Atheism

So, I'm going to venture into a controversial topic - religion.  Woo hoo.  As you may have guessed from the title, dear reader, I am an atheist.  I am 27 years old and I've been an atheist longer than I have not been an atheist, if that makes sense.  And, in all honesty, I'm not sure I was ever not an atheist.

A little bit of background to explain where I'm coming from:  I was raised in the Catholic church by my mother's foster parents.  (I always just think of them as my grandparents, and from this point forward will refer to them as such, but the distinction is important.)  My mother was not around (I think I've mentioned this before), so it was up to them to raise me, and they were devout Catholics.  I mean, they really had faith, they believed ardently.  Every day at the same time, my grandma would sit down with her prayer book (what even is that?) and pray for an hour.  They always prayed before each meal.  They prayed before bed.  They went to Mass every week.  And they sent me to a Catholic preschool and a Catholic elementary school.  I didn't even know there was another religious option besides being Jewish until I was in 3rd grade, when a new girl came to school and she couldn't take communion with our class during the weekly Mass and I assumed she was Jewish and she looked at me like I had 3 heads.  (I'm pretty sure I only knew Judaism was a religion because of Jesus.)

I don't remember ever feeling that certainty that other people seem to feel in their religions, that knowing that their god is definitely there watching over them.  I had children's bible stories to read, and to me they were just nice stories, like Cinderella.  I'm not kidding, I felt exactly the same way about the bible stories as I did about fairy tales.  And I was a child being raised by devout Catholics.  I think my atheism was always going to happen.  Anyway, it never felt real to me the way it seems to be to the people I know that believe in God, and I started questioning it to the adults in my life sometime between 3rd and 6th grades.  I can remember specifically one of the teachers at my school reading a statement to our church one day, talking about Roman Catholic this and "our monotheistic" beliefs or something along those lines.  I do remember she said "monotheistic" and how much it confused me.  How can we be monotheistic if we believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? I wondered.  What about the saints?  We prayed to them, too, so didn't that make them gods, making Catholicism a polytheistic religion?  And even if you ignore the saints, how do you reconcile the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit style of worship with the statement of being monotheistic?  Obviously, I didn't ask these questions with this wording (at best, I was 11), but these were the kinds of questions that I was beginning to ask.  I didn't even know what atheism was, I didn't find out that was a thing I could be until I was about 13 or so.  I wasn't shy about it either, and I got bullied pretty badly for that (among other things) in middle school.  (Also, what the fuck is up with that?  Jesus says "love one another" so let's go persecute this girl who has no friends because she doesn't believe in Jesus or our God!  That does not make any kind of sense whatsoever.)

Anyway.  That's where I came from.  I did try, but I felt like I was talking to an imaginary friend, which, for all intents and purposes, I was.  I'm learning how to be comfortable with being "out" about the state of my (lack of) beliefs - it's very hard to allow people to see this part of me without fearing that I will be persecuted or thought of as a terrible person, which is what has usually happened in the past.  Here's the thing - while I was taught that not being religious meant that person was not a good person and they were going to hell, that is so beyond wrong.  I am a decent human being.  I care about people.  I try to help those around me when I am able.  I think it's wrong to treat others badly, or unequally, or to maim or injure someone for any reason other than self-defense.  I think children should be allowed to be children and not forced into work, marriage, war, prostitution, or death by those around them that are supposed to be there to protect them.  There's so much more to me that makes me a good, decent person than whether or not I believe in your god.  And then I wonder - why do you believe in god?  Why do you think that there's some sort of all-powerful omniscient being "out there" somewhere who benevolently watches over the humans on this planet?  If I was an all-powerful omniscient being, I don't think I'd care about one tiny little planet when there's a whole galaxy, a galaxy of galaxies, a universe of galaxies of galaxies, a universe of universes.  The world is bigger than our world, and we don't even know how big it is, and you can't tell me that all that is out there and expect me to believe in a god that was created to explain things before people had science.  That is really what religion is, that is the origin of religion in general.  I can't see how it's ethical to teach your children to believe in god but not teach them that there might not be a god at all.

I'm not sure I've actually made a point with this, but I felt I needed to say it, so I guess I said it.  I could probably go on - the universe of universes that I mentioned, for instance.  For all we know, that universe of universes is a teeny little speck on some world somewhere out there, a little dust mote, completely, utterly microscopic, and the world it floats in is just a tiny part of another universe of universes.  It could go on infinitely.  I cannot reconcile all of this with the concept of a god.  The two things cannot coexist in my head.  *shrug*  I'm not sorry, though.  I am happy with the way I am.

Evoked

I'm laying in bed right now, trying to settle before my final tomorrow morning, and grabbed my phone so I could make sure I had alarms set. I still had the camera app open, on selfie (hush), and noticed something different about my face now that my jaw is more prominent. (I'm still losing weight, my face is getting skinny.)

I took a couple pictures and looked at them and realized I could see the way my mother holds her jaw in the way mine was in that moment. I don't see her terribly often when I look at myself, which is a relief since that would be painful, but I have these little moments where I miss her, or more that I miss the her she was, the person she is not. I miss the concept of a mother, I think, more than anything else. It would almost be easier if she had died - there would be sadness and closure, instead of knowing that she's out there somewhere and knowing that there will come a time when I can no longer keep track of her and she will disappear forever. It's tough realizing again and again that I lost the relationship with her that I deserved to have, knowing that she either missed or didn't care about most of my milestones growing up, and now that I'm an adult, she's not here to watch me go to college, or promise me that I'm still a worthwhile person when I fail every test this semester (this semester has been delightful, by the way), she's not going to be around when Matt proposes, or to watch me get married. She won't be here to get excited and cry at the thought of becoming a grandmother when we start expecting a baby. She's missing everything, and I'm missing the conceptual her that lives in my head, that holds me and gives me advice and tells me she loves me no matter what happens because she's my mother and that's what mothers are supposed to do. It just breaks my heart, especially when I see other women and their mothers and their closeness and it hits me again and again that I will never, ever have that relationship, no matter how much I wish, and even if I try to ignore that missing part, it's there, reminding me that she's not there and never will be.