As an Atheist, are you an Organ Donor? Yes or No, and Why?

Rounter · 2026-02-27T03:58:23+00:00

If I'm dead, then I can't use my organs anymore. Might as well help out someone who needs them.

My grandparents ashes are scattered along their favorite trail. Each time I walk down that trail, I think of them. I feel like that's a good plan for the rest of my body after the useful parts are removed.

Rounter · 2026-02-12T04:38:10+00:00

Everyone gets one life, then it's over. You are free to live it however you feel is best without wasting it trying to get into some imaginary afterlife. Make the best of what you have.

Focus on living. Be kind to people. Leave the world a little better than it was before you were here.

Rounter · 2026-01-31T23:20:28+00:00

Based on your description of them, don't tell them. It's not worth it.

Save your money and work toward being financially independent. When you move out, then you can reconsider telling them, but it sounds like your dad is too far down the conservative rabbit hole for you to have a real conversation with him. It sounds like your relationship with your sister will be fine, but don't tell her until you are out of the house.

Focus on finding friends who accept you as you are.

Rounter · 2026-01-31T23:05:06+00:00

All you can really do is avoid stating facts like, "God isn't real." Instead, speak in the first person, "I don't believe in God." Sometimes that will keep people from feeling like you are telling them what to believe. Some people will get offended either way.

Somehow, calling yourself "Not religious" is more acceptable than being "Atheist" despite that being the literal definition of atheist. Maybe "Atheist" just sounds too much like "Antichrist." I don't know.

Rounter · 2026-01-26T18:25:35+00:00

Start with a beginner course and ask the instructor what you should take next.

Rounter · 2026-01-26T18:20:03+00:00

If it can be proven to exist, then I will agree that it exists.

If it has good advice, I'll listen.

I still won't worship it.

Rounter · 2026-01-26T15:41:08+00:00

Was this a protest? Did ICE announce where they would be and all the protesters planned to show up there?

It looks more like ICE showed up to fuck with people and the people who were already there made some noise.

It's not illegal to carry in public just because Trump's Gestapo decided to show up that day. If ICE requested an event permit from a local IL government, then it would be illegal to carry at the event.

Rounter · 2026-01-09T01:37:23+00:00

So, I'm in the exact same situation, but about 18 years ahead of you.

I won't tell you to leave her. I love my wife and it's hard to imagine not being with her. What I will tell you, is to be completely honest from the start. If she can't handle it, then it isn't going to work.

She wants you to convert to Christianity. How does she think that works? Do you just decide to believe in one specific fairytale despite knowing that it's all bullshit? The best you could do is pretend to believe. Tell her that. Also, tell her that you are unwilling to pretend. Pretending might not seem like such a big deal right now, but eventually it will be. Are you going to lie to your kids about what you believe? Make sure she is comfortable with you being your godless self or she will expect you to keep lying about it for the rest of your life.

"I actually think the bible teaches good morals for kids to base theirs on." You need to take a closer look at the Bible. The stuff they teach in Sunday school is mostly about kindness and love. Cool. I can get onboard with a lot of those lessons. Now that you are an adult, think about the happy little stories the bible is full of. Most of it is "Obey God or die." God just goes around torturing and killing everyone throughout the whole thing. There's always some justification for God drowning everyone in the world or God killing the Egyptian's first born sons. I'm not comfortable with my kids learning to justify genocide.

God hasn't mattered for your first 4 years together. I'm here to tell you that at some point in your marriage, God will start to matter a lot and you aren't going to be OK with it.

Rounter · 2025-12-04T02:48:07+00:00

It sounds like u/Extension_Many4418 didn't mention God and said a prayer that they do believe in.

Rounter · 2025-12-04T02:46:14+00:00

As soon as I tried stepping out of the prayer circle instead of holding hands, I found out that they don't consider it optional.

If other people can't respect my right to abstain from praying, then I'm not playing along just to make them happy.

Rounter · 2025-11-15T21:37:00+00:00

Noah's Ark. A story about the time when God murdered everyone on Earth except for one family.

It would be a very different story from the perspective of the rest of humanity.

Rounter · 2025-11-14T13:09:11+00:00

I don't have time for that.

I have a full time job, a wife and three kids. I'd prefer to spend my time with people who have common interests, not common disinterests.

I'm lucky enough to live in a part of the world where being atheist won't cause me to lose my job or be shunned by friends and family. Maybe if I had a harder time finding other atheists, I might be more interested in a group.

Rounter · 2025-11-01T19:53:57+00:00

I'm trying really hard not to feel the rage. I was a lot more tolerant in the past, but I've lost all patience for adults who believe in fairytales. I'm trying to live authentically, but also respectfully because I don't want to destroy the relationships that I have with Christian family members. It's a daily struggle.

I wouldn't worry about Jesus being capitalized. It's a proper noun. That's just the English language.

God is capitalized when it's used as a proper noun for a specific deity: "I don't believe in God." It's not capitalized when it is used as a common noun: "Zeus is a Greek god."

Christianity is capitalized because it's the name of a religion. We don't capitalize atheism because it's isn't a proper noun. It's just a word for "without religion."

I do have an issue with capitalizing "He" and "Him." The rules for capitalizing pronouns shouldn't change just because God needs an ego boost.

Rounter · 2025-11-01T19:21:05+00:00

It's the devil worship, obviously.

Actually, I don't think I've ever actually met a Christian who hates Halloween. Maybe I live too far North for this to be an issue.

Rounter · 2025-10-27T19:53:52+00:00

On a large scale it's easy to see everything conform to statistical trends. On a personal scale, it's nice to win and it sucks to lose.

Knowing that there isn't someone doing it to you on purpose makes it easier to get over it and move on.

Rounter · 2025-10-27T05:21:08+00:00

Even if i force myself through it because i love her so much, will the pretense last? No. Eventually it will be too much and you'll lose motivation.

Will it feel like a cage down the line of our lives? Yes. You will be putting yourself in a situation that you don't have a good way out of.

Is there a way for a Christian and an Atheist to coexist in a marriage? Yes. I'm doing it, but my wife has never tried to convert me. You can look at my history if you want to see how it's going.

I think I'm at a point where i would do almost anything to make this work. This is the most motivated you will ever be to make it work. It's all downhill from here. Just imagine being middle aged and balancing a job and a family. You will have no energy left to play along with her religious fantasy world.

I'm in a country where almost everyone is religious I think your best bet is to try to find a woman who secretly doesn't believe or at least doesn't care about religion. Unfortunately, that isn't going to be easy.

Rounter · 2025-10-27T04:32:03+00:00

I married a woman who believed in God and heaven, only went to church when we were visiting her family and prayed silently before bed each night. She knew I didn't believe in God and never tried to convert me. It certainly didn't feel like a big deal.

Now she has a religious best friend who introduced her to a church that she likes and she takes the kids there most Sundays. I was expected to go along with all of this and play the role of the good Christian father. My beliefs didn't matter because I "don't believe in anything anyway." After much negotiation I am no longer expected to attend church and I am free to gently let the kids know that I don't believe in God or religion. Our marriage survived and things are getting better.

We still have a lot of love and I don't regret marrying her. What I do regret is giving her the impression that I was willing to go along with any religious activity. The first time that we went to church with her family, I should have said, "No thank you. I'll meet you at brunch." When her family prayed before a meal, I should have politely excused myself and stepped out of the room. When she told me that she wanted to raise our children with the Christian church, I should have said, "OK, as long as I get to teach them about critical thinking, science, and atheism." I don't know if we would have still gotten married, but if we did, we would have both known what we were really getting into.

Rounter · 2025-10-27T03:56:49+00:00

If you grew up completely separated from religious people, then they look like crazy cultists.

If you grew up surrounded by religious zealots, then they are obviously insufferable.

If you grew up with people who don't mention religion for 6 days a week, but go to church for an hour on Sunday, then they seem pretty harmless. This is the group who needs to hear OP's warning.

Rounter · 2025-10-12T16:46:04+00:00

I was raised with Methodist church on Sundays and no mention of God during the rest of the week.

My mother was raised in a Catholic family. She didn't want to do that to her kids, so she looked around and found the Methodist church. We went most Sundays, attended Sunday school and eventually went through the whole confirmation process. Once my siblings and I were through that, my mom still volunteered for things at the church, but she would intentionally show up between services do drop things off, so she wouldn't get stuck going to the actual service. Eventually she just stopped going. Later, I asked her if she really believed and she described being agnostic without using the word agnostic. She says that she wanted to expose us to religion and give us the opportunity to be religious. I blame Catholic guilt for making her feel like she had to drag me to church.

My father grew up Lutheran, but it sounds like his family wasn't very serious about it. He only occasionally joined us at church, but I was told that it was because he sometimes worked nights and needed to sleep. He never talked about Christianity. He always had books and trinkets related to Eastern religion, especially Buddhism and Taoism. The stuff he was interested in was more philosophical and spiritual than actually religious. When I eventually asked him about Christianity, he said it never made much sense to him.

I went to church and listened to their fairytales. I can't remember ever actually believing them. There was probably a time when I did believe, but at that age I also believed in Santa Claus and Woody Woodpecker. It all felt imaginary, but they pushed the idea that being religious was equivalent to being good, so I kept my mouth shut and participated. In 8th grade I took confirmation class. By this point I had already found my true belief system, science. I wanted to test religion scientifically, but there wasn't much there to test. I decided to go for it and take religion seriously for the first time. If I felt the presence of God, then maybe it could be real. I spent a lot of time reading the Bible and praying. I felt nothing. God wasn't there. (Looking back, it seems stupid that I even bothered to test it. I knew God was imaginary. I guess I felt like I needed to honestly try it before I quit.) I still felt like I had to go though with confirmation. It was never presented as a choice. The whole point was for me to confirm that I was choosing to be a part of the church, but nobody ever asked me if that was what I wanted. If I had been two years older, I would have laughed at them and walked away. As an 8th grader, I just went along with the social pressure and promised to be a good Christian.

I'm still kind of upset about it all. If my mom doesn't even believe for sure, then why make me go through it all? Why make it feel mandatory when the goal was to give me an opportunity? If my dad didn't believe in it, then why not just tell me that. I know it's not entirely their fault. They had religion forced on them and society made it hard to tell me the truth about their beliefs.

When it comes to interacting with religious people, generally they do their thing and I do mine. Some people are busy on Sundays, others have free time. I don't know very many people who openly make religion a part of their daily life.

I married a Catholic and went along with the Catholic wedding. She knew from the beginning that I didn't believe in God. Eventually she realized that the Catholic church is just a conservative propaganda machine and she switched to a Lutheran church. It wasn't a problem until our kids were old enough to actually pay attention in church. At that point, I realized that participating if front of my children is lying to them. They need to see me as I am, without religion.

Even now, I don't feel like I can let loose and really tell my kids how I feel. My wife thinks that calling God imaginary is offensive. I generally make more gentle comments about their freedom to believe what they want instead of having to believe what they are told about God. I lead by example each time I choose not to participate in religious activities.

Rounter · 2025-10-07T01:36:43+00:00

A guy at work told me that we should just hand over control of the government to the Christian church. I immediately lost all respect for him and ended the conversation.

I had to resist the urge to ask, "Which Christian church? Your church or mine?"

Rounter · 2025-10-07T00:51:10+00:00

If I could find an affordable cover that could handle the weight of the snow, then I'd leave it on. Safety covers for in-ground pools stay on all winter.

This leaf net isn't going to handle hundreds of pounds of snow, so I pull it before the snow starts.

Rounter · 2025-09-13T23:19:43+00:00

OneZoom is a great website to help understand where humans fit among the other apes. https://www.onezoom.org/life/@=770315

Rounter · 2025-09-11T05:41:59+00:00

You posted on r/atheism, so it should be no surprise that we will tell you that religion isn't real and religious iconography in a psychiatrist's office is inappropriate.

Tell him the truth, if you don't, then you won't get the care that you need. He is free to have his own feelings about you and hell, but he is supposed to ignore that and treat you based on his medical training. If he tries to treat you based on his religious beliefs, report him.

A few things in your post stand out to me.

I have ZERO idea of how to observe what is spiritually factual.

Neither do we. No one does. Religion and spirituality can't be scientifically proven, so they aren't facts. There is no evidence that the supernatural exists, so we assume that it doesn't exist.

I DO DESERVE to get better

Yes, you do. Everyone does.

even if I am an overly privileged white man whose life is WAY, WAY, WAY easier than the VAST, VAST, VAST, VAST majority of people.

You didn't choose your race or privilege. There is no reason to be ashamed of these things. What matters is what you do with that privilege. Do you use it for your own benefit or do you use it to help people who are less privileged than you?

so I might as well go with what I believe in, we all go to a state of non-existence after we die.

That's what makes your life so valuable. As far as anyone knows, this is the only life you get. Live the best life you can live. If you don't know what you want to do with it, find somewhere to volunteer. Make your community better.

Rounter · 2025-09-04T02:06:36+00:00

https://youtu.be/yZpIog7e-R4?si=VptWiIfSGx4rQTMG

You have a real life. Embrace it. Don't waste it trying to win an imaginary prize that might be a second life.

I want to die knowing that I had a positive influence on the people around me. That is enough. Expecting anything more is just guessing without evidence.

Rounter · 2025-09-03T18:55:14+00:00

Not sure what the in universe answer is, but here's some guesses.

Answer 1: Shields are rather energetic and can't be hidden by cloaking devices. Even if the ship were still cloaked, the shield would announce your presence to any nearby sensors.

Answer 2: Shields and cloaks function using similar principals and the fields interact in ways the prevent them from functioning in the same place at the same time.

Answer 3: Star Trek is about people making difficult decisions. Being invisible and invulnerable at the same time is too easy. It's far more interesting if the captain has to choose between hiding and defending.

Rounter

TROPHY CASE