I’m just going to go ahead and rip the Band-Aid off. It’s supposed to be less painful that way, right?

My husband and I separated, after 9 years of marriage. He moved out last weekend. It is both mutual and, thus far, amicable.

I am a walking cliché, it seems. Conservative Christian becomes an atheist and divorces her husband. The narrative pretty much writes itself, huh?

Well, whatever. Hey, they told me that if gay marriage passed in New York, it would endanger every marriage. Heh.

All joking aside (that is, if I know how to not joke when things are tense, which I don’t), blogging about my marriage and separation puts me in a bit of a tight spot. See, I have one and only one rule about blogging – no blogging about my husband.

I have had so many posts that I wanted to do over the past almost-two years about marriage and Christianity, but it was hard to do that while we were going through our problems without revealing that we were going through our problems. And, well, it’s just not cool to blog about your marital problems, you know?

So, now’s my chance to talk about some of that stuff. Of course, I will still keep my husband’s privacy one of my primary concerns. I don’t intend to use my blog as a forum to air my dirty laundry.

However, I do intend to use it as a place to discuss what’s wrong with Christianity’s views on marriage, and how those beliefs negatively affected my own marriage, from my perspective, of course. I think these things need to be discussed because they constitute so much of what is wrong with Christianity.

It was the Summersault tour, which was put together by the Canadian band Our Lady Peace, and featured The Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, A Perfect Circle, and others. My then-boyfriend, now-husband, and I saw the Montreal show.

I was just listening to the song “Judith,” by A Perfect Circle, a song that I had heard many times on the radio, but without the context that I now have, it carried no meaning for me.

Up until I was a Christian, I really didn’t know much about Christianity because my mom had such a traumatic experience with it. My childhood was virtually religion-free and, since I didn’t have any religious friends, nor did my mom, it just never came up.

Now that I have been a Christian, and left Christianity with some scarring of my own, this song has a lot more meaning.

According to Wikipedia, the song is about the lead singer’s mother, Judith, who had suffered a stroke and was left confined to a wheelchair.

These are the lyrics:

You’re such an inspiration
For the ways that I will
Never, ever choose to be
Oh so many ways for me to show you
How your savior has abandoned you

Fuck your God, your Lord, your Christ
He did this, took all you had and
Left you this way, still you pray, never stray, never
Taste of the fruit, never thought to question “Why?”

It’s not like you killed someone
It’s not like you drove a hateful spear into his side
Praise the one who left you broken down and paralyzed

He did it all for you…
He did it all for you…

Oh so many ways for me to show you
How your dogma has abandoned you

Pray to your Christ, to your God
Never taste of the fruit, never stray, never break, never
Choke on a lie even though he’s the one who
Did this to you, you never thought to question “Why?”

It’s not like you killed someone
It’s not like you drove a spiteful spear into his side
Talk to Jesus Christ as if he knows the reasons why

He did it all for you…
He did it all for you…
He did it all for you…

I can understand the frustration he must have felt at the idea that there is a loving god who nonetheless allowed this tragedy to happen to his mother.

I think we all have struggled with trying to reconcile that contradiction, whether we kept our faith in the end or not.

I still find it kind of strange that the message of that song didn’t even register in my mind back in 2000. I mean, the lyrics are pretty straight forward. But, then, I also did not understand the kind of faith he is talking about, either.

A lot can change in a decade.

Sunday will be my first Easter since I stopped believing in Jesus.

It’s kind of weird to not have plans to go to church for Easter.  We went to church every Sunday, but Easter was always a big deal service designed to appeal to the seekers.  Our church always had a big variety show-style service with the band, choir, dancers, and skits.  The church even rented a bigger space to accommodate the increased crowd size and hold only one service, instead of the usual five services they have on regular Sundays.

As you may know, if you have ever read my craft blog, I love planning big meals, doing crafts, and decorating.  When I was a Christian, though, I believed that celebrating the secular trimmings of Christian holidays trivialized the meaning, so I stopped doing a lot of it.

Yes, as my husband pointed out to me the other night, I took all the fun out of being a Christian.

I can’t help that I took it seriously.  I fail to see much point in being a Christian, if you’re not going to take it seriously.  Maybe that was my problem.

But I digress.

This Easter, I have been enjoying the planning of a secular celebration, like those of my youth.  I can buy the kids big baskets and fill them with candy, without worrying about rotting their souls along with their teeth.  I can make decorations of bunnies and eggs, without guilt over participating in a pagan celebration.  And I don’t have to worry about how I am going to schedule the cooking around the church-going.

I find it freeing.  Which is ironic, since freedom is what I was seeking to find in Christ.

I think I did, for a time.  Being forgiven, being loved unconditionally, feels free.  Coming out from under the burden of the past mistakes is true freedom.

But, when most, if not all, of the guilt over past mistakes comes from Christianity in the first place, from this notion of how God wants us to behave, then it doesn’t take long for the freedom to turn into bondage.

Some might say I was just being legalistic, or that I need “a relationship, not religion.”  And, indeed, some have said just that.

To that, I say, show me a religion that has no standards of behavior and I’ll show you a religion that has no point.

If what is said in the Bible is just a friendly suggestion, it has no point.  At least, no more of a point than any other good book of religion or philosophy, and certainly not enough to call me into a life of service to its god.

For there to be a need for Jesus, and his death and resurrection, we first need to have sinned.  There needs to exist that separation from God.  For us to have sinned, there needs to be standards of behavior laid out by God that we violated.  So, for anyone to suggest that Christianity is only about grace and not about standards of behavior is a bit disingenuous.

That’s not to say that I have no standards of behavior.  I do.  Only, now, they are based on what behavior will yield the best results for me and the world around me, not some book that is thousands of years old and was written to a long ago, foreign culture.

And my new standards, which are in many ways like the old ones, allow for me to celebrate spring with my family, without all the guilt.

I have always thought there was immense value in marking the passing of time and important events with celebrations. Getting together with family and friends – especially when there is delicious food involved – is good for the soul (meaning, of course, our emotional/psychological well-being, not a literal soul, in the religious sense).

Living in Vermont, winter is long, cold, snowy, dark, and did I mention long? Spring is a season that just begs to be welcomed with a large celebration! And why wouldn’t we want to celebrate it? It is the time of the earth’s rebirth. The grass is turning green, the birds are returning, the trees are budding, the bulbs are blooming, and, most importantly, the snow has melted. Another long, snowy winter has come to an end. Pass the ham!

I noticed this year that a lot of stores have spring-themed decor, rather than just religious-themed, making it even easier to have a secular Easter celebration. Now I can have flower cupcake papers and butterfly serving dishes, alongside the traditional bunnies, eggs, and chicks.

Now, I know I don’t have to celebrate spring on Easter, but the vernal equinox is usually still way too cold, and it’s a convenient way to plan the date and make sure I don’t forget to mark this special time of year.

So, while Christians are thinking about their stories of the death and resurrection of Jesus and what it means to them, I will be taking a break from my hectic life to celebrate family and welcome spring, thankful that I no longer need to plan my cooking around the church service.

Have a happy Easter, and thanks for reading Shatter Nicely!

That annoyed me to no end. Here in Vermont, it was not beautiful, nor sunny. I thought, If god is smiling on Texas, then what’s he doing to Vermont?

That’s the implication of statements like that. If you believe god is showing you favor when things go well, then what does that mean when the opposite is true? If god answers your prayers when he cures your loved ones, then he’s ignoring the prayers of others whose loved ones are allowed to die.

I know, I know, god works in mysterious ways, et cetera, but I can’t help but feel like those ways are kind of dickish.

Anyway, this morning, I saw the headline, Texas burning ‘from border to border,’ and it reminded me of that facebook post.

So, if god was smiling on Texas that day, what’s he doing now?

At any rate, I thought I would throw this post up here as a place for any conversations that anyone wants to continue, or even new ones you want to start.

I want to add a couple things to my comments in the “Molecules” post.

First, I want to say that I am not here to debate theology. That’s not to say that I am so sure that I am right (that there is no god) that I would never listen to someone try and convince me, or anything like that. I am not closed-minded. It’s just not what this blog is about for me. I am not posting here to make an argument or convince anyone to become an atheist. I am not an evangelical. I don’t need converts.

This blog is just where I post about my feelings and experiences with Christianity (a very specific kind of Christianity, not every possible permutation of Christianity), my deconversion experience, and my thoughts about life, and other stuff, now that I am an atheist.

I don’t have the time, nor the inclination, to debate theology. I welcome all comments and I enjoy reading what others have to say on the matter, but I want to let you know that I will probably not participate much in the discussion. Don’t take it personally.

Speaking of not taking things personally, I know this blog is hard to read for anyone who is still a Christian. It feels like a personal attack. Know that it is not. If I am angry, snide, sarcastic, or in any other way unpleasant, it is toward the emotional harm that I brought to myself by believing things that I believed and doing things that I did, while I was a Christian.

This is about me. This blog is about me. Not you. Not god. But me. This blog is a place where I come to sort out my feelings and thoughts. Along the way, I have met other people who have had similar experiences. This blog is about them, too.

I know that Christianity is a very personal religion. As such, it is hard to separate a person’s dislike of or abandonment of the religion from that person’s feelings for you. I get that. I was there. I also experience it from the other side, now. I feel the pain of knowing that some of my relationships will never be the same again. I even still have friends and family members who do now know that I am an atheist because I am still afraid of what it will do to our relationship.

But, try to keep in mind that I do not have any bad feelings toward anyone for believing. I don’t think they are stupid or foolish. I understand that everyone is just trying to make sense of this crazy world we all live in, and we all do that the best way we know how.

Please respect that I am just doing the same thing.

This theme has been coming up a lot lately for me. I even saw that phrase on a blog this morning, after I had already decided to write this post.

Obviously, since I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe that he put a god-shaped hole in our hearts, but I do admit that often I feel a longing for something more.

If it’s a God-shaped hole, how come I still felt that way when I was a believer? I always looked to God to fill it, but yet it was always still there.

I have come to realize that it is an evolutionary necessity that we are always looking for something more. Think about it. If we felt like our lives were complete and lacking nothing, most people would not bother having children and the species would die out.

It’s that innate human desire for something more, something bigger, something better that leads us to discovery. None of the inventions of man could have happened without that human quality we all have that drives us to always be seeking something else.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s not meant to be filled. Without it, we are not driven to do, to explore, to invent, to imagine, to create, to do better, to be better people, to live life to its fullest.

So, the next time a Christian says that I have a God-shaped hole in my heart, I will reply that I do, indeed, have a hole. But it is a life-shaped hole, and the only way to fill it is by living.

(As I was re-reading this, it suddenly felt familiar. Yep, I blogged about this same topic before!)

You don’t need God— to hope, to care, to love, to live.

The message will be spread via bus, billboard, and YouTube video.

The goal of this campaign is to dispel some of the false beliefs about atheists, namely that they are selfish, immoral people.

“One common myth is that the nonreligious lead empty, meaningless, selfish, self-centered lives. This is not only false, it’s ridiculous,” says CFI president and CEO Ronald A. Lindsay.

But, not everyone agrees that you can have a good life without god.

“You are talking about joy, and pleasure, and goodness and so on. If you’re employing words like that and you have no objective basis for the reality of those words … in other words, if you don’t believe in a moral law giver who actually gives meaning to the words good and evil, you can … put up billboards all day long and they mean nothing,” [Craig Hazen, director of the M.A. Program in Christian Apologetics at Biola University in Southern California] told The Christian Post.

[...]

The only way to know good, joy and love or even pain is if there is a moral law giver who can actually communicate those things, he maintained.

“Apart from that, you make it up as you go.”

He’s right, in a sense. The Christian definition of “good” is “whatever God says,” and the definition of “bad” is “everything else.”

Old Testament-style rape and genocide=good!

Gender rolls that don’t respect women=good!

Fearthought=good!

Homosexuals are an abomination=good!

So, yeah, the word “good” does not mean the same to an atheist as it does to a Christian. In fact, most atheists wouldn’t want that definition of good.

The same goes for love. In Christianity, love comes from God. “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) So, creating humans and giving them a code of morality that you know they can’t follow, then punishing them when they don’t follow it, is love. Sending your son to be beaten and killed in order for you to forgive the beings you created for not being able to follow the rules you knew they couldn’t follow is love.

And then there’s joy! Joy means putting Jesus first, then others, then yourself! Joy means giving your life to serve the Lord, no matter what hardships it entails.

So, he’s right! We do have to make up our own definitions of those words!

Hazen went further to contend that an unbeliever is actually “borrowing the Christian worldview to give your atheist life meaning.”

“I just don’t know where they’re getting their concept of good. They are just random bags of molecules. Morality … does not apply to random bags of molecules,” he said.

I think I demonstrated above that we are not using the Christian definitions. And nothing about my life as an atheist has anything borrowed from the worldview I had as a Christian.

I don’t believe that I need to be a wife and mother, and nothing else. I don’t believe that I need to tithe to the church, even if that leaves us without enough money for food. I don’t believe that I need to chastise myself for thinking normal human thoughts, like “hey, that man (who isn’t my husband) is attractive” or “I don’t always like being around my kids.”

So, where are we getting our concept of good? I mean, after all, we’re just random bags of molecules.

Well, fortunately, we are random bags of molecules with sentience. All throughout human history, people have had a concept of good. More or less, the concept is the same. But, I don’t think they were all borrowing from Christianity.

It took literally 14 minutes for the following response to be posted.

This is a homeschooling group, and in the past, the moderator has requested that we leave other issues not related to homeschooling out of the discussion. I for one do not appreciate your foul language, and not all of us view homosexuality the same way you do. It distracts from our ability to present a united front as homeschoolers when irrelevant issues are brought to this group. Let’s try to focus on what we have in common…homeschooling.

*Sigh* The post was related to homeschooling. She is the one who can’t focus on what she has in common with the poster and is instead focused on her intolerance.

On the bright side, it took fewer than 10 minutes for people to start posting comments in support of the original post.

Ironically, she is the one who changed the subject to something irrelevant to homeschooling, since the topic of discussion all morning was her off-topic comment. The original post, had she not responded, would not have led to a discussion about whether or not the rest of us supported gay rights.

In a way, I feel kind of bad for the woman who posted the homophobic comment. Not because everyone (rightly) piled on her for her comment, but because she is unable to see how that post did have relevance to homeschooling.

Despite the fact that the author of the original post (which I am not reprinting just because it’s so long) specifically stated the parallels, this woman was so offended by the mere mention of gay marriage, and the idea that – gasp! – she could have something in common with a gay rights activist, she simply could not see past her disgust and deemed the post irrelevant to a homeschooling message board.

And now she probably feels persecuted for all of the comments that have been posted denouncing her comment and supporting the original post.

I don’t know about other women, but I have my own answer to that question.

Believe it or not (and some of you who know me will have no problem believing it), I never wanted to be a mom.

That’s a hard thing to say, since, well, I am a mom and I love my kids very much. I would do pretty much anything for them, and I have sacrificed a lot to try and give them the life I thought would be the best for them. Whether or not that was a good thing remains to be seen. But, one thing’s for sure, I would go to the mat for them, and even they know that.

To admit that I never wanted to be a mom feels a little bit like saying that I wish I never had my kids, or that I don’t love them, so it’s a hard thing for me to come to terms with, let alone tell the whole world.

A lot of little girls dream about becoming moms. They play house and pretend their dolls are real babies. They think about what kind of mom they will be. They imagine their perfect wedding day.

Not me. Ew. I was too busy playing with my chemistry set and imagining living alone in a fancy loft in NYC with no man, no kids, just my career and my social life.

But, I did become a mom, if unintentionally. And I don’t believe in doing anything half-assed, so I took my responsibility very seriously. So, I have always tried to be a good mom, a dedicated mom, a mom who is always there for her kids and doesn’t put her career first.

Still, every time I had to say no to a job offer because it required too many hours or, worse, decided to stay at home completely, I died a little inside. I had dreams, dreams that would never come to fruition.

Then, I found Christianity. Not only could I be forgiven for the indiscretions that led to my unintended pregnancy, I had found a culture that not only valued motherhood, but held it up as the highest calling for a woman.

You may call that sexist; I call it salvation.

This was the answer to all my problems. Finally, I would be able to put my ambitions aside and embrace motherhood with a sense of real purpose. I would be serving the lord in my home mission field, raising three young men who would go into the world and do three times the work building god’s kingdom that I could do. Instead of being an obstacle to being somebody important, motherhood was going to make me somebody important.

I poured all my energy into being a mother, wife, and homemaker, telling myself that I was honoring god and fulfilling my god-given purpose. I communed with other godly women online who reaffirmed each other in our dedication to serving the lord through motherhood and supported each other through our struggles against the temptations of our ambitions.

That worked for me… for a while. But then, as you can imagine, it still wasn’t enough. I still had these desires to be something other than a mother. Only now, I had a heaping helping of guilt to go along with it. A god-sized helping of guilt, and it almost crushed me.

For years I struggled to push these “worldly” ambitions aside and let god be enough.

But, being, you know, imaginary, god never was enough. What’s worse, I started to resent my kids. I never resented them before for mucking up my plans. They didn’t ask to be born and I freely chose to put them first. But now I wasn’t freely choosing; I was doing it because I thought that’s what god required of me, and I resented it. And, of course, I felt guilty for resenting it.

Needless to say, it did a number on my psyche.

Once I left Christianity, I thought about putting my kids in school and pursuing a career, but I decided that it wasn’t the best choice at that time for our family -for any of us, including me. But, that didn’t mean that being a mom was all I had to be, and I have been pursuing other interests.

And, what do you know, I don’t resent being a mom anymore. I actually even enjoy it sometimes!

I probably won’t ever have that fancy loft in NYC and the career and social life I dreamed about as a girl, but I am finally okay with that. I like my life, and I still have plenty of time to do a lot of things that will be fulfilling. I even get to raise three amazing (if not sometimes annoying, loud, and/or smelly) boys in the process.