My son came home talking about god, and the pit of my stomach turned with bitter indignation.

Wow.
I didn’t realize I was so angry.

But I was so angry.
It came as a slap in the face – how horrible, how prejudice, how hypocritical I was being. I tried to remember how I felt when others around me tried to push their own ideas onto me. I didn’t want to be that person, I don’t want to be that person, and up to this point I have worked hard to not be that person. But my subconscious kept crawling up the back of my spine, screaming profanities at me, and insisting this wasn’t the same. But how is it not?

It’s not. I was angry, and after a very gut-wrenching night of virtually no sleep, I can clearly explain why it is not the same now.

Those who know me personally know that I am very proudly, strongly, and happen to be extremely religiously pagan – a traditional brand of Irish Druidry to be specific. My husband was, for a time, very much so rastafarian, but it died in the fact that he is very against religion – not necessarily faith, but religion as this organized monster. He’s also a bit of a conspiracy addict with a vein of paranoid anti-social hermitism. So, needless to say, we are not the overtly religious household, no matter which path it manifests itself, because, again, those who know me also know I am very subtly pagan outwardly in the regular, everyday, face-face world; Not because I am ashamed or because I shy away from the combative nature of others when they find out (my Irish blooded Gemini self relishes in quite the opposite, but I’m working on that…) but because that is how I feel all religious beliefs should be: personal. Because my son is not necessarily in a position to make a personal decision or connection with any one religion, it is just not a subject of discussion or direct influence or teaching in our household. My beliefs are my beliefs, I do not need to push them on anyone else. My son can make up his mind when he is olde enough to decide whatever he wants to believe in.

That is why it was different. That is why it bothered me so much and made be so bitter and angry with things I cannot control. Christianity in and of itself does not bother me; I have tons of Christian friends of just about every sect and variety, even my own husband – afterall, Rastafarianism is a form of Christianity itself, and I married him! It was not a matter of me trying to push my own beliefs onto my son, but the fact that others were doing that very thing.

I have tried so hard to raise him in a nuetral environment, and yet it is still happening. I am angry that the world I have worked hard to create for him is being violated. I feel like my lifestyle and my parenting is being violated. I am angry that my son thinks he believes in something, simply because he doesn’t know any better or any different.

They are children. They are naive, they are innocent, they are reliant on an entire universe of adults to teach them what is right and true in the world. When you tell them something, they take it as fact, because their entire lives have been trained that what adults tell you is true, and they know everything. They don’t know any better. They do not understand the concept of higher powers, divine interventions or spirituality – they are still trying to figure out their own selves, they are still trying to figure out how this world works, let alone a metaphysical one. You tell them 2+2=4, they learn it to be fact, you tell them the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, it is fact. You teach them about everything in life, and it is fact, it is only assumed that if you then teach them about god, it is also fact. There is no differentiating. He does not know that is not fact. He does not know he has a choice. And that is what makes me angry.

It makes me angry that I cannot protect my son from those who would keep him from thinking for himself – and in order to correct that, in order to show him he does have a choice in whatever he wants to believe in, I will have to go against everything I’ve tried to uphold until this point. I will have to break our neautral household, and start teaching him other faiths.
Which is not a horrible thing, of course, but that too makes me angry. Once again, my life has been dictated by others.
Everything which I didn’t want him to have to experience.