Truth be told, I’ve owned a tarot deck for the longest time. Our first tarot deck was gifted to me by a good friend, as he had joked that “I might need to have it on hand if (Bub’s paternal grandmother) shows back up on my doorstep”. I kept it around for sentimental reasons, and because it is a fully functional tarot deck.

The second deck that we acquired was one that I wanted us to have on hand to have a larger deck, and I managed to score one off of eBay for a considerable… dent in the normal asking price for that particular deck because I happened to find a seller that had taken a lot off of the normal asking price for it. Needless to say, I got us that tarot deck as soon as I saw that listing. That’s been the deck that we have generally used.

The third deck that we got, again, came from a friend. It was the official Supernatural Tarot deck.

I also got Bub a deck of his very own that is en route to us now because he continued to eye our decks.

Now I kind of want to begin making a bit of a habit out of collecting affordable oracle and tarot decks. I don’t know… there’s just something about them, and ritual Satanism, that draws me to them. I just like using them.

I know I’ve mentioned this, but this holiday pays homage to those who were victimized by superstition.

Bub’s father and his grandmother on that side of the family attempted to coerce me into converting to Catholicism, even going so far as to rush me into filling out forms for RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). I was never once asked how I felt about religion, or their religion. Not once was I asked if I even wanted to convert to their religion. To this day, I still remember something that Bub’s paternal grandmother said to me — “everyone has their own journey to God”, or something to that effect. No, you just expected me to roll over and die, to convert to your family’s religion because it was your family’s religion because you were going to use it as the battering ram to control me, then you were going to use it as the means to shotgun wed me to your son to “erase the sin of our child being born out of wedlock”, and then you expected me to have child after child that I did not want because your religion forbade contraception. And when I died, as I would have due to the health concerns that I had that would have caused pregnancy to imperil me, “it would have been God’s will”, because all you would have seen me as would have been your son’s incubator.

Not once was I asked if I even wanted to attend the Masses and church functions that I was literally drug to.

I told your son that I did not want to attend these things, that I did not want to convert, and look where that got me. Look exactly how far that got me, until I outed myself to your (deacon? priest? pastor?), and the people that I needed to out myself to in order to extricate myself from the whole situation. I shouldn’t have needed to go nuclear to be treated with a modicum of decent human respect, and I should have been asked about these things long before it got to that point. I was victimized by everything that led up to that point…

I don’t mind who practices what (even Satanism!) as long as they do not aggressively try to evangelize or proselytize to my children or me. You are free to practice how you want as long as you leave my children and me out of it — I’ve even saved you, the “in general theist who might do this” you, the trouble of claiming, “But you’re a Satanist! So you have to be raising your children to be little Satanists!” by stating that I have not introduced any form of religion to them, not even my own, and that I do not intend to do so for as long as they are minors under my care.e The more I think about that, the less comfortable I am with the idea of it.

You may have the right to free speech, as they say, but that doesn’t mean that I have to abide by what you say, like what you say, or continue to subject myself to what you say no matter how many souls you claim you want to net — convert — to Jesus. The more aggressive or rude about this you are to me, the less likely I am to even entertain the notion of your claims, and the more likely I will want to distance myself from you. This does not matter who you are, although my friends are respectful enough regarding any differences in our religious ideologies not to try to “net one, two, or three for Jesus” or to push their religious ideologies and worldviews on me unless I’ve explicitly asked them something about those ideologies and worldviews and make it clear that I consent to them doing so. You don’t get any points here being loud about this or violent.