Reply #2: My mother doesn't really know -- or admit -- I'm agnostic.

[Philostopher]

And I don't pressure her about it. My brother knows, and I don't think he cares -- he's gone back and forth over the line before, and I still think he attends church, when he does, more for the social connection than anything else. Nobody could have as deep an appreciation for Frank Zappa as he has and believe wholeheartedly in Christianity, I suspect.

For me, weddings and funerals are it for religious services, family or not. I got to the point where, with church, I felt like I was forcing myself not to think of objections to everything the minister said that wasn't quoted directly from the bible. I think the first four years of my first marriage -- spent with my former Air Force first hubby living at least six hundred miles away, sometimes farther -- got us off the expectation that we'd come back to the homestead and attend.

But family and second hubby's friends do die and get married, and we've been compelled by social or familial connections to attend these things. As I mentioned in another thread, about funerals, I don't pray -- and I don't go out of my way to fake it. I have no urge to be disruptive, but neither do I have any urge to put on a show for a bunch of people who believe something about which I have fatal doubts. Nobody ever mentions it, so I guess they're as devout as they want others to think -- or they know if they admit they were looking around during somebody's prayer, they're admitting to being inconsiderate and irreverent of prayer.

I don't know, it wasn't church services per se that put me off -- it was a particular minister at a particular church who started my journey into logical apostasy. I don't hold that against other ministers or other churches that don't hold the particular dogmatic values this guy held that made me ask those uncomfortable questions of myself (not that I didn't start asking the same uncomfortable questions of youth ministers and Sunday school teachers at around the age of eight or nine). I just don't care one way or the other, and I'm okay with other people who can give me the same consideration. Going to church isn't a very good way to avoid that, though, so unless somebody's getting 'married or buried' I don't.