No Thank You

[Content Note: Christian Supremacy.]

I am an atheist.

And here is something that happens to me sometimes: When I do something that a Christian sees as "good," zie will tell me I'm not really an atheist.

(I'm sure people of other religions do this, too, but in my personal experience, it has only been done to me by Christians.)

Sometimes this is said plainly, or sometimes it's communicated via a jokey question: "Are you sure you're really an atheist?" Wink. Sometimes it's just a comment about how that's something Jesus would do, or some comment about how God doesn't care that I'm an atheist; he'll take me to heaven anyway.

No matter how it's said, what I'm being told is that "goodness" is the exclusive province of Christianity and that I am a fool.

Of course, no one intends to tell me I'm a fool. But it sure feels a hell of a lot like being called a fool when I'm told, in one of a dozen different ways, that I don't know the "goodness" within me is not my own.

It's demeaning. And it hurts to be told things I do don't belong to me, but to some deity in which I don't even believe.

Nonetheless, I'm meant to receive that shit as a compliment.

And, if I don't, I'm the bitch.

If I push back at all on the idea that I did not do something "good" because of divine intervention I can't see, but because of carefully considered choices I made, then suddenly I'm the atheist asshole who is intolerant of religion.

No, thank you.

Don't put me in that position. Don't say this sort of thing to this atheist. It is not a compliment.

[From a conversation with @SpokesGay.]