Religious Discrimination Options

Please keep this respectful. Any slurs or attacks against other members because of their beliefs will be deleted.

I'm curious to see what members have to say. In my life time I've been riddiculed by my family, who are Catholic both on my mom and dad's side. I've been picked on in grade school too, thats not surprising growing up in a small town with small minded people. But I've never really enountered discrimination in a work environment or otherwise had my rights overtly broken. In college, well mine at least, people either don't really care or are openly curious. I guess there have been a few religious nuts I've banged heads with, but nothing that really impeded my rights.

Now I do hold a certain level of resentment for religious fanatics of any sort, be they Evangelicals, Jehova's Witnesses, KKK, Pagan knights or cults that I percieve as dangerous. My main resentment towards Christianity in general stems from the idea of conversion. I do not think it is right for any religion to pressure or coerce any other denomination to convert. In prision I did not openly discuss my belief either. But in that kind of environment thats a good choice regardless of one's beliefs. I'm also bitter from just the general "holier than thou" attitude I've encountered in grade school and day to day life. All these aspects have formed a kind of prejudice in me against Christians. Not because all Christians are closeminded fanatics, but because a few roten apples spoiled my pie, so to speak.

For me, this manifests as a messure of mis-trust and disdain. I don't often talk about my beliefs with strangers because I don't want to be oustrasized in my community. And yet a portion of me finds pleasure in pissing off fundies. I've been known to challenge the various Mormons or whoever who periodically come to my front door and try to tell me I'm going to hell and need to accept Christ into my heart, under their banner no doubt.

Of course I do try to be respectful, usually, in these "debates" that get stired up. And I always respect people's beliefs in day to day life.

So where have you, if ever, experienced prejudice or discrimination because of your beliefs?

Do you hold any prejudice against a particular religion?

Yes, even if things here are much better than 15 years ago, that concerns mainly Athens and other big cities. I can’t say that there was some serious harassment towards me the last years, because simply I was very discreet concerning my beliefs during this period. In previous years most of the cases in which I was harassed doesn't concern so much expressing my beliefs, as not sharing the beliefs of other people here which they consider offensive. Here, the outcome of challenging the generally accepted beliefs, really depends on luck; you may do, or say something and nothing will happen in return; and then again you may do or say something and what will follow will be simply insane and from some point of view hilarious. It all depends on if you fall on some religious fanatic or not. Unfortunately we have a lot of them here.

So, once, 20 years ago I was attacked (bodily I mean), because I was eating ice-cream on the street on the Good Friday, I hadn’t done it on purpose; I had enough sense to know that something like this could turn bad; I simply had forgotten what day it was.

Another time, 7-8 years ago, I was thrown out of a church, because I had found pilled up, in a dusty corner, some frames with the detailed diagrams of a nearby ancient temple and the area around it (I don’t know why they were left there) and started to examine them. As it wasn’t during the mass or something, it didn’t cross my mind that the people who were visiting the church would get offended (sometimes I really can’t grasp how their mind work), but apparently they did get offended, every single one of them. I tried to find those diagrams on the internet and found some of them at the perseus.tufts.edu, but not all and not so detailed. So the next time that we were around there, I persuaded my husband to take the frames out of the church (they were heavy) to study them by the day light, much better, everybody happy (except of my husband who had to carry the frames out of the church and then in again).

But mostly, what bother me, are the conditions concerning religious matters here. I mean, from 3rd grade and until I finished high-school I had to attend a “bible history” lesson at school; that applies to all schools here. We were taught the Orthodox Christian dogma and only that and nothing else. Arguments were not welcomed (a friend of mine started an argument with the teacher and ended up reading the lesson all summer in order to pass the class). It was a lesson that you had to pass in order to pass the class. The only way to avoid it, was to bring a certificate that you belonged to another dogma or religion (a certificate, not a note from your parents), in which case you still would have to deal with the teacher of the lesson, who would try to bully you to attend it anyway, as well as the insults of other teachers and students, but you would have the legal cover to not attend it (I saw this happening to a girl in my classroom, who was a Jehovah Witness).

Then, we had to attend church with the school once a month. I managed to avoid it every single time, in high school, using menstruation as an excuse. They knew that I was lying, but they couldn’t prove it.

Another thing is that here everything is functioning in accordance with the local religious believes. For example, my husband and I usually go on excursion on the Good Friday, as we both are not working on this day. The only problem is that, on this day it is impossible to find a tavern that would serve food during the day time. You can’t imagine how angry I was, spending all the day hungry because of that. The next time I brought food with me.

Another outrageous event, indirectly connected to me, was when some of my friends in the university got arrested, when one of them lost his temper, irritated by the inquisitive style in which another student asked him if he is a satanist, (he wasn’t, not that I would mind if he would be, but as simple as that: he wasn’t) and answered that yes, he is and what’s the other’s f… problem with it etc, etc. This dialog took place in the university. Some hours later the police arrived at their houses. They were arrested (all of them) and their homes were searched. That was closely after a very unpleasant event concerning satanists that had happened here approximately 15 years ago. At the end, nothing happened, they were released and we were rolling on the floor with laughter talking about what had happened. (I literally felt from the chair from laughter, when one of them was describing some really idiotic dialogs occurred during the interrogation.) But thinking about it a little bit more… it’s not funny.

Considering all the above, yes, I do have problem with some of the Christians (not all of them). What bothers me is the inability to tolerate other people beliefs, the unwillingness to even examine the possibility of the existence of anything different from what they know. It simply happens that here, people that demonstrate this kind of behavior are Christians.

At the end I simply avoid any kind of discussion on spiritual matters, with people around me, except of my husband and maybe a little with my mother. In other cases, people around me simply don’t know what I am thinking.