Yes, that’s all it took. Nevermind that she’s had “Islam – the way of the One True God as told by his Prophet (pbuh)” as her “religious beliefs” status for years. But no, simply saying “Atheism” with no reference to it being the “One True” worldview is just too much.

I see it as a kind of hostage situation because the tables are so uneven. She sends me chain letters talking about the glory of Allah and his miracles fairly frequently. When I one day wrote back to her asking that she stop sending me these things, there was a big fight about how she’s just sharing her beliefs and she’s totally not trying to convert me or change my mind so why am I being so unreasonable and sensitive?

Now the question is, how far will we go to maintain a relationship with a family member in this sort of situation. Well, in the examples I’ve already given, I went as far as just not talking about anything even close to religion with her – which, unfortunately, is a very broad subject that touches on pretty much every one of our combined interests. So for a while, we could talk only about clothes, husbands, and the potential babies we might have. The amount of time we spent talking to each other drastically decreased.

It decreased even further when she decided that my husband (her brother) and I don’t really love each other because I don’t serve him, cook for him, and treat him like an emotionally fragile imbecile and because we don’t feel a need to spend 100% of our time together. This was bearable but annoying. Then the kids topic was soiled when she developed the nasty tendency to believe that she knows everything there is to know about parenting and that any deviation from her ideal is abuse (keeping in mind that she is not a parent). When I told her that her many lectures on what constituted abuse would label my mother – someone I love and who has been very kind and generous to my sister-in-law in the past – as abusive and that this offended me. Again, I was being overly sensitive and attacking her for her beliefs. So then that was out.

And clothes… well, I like sewing them and she likes buying and wearing them. She likes these tight little things with weird ruffles and oversized plastic jewellery while I like more “conservative” fare. The overlap is very small.

So I gave up and we’ve stopped talking. The problem is that we’re still in the same family and that means seeing each other at family events. This means that I am now restricted in being able to talk with family members I get along with better. For example, my father-in-law and I share an interest in evolution. Two weeks ago, as I was telling him about Dawkins’ new book (which I’d recently read and thought was awesome), my sister-in-law (who was at the other end of the room and talking to someone else) burst into tears and ran upstairs. She later told my mother-in-law that I was attacking her beliefs and bullying her and would she please talk to me about my offensive behaviour.

This has all been a very long and frustrated rant and I am sorry for subjecting everyone to it. It’s something I am still trying to work out because I’m very much of the mind that family is of central importance. Ordinarily, I would say that you ought to try just about anything to keep at least a casual friendship with all family members, but I am now wondering if it is truly worthwhile in some cases – particularly those uneven cases where the family member in question is not interested in reciprocating.

I’m not sure that the person in the post is quite there yet. It seems that this cousin is being overly sensitive, but as long as she just doesn’t want religious discussions between them and doesn’t mind the poster having religious discussions with others, I think it would be worth just keeping the one account and agreeing to make the topic off-limits. But if it’s a case where, like mine, this family member has decided that everything is offensive and a direct/personal attack, it may be best to just go for the “once a year birthday/christmas card” sort of family relationship. Why bother working so hard to keep a friendship with someone who is not interested in returning it?

In the end, I don’t think it’s worth it to have to hide your beliefs or who you are to have a relationship with someone – because it’s inevitably going to be an unhealthy relationship.

The other day one of my less-than-skeptical, praise-Jebus, born-again friends posted that annoying UL Einstein absence of God video and I pointed out that it was, in fact, not true. Almost immediately my friend’s friend started “yelling” at me (lots of !!!’s) that I was intolerant and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t true (o_O). My friend didn’t seem to mind, we’ve never agreed about religion and are fine with that, but this girl just snapped. She then claimed to be an atheist too, but that she’d never be as rude (?) as me.

I also wouldn’t have spoken up about family prayers for healing, unless my family was clearly and directly insulting the doctors somehow (which I can’t imagine). If I was asked to pray aloud, as part of the group, I might say something acknowledging the doctors’ work and not address it to anyone in particular, or I might simply bow out and say nothing.

All of my family is Mormon (I left the church almost 13 years ago) and I do my best to avoid most conversations about religion with family. For a few years, it was all about “you are breaking up our eternal family” In the last few years, it’s been very civil because we’ve all learned how to converse about other subjects in life.

From a social networking point of view, I’m labeled as “Agnostic” on my Facebook page and I have many friends (and a few family members) that haven’t said anything about my religious preference. I’m sure they would if I changed it to say “Atheist”, which would send out a notify.

I prefer to find ways to not discuss religion as it makes it easy to avoid any points of contention.

I choose to never resort to creating another account just to appease certain people. If they don’t like my religious view, then so be it.

As for the original facebook debate- well, I can’t blame her for that. I have a hard time not arguing logical fallacies, and as long as the uncle was out of the woods, so to speak, I would have gone for it.