I belong to a family that is predominantly Catholic. A few have become Muslim and Buddhist. I have always been the black sheep of the family because I'm agnostic bordering on atheist. We had always respected each other's beliefs and never lectured. In fact, we rarely discussed religion when at the big family gatherings, because we don't all believe or disbelieve in the same thing. But the main point was that we respected each other, and held to the doctrine of to each his own, but most importantly, we had always been close. All this has changed however in the last month. I have one close family member who has become a more than devout and obsessive Marian Catholic. She goes to church and prayer meetings daily and drags her husband along, and subsequently, he too has become obsessive. She has in fact started to make claims similar to Leo.
Much to my horror and chagrin, she has started saying that she is visited by angels and the Virgin Mary. She has gone further to start saying that her prayer group are now performing miracles. She talks of nothing apart from religion. This is an intelligent and vibrant woman, who is artistic and loving. She has now become a religious zealot and has given away her art to take up reading the bible and watching bible prayer groups even on DVD and on CD in the car. She had been a woman who was an artist and she was earning quite a bit of money from her work. Now her teenage son is lucky if she even goes shopping to buy bread and milk. He's taken to making himself 2 minute noodles for his meals because there is nothing else to cook for himself and his mother and father have stopped caring. Their prayer will feed them as far as they are concerned.
Where in the past we could always talk and go out for dinner and lunches, last week I had an interesting chat to her. I hung up the phone feeling saddened when she started going on and on about how her Marian Catholic prayer group had told her that I was a heathen and that I was in Satan's clutches because of my refusal to accept any religion or religious belief. After 10 minutes I had stopped being amused and instead started to feel angry when she started telling me that I should go to one of her prayer meetings so that I could be healed and so that I could have God and Jesus and Mary back in my life. She was continuously saying 'allelujah' and 'praise the lord' (hence my initial amusement) during our conversation.
I really became angry when she told me that she could cure me to allow me to have a child and that the doctors were wrong because she had received a message from an angel telling her to pray on my womb
to make me have a child. By this stage I was getting to the point of telling her that if she didn't stop, I was going to hang up and that it was only because of the love I have for her that I was still trying to talk to her. The conversation ended when I hung up on her when she told me that I would not be welcome at any family gathering unless I 'embraced God' and let her pray on my womb ('praise the lord' she then exclaimed) because she refused to be in the same room as a devil worshiper like me. My parents (devout Catholics) are mortified by her behaviour, as are a few other family members (those that will still answer the phone when she rings).
I was invited to a dinner party at another relative's house on Sunday to celebrate two birthdays, my father's and this relative's husband's. Yesterday I received a call from this other relative asking me if I would mind not coming because it would cause too much friction because the newly lunatic zealot has told them that she refused to be in the same room as me thanks to my refusal to listen to her and embrace God and become a 'believer'. So to save others in my family from feeling uncomfortable, I will now be missing my father's birthday party. My parents did not want to go when they found out what happened, but I knew how much my dad had been looking forwards to this and I managed to convince them to go. Is this relative of mine a brainwashed Christian? Definitely yes. My other half (an atheist like me) and my parents think she has lost her mind. She had joined a prayer group a month or so ago to feel better about her beliefs. In a month, that Marian Catholic group have managed to turn her into a stark raving lunatic who has gotten to the point that she's got her nose so far up that bible that she does not even wash her hair anymore. They have managed to convince her that if she associated with me, that Satan would rub off on her and kill her. Brainwashed? Damn straight!
