I find it difficult to be empathetic with people who have had to reject religious thought, because I’ve never been religious. It has always been clear to me that my parents’ beliefs on the subject were absurd; the only change has been in my response to them (patient tolerance to impatient intolerance). I was a conscious atheist even before I realized there was no Santa Claus.
Perhaps that experience was something like what other people go through when they reject religion… except that I cared little about the Santa Claus myth in itself, and was traumatized more by the realization that my parents were willing to lie to me merely for their own personal pleasure than anything else.
I find it difficult to be empathetic with people who have had to reject religious thought, because I’ve never been religious. It has always been clear to me that my parents’ beliefs on the subject were absurd; the only change has been in my response to them (patient tolerance to impatient intolerance). I was a conscious atheist even before I realized there was no Santa Claus.
Perhaps that experience was something like what other people go through when they reject religion… except that I cared little about the Santa Claus myth in itself, and was traumatized more by the realization that my parents were willing to lie to me merely for their own personal pleasure than anything else.