On the Way Back

Okay, it's been way too long since my last post; like I said, I've been in some financial straits, and haven't even had internet access at home. But I've got my internet access restored now, and I should be able to start posting much more often again.

Though not tonight; I've got a lot of other things to catch up on. So...for right now, all I wanted to say was that I'm back. I'll post more later.

Schoolwork

Gah, well, it's been a long time since my last post (again), so I figured it was about time I ought to post something so I wouldn't leave January completely without posts, and so any readers that may still be keeping an eye on this blog will know I haven't completely abandoned it. Life's just been very busy (more specifically, the teaching job has kept me very busy, between writing and grading finals and students wanting tutoring)--that, and I still don't have an internet connection at home (I don't really feel comfortable spending money on things like that till I have all my past-due bills paid up--and while I'm getting there, I'm not quite there yet), which makes it hard to find an opportunity to make a blog post. There's been plenty I've been wanting to post about, though, and more frequent posts should resume...uh, some time in the future.

For now, I'm going to make this post relatively brief, because I have to be getting home and getting to bed so I can get up in the morning in time to get to the school early. But I do have something to tell about my teaching job that relates to the subject of this blog.

I may have mentioned (I'm kind of writing this post in a hurry, so I don't want to take the time to glance through prior posts right now to check) that I got this job because I'd applied for a job back in October at the same school as a science teacher. I didn't get the job then, but the head of the science department liked me enough to ask me to tutor a student he was working with--and, when a math teacher quit unexpectedly in December and an immediate replacement was needed, to recommend me for the position. Well, during my first interview back in December, he had remarked that he noticed that I had mentioned on my résumé that I spoke Spanish. Yes, I said, that's true.

"Why?" he asked.

Kind of an odd question, but I had an answer; I had lived for two years in Spain. But then he asked why I had done that, and I answered that, well, I was raised in the Mormon church, and I'd gone on a mission for the church when I was younger.

Then he asked whether I still was a believing Mormon.

I hesitated a little before answering. Private schools are often run or funded by religious organizations--as far as I knew, this one wasn't, but I wasn't sure. Besides, even if the school wasn't religious, he might be, and I didn't want to offend him. Was it a good idea to let him know I was an atheist? Still, the alternative was lying--or evading the question, but that wasn't much better--and while, admittedly, I still haven't told my family and the people at my church that I don't believe anymore, I didn't really want to spread that subterfuge any farther than it already was. So I told him that no, I'd been brought up in the church, but I no longer believed in it.

Somewhat to my relief, he expressed approval at this, saying that he thought religion was a bunch of nonsense himself.

(Which, I later discovered, may not be entirely true; he does still raise his family in a Christian church--though I don't gather he really believes in its doctrines.)

Anyway, he did occasionally thereafter talk to me about the LDS church, and tease me about it a little (he'd sometimes tell people I was from Utah--which I'm not; my brother lives in Utah, and my father grew up there, but the most time I've spent in Utah myself is two months in the Missionary Training Center before my mission). And apparently he mentioned to the English and history teacher in the room across from mine that I had family members who went to BYU. (Or possibly he'd erroneously told her that I myself had went to BYU--I don't recall correctly.)

I found this out one day when I went to lunch with said teacher and the science teacher next door (the person who, apparently, had gotten the job I'd originally applied for, though she didn't realize that). The English/history teacher brought up the subject, and I said that yes, my brother and sister had gone to BYU. So then she asked the inevitable follow-up question: Was I Mormon?

Again, I hesitated a little before answering, not sure how she would react, but decided to go with the honest answer. Well, I answered, I was brought up Mormon, and as far as most of my family knows I still am. I do still go to church, but just for social reasons; I don't believe in it anymore.

"Well," she said, "at least you still go to church."

Her reaction wasn't quite as positive as the department chair's; it turned out that she is Mormon (and is apparently doing her best to try to convert the science teacher; I overheard her inviting her to accompany her to church). Still, she remains friendly toward me, and doesn't seem offended by the fact that I've left the church (in spirit, if not in body, so to speak). But she hasn't talked to me at all about the church since then--though that may be not because she's avoiding the subject, but just because it hasn't come up.

The English/history teacher in question has a daughter in my class--one of the top students in the class, too, although she apparently didn't used to be; she was doing very badly in the class before, I've been told, but the science teacher has been tutoring her, and between that and the fact that she prefers my teaching methods to those of my predecessor she's shown a drastic improvement. Anyway, it was just yesterday, I think, that her daughter saw me drinking something before class, and said "Is that coffee, Mr. [insert my last name here]? Shame on you!" At the time, I thought it was a little odd she would find that shameful; did she think teachers shouldn't be drinking coffee for some reason? It didn't register with me until later that her mother must have told her I had been Mormon, and she was disapproving of my drinking coffee because it went against Mormon commandments.

As it happened, what I was drinking that morning wasn't coffee; it was, as I told her, an horchata-flavored smoothie. But--although I didn't tell her this--I have started drinking coffee now. Not every day, and not regularly, and the reason I started at all...can be laid largely at the feet of another teacher with a child in one of my classes. (Well, technically she's not a teacher; she's the academic admissions director, but a staff member, anyway.) But that's another story, and one that I suppose I'll tell in another entry another time.

So, anyway, I haven't been hiding my atheism at my new job (though obviously I haven't been going about trumpeting it either), and it doesn't seem to have hurt anything. One thing, though, I admit, I have avoided mentioning is...well, my sexual orientation. Not that there haven't been opportunities. The science department head has occasionally asked me questions about what kind of girls I find most attractive, and similar matters, and I've done my best to avoid them. My students have asked me if I'm married. And, well, I'm not positive, but I think the science teacher nextdoor may be flirting with me. But I just haven't felt comfortable mentioning that I'm gay. Now, the science department head does use "homosexual" as a random insult sometimes, but he uses various ethnicities as random insults, too, including his own (Armenian), so that's probably more because he enjoys being politically incorrect for his own amusement than because he really has anything against homosexuals; still, I admit it is a little off-putting. Even without that, though...I don't know. For some reason, even though I've known I was gay a lot longer than I've considered myself an atheist, and even though I know that lots of studies and surveys have shown that atheists are far more distrusted than homosexuals, it's still my homosexuality that I'm less comfortable admitting to or talking about.

Anyway, I said I'd make this post relatively brief, and arguably I've already failed to do so, but I really do have to get home and get to bed, so I should end it now. But anyway, I just figured it was well past time I ought to post something, and that I may as well post about my teaching job, and how my atheism has come up there. I'll try to post more often again in the future--I do have a lot more I want to post about--but...okay, you know, I'm struggling to think of a pithy way to end this post, but it's late enough I should just end it and go, even if it ends on a lame sentence like this one.

A Voice From the Dust

Okay, it's been way, way too long since my last update. When last we left off, I was in a state of severe financial hardship and searching for a job. Which explains why it's been so long since my last update--not only because I've had to spend all my time job-hunting and scrambling for money, but also because my internet connection was disconnected due to lack of payment. But let's continue the story from where we left off.

So, as I was going longer and longer without a job, things were getting more and more desperate. I wasn't completely without any income--I had a few tutoring jobs. One of them I'd gotten through another job I'd applied in October, as a science teacher at a private school. I didn't get the job, but the science department chair liked me enough to arrange for me to tutor a student he was helping out independently. Another tutoring job I'd gotten through a tutoring company. Still, while the income from the tutoring jobs was certainly better than nothing, it wasn't enough to pay all my bills.

In particular, it wasn't even enough to pay my rent, and by the beginning of December my landlord had lost what patience he may have had. I'd already been very late with my November rent (and had managed to come up with it only by borrowing money), and he wasn't happy about having to wait for late payment in December too. He reluctantly agreed to give me until December 10 to pay--but if I didn't give him the money by then, I'd be evicted.

Now, it probably goes without saying that eviction would be an utter disaster for me. With no car, and no money to rent a truck or hire movers, I'd have no way of getting my stuff moved, and nowhere to move it to in any case. It might not be entirely true that I have nowhere to go--my mother has long been trying to convince me to move back in with my parents, and she'd no doubt be happy to have me. But--while that would beat homelessness--it would be a catastrophe as far as I was concerned. Aside from the fact that I don't want to live in Orange County, and that I have lots of things going on in Los Angeles I wouldn't be able to get to; and aside from, well, the opprobrium of a thirty-something living with his parents; there's the prospect of it being a dead end I couldn't escape from, or at least couldn't escape from without great difficulty. My mother kept talking about the money I'd save by not having to pay rent, and how with what I'm paying on rent at my current place I'd be able to afford a car--but this overlooks the difficulty I'd have making any money there at all. In Los Angeles, I can still work without a car (or could if I had a job); the public transportation system, while not top-of-the-line (the MTA has advertised that it won an award as the best municipal transportation system in the nation; I find this hard to credit), is at least serviceable; Orange County's vastly inferior and thoroughly inadequate bus system would make getting to a regular job impossible. Not to mention the fact that I would lose the tutoring jobs I already had, plus the job leads I was still pursuing, and would have to start a job hunt over from scratch. And there are many other ways that moving into my parents' house in Orange County would severely interfere with my plans for my future... Suffice to say that moving in with my parents was an extremely unpalatable contigency. But if I was evicted, I would have nowhere else to go--if I didn't have the money to pay my rent where I lived now, I certainly didn't have the money to put down for rent somewhere new (even if I could find another apartment I could afford). So eviction was something I wanted to avoid at virtually all costs.

Which is why I was so tempted by a possible way out that presented itself...

One friend I knew from church (who had loaned me some money)--for the purposes of this post, I'll call him "Tom", which isn't his real name but is close enough--had been urging me for some time to go to the bishop about my financial difficulties and get some money from the church. There was nothing to be ashamed of, he said; that's the reason we pay tithing and fast offerings; he knew of many people in the ward who had gotten money from the church to get through hard times who deserved it a lot less than I did. "Tom" pressed me to just give the bishop a call and explain the situation, and there shouldn't be any problem with just getting enough to get by--in fact, he recommended I ask for a little more than I needed just for rent, enough to get a bit of a cushion and avoid undue stress.

Obviously, I'd resisted doing this. Neither "Tom" nor the bishop, of course, knows about my atheism; as far as either of them knows, I'm still a faithful member of the church. ("Tom" had even mentioned at one point--I think half in jest, but not entirely--that his testimony depended to some degree on mine, that my own faithfulness was helping him through. I...really wasn't sure what to say about that.) I feel bad enough about that, about going through the motions of Mormonism for social reasons and hiding my deconversion from the ward members. But actually getting money from the church under false pretenses...well, it struck me that that would be a whole different and much bigger level of wrong. (And it would be under false pretenses; I'm pretty sure the bishop wouldn't consider giving me any money to get me through my financial straits if he knew how I really felt about the church.)

But by December 8, two days before my eviction deadline, when "Tom" pressed me again to see the bishop and ask for money...I gave in. I was desperate. I'd tried anything else. I'd tried getting loans, with no luck. Payday advances? No dice without a regular payday, and the tutoring jobs didn't count. I had gotten a job at Universal Studios--a sort of embarrassing, barely-over-minimum-wage job that I'd gotten because it was at least better than nothing, but that still didn't seem likely to be enough to cover all my bills--but the five-day training period for that had just started, and I wouldn't be an official employee until after the training was over (and wouldn't get paid until the following Thursday--and even then, of course, it wouldn't be nearly enough to cover my rent). I'd tried pretty much everything I could think of, and hadn't found a way to come up with the money. I was out of options.

So I told "Tom" that yeah, maybe he was right. I'd go to the bishop.

He called back later and said he'd talked to one of the bishop's counselors and explained my situation, and that all I needed to do was talk to the bishop and work out the details. I called him and explained the situation, and arranged to call him the next day after I got out of job training--because of the training, I wasn't going to be able to be at church that Sunday--and set up a meeting.

So. It looked like I was going to be able to avoid eviction after all. But...I didn't feel at all comfortable about what I'd had to do to do it.

I tried to rationalize it. After all, the amount I'd be getting was much less than I'd paid the church over the years in tithing and fast offerings, so I'd be just sort of getting back some of what the church had already taken from me. Okay, I hadn't been planning to pay tithing or fast offerings anymore, but after this, maybe I owed it to them to pay for one more year. In fact, once I was in a better financial spot, I could pay back what I'd gotten, with interest. There'd be no harm done. I wasn't hurting anyone.

I wasn't buying it. No matter how I tried to justify it, it just didn't sit well with me. The ends didn't justify the means. It was still wrong.

Desperate as I was to avoid eviction, I still couldn't go through with this; my conscience wouldn't allow it. It was too late that night to call the bishop back, but I called him the next morning and left a message, and called "Tom" too, to let him know that, while I appreciated his help and his friendship, I didn't feel comfortable taking money from the church.

I still didn't have any idea how I could come up with the money for rent, and eviction still looked possibly inescapable. But I did manage to talk the landlord into giving me till Thursday, though it wasn't easy and he made it very clear that he wouldn't give me any further extensions.

Then, on Monday, December 10, a math teacher at the private school where I'd applied for the science teacher job back in October quit very suddenly, without giving notice. The school needed a replacement teacher immediately. And the science department chair, whom I'd kept in touch with through the tutoring job, asked me if I wanted the job.

This didn't immediately solve the problem, of course--I had a job now, but I didn't get paid immediately. Still, knowing that I had a decent job now and a definite prospect of income made it easier to get some loans from friends, and I managed to get the money to the landlord by Thursday and avoid eviction...and from here on out, my financial prospects are looking much rosier. Oh, it'll be a while before I'm really caught up and financially comfortable, but at least I'm in no danger of eviction now and, while things will be tight for a while, I'll have enough to get by.

We've all heard the "inspirational" stories of people in dire situations resisting the temptation to get out of their trouble by immoral means and being rewarded by an unexpected boon that gets them better off than they would have been had they given into the temptation in the first place. The idea behind the stories is that the people were being tested by God, and that He rewarded their faithfulness. The story of my recent experiences has a similar flavor--I turned down the option of getting money from the church, even though I didn't see any other way to avoid disaster, and then a better option unexpectedly arose. But if the God of those inspirational stories did exist, it would seem out of character for him to reward what was essentially my staying true to my atheism, so I think He can be ruled out as the architect of my financial deliverance. Still, even if I can't thank some divine benefactor for my fortune, I'm certainly grateful for it, if one can be grateful to impersonal circumstance--and I'm glad I don't have to live with the guilt of having taken money from the church to get through my straits. I'm still ashamed that in my desperation I went so far as to call the bishop and start the process, but I can take some consolation in the fact that at least I didn't go through with it.

And anyway, now that I've got a job and am in a much better situation than I had been for the last few months, I'll try to update this blog much more regularly again...

A Month In Review

Dang...it's been way too long since I last updated this. Over a month, in fact (though just barely). Yeah, sorry; things have been busy lately...mostly because I've been, well, busy trying to get enough money together to pay the bills. (The acting thing has actually been going fairly well...but not well enough to make me enough money to live on.)

I'm in a hurry right now, and don't have time for a long post, so, though (as usual) there are many things I want to post about (including but by no means limited to finally posting a wrap-up to the series about The God Delusion), for the moment I'll just give, well, a brief rundown of what's been going on for the last month. Or the last two months, really, because last time I posted I'd still been behind stating what was going on.

So, what's been going on lately. Um, okay, not much worth stating here, really. Still for the moment keeping up the faĉade of going to church, though fairly infrequently; things have come up often enough on Sundays lately that I haven't been going all that often. (Which is okay; I'm doing it pretty much just for appearances now--well, okay, that and to keep in touch with friends there--, and eventually I ought to come clean about my beliefs, or disbeliefs, anyway.) Went to a few more PFLAG meetings, but may not go to any more, particularly as I've since found out about a group meeting more nearby (at the Center for Inquiry) that seems likely to be more congenial--although unfortunately I may not be able to make the meeting this month (and it is unfortunate, because I'm curious what that group's like).

Hm...not much more to say right now, especially since I don't have time to go on at length right now. I am, however, possibly about to start a new job (I've interviewed for it; the interview went well; but I haven't heard back yet)--in fact, I'll just say that one way or another I am about to start a new job, because if I don't get this one I'll find another one; I really need the money right now, and acting, while it's been fun, hasn't been sufficient financially--and when that happens, I should be able to post more often. Being stressed out about not having money, and desperately seeking sources of same, has made it hard to keep up with things like, well, blog posting. But I'll post again--a more substantive post--soon. Definitely within much less than a month, at any rate...

The God Delusion: The Third 100 Pages

Wow. It's been three weeks since I last posted here. That's way too long. Yeah, there are reasons for the delay--I've still been quite busy, and I was actually without internet access for a period of time (not worth going into details)--but anyway, uh, I guess I'm back. And though there are plenty of other things I've been wanting to post about, I think I'll start out by finally continuing my posts about my impression of The God Delusion

Anyway, I said in my second post that I probably wasn't going to do this--not that I wasn't going to continue this series, but that I wasn't going to post about the third 100 pages, specifically; I was likely to just make one more post wrapping everything up. I'm not doing that primarily because, uh, I still haven't finished the book. Not that I'm that slow a reader, of course; I finished the first 300 pages in a few days, after all. It's just that when I didn't finish the book by the book club meeting, I wasn't in a hurry to finish it thereafter, especially since I had so much else to do (like I said, I've been busy). But after this post I'm going to read the rest--aside from the fact that, well, it's about time that I finished it, it's, uh, overdue at the library... Anyway, I haven't looked at the book since that August book club meeting, so I guess before making this post I should at least skim those third 100 pages to refresh my memory...

Okay, back. Actually, I have little to say about this part of the book (which is good, because this post is late enough already, and I don't have much time to write it). Dawkins presents here arguments about why religion isn't necessary for morality (a well-worn subject, but one that too many theists still refuse to accept), and, significantly, why and how religion has been--and still is--an active force for harm, both societally and individually. (His discussion of the "moral Zeitgeist" in Chapter 7 has much in common with a post I made back in June). But I won't repeat his arguments in detail; you can (and probably should, if you haven't) read the book yourself for that. Again, my purpose here is to state my impression of the book--and in particular, my criticisms of it, since I haven't seen any really critical reviews not from a religious standpoint. (I repeat, however, as I've said in earlier posts, that my focus on criticism here shouldn't be taken to imply overall that I disliked the book--only that it's the details I found fault with that I think are most worth discussing here, since plenty of other people have already gone on about its virtues.)

Actually, after reading this part of the book, I think I want to mitigate--though not entirely retract--some of my prior criticisms. I mentioned that the second part of the book seemed somewhat less gratingly insulting and potentially offensive toward the religious than the first; the trend continues in the third. At first, I thought perhaps this was an odd strategy, to concentrate his venom near the beginning of the book and thus turn off potential religious readers, but on further thought perhaps that's not the case after all. Any theists willing to read the book in the first place are likely to expect some offense and stick through it, and if they get through the harshness at the beginning then by the time they've finished the book they may have forgotten it, or at least forgiven it. I still think it would likely have been more productive--from the standpoint of winning religious converts--to forbear from such insulting language altogether, but if he feels the need to put it in perhaps the beginning of the book is the place for it. (The possibility has not escaped me that perhaps its concentration at the beginning of the book is in fact illusory; that it only seems that there's less vituperation later on because I became inured to it. If that's the case, though, then that's likely to be just as true of religious readers, so again the situation is not as bad as it first appeared.)

And as for my criticism about his misunderstanding of the literalist mindset, in his apparent belief that no one really believes that God is a bearded man and that all the Bible stories are literally true--again, there's some validity to that criticism, but it's not as bad as I originally thought. It becomes clear later on that Dawkins is perfectly aware after all that there are people who believe in the literal truth of scripture, and so forth and so on--he just doesn't regard them as part of his target audience. They are, he opines (apparently, though of course he never explicitly says so), too far over the edge and beyond dissuasion; he will address himself to the more sophisticated liberal theists and give the literalists up for lost. I do think he misses the mark here--I think many literalists are more sophisticated and more open-minded than he gives them credit for (perhaps I'm a bit biased here because, after all, I was raised Mormon myself, and the Mormon religion is quite conservative and literalist and has much in common with fundamental Christianity despite the fundamentalists' abomination of it)--but thinking that literalists are all hidebound and unsophisticated is at least a less severe error than not realizing they exist at all.

So. I realize this hasn't been a very meaty post, but like I said it's been way too long, and I just wanted to get something up. Tomorrow I hope to make my final post about The God Delusion--and after that I really need to return it to the library...

One Foot Out of the Closet

No, I haven't abandoned this blog; I've just been really busy lately. I had three different projects I was filming last week, including one three-day shoot in Ventura. (I don't want to make it sound like I'm having more success at my acting than I am, though...for one thing, I'm not usually this busy; it just happens that these three projects all happened to converge in one week. Also, these are student projects and low-budget movies, which means credits for my resume and footage for my reel but little or no actual money...)

Anyway, I've gotta go somewhere tonight, too, so this is going to be a short post, but there's something I've been meaning to post about...something that happened just the day after the Skeptics' Book Club meeting that factored into my previous post, in fact. (So...in other words, it happened three weeks ago. Yeah, I'm way behind on my posting.)

I went to a PFLAG meeting.

Someone had suggested that in a comment to the post I made where I admitted I was gay, and I decided I might as well try it. Maybe it would help me come to terms with things. I looked for a local chapter online, and after being unavailable to find a meeting time for the chapter that seemed it would be the easiest to get to from my apartment (PFLAG San Fernando Valley, which I later discovered was at least temporarily defunct), I ended up going to a meeting of PFLAG-LA.

Nothing earthshattering happened there; I didn't have any important revelations. But it does mark the first time I openly admitted to anyone (without hiding behind the mask of anonymity) that I'm gay. And I guess that may be an important step. For the record, it's not like I don't have any friends that I'm sure would have accepted me had I told them...but, you know, it's not exactly something that's easy to work into a conversation. "Hi, how you doin'? Yeah, well, I just called you up to tell you I'm gay..."

So. I'll probably go to this month's meeting, too. I don't know exactly what I expect to get out of it, but it can't hurt. And anyway, being able to openly talk about my homosexuality at least in one specific setting is, I think, bringing me one step closer to being ready to come out with all of this (my homosexuality and my atheism) completely...

Family Matters

Okay, it's been almost two weeks since I said I'd have up my third post on Dawkins' The God Delusion. Uh...what can I say? I've been really busy. Busy enough, in fact, that...I didn't manage to finish the book before the book club meeting after all. Though this wasn't all that big a deal, since (a) generally many--perhaps most--book club members don't actually finish reading the book before the meeting anyway, and (b) usually the discussion during the book club is only tangentially about the actual book. Anyway, I did read most of it...

Well, though I hadn't finished the book, something did happen at the book club meeting that I've been meaning to post about. At one point, Wendy, one of the book club members, related her telling her mother (or maybe it was her mother-in-law, or some other quasimaternal relation; I don't remember for sure) about her atheism. And rather to her surprise, her mother(-in-law?) confessed that, well, secretly, she didn't really believe in God either.

I briefly thought that I wished there was someone in my own immediate family who might harbor such sentiments, but it seemed unlikely. (Even the gay uncle I've mentioned professes a belief in God, though he has little use for organized religion.) My mother is constantly talking about prayer and eternal togetherness and so on and so forth; certainly no closet atheist there. My brother moved to Utah--enough said. (Okay, that's not fair, and not really meant entirely seriously; certainly not everyone in Utah is a dyed-in-the-wool faithful Mormon. Still, my brother's shown no signs of doubt or of not fitting in with the Utahn norm.) My sister is maybe a little less definite, but there's enough evidence to conclude that she's pretty firmly entrenched in the church as well. And my father...

Hold on a minute...

It occurred to me then that I didn't recall having ever heard my father talk about religion outside of church meetings. It was always my mother who was suggesting prayer, who was urging him to give people blessings and otherwise "use his priesthood". Outside of attendance at church, my father never really engaged in any religious activity or talk on his own initiative. Could it be that maybe he didn't really believe, or at least didn't have strong beliefs, but just didn't want to admit it?

It's possible. My father's always been nonconfrontational, perhaps to a fault; it wouldn't be out of character for him to remain silent on such a matter. On the other hand, he's also just fairly taciturn, so it could also be that he does have strong religious beliefs, but just, well, doesn't talk about them. So I certainly don't regard the matter as proven that he doesn't really believe in the church. But I was surprised it had never occurred to me before that he never talked about it, and it's an interesting possibility...

Anyway, that was a post I'd been meaning to make since the book club meeting almost two weeks ago. And I would leave it there, except that something happened last Monday that's sufficiently related that I'll go ahead and include it in the same post as well.

My brother called me to wish me a happy birthday. In the course of the conversation, though, he eventually mentioned that he had found this blog... This was at the end of what had already been a fairly long conversation, however, so my cell phone battery gave out shortly after he mentioned that, so I didn't talk to him much about it until the next day.

How did he find it? Well, I've mentioned here before that I have a LiveJournal; as it happens, I mentioned in passing in a recent LiveJournal post that I had a blog "where I maintain anonymity and post about subjects I'm not yet ready to discuss more publicly". (I had a reason for mentioning it; it was relevant to the subject of that post; but of course I could have omitted the mention.) My brother had been concerned about certain matters and had tried to find said blog through Google, and apparently had hit on it fairly easily. (I don't know what exact search terms he used, but apparently this blog had come up second among the search results. Plugging in some of the terms he did mention using--"anonymous", "blog", "mormon", "brother" (I'm not sure why he'd try that one, but apparently he did)--brings it up fourth, so this isn't implausible.))

Now, you might say it was stupid of me to mention the existence of this blog in my LiveJournal. Well, certainly when I did mention it there, it did occur to me that this might lead readers of my LiveJournal--my mother or brother especially--to try to find this blog. I didn't really expect it to happen--I didn't think it would be that easy to find. (Then again, I was thinking mostly of my mother, who is more curious but less computer-savvy; I doubt she would have been able to find it. I didn't really consider that my brother might search for it.) But, on the other hand, I did realize it was a possibility.

Coincidentally, someone made a comment on a recent post mentioning that "while [I'm] still maintaining your anonymity in name, it[']s obvious that if someone who knew [me] (brother, friend, other relative) were to stumble on this and read your story they would easily recognize [me]." I replied as follows:

Oh, I've considered that; I know I've revealed enough information about myself in this blog that if someone who knew me well read it they'd be able to recognize me. But I'm not too worried about it. I'm pretty sure no one among my family and the people I know at church makes a habit of browsing atheist blogs, so the chances of their running across my blog--and reading enough of it to come across identifying information--is minimal. And anyway, even if, against all odds, it does happen--well, then, that just forces the issue of my coming out about my atheism, which is something I know I really should be doing anyway...

And really, that was more or less my attitude when I mentioned this blog in that LiveJournal post. Yeah, it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't do that, because it was possible that would lead to someone finding the blog. But, on the other hand...well, if they did, so what? I wasn't really comfortable keeping these secrets anyway, and if that forced the issue, well, maybe it would be for the best. I'm not even sure that at some level I may not have wanted it to be found...

But, anyway, so what did my brother think about what he read here? Well...obviously he wasn't happy about it. (Though the two posts he singled out as the ones that upset him the most--Something For Nothing and Behind the Zion Curtain--were probably the two I'd consider the most questionable myself, and that I probably would have written differently if for some reason I had to do it over again--I do still stand by the main points I was trying to make in both posts, but I don't think I expressed them at all well.) But, on the other hand, he said there was nothing here he found really shocking. And he took it all a lot better than I expected. In fact, he said some things that really surprised me. I can't repeat it here, because, well, it's personal, and while I may be willing to share personal information about me here it's not my business to share personal information about my brother that I don't think he'd want shared, but suffice to say that his religious attitude is somewhat different from what I thought it would be. Obviously, I disagree with him about religion, but perhaps not quite as much as I thought.

(For what it's worth, by the way, the bit about my brother in the third paragraph of this post was what I had planned to write before my brother called. I'd already more or less composed the post about my father in my head, including that bit (and including the parenthetical comment explaining that it wasn't meant entirely seriously). Rather than change what I'd intended to write after my brother called, I decided to go ahead and write that part of the post as I'd originally intended, and then add this disclaimer here...)

My brother thinks, though, that this is temporary and that I'll eventually be realizing my error and returning to the church. Uh...not a chance of that, I'm afraid. After finally escaping from a prison that's held me for thirty-plus years, I'm not about to go running back, particularly after recognizing all the harm the church does. But anyway...

He's said he won't tell the rest of the family about all this, and I appreciate that. While in a way it's good to have it out in the open with one family member...I don't think my mother, in particular, would take it was well as he did. Still...like I said, I don't like keeping these secrets, and I think the time is coming near when I'm going to be ready to make a clean breast of it and come out in the open about what I believe and what I am and let the chips fall where the may. I'm just...not quite ready yet.

I think it may be fairly soon, though. And in any case, at least that's one fewer person now I'm keeping the secrets from...

(Oh, and that third post about The God Delusion? It's still coming...eventually...)