1 post tagged “catholic”
I'm an atheist, and so is the kid in the video, above. His mom doesn't like his announcement, and someone thoughtfully videotaped the fallout (but, alas, not the whole fallout, just the beginning of it).
I can't decide if the kid in the video is actually an atheist, or if he's making the announcement as a teenage rebellion against his obviously faithful Catholic mother. Either way, I applaud him for choosing to use atheism as the fulcrum of his rebellion; it might be the worst lifestyle choice he could have made, if you look at the statistics. Yes, coming out to the hyperreligious as a gay son carries with it a great deal of potential (if not certain) pain. But hyperreligious parents who also happen to be smart (which does happen, apparently) might accept the facts, that homosexuality is not a choice - their son is born that way, and sometimes these sorts of parents might realize that.
But an atheist son? That little bastard made a conscious choice to stop believing in god, having dumped his faith in invisible monsters and moved a few steps closer to accepting the universe for what it is and not what we wish it to be. The kid in the video is throwing the Bible into the fire, implicitly telling his parents that what they believe is wrong. The dad seems unpurturbed. The mom goes bug nutty.
I never really came out to my parents as an atheist, though I have been one since my first year of high school. They know I'm an atheist, and probably knew back then, too, and we can talk about it without anger or disappointment, but I wasn't very strident about it as a kid. I openly questioned religion on a regular basis, and expressed my preference for science over faith, but I tried not to be a dick about it. I was lucky to have the parents I had - while neither of them are atheist or even agnostic, my father is very pragmatic and keeps most of his religion and his faith to himself, valuing it as he sees fit. My mother was raised by a physician and amateur scientist who was known on at least one occasion to bring his kids into the garage while he dropped rocks into cement-filled pie plates to show how moon craters are made; they used to take road trips specifically to look at old battlefields or particularly interesting rock formations. She understands my point when we have our sedate debates about the nature of faith, but respectfully disagrees.
The overriding cultural belief is that atheists are inherently immoral. We don't believe in god, which means we don't believe in heaven, which means we don't have any reason to be moral. Richard Dawkins, among many others, say that the moral atheist is even more moral than the moral Christian. We don't do good works because we're afraid of the punishment for not doing good works. We don't avoid immorality because we think we'll go to hell. We are good people because we believe in responsibility. We know that doing good things benefits everybody. We understand the value of the social contract - if you act with ethics and benevolence, then you're holding up your part of the contract. Being good is its own reward, but good people also have good things happen to them.
Personally, I'm not sure I agree with Dawkins. I'm not going to get into the game of My Belief System is Superior in Every Way To Yours, even if I believe it to be true. After all, faith and religion are causing an awful lot of bad things these days. If you ask me, doing good things is fine by itself - I don't need to know why you're doing them.
I'm very glad I have parents who were understanding, if not
wholeheartedly supportive of my decision. My mother probably wishes
that I would believe in
>something, but I never hear that from her. And
I
still get presents on Christmas.
