Mortaine’s Blog

The field sketchbook has been updated!

Mallards At the river, there were Mallard ducks! I could have stayed to sketch them for hours!

My husband is a recovering Christian. As in, a guy who got straight “A”’s in Scripture class in the private schools he went to as a child, and now wants a bumper sticker that reads “Christians aren’t stupid– they’re ’scientifically challenged.’” As long as I have known him, he’s been an agnostic, not really deciding one way or another, but also not really motivated to give it all that much thought.

This morning, based on some of the things he’d been saying recently, I asked him if he was finally an atheist. He said “I think so.”

On the one hand, I’m glad, because I think agnosticism has been kind of a shield for him, an excuse for not breaking with his upbringing. On the other hand, his new non-faith is a little frightening. Like many atheists who come to it after a religious upbringing, he has a lot of… “issues” with organized religion.

By the way, my husband and I hardly ever discuss religion, neither of us has ever tried to convince the other to believe one thing or another, and it’s never been a source of conflict. If he had ever wanted to go to church or pray or anything, I would not have participated, but I would also have been otherwise supportive and not tried to hinder him. I don’t think I have the right to tell someone how to go about their spirituality, whatever it may be.

See, I have few issues with religions, having never really been enough part of any religion to feel left out or rejected or led astray by them. But I know a LOT of atheists who are downright angry at the church or at Christians or at God or something. Seems to me, if you really don’t believe in god, then you just walk away and don’t care. I wonder how many of those atheists spend their whole lives angry about it, or how many of them relapse.

By the way, my attitude towards religion and god and spirituality is basically what happens after someone gets really angry at the church and religion and god, doesn’t relapse, and passes it on to his children. Who pass it on to their children. I would probably have been Catholic if my mother had been– I just believe what my parents taught me to believe, and have never seen any reason to question or doubt the non-existence of god. It’s amazing how few spiritual crises one has when one is an atheist. I mean, there’s never any evidence to prove that god does exist, see? Not real, hard evidence. Perhaps you could go around reading into events and experiences, but that would mean you already believed in god. When you start with a different set of assumptions about how the world works, you end up with a different interpretation of events.

Someone once asked what it would take to make me believe in god. I couldn’t think of anything, not even god showing up, because he could never really prove that he was omniscient and omnipotent and also the creator of this world. Which doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t be mightily impressed by a being that was nearly omniscient and almost omnipotent. But it wouldn’t convince me that the Judeo-Christian god was real.

I’ve also been asked if I would convert if my husband asked, if it meant so much to him, if it was a condition of our being married. This seemed like an absurd question. I believe John is the “right” man for me, and after ten years together, nothing’s really shown that to be untrue. If he’d been the kind of man who insisted on a church wedding, on me converting to his faith– even in lip service– I would know he wasn’t “the one.” See, I’m an honest person– if I were to convert with lip service, that would be a lie. A lie to my spouse, the church, my community, and ultimately myself. It would be a lie to god. Why would someone who believes in god ask me to lie to him? And it is not in me to make a true conversion, as noted above in the “What would it take” discussion.

Anyway, that’s my ramble of the moment about religion and faith and marriage and stuff. Watch later for sketchbook posts– John and I went for a walk in the woods this morning. There were DUCKS!