Catherine Turley is a freelance writer, a caregiver for disabled adults, and an advocate for animals and the homeless.
I loved my mom. She was the type of single mother who never looked to anyone else to make her life easier. She believed that my brother and I should choose our own religion, despite her strong Lutheran upbringing.
Life didn’t inspire my mom; it wore her down. Whatever inspiration religion could have provided, my brother and I logically whittled into nonexistence. I regret that. What if one more working mom wanted to believe in the national fairy tale? She wasn’t any less of a good mom because she believed in God. In fact, at a time in my life when pleasing her was more important than searching for the truth, religion and the church youth group served a very real purpose by keeping me out of trouble.
The true problem with my mom’s religion was our inability to realize that she didn’t need us to save her from it. We were as bad as missionaries. She was starving for security, searching for a loophole that would allow her to give up the control that was killing her. But we didn’t allow it. We pushed logic and reason, not so much to save her as to fulfill our own “mission.” We didn’t want to shirk our duty to change the world.
Now I know I was wrong. It’s one thing to stand up for your rights or try to change minds indirectly through writing and speaking, but it’s something else to force someone to examine what they clearly don’t want to examine.
After my mom died, I wondered how much the vestiges of her religious belief might have damaged her or those around her. My conclusion: not much. In fact, the only events after death that could have been concrete manifestations of religion—the memorial and burial—turned out to be secular. She was too careful with her money to turn around and blow it all on a party, and she thought it was ridiculous to take up space on an ever-shrinking planet. So, where it counted, we agreed.
CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
Joint Conference of the Council for Secular Humanism, Center for Inquiry, and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
The transnational secular humanist magazine
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