1. My happiness is not the same as your happiness.

2. My beliefs aren't the same as your beliefs.

3. I am not you. You and I grew up with vastly different circumstances. If I believe something, if I choose to behave in a certain way, it will not be as if you were the one doing it in your childhood.

4. I can't be what you thought I would be. I can study. I can draw. But that's it. I can't take your faith, and I can't take the path in life you would have me choose.

5. I am not just a child when it is convenient for you. If you expect me to act like an adult, treat me as an adult, and my opinions as those of an adult, or let me be a child.

6. Don't belittle my opinions and beliefs. Yes, I am still a minor, and no, I don't know everything there is to life. But you don't know everything there is to me, either. And even if to you, my opinions and beliefs seem childish, they are very real to me. Don't just tell me that everything I am now will one day be gone and be replaced by something more like you.

7. This isn't about you, or other people; it's about me, because I am the one who isn't allowed to choose for herself. It doesn't matter that other people are worse. I don't care that your childhood played out this way. What about my life? Aren't I allowed to have my own, instead of shadowing yours?

I told my mom today, I don't want to go to church anymore. And she had been to many churches, and ours was the best one she had ever known. I said, fine. If it's the best church, and that's alright with you, then fine. But it's not fine with me. It's not fine that I still have to go and listen to the things I don't believe, and have it be shoved in my face that I am wrong and they are right. And every time, everytime I try to say otherwise, they won't even listen. She asks me, even if our whole family were still going to church, would you alone decide to go away? What does that matter, what the rest of my family does? Why should I be forced to stay where I'm miserable? She asks me, don't you care what other people think about you?

Why should I? Why am I supposed to be shaped by people around me, the way they think about me, the way they act? Why aren't I allowed to judge for myself what is right and wrong, and act upon it? Why is the church's word absolute? Why should I have to bend my life to something I don't believe?

And what I notice is, of all the atheist people I know, not one tries to make religious people atheist like them. Not one tries to take a religious person from their faith and happiness, to make them see their own version of happiness. It's only the religious people who fight to try and tear the atheists from their happiness and make them see things in their own way.

I've had it.