This topic is stemming from another topic I posted about a week ago about my father who is convinced that the founding fathers of the United States were all Christian.   I thought I should start a new topic since what I'm going to post here is quite a bit deeper and more personal than the other topic.  

First of all, thanks again to everyone for the links and suggestions.  

I don't think my father's zeal will mellow with time... He's almost 60 now.  I think if anything, he will only become more dogmatic if nothing is done to counter the direction he is going.... It has contributed to destroying his marriage.  Although my mother and father are still together, I know my mother wants a divorce or separation as soon as my youngest sister (who's 15) goes to college.  

I don't know if providing my father with good rational arguments will have any effect...  All I can do is try. 

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 I feel a little weird giving details about problems going on in my family on here...  But on the other hand, I don't think it could hurt, and also religion is part of the root of the problem... so it is relevant to.  Maybe some of the people with psychology degrees could throw in their two cents and give me their take on the situation.

 Anyhow...

A little background.  My mother's mother is devout Roman Catholic.  My mother's father was alcoholic and abusive.  He was also injured very badly in the 1960s when the dynomite factory he worked at blew up.  A piece of shrapnel hit him in the head and damaged his frontal lobe.  He lived but his personality was very different in the following years.  He has handicapped mentally and physically, yet not so bad that he had to be put in a nursing home, so he stayed home.  But his personality changed, and his alcoholism got worse.  Yet no matter how abusive and horrable he was, grandma stayed with him all those years until he passed away in 2001.  We all attributed her strength it to her faith in Jesus.   My mother has a brother and sister, both of them are younger.  My mom was devoutly Catholic also, as long as I have known...  Until I revealed to her that I was atheist recently.  We've been talking about it... And recent experiences in her life along with her starting to use reasoning have softened her position a lot.

My father's mother came from a syrian family of 9 kids.  The father of her family was abusive, probably alcoholic too.  And she was very egocentric, abusive, and manipulative.  Sweet if you were on her good side, but rotten to the core if you weren't.   My father's father seems like the nicest old man you could ever meet, and he's Polish.  He's somewhat of an authoritarian.  However, my father tells me that his father didn't speak to him until he was 15 years old.  Mixed marriages were looked down on by everyone back in those days.  So all of my fathers Syrian uncles (on his mother's side) looked down on my dad because he was a half breed.  The uncles were also a pretty bad bunch.  They had their own little mafia going in our town.  So you could see how a teenage boy might look up to these guys who got whatever they wanted.

 My father had an older brother who died of leukemia when he (the brother) was around 16.  My father would have been about 12 at the time.  My fathers family were some branch of orthodox christian until their son died.  After that, I think they stopped attending church except for the holidays.

 Everyone who remembers him describes this older brother as saintlike or perfect....  And he got all the attention.  My father was the black sheep, a just the typical crazy kid who always got into trouble.  But he took the blame for everything.  After the older brother died I can only imagine it got worse.  My father also told me once that a few weeks before his brother died, they got into a fight, and it ended with him saying "I wish you were dead" to his brother. 

Also he had some bad experiences with priests when he was a kid.  He was kicked out of confession by the priest when he confessed that it was him who hit the baseball through the church window.  Also he told me of the time that a priest offered to drive him home from a baseball game.  My father fell asleep in the passenger seat while they were driving, and he woke up when he found that the priest had his hand down my fathers pants.  I think he was about 14 at the time.

So you can see that my father has some serious issues.  He was kind of a hellraiser.   After all that, my impression of his religious ideas as I was growing up was not that he didn't believe in God and the bible, but that he had his own ideas.  That it just wasn't for him.  Mom would make sure we were in church every sunday.  Very seldomly dad would come too, but he always came to church on holidays.  

My sister and I went to catholic school for elementary through 8th grade.  I'm sure that my father and mother both wanted it that way.  

Now, my mother was always very passive, had no confidence.  And she saw her mother's devotion to her father as a model for how much she should be faithful to my father.  And my father was pretty bad to my mom.  We were all pretty much afraid of him.  He was very unpredictable, but we depended upon him.   No matter how awful he was, my mother stayed with him... On one hand it was because she was afraid and too weak to do something about it, on the other hand she believed that marriage was perminant, and divorce is a sin.  So she prayed.  And Grandma prayed.  They prayed and prayed for years that my dad would change.  All the while my mother was suffering.  My dad could be a mean son of a bitch. 

Eventually my mother got a job as a flight attendant, which was the biggest achievement of her life.  She now travels all over the country, and has become freinds with lots of very different people of different faiths (or lack of), and different sexualities.  It really opened up her eyes.  And she's starting to think for herself finally.  Also she is away from home more than half of the time.  It's an escape for her.  She doesn't have to serve my father 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.   My father hates it.  He needs someone to wash his clothes and have dinner ready for him.  He wants her to quit, but she won't.  

This has caused a lot of stress for him...  About a year and a half ago, my father had some kind of nervous breakdown.  It led him to have what he called an "epiphany".  He had some kind of vision that led him to start believing in god and jesus and becoming faithful again.

Gotta go for now, I'll write more later.