5/9 Check In

[aves0708]

Welcome to the weekly Secular Families check in! If you would like to be added or removed from this check in please tag me.

. , serenla , randomosity, @dutchkatie , cavewmn , @saveourship , sewfie2 , namastebiotches , 4paws , beardpapa , CharlieB , @wallflwr926 , draedenne , estrellas , ovenrack

Is there anything else anyone would like to add to the check in? I just wanted to make sure I got it up today and this was all I could think of at the moment.



Age of LO(s) if you have any:

AW/Vents/ Encounters this week:

QOTW: This might have been covered in the intro thread but I’m working on catching up! When/why did you start questioning religion?

[namastebiotches]

Age of LO(s) if you have any: 4.75yo son

AW/Vents/ Encounters this week: nothing secular related this week

QOTW: This might have been covered in the intro thread but I’m working on catching up! When/why did you start questioning religion? I don't really remember exactly when but I never felt very religiously connected even growing up going to church occasionally & doing all the sacraments. I remember in undergrad I took a broad religion humanities course that studied many & I guess at that point really solidified how non-Catholic I really was.

[sewfie2]

Age of LO(s) if you have any:
7.5m

AW/Vents/ Encounters this week:
I had the weirdest dream about telling people I know that I'm atheist and them being all jerky about it. So that was weird.
A coworker and I were talking and she mentioned to her kids that she didn't care what they were (like, which religion they went with), as long as they believe in god. I guess we were talking about kids rebelling or something and one of her daughters had "threatened" to convert to Judaism as a teenager. I was like "She should have at least gone with Paganism or Satanism if she's going to rebel."

QOTW: This might have been covered in the intro thread but I’m working on catching up! When/why did you start questioning religion?
I guess just getting more into science and being around atheists? I guess I just started really thinking about it more and it just really doesn't make any sense to me. How can only one of the current popular religions be the "right" one? And humans are so bad when it comes to being eye witnesses and relaying information!! It's not fair for a god to be like "you have to follow me" but then not undeniably be around as the message gets watered down and messed up.

[Deleted]

Age of LO: Our daughter is just three.

AW/Vents/Encounters: For the first time in my life over the past few months I have started to noticed that maybe we are more of an exception than I thought we were. We are in the process of choosing an elementary school and the one closest to us has a religious background. I tried to speak to lots of parents and their school choices to learn about the difference between the schools in our town. So I found that a lot of them looked at me a bit strange when I mentioned my hesitation regarding sending my kid to a Christian school when neither of us has ever been churchgoing.

QOTW: While my parents met through youth organizations of their respective parents' churches, they have been a secular family all along. There was no religion for me to question or break away from. Something similar goes for my DH. We both had one or two religious grandparents, but they weren't on any mission to get grandbabies baptized or any thing.

[cavewmn]

Age of LO(s) if you have any: Due July!

AW/Vents/ Encounters this week: DH's step family is religious. You think that they would be understanding that a sick pregnant lady needs to rest. Long story short - I think his step mom is bipolar. She went from being super angry that we didn't go to their house to how much she loves DH and won't let anything get in the way of their relationship.......

QOTW: This might have been covered in the intro thread but I’m working on catching up! When/why did you start questioning religion?
- I have always questioned it. My family has a habit of dying in 3's. So I have been surrounded by a lot of death.
- There have been really shitty things that have happened in my life. I consider myself a good person and could not figure out what I did to deserve it. Or what I needed to learn from it.....
- Never fitting in. Trying to fit in so hard one year with church kids gave me a lot of emotional issues. Thank goodness we moved away after a year. lol
- The meanest people I have ever met were religious...
- Trying to conceive when it seemed like every crack whore children with no problem.....
- The straw the broke the camels back was when I had my loss. Between the guilt of not dying with my baby, it taking over 5 years just to conceive said baby, just to have the baby ripped from me. I can't believe a God would/could be so cruel.

[ovenrack]

Age of LO(s) if you have any: 2 year old son, 4 month old daughter

AW/Vents/Encounters this week: nothing, really.

QOTW: When/why did you start questioning religion? I actually never really had a religion to question. My family has always celebrated Christmas and had chocolate/egg hunts for Easter, but otherwise, nothing much.

My extended family vary in faith from Unitarian to Protestant and other varieties of Christianity. My cousin is a Unitarian minister! When I was in middle/high school I went to church with several friends, but otherwise didn't really explore too much until college.

Organized religion is a thing that makes very little logical sense to me, but I totally understand the draw of having a community rooted in similar beliefs.

I maintained a level of slightly suspicious nonchalance until my father died, then my son was born, and then my mother died. Now I'm more vocal and less patient. Hah.

[namastebiotches]

On a related note, I am currently watching God's Not Dead for some odd reason.

[aves0708]

Age of LO(s) if you have any:
DD is 6.5 months

AW/Vents/ Encounters this week:
My BIL got married this weekend and DH's family is very religious so there were prayers flying all over the place this weekend. At the rehearsal dinner DD was getting restless just sitting so we were up walking when the family decided to do the big prayer, she decided to pterodactyl screech through the whole thing. It made me chuckle.

QOTW: This might have been covered in the intro thread but I’m working on catching up! When/why did you start questioning religion?

My parents were always holiday church goers until I was in middle school and they decided we needed to go regularly. I never really felt comfortable at church and always thought of it as a little brainwashy (think creepy worship songs) and very hypocritical. I really started to question things in high school when I became more involved in science. Like randomosity , said I realized much of religion was a way of explaining things that people didn't understand. Things that science has since explained. I also started to feel like the idea of a god was mostly psychologically based, in that people have this need feel like something happens after death or that when things are out of their control they can actually do something by praying.

[Deleted]

Age of LO(s) if you have any: Nope. I just like to hang out with the cool kids.

AW/Vents/ Encounters this week: I shared something on FB for NIAW and my aunt told me to pray to a saint. She is a nun and means well, but prayer is not going to help fix my uterus.

QOTW: This might have been covered in the intro thread but I’m working on catching up! When/why did you start questioning religion?
***Trigger warning, Suicide, Parent Death***

I always had doubt, but after my mother committed suicide I couldn't believe in a religion that said she was going to hell for what she did. She wasn't a bad person, just severely depressed.

[cavewmn]

@wallflwr926 I'm sorry about your mother. Depression is a beast.

[Deleted]

May 10, 2016 22:02:32 GMT -5 cavewmn said:

@wallflwr926 I'm sorry about your mother. Depression is a beast.

I was almost 12 when she passed away. My grandparents were so relieved when the Catholic church finally recanted their stance on suicide. It broke my heart knowing they were such strong believers that they let church teachings dictate their feelings.

[Deleted]

May 10, 2016 22:48:01 GMT -5 @wallflwr926 said:

May 10, 2016 22:02:32 GMT -5 cavewmn said:

@wallflwr926 I'm sorry about your mother. Depression is a beast.

I was almost 12 when she passed away. My grandparents were so relieved when the Catholic church finally recanted their stance on suicide. It broke my heart knowing they were such strong believers that they let church teachings dictate their feelings.

That is so sad. On top of the horror of losing a child to depression to feel like you have to believe she's still in some kind of hell.

[namastebiotches]

((Hugs)) @wallieflowers

[Deleted]

May 11, 2016 6:58:42 GMT -5 . said:

May 11, 2016 0:22:22 GMT -5 @dutchkatie said:

That is so sad. On top of the horror of losing a child to depression to feel like you have to believe she's still in some kind of hell.

@wallflwr926, this, exactly. I'm sorry you went through that. It sounds like you've made peace with your mom's decision, though, in a way? What about with your grandparents - how is that relationship now (assuming they're still living -- apologies if they're not)?

It will be 21 years in August so i've made as much peace with it as I can. We didn't know that she was in as bad a place as she was. She was actively involved in our lives, as a classmom, girl scout leader, little league coach, the list goes on. One day it got to be too much for her. It will always hurt knowing that she has missed all of our graduations, weddings, and meeting my niece (and future LOs), but it gets easier with time.

My grandparents have since passed, but they lived to the ripe old ages of 95 and 97 (We seem to have babies later in my mom's family ). They were a huge part of our lives before and after my mom died. I know losing their daughter was hard, but being able to maintain a close relationship with their grandkids helped them through. My grandpa was my sister's BFF and my grandma was mine. My brothers had to fight for attention. lol. They were amazing people, and their marriage is the standard I try to keep for my own relationship with my husband.

[sewfie2]

May 10, 2016 13:53:11 GMT -5 namastebiotches said:

On a related note, I am currently watching God's Not Dead for some odd reason.

Mh keeps watching religious movies! He just finished "Revolution Road" (not the Leo/Kate "Revolutionary Road") and started some Noah's ark movie (not the Emma Watson one, something else on netflix).

[beardpapa]

Age of LO(s) if you have any: 11.5mo

AW/Vents/ Encounters this week: Well, it's last week by now but we were in Philly for my spouses work and it was a great trip and LO and I just walked around for like 6mi a day sightseeing and such. I was really ready to be pissed at all of the Church in our State, if you will, especially in a state with such early colonial history. However, I was happily surprised when our walking tours weren't invaded by all that stuff. I'm sure I was selecting to avoid most confrontation with it, but I was prepared to be nauseated and instead just had a great trip #humblebrag

QOTW: This might have been covered in the intro thread but I’m working on catching up! When/why did you start questioning religion? The anecdote that sticks with me most is sitting in the front pews of the synagogue I grew up in with other Sunday School children--we must have been 5 or 6. Across the aisle, more children and the Rabbi were sitting on the bimah steps and discussing one of God's many miracles. I recognized that I was thinking about what _really_ happened there, and how we won't know, etc, when another child asked a question that was legitimately about and legitimizing God as real. That moment when I saw that we weren't on the same page: that was a huge moment for me. Questioning _religion_ as an institution, though, that didn't come until sitting in the back of the amphitheater for Friday night Shabbat evening services before dinner at my Jewish summer camp. A friend of ours who was a picture of contemporary Judaism--I'll anonymize his amazingly Jewish name as Jonah Haban Yisrael Kravitz-Prinz--came back from a summer trip to Israel and was visiting us at camp. He sat next to me, in the back, and leaned over to me during the most solemn and holy daily prayer--the Shema--and he whispered an interruption that was so simple is shook me to the core of my already secular Judaism. He said, during this prayer, "Why do you say the Shema?" That moment I was somehow given permission not only to question the poetry of a God, but also the traditions, institutions, and practices of being a Jew. I was 16. Over the next 10 years I would continue to embrace traditions in front of my non-Jewish communities--sharing and educating, but eschewing them in front of my Jewish communities--discounting and not participating in them. My family saw me as becoming less Jewish and my friends saw me as staying or being more Jewish. With a LO i'm interested in striking a better balance: defining and finding a set of values that let's me embrace heritage, practice traditions for better reasons that just "tradition", and help create a family of people who are of Ashkenazi Jewish descent who don't disrespect the struggle of our ancestors but also don't have to believe in anything extra-physical.