Hell yeah. That’s exactly how I’m feeling these days. Your third paragraph especially resonates with me.

Sounds like maybe you have it worked out so I wouldn’t rock the boat but, I can’t help having the urge to send you a T-shirt that says “ I got a free T-shirt from atheist.com but my wife hid it”

@JacobMeyers <perk> a pocket t-shirt? I've got too many novelty t-shirts and most of them don't have a pocket.

Contrary to my personal tastes, Petunia tries to buy me the loudest shirt in the store. It's so I don't vanish into the crowd. Ironically loud shirts are a magnet for saucy young women who admire my guts for wearing it.

@WonderWartHog99 Hmmmm that sounds like great advice . These days I wear plain active wear. Maybe I’ll buy one of those crazy ones like soles walkers wear in the park

@JacobMeyers Another piece of advice: buy one of those big honking golf umbrella for the day it's suppose rain hard and drown frogs.

That'll be the day you'll find young short sighted curvy women that went shopping and are standing next to the door going "Dam, I'm a-going to drown getting to my car."

Be gallant. It'll be an ice breaker.

The whole go with the flow attitude of buhdism prolly helps with that and it sounds like maybe you have some of that naturally

@JacobMeyers i think it also helps that most, not all but most buddhists don't consider buddhism a religion. They consider it a philosophy, a way of life. Also, the Buddha was a real person, not some made up fucker. Siddhartha Gautama was born in Lumbini in present-day Nepal. He belonged to a large clan called the Shakyas. Son of the King of Nepal, Suddhodana in the sixth century.

To a degree yes but for some of us reality is as important as faith is to the churchy people. In a way it’s like being with someone who has an opposite morality. I’ll assume your morality regards rape as atrocious, so you wouldn’t be with anyone who practiced that. I would think no matter how well you got along on a day to day basis that bit of their personality would be detrimental to a relationship. I understand this isn’t your case. It wasn’t the case for me when I was married either. Just mentioning it for conversations sake

@JacobMeyers I think morality and religion are mutually exclusive. Humanity has nothing to do with religion. Both sides claim the right to morality.

I agree that it depends on the people and the basis of their relationship. For me humanity and happiness of all was most important. It is not that we were happy all the time. We fought and we did it hard, we were frustrated on many other levels but our religious and political differences did not break the belief of each side that each was a good human being and would not do anything hurtful intentionally. That built a very strong gratitude which I believe is the glue in the long term relationship. Of course mine is not the universal truth. There are strongly opinionated people, stronger personalities, often less reconciling and sometimes people who do not understand priorities correctly. To me, political and religious beliefs are least important in my relationship. Partners being right for each other on many other levels is very helpful.

I believe that relationships based on incorrect expectations are fragile.

I could deal with that I think. While a strict non believer in anything supernatural I do have a love for earth based shamanic things

so you had to do all the tolerance

@benhmiller no she was equally tolerant. that's why it was a happy 50-year marriage

As a pure relationship I see how that could work. But as I recall they have some pretty crazy notions on healthcare and I just see massive battles where children might be concerned.

@JacobMeyers They believe on power of prayer so they have not much use for hospitals... but she always knew when it comes to my body.... hospital and medicine... My real and her real are different.

Being able to learn from your mistakes, priceless

How rude of her! Instead of marrying you to spend a life trying to save you she just left for easier fruit. Not the best morality there.

I had similar exchanges with my ex. I can summarize most of them with two lines.
Me “why?”
Her “because god told me”
It was pretty much the end of conversation in most instances. It worked fine for us, but without the history of a relationship I would feel compelled to question the logic.

Very true. I did it for years although at the time logic and rational thought weren’t as big a part of my life.

@JacobMeyers Same here. It's harder for me to put up with that make believe crap now-a-days.

I get that. Online I often meet people that like the same things I do. Conversation goes like this:

“You like that?’”
Yah!
“ I like that too!”
Cool!
“ I like it because of X”
Yah me too.

Then fade to silence because there’s nothing to discuss. Conversations work better when there’s some aspect of rhetoric happening.

@JacobMeyers Yep, like on this forum.

But here we are agreeing—damn!

@WilliamFleming gah!

I totally agree with your last remark.

Hmm interesting. I guess when your young it’s harder to tell general apathy from theistic. The dating pool thing is sooo true though. However it’s my doing, I’ve been rejected plenty of times but it’s never been for atheism.

Was it the “ you believe your just mad at god” kinda argument? (Googles legion Maria)

@JacobMeyers She saw the logic of atheism but had been told of god all her life. Simeo Ondetto is the top man in Legio Maria and my ex wife's grandfather was a Bishop in this movement. Both are long dead now but sometimes the followers see them alive. Ondetto is seen every year.

Sounds like a pretty bad episode. Sorry you had to go through that. I find it interesting though that your child self identified as an atheist without any kind of coaching. I wonder how the world would be if no child ever was indoctrinated into certain beliefs. I’m with you though on not being able to really have enough respect for a believer to have a real relationship

@JacobMeyers Its funny after he found out I was an atheist he got a bit bligerant towards Christians, so I of course took him to church for about 4 months so that he could see they were real people. After that he made the distinction beween beliefs and human beings!

I’ve had some of my likes disappear but never a whole post. I’m sure the congregation supported him. That’s what church is all about, supporting each other’s delusions and making sure outside thoughts don’t get in. Of course I’ve no idea what brand of church he was in but I’ve heard some absolutely despicable things about marriage coming from church people. I’m glad that’s over for ya.

@JacobMeyers It looks like a post I had replied to was deleted so maybe the original poster deleted it and due to that, mine was deleted as well.

Anyway, his is a rather outside the mainstream church, a split off of a split off of a split off of Seventh Day Adventists. Christian due to their believe that Jesus was the messiah but followed a lot of old testament laws including keeping the sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, not eating pork, following specific holy days including Passover that are in the bible (so Christmas was out because it's an evil pagan holiday). His church is actually a split off from the original known as the Worldwide Church of God which had some similar beliefs to the Branch Davidians. Interestingly enough, that church decided to go more mainstream in the years following Waco thus the split off. Those who didn't want to go mainstream evangelical created a new church. From there, there's about 300 of the splinter churches but the one my ex is involved with has the largest number and even that is only around 50-60,000 so not a huge number. Just happened to be the lucky girl to find someone like him. Technically, he never should have married me but we met at a time he was not happy with the church because he hadn't found someone yet. He got involved with this church within months after we married and things pretty much went downhill from there. There were a lot of red flags though that I missed/ignored but considering the family I came from, he looked like the better option.

The only reason I am active and out of the closet is my x-wife announced that I was an atheist to everyone she could in a very religious area where we live and I grew up in.

Damn dude, talk about growing apart!

Well, I can give you an example from my own marriage which ended back in November. We had been together for 4 years before we married. Now, he did live in Korea teaching English for almost two of those years but we had been seeing each other and off and on living together before then. When we were seeing each other, he hadn't been involved with his church. He left his church before we met. Not long after we married, he went back to attending church services. It started when he decided he would no longer buy anything on Fridays. Since his religion followed Old Testament beliefs, he didn't work from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown. This went to being not just not working but not spending money at all.

Then it was attending his week long holy day thing that he needed to put aside 10% of his income for. This was for the church. Our firstborn was due Christmas Eve. Since his religion sees Christmas as evil, he started fasting a praying Christmas Eve night until I was admitted to the hospital the evening of December 26. He had been fasting nearly 48 hours at that point. After we had our first child, it was tithing 20%. Mind you, at the time, I wasn't working, he had been fired from BOTH of his jobs within 9 days of our daughter being born, and we were on government assistance. He was tithing from his unemployment checks and I barely had enough money to get my baby diapers. He hoarded money, locked (literally) it away from me and then eventually took the money and opened up his own banking account without me on it.

And this was just within the first two and a half years of our marriage. Tried to leave him then, no family to support to make it possible. It took me 8 years to get to where I could go back to school (because I had another child in the meantime), get my degree (and driver's license), and a job. And then I got legal aid through work and used that to start the divorce proceedings and I still owed over $2300 after it was all said and done (this after trying to leave him two years ago which failed because I wasn't yet working).

I tried to see things from his point of view, tried to join his church. I wasn't an atheist at first though would say veering towards it because our vows had no mention of god at all and that was my intention. I went to Korea with him when he went over the second time. But it was never enough and I couldn't believe what he believed. I tried, and eventually went the other direction and came to realize I was an atheist and started hanging out with people who believed like I did.

Unfortunately, what he believed meant behaviors that affected our family and there was never compromise. It was his way or the highway and it was on some pretty major stuff. He didn't want our girls vaccinated. They were not vaccinated for the longest time, not until after our divorce. I finally got them vaccinated last year. They are caught up enough that the doctor's not concerned (except the HPV one because I'm not sure about that one). He doesn't know. My daughter came out bi to me last year. He doesn't know that either. Before school ended which was before I filed, she was cutting herself, and a lot of that due to her deteriorating relationship with him because of his beliefs. This last year, she's had a chance to really bloom and figure out her values. And it was his relationship with her that really made me see that the marriage was no longer salvageable.

@SimplyJaneen

That has more to do with neurological problems rather than beliefs. Your husband clearly had some real mental issues and I really hate to say this, but you should READ the people that you get involved with.

For example, I personally wouldn't like people trying to waste my time with long anecdotes about how they realized that their spouse, of all people, was not actually able to handle something as simple as a marriage, but that was already made very clear.