I am at a total loss. I have been married to my husband for almost 7 years. We have been together for a little over 12 years. I was raised in a Protestant church while he was raised Catholic. I became an atheist when I was in my teenage years. I never have a problem telling people I am. My husband said he was atheist when we met. I felt like I had finally found someone like me.
Fast forward to today. My husband now says he has a void in his life and will be going to mass every week. I was shocked. I feel duped. I don't think I can handle him going to church and taking our son.
What do I do? There is a large part of me that feels divorce is on the future. Are there any atheists here whom are married to believers? Did they become believers after marriage?
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Carla,
Wow that is unfortunate to hear. I'm sorry to hear it and I wish I could help you, but I'm not qualified on the subject at this time. the good news is that there are quite a few people here that can better relate. There are a few. Try the hub rather than the debate room.
@Carla: Your husband has every right to be a believer if want, of course, but he has no right to impose his beliefs to you, to you or your child, and if he tries the best is to make him clear without leaving a loophole to the misconception. The most disgusting argument is "it cannot hurt you" and "it's good for the child". Unfortunately I've seen this many times in Europe, Spain, Italy and France, both from Christian and Muslim conversions, I must be honest, don't end well.
My advice is, please, seek legal advice as soon as possible to know what you're facing and what you're entitled to.
And I'm so sorry... really.
I think what I am struggling with is the fact I feel like I thought I married someone who said "they were atheist". I wanted to marry someone who believed the same way as I did. I didn't want to marry someone religious let alone Catholic. This is why I discussed such before we married. I waited 5 years to make sure. Is this wrong for me to feel anger? I didn't want religion to be an argument. Does he have the right to be religious? Yes, but I was very upfront from the get go that I didn't want to marry someone who is.
Does he impose his religion on me? No, he does not. He wants to go but does not expect me to. He wants our child to go but does not expect him to go if he doesn't want to. However, with that being said, our son is 6. He doesn't understand. He just knows dad goes here and I want to go. But.....with my husband changing his "beliefs" will he pressure our son later on? The reason I say this is because of the past. My husband is one that says one thing (because he knows this is what you want to hear) then does another because this is what he ultimately wants. (This has been an ongoing problem and I have found he has done his whole life and it honestly frustrates me).
I would like to add, we named our son "Atlas" from an Ayn Rand novel.
Hey Carla, I would recommend hearing him out on certain things. Be sure to speak with your kid too and see if going to church is something they want. If your kid is too young to make those decisions it's worth an argument with your husband about raising your kid to be secular.
My girlfriend is religious and we love each other dearly. Perhaps try finding the fun in living with someone of opposing beliefs and enjoy the drunken philosophy nights. If your husband isn't hurting anyone but himself and he needs religion to give him meaning in life then he's entitled to that. What's more important though is finding out when and how this void in his life began. It sounds more like he needs to see a professional and the two of you could really benefit from some counseling.
Best to you.
Your husband needs Christ don`t alienate yourself from him support him in this endeavor The Lord is calling you get right with the lord. believe me you don`t want divorce over this. Give it time I think it`s a wonderful thing for a man to come to realize he needs God in his life.Evidently your not filling it.How can you be an atheist a complete nothing!!!!! nihilism is not the solution here.
I can not even fathom why you are even on this site.
The lord is calling me? Are you serious? People do what they want to do for themselves not what the "lord" wants them to do.
A husband getting right is a beautiful thing? Please. He is going to go to mass every week and he "forgiven for his sins he committed during the week". So what is the point? Religious people are the MOST HYPOCRITICAL people I know.
I not fulfilling what? A ritualistic way of life for 45 minutes a week. Please......
"How can I be an atheist a compete nothing?" What does that even mean?
Perhaps you can ask your husband about the void he feels. When did he start feeling it, why? (He probably won't know why but it will get the wheels turning if he has not already made up his mind.)
As an atheist, I feel religion is a crutch, an easy, comforting, answer to life's most difficult questions and realities. What made him go back to this crutch?
My wife of almost 5 years from the get go believes in some sort of loosely defined reincarnation deal, but in general does not like to talk about religion or philosophical issues and shuts down any conversation about it pretty quickly.
Not the same situation as yours but, I still love my wife like crazy, it is an issue I am easily able to look past for all her other wonderful qualities she has to offer.
Throwing a kid into the mix makes things more complicated. But I would my self compromise and allow the husband to take the kid to church as long as the kid wanted to go. But the husband would also have to be okay with you on the other side explaining science and all the many many flaws of organized religion to your kid on a weekly basis if you wished. And both of you would have to agree to not make it a competition. Let the kid hear both sides and make his own choice as the kid grows older.
Take solace in the fact you were both raised in religion, and both, (at least for a time,) became atheist.
I also feel a true atheist would never hop back into religion simply because they "felt a void." A true atheist, (in my opinion,) would need unquestionable real world proof that a particular god existed to go for religion. Just like a life long religious person would need unquestionable proof their god did not exist, (which by religious design is impossible if you believe everything told to you,) to convert fully atheist.
I have a very concrete suggestion: look at some of the lectures of Jordan B. Peterson and show them to your husband. Jordan is a professor of psychology and many of his lectures contain concrete advice on what is a good life and what brings us meaning. His message is even more important to men, because quite often in modern life men are seen only as potential rapists.
There is a reason why people are paying $30000/month to Jordan on Patreon. There is also a reason why his Youtube videos have a ton of adoring comments saying he has changed the viewers life.
https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos
Many people have also created shorter videos of the full lectures on specific topics, like marital advice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VM1UA0pCMQ
30 grand a month for psych advice? Woah. Even if i was a billionaire I would never pay for that, no matter how good the advice is. I would expect hours of 1 on 1 meetings every month if I paid that. I would expect general advice is good, but individualized tailored advice when the psychologist knows your unique situation to be far better.
This Jordan guy may be brilliant, and greatly change lives for the better, which is worth a lot, but alarm bells in my head starts going off when people start paying him that much money, and his generalized youtube videos receive a lot of adulation.
Admittedly I have not yet checked out his videos yet. I do not feel a need to.
Oh and "in modern life, men are only seen as potential rapist".... who sees it that way? I really hope only a small minority of people feel every man they meet is a potential rapist. I have not heard that before. I myself (a man) do not consider other men to be potential rapist unless I see real behavior that starts to indicate that, and even then I will not consider my judgement may be off, I would investigate further before I decided that person is a potential rapist.
Nobody in paying $30000, it's thousands of people paying a little.
Oh phew, that makes me feel much better. The way you worded it, to me at least made it seem like individuals were paying that much.
30 grand from thousands of people watching a recording with helpful information to them is just fine.
I am happy that a guy with some helpful insights is bringing in an extra 360 grand a year. As long as it is helping thousands of people, this is a good thing.
Hi, Carla. I'm an Atheist married to a cultural Christian. "Cultural" in the sense that she doesn't believe in god so much as she has fully accepted the Christian culture and mindset and its various cultural mandates; it is how she was raised and is now the basis of her worldview.
A key difference in your circumstance and mine is that I use to be a devout Christian but realized my life long mistake in late Summer of 2015 and became an Atheist. So I'm the one that changed, not her. We've been married for 25+ years, so I feel a deep obligation to work it out in some way. That said, the 2016 US election couldn't have been more ruinous for two people with different world views trying to live amiably. My wife and I were previously heavily conservative, but now I'm ultra liberal while she remains conservative. I worked on the election campaigns of liberal politicians, she contributed to conservatives. I would insist on watching Rachel Maddow and MSNBC, she demanded Megan Kelley and kept Fox News turned up. What a collision. Clinton vs. Trump, reason vs. ranting, humanism vs. nationalism. So we've had sort of a 'sleeping with the enemy' dynamic.
I am still deeply committed to my spouse. I care deeply for her and I don't make commitments lightly. That said, we are not matched well at all right now. I'd hoped that she would recognize the nature of reality as I had and she could emerge from the effects of iron age ideology. No such luck.
We have children as well, but ours are in their late teens. They are deeply aware of exactly what my views were and are now. We've hidden nothing from them. One child is now atheist, one is midway between agnostic and atheism, and another is still religious. If a family story could be pictured as a natural event, ours would be a picture of a river with white-water rapids.
Carla, if my kids were young and impressionable I would demand that they not go to church and not be subjected to religious indoctrination. It is poisonous. I already speak openly, honestly and often, but if they were little kids the stakes would be much higher. I consider this issue to be your most urgent. You and your spouse can fend for yourselves, but that kid's world is at stake. In my opinion, that child's well being takes priority over other concerns. If you split and there's a chance that you won't have full custody, I would consider staying together so that you have immediate access to your child. If the child is taken to church, you'll need to be able to mitigate the indoctrination, and you can't do that from afar. Once the child is approaching adolescence it won't be so urgent. An older child will be less susceptible to indoctrination and you'll be able to communicate from afar if necessary.
I personally recognize many of the problems that you've described and I feel for you. I don't know if you can make it work, or if I can. Good luck, and take care of yourself and that child. And perhaps your partner will wake from his delusion and meet you in the light of reason. But we only have so many decades of life, and we shouldn't waste them by suffering through a bad relationship. Good luck, Carla.
I married an apologist, she married an atheist.
It didn't matter to me her beliefs because I saw them as inconsequential. I knew she would never acquire any benefit from her beliefs either in her lifetime not at its end and I told her that. She, for her comfort, dismissed my sense of her fruitless hope.
I did not want kids. I'm a person who desires to remain as unencumbered in life as possible to better leave it. She knew this going in. She allowed herself to get pregnant.
I allowed the second pregnancy to give the first born a sibling in life. I abandoned my own brother and sisters but could not bank on my own kids being as stoic about life, and needing family instead.
The kids are 5 years apart and I allowed them to be enrolled into a Methodist preschool, in succession, to give them an early education about apologists. I was careful to counter the doctrine they were exposed to by employing secular rationale. Both rejected belief systems on their own and this impacted my wife in a manner only an apologist can understand.
We never let the differences between us take a toll on our marriage, but it had suffered mightily when she allowed herself to get pregnant with our first son leaving it crippled due to her breech of trust. The indoctrination of the boys was unrelated to that and their abandonment of her beliefs was also unrelated. The marriage remains a tentative bond that would be long ago divorced if not for my own will to raise the boys as a family unit despite my own desire to free myself of the burdens of a largely uninformed woman, being charitable to her in this discussion.
Being the dominant personality in the family, I was able to counter her religious front with a secular one in a fight she knew she could not win. In your situation, if you are not in such a position of strength I would have to say you have legal grounds for making a change based solely on the trust you placed in him that gave your marriage a chance to succeed. He broke that trust. The rest is for an attorney to ferret out for you. Your son is the victim here so take care to involve him as little as possible. I would seek out the legal services of a secular attorney first and then plan a move.
I said all the preceding because you seem resolute in your determination towards action against, rather than for, your husband's radical change. If that seems extreme then you will need to come to terms with his change and decide for yourself where importance needs to be placed. Like I mentioned above, my wife's beliefs meant nothing to me and didn't deter a marriage from going forward. If you can also dismiss your husband's change in a similar manner, then your own marriage might hang together. But, I do see where you've been bushwhacked by his change and find it to be a breech of trust no differently than my own about my wife's pregnancy.
It's a dilemma to ponder. It'll take a good deal of strength one way or the other. Think it through.