This video appears like it was designed to be “preaching to the choir” of people who are already atheists, who are frustrated after dealing with the majority of our countrymen being theists, and who are looking for a place to decompress after a long day. However, that is pretty much the audience that I’m picturing when I write on here, not that anyone else is unwelcome at all; I just find it unlikely that I’m ever going to deconvert anybody and I really don’t care if I do. So I found a video made by somebody else who was venting and figured I’d vent right along with him 😉
The thing that bothered me about the video that Sir Sic was responding to also bothered him: the Christian is speaking slowly and carefully about what he calls a sensitive issue. As though heathens are simply a bunch of ticking time bombs who could get “offended” at any minute. As though it’s really, really hard for us to deal with the fact that other people don’t think like us. As though we ourselves aren’t an incredibly diverse bunch, mostly united by the people who grouped us all together in the first place when they declared that the USA was a “Christian nation” and we have to just deal with laws and policies governing all of us that are rooted in the bible and only benefit them. And I’m using the word “heathen” here because my sister once forgot that I could hear her when she asked her husband what “pagans” believed on a certain issue. Apparently she didn’t know that 1)Paganism is its own religion and not synonymous with everyone she thinks is headed to hell and 2)I was right there and given that I was clearly the “pagan” in question, she could have just asked me.
But yeah, non-Christians are totally the ones that are so easy to offend.
The reason I harp on this is because my mother, who I’ve already mentioned in previous posts likes to spin narratives about me that are based 100% in whatever she thinks it would be advantageous to her for people to believe about me, has taken this “easily offended” notion and run with it. Any time anything significant happens in my extended family, such as a pregnancy or whatever, I find out from a cousin who somehow had insight into what the “inner clique” is up to. They find out through various means, having been basically ostracized themselves for being apostates, but apparently their mothers have less time to devote to making the whole family hate them. (I want to underscore here that I adore my cousins. They have no “guilt by association” and instead are some of the most supportive people in my life.)
Most of my family finds out news through an extended family chat group. I have no access to this group because the family shares prayer requests on it and my mom told everybody that I would be incredibly offended by even seeing the written word “prayer.” She ostensibly got this idea from this message that I sent to her and my dad:
The context was that I had been in the hospital for a while and for some reason had to send my parents a message. I had not contacted them and obviously my mom had never contacted me, which she has also spun narratives to explain, but really she’s just a 🤬. So I sent her and my dad a message saying that I was in the hospital, followed by the above text, followed by whatever I had to write to them about.
I feel that the point of the message is obvious. I don’t have a problem with prayer; I have a problem with my 🤬 parents. They knew that, so they threw God under the bus. My parents’ prayers are totally insincere. They claim to pray for me (hence the quotation marks in the text) when really they just want to pretend that they care about me. If they actually cared about me, they would apologize for being the reason I have C-PTSD in the first place. I’m really over the fact that they will never apologize, and it doesn’t hurt me anymore to think about it. But since they’re toxic people and nothing good will ever come from my having relationships with them, I don’t write to them much. I called my parents out on their hypocrisy and fake prayers and stated explicitly how I knew that they were insincere (their “inability” to recall anything that they did to me, which I described in the passive voice in an attempt to include at least a tiny bit of diplomacy in an otherwise scathing text).
My mother is nothing if not resourceful in pushing her manipulative agenda, so she can use absolutely anything to her advantage. That’s why I never called her out ever on anything until my mid- to late-twenties, then went through a brief phase where I would blow up at her and my dad with decades’ worth of pent-up anger, then found out what I had already known to be true: anything I say can and will be used against me.
If my mother could use my reaching my wit’s end and lashing out at her to make most of the extended family view her as the victim and me as the irrational, rebellious middle-aged adult, how much greater is the whole Heathen population in this country’s frustration at being constantly misrepresented? Some people may genuinely not know anything about any of us because they talk almost exclusively to other Christians; some are intentionally spreading a web of lies (i.e., my mother); and most are probably somewhere in between and not always aware of their subconscious motivations. Either way, this is why it’s so hard for us to respond to Christians calmly and rationally and sometimes we just preach to the choir. It is an emotional issue that our own families treat us with cruelty or even outright disown us for our beliefs. If that makes me “easily offended,” then fine. But if the tables were turned and Christians were no longer the most privileged religious group in the country, I’d be willing to bet that they’d react quite a bit more strongly than by avoiding their parents and watching satirical cartoons on YouTube.
