there is soooo much I don't know. I just don't attribute what I don't know to the presence of the God I was raised to believe in.
I have been a member of three different Christian religions, but don't belong to any now and have no desire to. I believe in good, love, compassion and being truthful and honest. For me, that is enough.
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