This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can I say I’m an atheist, when I’m actually agnostic? If I say I’m agnostic I’m worried that people will either say that it’s not real, or try to convert me.”

You can say that your beliefs are your own. You have no obligation to share intimate details of your journey with anyone who isn’t a part of your life.

Anyone who presses you doesn’t respect your boundaries, and if that’s the case, tell them whatever they want to hear to get them off your case. They’re not interested in getting to know you as a person because they want to be closer to you but because they’re looking for some information about you that they can use for their benefit.

People in life will ask you questions about yourself only because they’re looking for weapons to use against you.

You cannot trust people who cannot respect your boundaries. Life does boil down to being as simple as that.

The next time you wonder if you’re “allowed to say something” or another about yourself, try to remember how an orange Nazi turd concocts bullshit about himself and others with every sentence spewing out of his lying piehole.

I am certainly not advocating for any “benefits” of becoming a pathological liar because that’s just disgusting. I am simply pointing out that you have no reason to tie yourself up in knots over how you describe yourself to someone else.

The harsh reality is that you could likely spend an entire month describing intimate details about your life and why you arrived at certain conclusions that prompted you to think one way over another. The chances are excellent that 99% of what you say will be lost on your audience. People remember only 20% of what they hear.

Most of what you say about yourself passes through another person’s perceptual filters, and you have no control over how they interpret what you say. The only thing you can do is make your best guess at understanding them well enough to use the right combination of words that will get them close enough to understand something resembling what you want them to know and then hope for the best.

Your thoughts and feelings are your own… and if you’re anything like what I’ve gone through, then one day, you’ll be agnostic within a specific context and then a militant atheist within another context the next day. The following day, you’ll be amenable to believers, and later on that afternoon, after encountering a zealous believer, you’re back to hating religion and thinking of yourself as an anti-theist while thinking atheism itself isn’t firm enough to get the stench of the zealous asshole off your body and cleared from your mind.

The entire point I’m getting at is that human beings are not robots. As much as too many people want to create labels and stuff people into neat little boxes, humans are not that defined in such discrete terms.

Humans are more like water or vapour, constantly shifting in the wind or changing direction and flow depending upon the shape of the land one moves over. Whatever defines you as you is summed up entirely as your collection of memories.

Meanwhile, your memories are not stored like magnetic particles on a hard drive. Your memories are stored in eleven-dimensional space as “signposts” — symbols that your mind unravels as you recall events from your life… and your recollection changes as your state of mind changes.

Humans are more fluid than literal fluids in nature.

The next time someone asks you what you are, tell them you’re human.

The next time someone asks you what you believe, tell them you believe dinner is being served at 6:00.

Unless you find yourself in a long and deeply meaningful conversation with someone who truly wants to know your person, you have no obligation to barf up serial numbers for their mental registration of who they want you to be.

Be you and let the “Nosy Parkers” in your life be confused. That’s a “them problem,” not a “you problem.”

Being worried about how other people will respond to you because you’re trying to be honest with them about trying to figure yourself out is an unfair and intrusive expectation from another person.

You may not feel annoyed enough by such prying yet. If you manage to get on to your senior years, you’ll find yourself pissed off at such a rude and entitled attitude precisely because you have gone through a lifetime of being worried about telling people what you fear might be the wrong thing.

Don’t apologize for being who you are. You will only end up hating yourself for doing that. If someone decides they have a right to push their beliefs onto you, tell them to fuck off. Seriously. If Helen Mirren can endorse this response out of regret for being more polite than she should have been, you should not ever feel guilty about drawing your boundaries with a nosy someone in the harshest of terms.

Now that I’ve gone on this rant, I bet you might remember a half-dozen words… assuming you read any of it with any consideration instead of skimming over it all.

Good luck in navigating through this monkey house we call life. You’ll do fine if you can learn to duck and weave around all the flying feces.

Cheerioz