Attitudes

I don't act according to my attitudes all the time, mostly because of subjective norms (Ajzen, 1991) which tell me I shouldn't voice my thoughts or act in a way that I want to.

The most obvious that I run into the most at Southwestern is the need to suppress my ideas, thoughts, and attitudes which come from being an atheist. For the most part one would think that any atheist acting according to his or her attitude would criticize or mock religious beliefs all the time. This, of course, is hardly helpful. Besides, isn't it a norm in our society that we accept that people have differing opinions from our own?

This is why I rarely bring the subject up and usually stay quiet when people begin to talk about religion. And I actually usually don't really care about people and their beliefs. Occasionally, though, I come across a particularly difficult situation, like people who insist they have special communication with god, or can speak in tongues, etc. I think the hardest situation sometimes is when I go home and my little 6 yr old brother asks a question and my mother proceeds to take advantage of the opportunity to teach my little brother more about god and catholic culture. Sometimes I just feel like voicing some kind of skepticism, just to give the kid a chance to make a choice. But I realize this is inane, and that every child needs some kind of structure, and deconstruction of that structure at too early a point may lead to bad things. I'll catch him when he's halfway through high school.

The norms about what is okay and not okay to say about religion are set by religious people in the U.S. After all, they are the majority. So, where someone who doesn't believe in hell and only in heaven may interject a fellow religious person and proceed to argue this point, it is far more of a social stigma to interject and say that one doesn't believe in a god at all and proceed to argue the point.

For these reasons, I rarely voice my beliefs or act accordingly or even mention that I am an atheist, even though I have strong attitudes in this area and perceive myself as having a lot of control over my behavior.

In conclusion, 'coming out' as an atheist' has its unique subjective norm, more specifically it is a stigma- we will see a black AND woman president FAR before we see an atheist one.

Marcos

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational Behaavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179-211.