Another thing about certain religions that I despise is their attempt to force themselves onto unwilling participants. Again, the Catholic and Mormon faiths seem to be two of the worst at this, although my only “experience” has been with Catholicism — I was not raised Mormon, with any of my Mormon relatives, and quickly came to reject the Mormon faith, resulting in many of my extended Mormon relatives no longer associating with me as a result, which hasn’t concerned me any since I wasn’t any closer to them than being friends on social media had allowed anyway. But I do know that those two faiths are particularly bad about trying to force individuals who are not even members of their doctrine into following their faith. For instance:

· the Catholic faith “demands” that children born of a Catholic parent be baptized Catholic
· the Catholic faith “demands” that children born of a Catholic parent be brought up Catholic
· if one member of the marriage is Catholic, the marriage must generally take place in a Catholic church, getting a dispensation from this is difficult, and it must follow their marriage protocol even with one
· if a non-Catholic marries a Catholic, they must be “open to life” and not contracept “for it to be valid”
· if a non-Catholic marries a Catholic, they must be monogamous (“faithful for life”) “for it to be valid”
· if a non-Catholic has been previously married, they must pursue an annulment through the Catholic church
· the Catholic church requires that both parties go through various pre-marriage… consults prior to marriage

To me, this is a lot of control being exercised for someone who might never convert to Catholicism, and I can see why it puts a lot of people off to Catholicism. Prior to the wedding that wasn’t with Bub’s father, I eventually put my foot down and stated that I was not willing to do anything that his church asked of me. I was not willing to convert, I was not willing to consent to my older son’s conversion or our son’s baptism, and I was not willing to do anything that his church asked of me in the way of marriage because I was sick and tired of having anything at all to do with his church. It finally managed to get the point across though…

That was when I began to enforce the requirement that I not be expected to participate in the religious activities of any significant other unless we shared that religion in common coming into the relationship. I wasn’t going to go to church with them, I wasn’t going to partake in any of their rituals, I wasn’t going to attend any functions with them. I didn’t want to hear about them if it was something that we didn’t already share in common, and to be frank, if we didn’t share religion in common and their religion was that important to them, I would wonder why we were even in a relationship given what my religious views are.