Step parents and disrespect

How is it so many step parents do not understand that "step" is closer to "interim" or "momentary" than it is to "step in to someone else's shoes"? In old English, the word referred to bereavement or deprivation.

In my case, I have not ceased to exist, nor have I even remotely - like a billion time less than .0000000000090% remotely - stopped being the MAIN parent in my children's lives. I am also the foundation for these, well, orders: 'THINK for yourself" and "Challenge Everything."

So, when the step parent in my children's lives, who would very much like to have some respect, repeatedly disrespects my brilliant, thinking ADULT children by foisting off her inane brand of insanity (religion) on them, despite their repeated requests that she stop, I get a little hot.... It's way worse when I know more about what's going on with her kids at their universities than she does.... but I digress....

I have no particular quarrel with her having religion. I personally think religion is an absolute poison that blinds a person to reality and stifles their ability to love, live and reason. But that's my philosophy. I don't care if anyone else agrees with me.

She, on the other hand, is intent on foisting her stupid, childish 'faith' off on my children, who have patiently explained that it isn't something they're interested in or are going to come to or accept or whatever it is she wants of them.

Worse, her spouse, my X, not only participates in this lunacy, he also will not listen to his children when they say that his and his wife's religion and their determination to choke my children on it are spoiling an already distant relationship.

I am convinced that several really traumatic, damaging events in my X spouse's life have been quite conveniently covered up in the name of being the eldest son in a good, church-going family that not only doesn't talk about such things, they simply pretend they didn't happen, despite the wide-reaching damage done to at least three little boys and probably closer to five or six. I'm boggled by his commitment to a life in an open-topped, glass box called religion, all things considered.

Today this step parent forwarded a clip from the bizarre and weird GodTube. I would be writing 24 hours a day for the next month if I were to start pointing out the abject horror of logic that site is. Worried about indoctrination of children? Well here you go; GodTube is as base and scary and mind-warping as anything the Scientolgists can throw at you.

I'd contact this step-person directly but, well, suffice to say, I'm incapable of doing it for several reasons; mostly because I already question the sanity of someone who would marry my X - I certainly questioned my own for a few years - but more of someone who is perfectly capable of living a good, moral and logical life but chooses a demonstrably false paradigm by which to abandon her right to self determination.

Another reason is that I am fully aware that most 'religious people' are logical somewhere in their being and in order to force that logic down, they resort to intense verbal defensiveness when anyone touches that very tender spot they hide. In short, I don't want to be on the hot end of the defensive blast that's sure to occur were I to ask this insensitive person to quit.

But whatever. I don't actually care about that. I care only that each time she/they forward their ridiculous crap to my children, they further drive in the wedge of alienation between them and my very intelligent, world-minded girls.

Madam, if your religion and your "personal relationship" with the definitely-dead and probably never-existent Christ of the hilariously-impossible 'virgin' birth are more important than a logical, real relationship with my two children, then all I can say is it's absolutely your loss. But at least you spouses are equally yolked with the suffocating noose that is religion....

It is sickening and sad.