Them: (says something very obvious)

Me: (confused face)

Them: (thinks I'm confused by what they're saying, so they repeat and over-explain)

Me: yea I know all of that

Them: no you don't

Me: why would you assume that? I've known that since I was a kid.

Them: you were confused

Me: no. I wasn't. I WAS confused that you felt the need to say that to me

Them: no. You're covering. You were confused bc you've never known this

Me: again, why are you saying that? That's incredibly insulting

------------------------

Also

Me: (makes eye contact with a person in passing, I head nod and small smile)

Them: (eyeroll and sneer while making direct eye contact)

I argued with the teacher who responded that these gods didn't exist. I retorted that these people lived, they worshiped, they believed their gods to be real. It's insulting to call their gods fake and one day the religions of today will be in the same boat and they'll call us gullible and these gods fake.

I was almost suspended from my public school for saying this and was physically threatened with violence by several people if I didn't "shut the fuck up". A few people came up to me later and quietly thanked me so that was nice. My mother told me to never bring up religion in school and best to never bring it up to other people ever again. She explained that people hold religion very close to them, as a part of themselves. So if I deride their god, they believe I'm diriding them as a person. I said that was stupid and she said it was a fact of life I needed to understand.

Reviews on this book vary wildly. Someone said that these are tired tropes. But they might be surrounded by progressive or just atheist people. I'm surrounded by Christianity. The ladies in my office are aggressively Christian and make their discomfort around my very quiet atheism loudly known. (All I said was I don't listen to gospel music because I'm not very religious. That's sparked many inane, hostile conversations over the years that I end up walking away from).

Conservativism and Christianity as default hasn't crept back into our lives. It's torpedo gunned through the door that was closed on it for decades.