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I have a question for the lesswrong community. I've been lurking here for a while and haven’t posted but I think this is the best place I have to ask it. I'm an atheist, my family are Christian. They raised me christian, but as I got older I slowly began to realize the contradictions inherent to faith and grew disillusioned. I so far have avoided telling them because it would just worry them and it didn’t really seem to matter while I was living somewhere else. However, I’ve now moved back to their house temporarily, and they expect me to go to church/talk to them about the bible/join the small group they host, and it just leads to me feeling frustrated with them a lot. My question is this: Should I tell them I don’t believe in christianity anymore and live with causing them large amounts of worry and heartache for a long time? Or should I keep quiet about it, avoiding the confrontation for now, but maybe just making it worse in the future?
1Primary considerations:
- Can you bear to keep living falsely?
- Would you be okay if you were kicked out?
- How hard would your family take it?
Generally speaking, the Litany of Gendlin applies here, but it's a hard choice and, barring severe housing difficulties, the primary determinants are the personalities of you and your family. It will be difficult for you to express those, esp. the latter, to the extent that you could get definitive advice here. Often people don't even know themselves how they'll react until after it happens.
(Personally, I couldn't bear pretending any longer and ended up confessing abruptly. I regret my lack of care in the matter, and my bad timing caused myself and several other people difficulties as I had to abandon religious commitments I had made, and it will always hurt me that my family, whom I love and respect, lives with the difficult knowledge of my apostasy.
Nevertheless, I'm glad I was honest, and I'm much more at ease around my family these days than I would have been otherwise. I fear my family got the worse end of the tradeoffs here compared to the scenario where I never said anything, but as that was beyond me, it's at least good that we didn't end up in the scenario where I just avoided them indefinitely. I'm lucky that, even though they take their faith very seriously, they don't see my atheism as grounds for mistreatment or exclusion. I hope, if you make the same choice I did, you are lucky as well.)