My Beloved, the Whore

This is going to be a deeply personal post, sort of a public “Dear diary”, so if that’s not your thing, please don’t read it.  All others, I post this publicly to receive a public review of my thoughts and keep a record of the process.  Feel free to comment.

I have recently told my parents  I am an atheist.  Now, I know that this is very painful for them, but I’m finding the post closet experience particularly frustrating (and ultimately painful) for several reasons.

They don’t really know what an atheist is, so they alternately (a.) don’t think I am really an atheist or (b.) ascribe to me the beliefs that they think an atheist has.   They (c.) don’t really understand why I became an atheist, and as such (d.) think it is because they were bad parents.

(a.) They see that I am still spiritual, ethical, and looking for truth and they assume that it is a vestige of Christianity.   Number one, wouldn’t that mean any moral person was some sort of a partial Christan?  “Christian” is not, last time I checked, a substitute for “moral”.  Ideally, yes, all Christians would be bastions of morality.  Some are, many aren’t.  Further, ideally, all Muslims, Buddhists, and Pagans would be intensely ethical people.  Some are, many aren’t. Number two, it says “All those years that you were moral?  Yeah, that doesn’t count, because that wasn’t the authentic you, the authentic you is incapable of morality without Christ.”  And as a logical extension of that belief, then all the emotions I had were inauthentic as well.  Morality isn’t free.  Sometimes we want to do immoral things, and there is a cost to being moral instead.  Moral means desires differed, sometimes forever, and to have the work I put into being moral just written off kinda sucks.   To be told either the “Christian me” or the “atheist me” is less than the authentic me is very insulting.

(b.)To a Christian, atheist means one who wishes to reject God.   So they ascribe to me the beliefs of one who, in their heart, believes in God, but desires not to.  It’s not that I wish to reject the God hypothesis; it’s that evidence compels me to reject God.  Working from the assumption that I wish to reject God they think I believe things that I don’t.   They make assumptions about why I became an atheist and what atheist means.  Which goes right to (c.)  I publicly profess atheism because it is the cry of my heart and mind.  I can no more just wake up a Christian that I could just wake up gay.  This is what I am.  To public state otherwise is to live a lie.  I expected a lot more “Good job, son.”  It takes a huge amount of courage to challenge everything you were ever told and disagree with 96% of the population.  I thought the attitude would be a lot more, “Well, we disagree with you of course, but we understand why you believe what you believe, and we’re proud of you for having the cojones to admit it.”   I am proud of having this courage, and I feel like someone who really knows me and loves me would feel the same way.

It leads me to believe that my parents aren’t responding to who I am, but rather to who they think I am.  Which is terrifying because it leads me to ask the question, “Did they ever…?”  Did my parents ever really understand who I am?  I think, sadly, but reasonably, no.  It wasn’t even their fault exactly.  Even I didn’t believe the evidence of who I was. I was suicidal in high school.  My usual day consisted of waking up, putting a loaded gun to my head and trying to find the courage to kill myself.   Accepting my total failure of inner strength, I could then find a reason to eat breakfast and shower: maybe I would get laid that day, and then I would either go crazy with lust and die in a whore house in a few years (suicide on the installment plan) or I would be so disappointed for pointlessly giving my virginity away that I could pull the trigger and, of course, I would have gotten laid.   This is not the thoughtscape of a Christian.

Several thoughts prevented me.  Putting a hollow point in your brain is an ungodly mess.  It didn’t seem fair to have my parents come home to find my head inside out, running on the wall.  I didn’t want to make them suffer, I just wanted to not hurt inside anymore.  It didn’t seem right to kill myself in some odd way that hid the body either, because I heard from people whose kids were never found, that the not knowing is horrible.  I was a little concerned about hell, because no “real Christian” would want to kill themselves for years on end, but I predominately worried about two things.  One, that I would give myself a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and make myself a quadriplegic.  Two, that there was no sex in heaven.  I was worried about TBI for two reasons: one, I’d never get another chance to kill myself because no one would kill me just because I asked, and two, I wouldn’t be able to feel my penis anymore, again preventing sex forever.  For probably 3 years or so, I couldn’t make myself get out of bed without holding a 9mm and saying something like, ” I can get up today, because no matter how much this day hurts, I am in control.  I can always end it”…and they never noticed.

Which leads me neatly to (d.) They think I am an atheist because they were bad parents…

Ok, in several ways my folks were not bad parents.  I was never sexually abused.  I was never physically abused (though I did see some in our home).  I was never verbally abused.  They made sure I knew the Bible.  That’s a fantastic start. The world needs more parents who don’t rape, hit, or ridicule their kids.  I no longer believe the Bible is inspired, but they did, and I understand and respect their motivation, if not their application.   The thing is….um….that was sort of… it.   When I was 8 years old, I told my mom that I was planning on killing my sister because she was sadistic bitch.  My mom told I loved my sister and I didn’t mean that and made no effort to put away any of the loaded guns littering the house. I mean, I’m not a perfect dad, but I’m pretty sure if my daughter said she was going to kill someone, I might, oh, I don’t know, put away the guns (if I had any).

Number of times my dad played catch with me? Asked me what I was doing in piano? Asked me who my hero was? What I wanted to be when I grew up? Asked me what I learning in school?  Yeah…never.  Number of times my Mom taught me to cook?  She didn’t. I taught myself (much to her surprise).   She never asked me why I wanted to play piano (because I wanted to play jazz).    Neither parent ever asked me what I planned on after high-school, where I wanted to go to school, what I wanted to do with my life.   They made sure I was fed, clean, and educated.  They made sure that certain tests (my ACT) were done, and paid for my health care.   They were the best foster parents the state could have appointed.  Except, they weren’t foster parents.  They are my blood parents who brought me into this world at least partially on purpose.  And as far as what makes me, well me, they never gave a damn.  Some of this is explainable by the fact that my dad was pretty invested into drugs and my mom into codependency in my early life.  Fair enough.  But why, my senior year did they not say “Hey, where do you want to go to college?”  They never asked.  They never asked where I wanted to go, what my major might be, never asked a whole lot of things.  Nothing that would really mark me as me, my dreams, my hopes, was ever talked about.   They had no interest in knowing me at all.

For years, I’ve struggled with these memories of my first girlfriend.  Which, honestly, makes me feel like a doofus.  28 year old men do not pine away for the 18 year old they dated 10 years ago, at least healthy ones don’t.   She and I were both very lonely, very sexual people, but because we were Christians, we never slept together.  A lot of the obsession went away when I called her a few years ago.  We talked about the breakup and the relationship and how we had both hurt each other.  We parted not-quite-as-hurt anymore and accepting that we had other lives now that couldn’t reasonablely include each other.  But, I still think wistfully about making love to her more than I am comfortable with, and I’ve never understood why.

Then this week I got it.  I did a lot of the things I did to impress my parents.  I read Brave New World as a nine year old so I could impress my parents with how smart I was.  In fact, reading was about the only thing I ever got positive feedback for, and read like crazy.  I read to find something smart to say, so I could get some parental approval.   I aced algebra because my mom said her kids weren’t good at math.  I graduated with a 4.0.  I went to bible college instead of a engineering school because I wanted my parents to be proud of decisions, and nothing else I wanted to do would have pleased them as much. So what happened when I brought the woman I wanted to marry home from Bible college, the woman that I loved sacrificially as Christ loved the church (I wanted to marry her to redeem her reputation)?  They called my beloved a slut, said she dressed like prostitute (she wore silk pajama pants and a camisole to bed), and refused to leave us alone together so we wouldn’t have sex.   When I went to stay with her in her hotel (She was fairly offended and left) they commanded me to come back home.  I could have disobeyed, but I did not, because my father was appointed over me by god.  To disobey him was to disobey God himself, and he told me so when he commanded me to come back home.  They called my beloved a whore and told me it would be best if I broke off my engagement.   So I did.  10 years later, it still hurts because I showed them the one thing in the world it was most important to me for them to be proud of and they said….nah, she’s a whore.  It’s the rejection by the people I loved most in the world that made the wound so deep.

So, am I an atheist because my parents were bad parents?  Absolutely not.  Had my parents been really great supportive people instead of emotionally distant and judgemental people I probably would have realized I was an atheist by the time I started high school. I can’t and do not blame them for any of the really stupid decisions I made after I was 18.  But up to 18, they were my life, and I do blame them for a lot of the guilt I felt and the stupid things believed.  They asked me recently to forgive them for “any harm we caused”.  Which, I can’t really do.   A bit because an open ended request for forgiveness is worthless: “I’m sorry that vague things I don’t care to understand and refuse to accept responsibility for hurt you for some odd reason.”   Ahhhhh, no.

But mostly, because a request for forgiveness is saying to someone “Teach me to treat you better”.  I really should carefully and lovingly delineate to them how they messed up and how this doesn’t relate to atheism, the opposite really, but I don’t believe them yet.  They didn’t care about my core identity for 28 years.  Now they respond to me the way they think an atheist feels instead of the way they think a Christian feels, but they still seem to have no real interest in understanding what makes up my core, my true self.   They ask me no questions about why I believe, or even the specifics of what I believe. Instead of talking to me about what I believe, they would rather to talk to to others about what they think I might believe.   They knew I was blogging, and that my blogs were asking hard questions, yet were completely surprised by my confessions of non-faith.  Why?  Because my blogs made them uncomfortable they stopped reading them.

There is a chance that they will read this, and  feel they must ask me questions about myself.  Then they will most likely be offended when I don’t want to answer.  A date you have to tell to compliment you isn’t much of a date, is it?  The time to care about what made me me was a good quarter a century ago.   I’m very selective about my friends, and they don’t make the cut.  I will continue to be kind and friendly, and call at appropriate holidays, but I no longer care about their approval one way or the other, and I could care less about really trying to have relationship with them.  Perhaps most tragically of all, since they never knew what a constitutes a real relationship to me they will probably never notice the difference.