JE #7

My family is Christian but my mom did not raise me to be very religious. My aunt Betty is the most religious one in the family and my aunt Marta is less so. The only times I went to church often were when I was visiting Betty. And I found out recently that my family converted to Christianity from Catholicism after my grandpa met my grandma in El Paso. I do not know the story of how that happened but my grandpa raised his kids to be religious and my mom still thinks religiously but she did not entirely pass that down to me, just like how she didn't pass Spanish down to me. She uses the entity of God to blame things on and expect things of. That is pretty much the impression I got of religion growing up with my mother. You can berate God for messing your life up while simultaneously asking for his good fortune. I judged my mom for relying so much on whoever this God was. And because of many other reasons in my life growing up with her, I learned to be independent and this bled over to not liking religion. I saw it as a crutch, as something to lean on when one did not want to take full responsibilities for one’s life. I have had extensive conversations with most of my friends about religion since middle school but not with my family. And that is also because I do not spend enough time with some people in my family because of physical separation of cities as well as personal separation. Both my mom and the aunt that we live with have problematic views on homosexuality that have caused many fights. These fights weren’t concerning my sexuality but their bullshit views on my friends and things happening on the news. I am not sure if I will not be talking to them about being queer because I just do not want to get into it, if it ends up being a fight or something or if I really just do not see the point in it. They don’t know anything else about my personal life, they don’t know my majors or my plans, and we just don’t have any sort of open communication between us. I see myself telling my cousins but am unsure how Joshua will react because he grew up with my religious aunt Betty. And I don’t know her views again because of minimal visiting times. It’s a border that has been experiencing severely dense fog where my family and I cannot see each other as we are. I have identified as an atheist for most of my life after age 7 when I had a talk with God telling them my reasons for giving up any beliefs I had in them.