Hi, I'm new. After growing up in the church as a Jehovah's Witness, I stopped going once I became an adult. Before getting married at 18, my husband and I both agreed we would be a non religious household. Well, that's all changed and now he is a devout Christian (yawn) that believes I need to 'get right with "god". This is basically what I've been struggling with for about two months now and I'm finding it incredible diffucult to deal with, but I'm hanging in there! I'm hoping our newly religious differences don't tear our marriage apart but I can't seem to 'wake him up' to the realization that there's no flying man in the sky. Wish me luck!
good luck! but you'll need it. may i ask what brought on his sudden reversion after you agreed to be nonreligious? have you (i am sure you must have) pointed out to him that your marriage was based on an agreement he is now violating?
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p.s. have you asked him "what about your getting right with ME?
I have asked him that! He told me that people change and he is never changing who he is now that he has found god. He cheated on me on a recent deployment (he’s in the army) and I think his conscience is eating away at him. He feels now that he’s going to go to hell if he doesn’t get right with god
One of the real drawbacks of marrying young is most of us go through more changes in our twenties than any other time in our lives. Out in the world in a very real way for the first time, we really run into a lot more new influences than we may ever face again. It is very easy to grow in different directions very fast. It happened to me in my early twenties. Good luck with this.
If he's trying to "wake you up" and you're trying to "wake him up" you've got a big problem. I suggest not trying to convince him but set some boundaries. He made an agreement and you have every right to expect him to respect that agreement. You have the right to tell him that you won't tolerate him trying to convince you to join his beliefs and enforce that demand. If you can't enforce it, you may want to consider whether you want your marriage to be saved.
When you figure it out, let me know. I've been out 3 months to my wife. She sent me a video after a week or so about a satanist who discovered "god". I watched it and asked her if now I was allowed to send her a video of a Christopher Hitchens argument. All I got in response was a dirty look.
I can empathize with your situation. Before getting married my now wife was pretty easy going. She was catholic, but not a fervent believer. About six years ago she got into the very orthodox catholic groove. Now she prays almost constantly. We have arguments on a daily basis because she is trying to convert me. My daughters want to move away from home because of my wife's staunch beliefs (they both love science). I think is just a matter of time before I move out of the home too.
Have you ever considered saying you might be interested in alternative religions? Ask how he feels about possibly wearing saffron robes to work and shaving his head?
Ask for equal time. Be respectful of his beliefs and open to whatever teachings etc. that he tries but with the proviso that he does the same. So if he wants you to watch a video for 20 mins then he has to watch 20 mins of Richard Dawkins or similar. He will soon get tired of quid pro quo or see your side.
I thought about this again and realized that it may not come in the shape of "Watch/read this". More like"Look at God's beauty" or "It was a judgment from on high" kind of thing. I suppose that you already have a lot of stock answers to his bs but there is a well of many more on here and we are here for you
I don't want to give you false hopes, but your husband may come to his senses. I've seen it happen. If he is loving and respectful, I would give it some time.
How about raising the stakes a bit. One night, orally pleasure him. And I mean really go to town, full-on naughty girl fellatio style. If you need any advice, tips or tricks, the 'Sexual Deviants' group here would be glad to help out.
The next day, tell him you'll do it again if he denies Christ. Any time he preaches at you, give him a big smile and lick your lips.
Slowly.
No that would be the devil at work and it is wrong to use sex in a relationship like that. Someone's beliefs are theirs and should not be bought/sold or prostituted.
No I am definitely NOT going to use sex as a bargaining chip
@KMarie123 I wasn't being serious! I was kidding!
Welcome to the asylum. Enjoy your stay.
I do wish you luck, but from my own experience, I can't really hold much
hope for you.
Love is not enough to overcome one partner's stubborn insistence to
cling to their delusions.
I know some marriages survive it, but the majority do not.
I hope y'all don't have kids. That's only going to complicate things.
He's going to want to raise them to believe in things that don't exist.
No matter what you have to say about it.
We don't have any children yet and that's the main thing that I'm worried about. I feel that our children should have the right to choose to believe or not. But he's insistent in them believing in imaginary things.
@KMarie123 Don't have children with this man. You'll be fighting over this issue for their entire childhood. Unless of course, you acquiesce.
Then you'll be condoning the religious indoctrination of your children.
If I'd had children, I'd have raised them as non-believers and I wouldn't have allowed anyone (including their father) to fill their heads full of religious bullshit.
I also wouldn't give them the opportunity to choose whether to believe or not.
I think that's an awful thing to do. I'd fight it every step of the way.
Religious faith is a deliberate mental illness. It's rooted in delusion and falsehood.
I could never willingly allow my children to cultivate a deliberate mental illness.
That is the same thing as encouraging them to develop a drug addiction.
You must be familiar with the practice of JW shunning those who don't have their beliefs?
We do have a group here of the formerly JW. They might have some insights that would help you. "Cult 45 Apostates"
Sorry he went back on the beliefs - that's rough.
Welcome, you'll find a lot of open minded people on this site. And excellent advice in my opinion.
That's very bad news... He went back on his agreement with you... There's no trust anymore in my opinion... Good luck with your fight if you choose to fight...
Being alone is better than being with a bad partner. With my track record, I have no advice for finding a good partner. But I know from experience that being with a bad partner is worse than being alone.
I'm sorry you both can't see eye to eye. That must feel so lonely. I hope this get better for you. We're here to listen.
I dated a fundamentalist... It didn't end well. I wish you luck, and I hope that things can work out. But more than anything, take care of yourself. One of the challenges that I faced so many times is the way my partner and his friends tried to steal my very soul in the name of their god.
Thank you so much. I’m trying to not be sad and move on with my life. We’ve decided to divorce
That can be a tough one. My late wife and I spent most of our marriage as nonbelievers with a Buddhist slant, but when she got cancer, she went back to the Catholic church. She never demanded that I convert, as your spouse is doing, but her newfound spirituality made discussions of whether or not we would see each other in an afterlife difficult. Religion sucks--I felt it tearing us apart at a difficult time when we should have been coming together. Good luck finding a resolution.
I recommend couples counseling or mediation for you and your husband, to help you agree to some guidelines for respecting one another's views so they don't interfere with your relationship. If either of you is trying to convert the other, that's serious friction that will eventually erode the foundation of your marriage. Good luck to you.
There is an illustration contained within your dilemma that makes my case regarding necessity of 'rooting-out' not just theological delusions when one chooses godless life, but to shed so many assumptions about life that are founded upon these destructive theologies.
One and all, major religions are the products of males exclusively. Males, with the help of their gods, also enjoy a 'superior position' (headship for your JW's) in family and community; lip-service and occasional deference to females notwithstanding...
So even though your bond with him was thought to have been based on mutuality of godlessness in your life together, an anchoring in male preeminence still infected his, and apparently your, thinking. If he had betrayed the nature of your bond by becoming a devout polygamist or had just 'fallen for' another woman, the bottom line would be similar. He would still have granted himself license to determine his personal thought system and 'needs/wants' that it would satisfy as more important than the status upon which your relationship was established. It is, as you expressed it, that YOU are the one who must 'get right with (his male) god'.
You thought the poke contained only salad and after you got so far into it, lo and behold, a pig also appeared... Whodduh thunk it?
your decision about your future isn't so much about 'religion' as it is about how you see yourself as a human being. If you followed the theological tradition of being subordinated to a male 'head', you inadvertently 'fed the monster'. The monstrous priority places him in the 'driver's seat' with you having little more choice than to ride-along as someone else's person or to get out and walk on your own path. It is the picture you present at least and probably don't see what the hanging in there will do to what is left of YOUR life.
"What has been seen cannot be unseen." It can be ignored, but just know it will be at a dear price.
Good luck as you face a nearly impossible task. Sounds to me like he got in with an Evangelical group who claims to have all the answers. His next steps will be to convince you that some invisible part of you will go to a non-existent place when you die if you do not change your ways and wake up to belief in the invisible man. Arguing the differences will not help you. One thing that might is if you agree to study how we got the scriptures as they are today, see the allowed and not allowed ones, put a time frame on this venture and know it was all 300 plus years after the time of Jesus. With that sort of time frame I equate Christianity as sort of like believing in the Fountain of Youth because people believed in it in 1700.
If you can do this study and wake him up do not study it with his church group writings. Google it so as to take religion out of the subject matter from the beginning.
I remember seeing somewhere that the earliest edition of the bible that we have, has about 30,000 alterations in it. So much for the immutable word of god.
@DenoPenno It is a little known fact that the old testament was written after the new. It is made up from the collected works of the Torah. These were scattered around the various tribes of Israel and only when the Romans were ethnically cleansing Judea did it become a single book. With the usual editing that goes into a collection.
Early Christians had their own version of it but that was ditched in favour of the definitive work
I agree that you two should not have children together. Complicates things exponentially! WAY worse than now. Please read my full bio- it might help.