Guilty pleasures?

In an online group, someone asked the question "As an atheist, what's your favorite guilty pleasure that religious folks might consider a sin?"

And my honest answer is: None. To paraphrase Penn Jillette, I sin exactly as much as I want to, and that amount is zero.

I make the same exact choices now that I did as a Christian. I haven't started doing harmful things just because there's no cosmic Elf on the Shelf looking over my shoulder.

I'm still faithful to my wife because of fucking course I am. I love her and I promised her to love only her in that way for life, and that hasn't changed and never will.

I still don't gamble because, while I'm bad at math, I'm not THAT bad at math.

I still don't smoke because I watched my grandmother slowly die of lung cancer when I was a kid and the idea has somehow never appealed since then.

I still don't drink to excess because I saw the effects alcoholism had on generations of my family.

I still don't use recreational drugs (other than the occasional glass of wine or beer with a meal) because they can be dangerous and why spend money on something that will make my brain EVEN less functional than it already is?

I still, in fact, have never done any of the things that my youth pastor spent so much time and work trying to convince my peers and I not to do when we were teens, and I'm one of the few former youth group kids who can honestly say that. I still meet the behavioral standards that most Christians profess but do not in fact meet.

I haven't added any guilty pleasures.

But I HAVE gained some WHOLESOME pleasures.

I now have the pleasure of knowing that when I help people it's because I chose to, not because my imaginary friend gave me the ability to do something that I as a wretched sinner would never have done on my own.

I now have the pleasure of being able to truly relax when I'm not busy, rather than feeling guilty for not doing something more with that time to further the kingdom of my god.

I now have the pleasure of ACTUALLY being able to love all my neighbors as myself - including my LGBTQ neighbors - and NOT have to do the mental gymnastics to convince myself that that's what the homophobic homicidal sadist who wrote Leviticus actually would have wanted.

I now have the pleasure of ACTUALLY treating Sunday as a day of rest, instead of getting up early and doing a bunch of unpaid labor on my day off.

No true pleasure is a guilty pleasure. But there's a great deal of pleasure in letting go of unnecessary guilt.