#pretty sure that first person said i look jewish because i have my dad's italian nose 😬

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Person who told me I look jewish versus person who told me I don't look jewish: Fight!

[janiedean]

Hey, personal Q but may I ask why you’ve had a somewhat hard time being an atheist in Italy? Is it bc your family is really religious? Is it bc you’ve encountered a lot of older Italians like Italian professors or your Italian work colleagues? Bc I know tons of Italian atheists (all over Italy, in Sicily, Veneto, Naples, Florence etc,) and none of them had a problem w it not even with their families, they’re all fairly young 16-22 but yeah they’ve not even faced remarks from their old relatives.

hahahahahahahaha

*clears throat*

my immediately close family is thankfully not religious, or better: my parents are both atheists and haven’t baptized me or anything and on my dad’s side my aunt is somewhat practicing and no one else does or cares. on my mom’s side though everyone in the older generation is and like I didn’t have issues because of that per se, but in order (count that I live in *rome* which means there’s the vatican beyond the corner):

my grandmother has I think gotten it but once in a while the immortal ‘I hope you convert because I don’t want you to go to hell’ shows up again and good luck explaining her that the last three popes at least said that it’s not a guarantee, and I’ve had endless discussion with one great-aunt on the topic but that’s minimal;

the problem is everything else ie: when I was like, seven or eight and I didn’t take religion classes people tended to look at you weird because hOW ARE YOU NOT BAPTIZED AND HOW DO YOU NOT GO TO CATECHISM WAIT YOU AREN’T GETTING SACRAMENTS????, which ended up in two fairly crappy years when I was... 8-10 yo I think where I felt like shit for not fitting in and I actually actively tried to buy it and I wanted to be baptized THANK FUCK MY PARENTS DIDN’T LET ME DO IT or I’d have sorely regretted it and I felt like a complete idiot because I didn’t really feel it but I thought I was supposed to, and meanwhile I was taking the infamous religion classes in elementary school and man it was not a good idea let me tell you;

anyway at that point I pretty much made up my mind and realized it was Not My Thing and that I wasn’t a spiritual person in the slightest and so I went into middle school not taking the religion classes (it’s one hour per week at every level of obligatory school but you can opt out of it) and I spent three lovely years with my italian teacher (the main one) talking about how I should try to take them/*try religion out*/’but why are you assuming you KNOW EVERYTHING WITHOUT HAVING TRIED’ in front of the entire class which was part of a series of things that lovely woman ended up doing which eventually caused me a shitload of issues in the long run, I always stood my ground, she didn’t quit until I sent my father to tell her to do it. I took alternative classes every time but I was the only person in the school and most teachers I ended up with were pissed off because they had to do something with me rather than having their free hour, every time I got asked if I was jewish/buddhist/muslim/WHATEVER otherwise why wouldn’t I take the religion class? I replied that I was atheist, I always got ‘oh but then why don’t you try it out?’

yeah, I did, didn’t work, thanks.

anyway, that was the reaction I got half of the time I told people older than thirty. and it was good because other than that I’ve had people straight up ask me the following ie: ‘but how do you live without the knowledge god’s over there’, ‘how do you get out of bed in the morning’, ‘so you think stealing and killing people is okay???’, ‘but why don’t you believe in god’, a question that whenever answered truthfully caused in 99% of the cases people getting offended and calling me an asshole when they asked it first, and on top of that if I ask that question to someone it’s passed as rude, if the contrary it’s ‘just curiosity’;

when it came to people my age it was better, but once I had to hear from a fairly close friend when I was like sixteen ‘I was thinking about it and I’m pretty sure you’re obsessed with singers because you’re atheist and YOU HAVE TO FILL THE HOLE INSIDE YOU THAT IS THERE BECAUSE YOU DON’T HAVE GOD TO FILL IT FOR YOU’ and like yeah okay sure bro no;

on top of that, I had another friend (PAST) who... let’s just say that he’s an eight on the kinsey scale but at some point got really hardcore catholic and went back in the closet/started being completely incoherent about it who spent like five years of his life trying to drag me to church, then he managed lying about what we were gonna do, admitted that he’d have never done it if I had been jewish or protestant or any religion but apparently if I was atheist it was all cool, and that one time he dragged me there I ended up stuck in the most awkward situation of my life which included some little old lady who gifted me a rosary that I didn’t want adding that ‘oh, it’s such a pity that a nice girl like you is headed to hell, I hope the virgin mary enlightens you’ when she didn’t even know my name but she knew I was U’s atheist friend so obviously I was fucked already and that about pissed me off to the point that I stopped calling him and I think he still hasn’t realized why I did.

and other similar stuff. I mean, obviously I didn’t get discriminated openly or anything but the above stuff is more or less the norm, these days less also because I think a lot of people don’t practice (less than they used to back in the day) but late 90s/early 00s it was like that almost everywhere and I’m actually lucky that my parents can’t give a fuck about the topic because I know people with extra religious parents who didn’t even consider telling them they actually were atheists period because they’d have taken it fairly badly X°DD but like if your friends had no issues then it’s a very good thing, but it’s... not a universal experience X°D and most atheist people my age that I know had at least some experiences in common X°D that said I think back then it was a lot more common to send your kids to the nuns in kindergarten/elementary school and I’ve met I think one person who attended a school run by nuns who didn’t have some horror story to tell so there’s that too, but like, this ain’t scandinavia. not yet. xD and on top of that I’ve had a bunch of people assuming that ‘well but if you’re not religious why does it even bother you BE MORE TOLERANT’ when I said I didn’t want to go inside churches period in the six months after The Mass With The Above Friend (it wasn’t usual mass, it was some subgroup of people who did things... DIFFERENTLY let’s say) Where I Was Dragged When I Didn’t Want To, but of course no one said that he had been an ass because he completely disregarded my wishes/my belief system (or lack of belief system). naaah, why would I be upset?

tldr: most of my experiences were like the above stuff. later it’s became less bad admittedly but I also am not really interacting with people like my middle school teacher and every place I worked at for now was THANKFULLY secular so X°D but I mean. I wish no one ever gave me shit for it xD