Religious stuff. Long, CWed for Length
@phyu I think my mother would rather I be religious, too. However, the best way to move forward in atheism is, I have found, not to bother with the beliefs of others. My Mother loves me. She is proud of the man I have become, even if I do not keep kosher or keep the sabbath.
Just do what you know is right in your heart. Treat people with respect, even if they hold a religious belief you disagree with.
One of the beautiful things in life is that you do not need to agree with everyone around you and that everyone exists in their own personal version of reality.
I grew up fairly religious, and fell away from it later in life. The way my brain is wired doesn't allow for an invisible force in the nature of the divine.
But, for many of my friends, it does. It works. It makes sense for them- and that's fine. There is a lot of beneficial philosophy in religious teachings.
Particularly, for me, when you strip away the idea of a creator god or commandments from an invisible force in the aether.
In the end, if you're a good person who lives a good life and does right by the people around you they won't really care if you're religious or not.
And the people who do? Ignore them.
Religious stuff. Long, CWed for Length
@Surasanji Even though I regard myself as an atheist, I keep doing the prayer stance when I was taken to pagodas or monasteries because doing it or not doesn’t mean anything to me and I would rather just do a 10 seconds stance instead of explaining 15 minutes or so why I’m not a buddhist anymore. I used to join r/atheism back when I was fairly new to reddit and unsubbed after how toxic it’s. I tried to ignore what people worship or believe as much as possible, part of the reasons I became an atheist is because I don’t want to think about next life, past life or karma and treat religion as something that doesn’t exist for me from the start. But it’s pretty hard to ignore when somebody starts shoving in my face how they don’t like how I’m practicing as a buddhist(which I’m not). I went to a trip with my aunt and her family a while ago and when we came back, she told my mom how I don’t know how to address monks(we stayed in a monastery). My mom proceeded to lecture two hours telling me “Do you even know how to address monks?” and how she’s going to be blamed for not teaching her daughter to be religious enough(always the blaming part included). Just a few days ago an acquaintance of my dead aunt came and asked my mom for donations for the new monastery while telling her it’s true that my aunt donated money but not as enough as her so she died earlier than her(my aunt died of cancer). She also proceeded telling my mom we’re upper middle class not because of our doing but because of past life karma, and she’s lower middle class because she donated not enough in her past life. Hello, my grandparents’ business got seized during anti-Chinese persecution and became poor due to that but my parents work hard to reach this life situation. I’m fine with religious people as long as they don’t start invading my space and shoving their religious stuff. When they do that however, I want to bite back. Idk maybe me not telling people I’m an atheist is not a good idea. I should make a post on facebook where my relatives and friends are present and tell them to leave me alone.
