Friday, February 06, 2009

The all-seeing all-knowing, and grannies.

Today at the Early Years, I was chatting with a couple grandmothers, both of whom thought my daughter was just so beautiful and sweet. They went on to marvel at the beauty of all children. This lead one of the grannies to say "I think anyone who says there's no God needs their head examined." To be fair, granny didn't know that I am an atheist, and that she was essentially telling me that I need my head examined. Annoyingly, I didn't say anything. If only I'd been wearing my Atheist Angel T-shirt. On the way home of course I was thinking of a couple of comebacks:

"I believe the opposite." Not exactly true, I don't think theists necessarily need their head examined (not all of them anyway), I just think they're mistaken.

"Oh, I don't know. I think belief in God requires a lack of imagination." Closer to what I think, but much too insulting. The woman wasn't dissing me on purpose after all. And anyway, how do you deliberately insult someone who's gushing over your daughter? No, even if I had the moment to do over, I wouldn't have said either of these things.

"I don't believe in God." Simple. Straightforward. Let's the woman know that she's put her foot in her mouth without taking an unnecessary stab at her beliefs. This is the winner if I ever get a time machine. Or if this lady ever starts bathering to me about God again.

Speaking of being all-seeing and all-knowing, I can now see where my husband is at all times (or at least where his blackberry is) using Google's new application Latitude. (He's at work right now). This is useful at the end of the day, when I want to see if he's left work yet and I can start dinner. On the news they were talking about this "raising privacy issues" and basically making it into a paranoid, big-brother-is-watching type thing. Of course you can turn the app off, or preset a location, or hide your location from certain people, or (gasp) leave your cellphone at home, so the privacy issue thing is a bit silly. But then again, being a mom, I have recently put my vagina on public display, and rarely get a moment to myself even in the bathroom, so maybe privacy doesn't mean as much to me as it does to most people.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed this post!!! My grandma occasionally says that babies and god line and my mom and I choose to remain quiet so you are in good company. I call my husband's cell phone his "electronic leash". I enjoyed how you summed post up with your lack of privacy. Very funny! ;-) k8

Anonymous said...

I told Kate that religion is a good social control for grannies. Can you imagine the havoc they could create if they they didn't have the "all seeing, all knowing" to keep them in line!!?!

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