Hi everyone. I've not been here in a while. I was Been busy writing and substitute teaching. Yesterday, I had dinner with a childhood friend whom I've not seen in 30 years. We have many parallels, including a rejecting of our religion. It was nice after losing so many friends.
Anybody else discovered friends who were secretly going through the same loss of faith as you?
I find, to my disappointment, that most Veterans are religious. They are not really religious but they get upset when someone doesn’t believe in god. They feel the same about the president and the Republican Party.
Most of my shipmates are pro trump, pro republicans, and pro religion. It makes conversations hard.
Most of the time I pretend that I am ignorant of politics and religion and say I am not interested in talking about it.
I have not been fortunate to find old friends who have left the faith, but then again, I never regarded any of those as particularly fast friends either. In our tribe, we were not encouraged to value each other's individuality, but each other's conformance. When conformance failed, we no longer had any use for each other.
I have known a lot of people as a minister, but only a few of them I called friends, and not many of them have chosen to continue being friends. So meeting up with my old pal was really nice.