Introduction of a new closet atheist

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Hello my name is Marty.I am a recent closet atheists/agnostic.I have been a Christian all my life .I want Christianity to be true but the more I study it the more I realize it is false like all the other religions out there.My wife is a devout Roman Catholic and I am also a Catholic.I don’t want destroy my marriage and loose my friends.

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Hi, @Martyd, welcome to AR

I’d suggest you get a copy of a book titled, “ Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why” by Greta Christina.

There’s info, stories, and suggestions that may be of help to you.

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Welcome, Marty!

I suspect there are a LOT of people like yourself.

Religion can be very savage toward people who lose their faith; but sometimes the consequences we fear can be more real in between our ears than they turn out to be in practice. For me some of the challenge was just admitting to myself that I didn’t believe. Once I was able to do that, I could be unimpressed with any pushback I might get along the way. But I got surprisingly little of it over the years. YMMV, of course.

You say your wife is “devout”. That can cover a lot of territory. If she’s a trad Catholic, compulsively does the rosary all day, etc., then her world could crumble I suppose. But my experience in my family (father was born Catholic but became non-practicing in his youth and then took the whole family evangelical when I was about 5) was that they seemed happy with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach. I did not disparage their faith or try to dissuade them from it; they noted I wasn’t church-going anymore but didn’t ask me about it. I guess the idea was everybody would mind their own business. They also weren’t stridently evangelistic or anything like that. I always say that they came to fundamentalism late in life (about age 40) and they had already been socialized to be decent people, lol.

As for my wife at the time (she passed in '07), she was a little concerned but really not perturbed by my apostasy. Our relationship was never based around church beliefs, but mutual respect and interests. We had a lot of other common cause, not least being united in fighting her chronic illness together.

Anyway … IMO anyway there’s no shame in playing a role to enjoy the social side of Catholicism if you can do it without a lot of self-loathing or internal pain. In the fundamentalist world that’s basically impossible because there are too many Shibboleths – you have to attend at least 3 services a week regularly to not raise eyebrows and everything is god-talk all the time; Catholicism is generally more relaxed than that.

Glad to have you here anyway, and we’re here for you if you need to vent or have questions or whatever.

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I have a lot to say to new atheists/agnostics:

  1. Many people will try to make you feel like you’re less of a person, or that you are–somehow–a failure for being an atheist. Don’t let these attitudes get inside your head.

  2. They may try to stage an intervention . . . so don’t let them gang up on you. Stand by your beliefs.

  3. In extreme cases, families have disowned relatives for leaving the faith. I don’t know how to advise how to deal with this situation, but I do think that people who do this to family members believe that love should be conditional . . . and to me, conditional love is not really love at all.

  4. Some places are more supportive of atheists than others. In Oklahoma City, an atheist can be beaten to death, while atheism is openly embraced in places like San Francisco, so know your local attitudes.

  5. Be discreet at work, because people are often fired and/or excluded from the employment process over atheism.

  6. Expect people to believe horrible things about you, such as the idea that you are a sexual pervert who “just wants to sin without consequences,” that you actually worship Satan, that you believe that America should become a Communist country, and that abortion allows you to murder babies after they are born.

  7. People will believe that you automatically have no sense of morality because you don’t have God to answer to.

All of these beliefs are pure bullshit.

Please let us know if we csn answer any questions.

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hello everyone. i am not a new atheist, but just wanted to say hi

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Greetings … and since replies must be at least 20 characters … felicitations!

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Thanks for the encouragement.

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