This post is not about grief, but it is something that has been on my mind for a while now. I want to talk about my perspective in writing this blog, and where it comes from, and why it’s different from most skeptic’s blogs out there, and how (maybe) that is something you can benefit from.
For a lot of atheists and other non-deists, living without a faith in a higher being is something they arrived at eventually. Sometimes tortuously, as they parted with a religion and a belief system that they were raised in. The results can be as catastrophic as if they came out as queer, with similar results: being thrown out of the house, disowned by their own family, and barred from interacting with the people they were raised with. I find such stories hard to even read about.
My life was pretty much the exact opposite: my parents were, for all intents and purposes, “practicing agnostics.” My father remained a Christian, but only distantly, and it was never something he talked about. I never saw him reading a Bible, although he owned several.
My mother sometimes went down roads of New Age Paganism, but in general spirituality was something she kept at a distance, feeling hard done by her Southern Baptist upbringing.
The result was that I was raised without any sense of religion or spirituality. In my house, Christmas and Easter were secular holidays, period. I had no idea of the religious significance of them until I was an adolescent. I don’t think I was even clear on what religion was until then, anyway.
Which is a long way of explaining why this blog doesn’t talk about deconversion, or other topics that most atheist blogs spend a lot of time on. For one thing, I can’t speak to those issues from experience. For another, they are not topics I think about at all (for good or ill).
My book Grieving Futures is a great example of that. I wrote the whole thing and never mentioned religion, and I didn’t realize it until I was deep in edits for it. Religion and “faith in God” did not register for me at all as topics that people might want to read about, which in retrospect I find kind of hilarious.
(I’m really sort of a unicorn in the atheist world: an adult over 30 who was raised as a non-deist. Like most unicorns, I find it surprising that I’m so rare, after all, I’m just me. *waves*)
I thought for a while that this was a handicap for this blog, and that coming at things from my neutral perspective would not resonate with readers. And that part is probably true, but I think I’ve also come to realize that there is a benefit here as well. I don’t weigh discussions of grief and mourning down with talk about religion. To me, that would just simply be off-topic. So I hope that readers like you will feel a certain freedom here, in that those other issues are not creeping into our dialogue and distracting us from talking about grief and mourning.
That’s my intention, anyway. I’ve made a conscious decision not to emulate other atheist blogs and to stick to what I know, and what I know is mostly about dealing (and not dealing) with death and loss from a 100% emotionally, psychologically atheist perspective. I hope it helps.
