I don’t know exactly how to start this story off. I guess i should start off by saying I was home schooled as a child. I only went to a (Christian) private preschool and kindergarten (if that even counts) so of course I was taught nothing but creationism and a biblical world view from an early age.

I remember once wondering why people believed in evolution so i asked my Mom if we could perhaps study it. She gave me a dirty look and told me i would have to learn about it on my own.

My only social life consisted of church/youth group up until about the age of about 14ish. It was around that time that i started to get in touch with some friends That used to attend a Home School group with me at a young age. (I will call them Bill and Ted) Me Bill and Ted started to get heavily involved with hardcore and punk music. As i grew up with these friends, they always held their faith strongly as did I. We still went to church and youth group but i started to get more of a social life outside of that by going to shows and making friends there and such. I can’t say exactly when it was that I started questioning what I so blindly believed. I must of been about 16 when I started listening to a punk band by the name of Bad Religion and saw a movie by the name of Zeitgeist. Both those things motivated me to do more research on atheism. After reading many books that tried to prove Christianity and many books about atheism i came to the conclusion that i was an agnostic. No doubt.

I never straight up told Bill or Ted but had brought the subject up quite a bit and dropped many hints until after awhile they finally caught on to the fact that I didn’t believe in God 100%. For awhile it was not that big of a deal, We had debates but we still coexisted very well. Slowly but surely that all changed. We started hanging out with alot of people and in a country where about 90% believe in God or a higher power they just so happened to as well. As did most everyone i knew. I remember one time when i was at a church with about 5 of my friends we were all outside eating some food and one of my friends (Who shall remain nameless) Said to me…”Hey man can i be straight with you for a second?” Me: “Sure.” Him: “Alright…can you get your head out of your ass and just believe already? We all know HES real” I was just quite hoping he would shut up but then Ted decided to add on to that comment by saying “Yeah I’m sick of this atheist/agnostic bull shit” (yes they cuss.) I still just stayed quite and they all laughed and put in their own harsh comments. Due to the fact that i wasn’t saying anything Bill decided to mimic what he thought i would say in a very sarcastic voice. “Whhy are you guys making fun of me?? I can believe what i want.” I know that all might sound kinda over exaggerated but i promise you it was all word for word.

As time went on i finally realized i was an Atheist for sure. I remember the night i told Ted i was an atheist he just said “well that’s depressing” I agreed to an extent due to the fact that all my close friends and family believe in God. I sometimes feel like the only one of my kind. I’m no more than a casual acquaintance with very few non-believers. Bill and Ted both slowly started taking me less seriously as a person. When ever my opinion would come up on any subject they would just make fun of it or belittle it. They always call me politically correct as an insult because i take a strong stance against Sexism, Homophobia, And racism. I don’t use the terms “Nigger”, “Fag” or “hot babe” and they make fun of me for that all the time. Another close friend of ours always goes out of his way to use those words just to try to get a reaction out of me. But i just don’t care anymore. I am now 17 (18 in 2 months) and its at the point where i can’t even bring up any issue that i find to be important because they just won’t listen.

You may be thinking to yourself…”Why doesn’t this kid just get new friends?”
Well its just not that simple. I have known these people for years and have built up a tight friendship with them. Even though i have told you about the bad we have had some pretty damn good times together. Forming a bond like that with other people takes time and is not as easy as it sounds. Although if i met the right people I would honestly leave them in a heart beat.

My family is a somewhat different story. I have 4 siblings and my youngest and oldest brothers are the only ones that know I’m a non-believer. When i told my older brother he didn’t care and said he has been an Agnostic for awhile now. I wasn’t that shocked but then he said (jokingly) if i told anyone he would kill me. He pretty much pretends to be a Christan. I guess its just not a big of a deal to most people as it is to me. I think my parents kind of know but probably deny it to themselves. They have seen The God Delusion laying around my room, I don’t go to church, they probably hear the negative comments i make about religion, but honestly i could give two craps if my rents found out or not. I hate them. They are awful people who don’t even deserve the right to be called “parents”. I’m not gonna go into to detail why they are such failures because that’s not what this story is about.

Even after reading this no one will fully understand my situation because I have left many things out and no one else has my outlook on life nor can they see things from my perspective. I have many other crazy stories that I just don’t wish to share. Typing this all out and reading other stories has been very therapeutic for me though.

I have been to The Creation Museum, I have read The Bible more than once, I have given my life to Christ multiple times, I don’t believe in the god of the bible! Nor any gods for that matter.

THE END.

I came out godless on television yesterday on 11/01/09. I started a group with other freethinkers in Evansville, Indiana and was interviewed about it. We started in May of this year and have grown to over 260 members. It was refreshing to tell this evangelical town that we exist and stand to be recognized.

Not long ago I received the following email from Ed Owens, who lives in Missouri and attends a Church of Christ there with his wife, who still believes. Here’s what he said:

I’m a 50 year old man from Missouri who preached for almost 30 years for the Church of Christ. Several months ago I read Joe Holman’s article at minister turns atheist and began my study of why he would do such a thing. I am now convinced by my own studies of the absurdity of the book called the Bible. My family on both sides are all members of the church and are now giving me pure hell about it. I’m seeing a psychologist at the request of all the family. They seem to think she will reconvert me, I guess. That’s their knee-jerk response; I must be coo coo or something like that.

In another email he added:

I was raised in a Church of Christ family and was baptized at the age of 19 by my sibling brother who is an Evangelist for the Church of Christ. We are the one cup one loaf no Sunday School group. My wife also has the same roots in the Church and still does. My brother and I married sisters. He got the younger and I got the older. He is eight years older than me. My wife is seven years and a few months older than I am. She was married before to the same guy twice while away from the church. When she returned and confessed her unfaithfulness to the church and asked God’s forgiveness she was reinstated as a member in good standing.

I began preaching in 1978 at the tender age of 20 and gave it all fervor and conviction that I could muster. My Dad was a preacher for the CofC and an Elder for many years so you could say I was following in his steps as was two of my siblings besides me.

I came across Joe Holman’s article on the internet entitled “minister turns atheist” and I couldn’t help but wonder what would possess someone who was once a minister to turn to atheism. To make a long story short I studied his arguments and many other atheist arguments and found the Scriptures severely lacking in credibility and accuracy. I’ve been in touch with Joe and have corresponded quite often in the past few months.

I left the church and had it announced last Wednesday evening of my intentions. It came as quite a shock to some but not to all. My poor wife came unhinged when she began to discover my intentions. She has settled down somewhat in the past week. I told her I would attend with her on Sundays if she wanted and of course she does. How long that will last I have no idea. It is very difficult to set through a service and listen to a message that is full of error and conjecture and not be tempted to jump up and declare, “It is a bunch of hooey!” You know what hooey is, don’t you? I thought so. DUNG! MANURE! KA-KA!

When the de-conversion started I was devastated!!! I felt like I had been lied to all my life. I was raised to believe the scriptures were without error and had no contradictions whatsoever. When I took the blinders off and began to see the multitude of errors and contradictions I became angry and tried to point them out to my Evangelist brother, who by the way had been my mentor all my life, and how he might see the truth of all this. You can imagine the result. He began to tell me how deluded I was and not to read that junk, as he called it, it would just confuse me and warp my mind. I tried time after time to illustrate the errors to him but he would not hear of it. He and I no longer speak to each other. He’s refused to answer my email because he can’t control the situation by his overpowering personality and make me shut up!

I’ve tried subtly to show others the errors and to no avail. I’ve even been told to quit trying to proselyte members. Any advice you can give me I sure would appreciate it!!! My wife belittles me at every turn claiming that I’m headed for Hell if I don’t change and repent. My brother likewise gives me fits. He is an Evangelist for the church and at one time my dearest and closest friend, past tense!

I told him that until he put his foot down they wouldn’t leave him alone, so he composed the following letter and read it after last Wednesday’s services:

It has come to my attention that some folks believe I have lost my mind. I believe the term was mentally ill. Let me assure you each and everyone that is not the case.

I stand before you this evening to set the record straight. I AM NOT MENTALLY ILL.

I am quite sane, I assure you. If this does not persuade you then you may call my analyst, who I have been seeing at the request of family and friends, and will verify what I have just said. I have given written legal permission to divulge my mental state.

People sincerely disagree on a host of issues, from who should be the next President, to which diet is best for losing weight. No one ever thinks to say that people who disagree about such issues is mentally ill. So why should that be the case here? Many of us have decided to walk away from the Christian faith, including former Church of Christ preachers Farrell Till, Joe Holman and John W. Loftus. I no longer believe for the same reasons you don’t accept Islam or Mormonism, and no one considers those who don’t believe them to be mentally ill for doing so.

Now, that having been said, I wish to make some things crystal clear so that not a single person misunderstands why I am up here.

1. I am no longer a member of the church.

2. I do NOT need reconverting PLEASE RESIST THE TEMPTATION TO TRY!

3. I will not debate, verbally converse, or argue with ANYONE on the issues surrounding my decision to leave the church.

4. If you feel so disposed to chastise me, I reserve the right to respond in kind. When you do, realize that you are only reinforcing my decision by not showing that you care for me as a person.

5. I still love each and every one of you irregardless of your feelings toward me. I really do.

6. I may attend services from time to time out of respect, but I will be attending less and less, since it would be no different for you if you were asked to attend a Jewish service, which you don’t believe. I admire your convictions even if I do not share in them.

7. I have been accused of trying to de-convert members with emails. I submit material for consideration by email and when I am told to stop, I DO!

In conclusion, I understand your concern for my spiritual well being. You have voiced it and I have heard. Now, please stop. I am assuming full responsibility for my own actions from this point forward.

You will not appreciate my decision I am sure, but you are going to have to learn to accept it because I am confident upon the ground I stand.

Then the shit hit the fan. Here’s what he wrote me last night afterwards:

I read the letter to the congregation after services had concluded and it was instant fireworks! My brother had to put in his two cents worth.

He claimed the analyst was my own decision, which was a lie, and then shouted that I was dis-fellowshipped. I thought that was really strange since I had just announced my own leaving of the faith. I asked if I was banned from the church assemblies and he said no, there was no need for me to attend ‘cause I would just be a hypocrite by doing so. I should have called him on the carpet right in front of everyone about not following scriptural process of dis-fellowship, but I didn’t, I just walked out.

I know I did the right thing but now my wife has no intention of attending that congregation any longer. She says she will attend where my daughter goes.

Thanks again for your support.

Why in the hell do Christians have to make it so hard on us when we no longer believe? I’m proud of Ed. He did what was necessary and right. He’s one of our unsung heroes. And I’m also proud of his wife for loving Ed enough to leave that church over it.

Before I start rambling, if you want to know what Humanism is all about….

I thought I’d write about my reasons for being Humanistic…

I had an odd and sort of fractured childhood, but when I was very little I remember my parents were evangelistic Christians, or whatever the correct term is…. I didn’t often get to go to their church – it was an odd, small 70′s box of a building, and inside there were ‘new age’ Christians in white robes, who would push you over with the power of Christ (or rather, their hand) it scared me really, and the way my parents talked about God made me feel uncomfortable, because I had little seeds of doubt right from the start…

Later on, after we moved house, my parents tried the local (more um, normal) church, and disliked it, so they seemed to forget about Christianity, and never really mentioned it again. Sunday turned into a day which was spent lounging round the house drinking wine until Mum saw double….

When I met Tony (my husband) I hadn’t really thought about God all that much, I think it’s much easier in the UK to just avoid religion, as it doesn’t seem as culturally important here as in the US and other countries… but when you get into a proper relationship, you discuss everything don’t you, so naturally, eventually it came up…. I thought of myself at that time as an Agnostic, I was sitting on the fence, not really caring about making my mind up. Tony on the other hand is a supremely logical creature (or at least thinks he is, but it’s just ‘man’ logic, and therefore incorrect most of the time ) I found myself agreeing with a lot of the things he said – that there is no proof of a higher power, there never has been proof, that a lot of things in the bible are impossible (the lack of evolution, the whole nativity story etc etc) and over the next few months I decided to become an atheist…

There were a few things that troubled me about being an atheist – for a start when I said ‘I’m an atheist’ I felt it was a sort of negative statement… I was in effect saying ‘I don’t believe in God’ which can be easily twisted into ‘I don’t believe in much of anything’…. also faith is important to me. How can you be an atheist but value faith? Well, I started by attempting to have faith in myself, I believe in myself. I have lost that belief from time to time, sometimes for long periods, but it always returns…. I have faith in my ability to be a good person, a person of worth, a loving, caring human. But that was just not quite enough, it was a very closed bubble of faith, and it didn’t feel quite comfortable….

So I started to expand my bubble…. I didn’t just believe in myself, I didn’t just have faith in myself… I had faith in Tony, my children, people close to me…. then I realised after a while that I have faith in humanity. It dawned on me that I have an integral faith in human beings and humanity as a whole. Humanity may go astray from time to time, have it’s bad apples and bad moments but intrinsically I feel that humanity has this amazing capacity for caring, and love…. and I have faith in that, a very strong faith. I also believe that each person, no matter how much they have strayed, no matter what they may have thought or done, can find the happiness, the caring and the love inside themselves, if they are willing. Some people may need a lifetime of professional care, but I think a glimmer of that ‘goodness’ will shine through. I have faith in people.

It took a while for me to realise that this was Humanism… or at least my own form of Humanism. My mother in law Phyllis has recently started talking to me about her Humanistic beliefs, and the Liverpool group she is thinking of joining….. rather than converting me she helped me to realise that this was what I had been believing in all along. I’m looking forward to having people to share it with.

My beliefs may seem very naive, and I find the problem I have with expressing them to others is that the age card gets pulled a lot…. a few people have laughed off my beliefs and told me that when I have ‘lived a little’ I will lose my faith in people….. I would offer those people the chance to walk in my childhood shoes, in which I met a few people who did evil things…. and then see if they would tell me the same thing. I believe that people who do evil things still have the capacity for good – it’s not God given, it is residing somewhere deep within themselves.

Anyway I should shut up, Come All Ye Faithful has just come onto Classic Fm and I feel suitably sinful

I was raised in the middle part of the last century in a small town in remote rural Missouri. I wanted to be part of the community, so I joined the church when I was eight or nine. (We had attended services faithfully for my whole life). As I grew older, things didn’t add up, though. How come there were all these different brands of faith, all claiming to be the one true faith? How come things were such a piece of shit at home? I grew outspokenly skeptical, and soon I was labeled as the village atheist; as a teenager squadrons of churchgoers would appear at my door to convert me whenever a roving evangelist hit town. It seemed funny at the time.

About the time I finished high school, though, my life went through a period of crisis. My girl dumped me, I was into a lot of sixties stuff, and the Jesus freaks were in town. The Jesus freaks included some people who I had thought of as cool, and joining them seemed like a way to shut down mentally and let someone else do my thinking for a while. So I did. Not wanting to do anything for halfhearted or insincere motives, I brought myself to be the most sincere, committed, heartfelt, Jesus freak that I could be. I moved into a commune, started prayer groups (that, sadly, continue to this day) and evangelized on the streets, converting many of my friends. Years went by, and my fervor (i.e., fanaticism) only increased. Then, my family physician persuaded me to go to medical school. He had known me as a bright young man, and he thought I would make a good physician.

At his suggestion, I went back to college to take an undergraduate degree, but soon I found things that were deeply disturbing to my faith. The first of these was when I took zoology, and we dissected the fetal pig. During the examination of the surface anatomy, I was stunned to see that our (female) fetal pig had a clitoris! I knew that the only function of the clitoris was to give sexual pleasure- but only humans needed a clitoris, since we were the only animals who had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so only humans had free will. Animals had sex out of instinct, not by choice; yet the undeniable presence of the porcine clitoris suggested that animals acted from motives like our own.

As I continued my studies I encountered over and over evidence that challenged what I had been taught about my faith. In physical chemistry and cell physiology I learned that living things weren’t anything but bags of chemicals that obeyed the same laws as non-living systems. Comparative anatomy showed how much more likely it was that widely different creatures had evolved from common creatures over time, since they were so similar (and would work so much better with a few design changes; e.g., the human sinus system). Studies of the laws of thermodynamics showed that it was inevitable that complex systems would arise from simple systems, just as eddies flow upstream in a river’s overall downstream movement, entropy increasing in the total system. I don’t remember any sudden moment when I realized that I had been transformed from a religious zealot into an atheist, but gradually my faith evaporated. What remained has been a source of confidence and peace. Life has only the meaning we give to it. There is no permanence. We are grass. I’ve found this enormously liberating, but also somewhat isolating, since there are so few that share this outlook.

I have no idea if you yourself will read this, but I wanted to share my story with you anyway because you are such an important figure in my life. I can never thank you enough for the ways that your work has set me free and enhanced my life. This isn’t so much a story of how your work has converted me to atheism as it is a story of how your work has made me confident and secure in my atheism.

I was born into a strange family. On the surface we were Mormons, but our lives moved with a deeper current of Evangelical Christianity. When I was six years old, my parents divorced – the greatest scandal my family has ever seen – and my mother moved my sister and me out of rural Idaho and into the more open-minded “blue state” of Washington. I shudder to think how I would have turned out if I’d stayed solely under the influence of my patriarchal, bible-thumping Idaho family. My mother still felt that it was important for our development to know our father and his side of the family, and to spend time with them. We spent every summer in Idaho. I am certain that if I’d had the skills and the courage to tell my mother what my father and his side of the family were doing to us, or even if I had the understanding to recognize how wrong it was, that I never would have been subjected to such abuse again. But I believed that was I was being told was right and good – such is the power of religious indoctrination.

Nurturing mental illness seemed to be the hobby of my father’s side of the family. My father himself was incorrectly diagnosed and treated as a paranoid schizophrenic (much later in his life, he received the correct diagnosis of severe bipolar disorder). Part of his delusion was a belief that he was the true prophet of God – or perhaps that he was Jesus himself, come again – it was never entirely clear. He was a charismatic man, and he convinced his family that it was true. Of course, they were already primed and ready to believe anything that came to light by means of “revelation” – if Dad said that Jesus had revealed his divine prophecy to him, then damn it, it had to be so. My father could even point to passages in the Bible that seemed to support him specifically as the prophet that would herald in the End Times and Jesus’ return to Earth. The passages seemed convincing to me, but I was only a little girl – what logical processes could I really apply to such a story?

Every summer, I was surrounded by Evangelical beliefs and was immersed in this strange culture of listening with reverence to any “prophecy” that my father made. The pastime of my family was looking for signs of the Second Coming and discussing the Trepidation to follow. I had not yet been baptized, but I was too scared to ask that it be done for fear that I would reveal myself as a sinner, in need of cleansing, and that the Holy Family would cast me out.

Every single moment of my young life became a constant, fearful watch for signs of Christ’s imminent return. Every lunar eclipse was the moon turning to blood; every hint of war or negotiations to avoid war was the Last Battle; Schoemaker-Levy 9 smashing into Jupiter, an event that should have thrilled me, was the “stars falling from the sky,” an event that instead filled me with dread of what was surely to come. I fancied seeing Jesus’ face in benign cloud formations and was sure that it meant He would show up to smite me tomorrow. I must have played and had friends, but I literally have no recollection of anything occupying my time other than worrying about my destruction at the hands of an angry Christ. I was constantly afraid, and constantly depressed. I remember having no solace from my fears of the Second Coming, and every moment I was around my father’s side of the family, my fears were compounded. My childhood was a complete wasteland of family-imposed terror and religious lunacy. I was too afraid to do anything that normal children do. How could I find it fun or safe to ride a roller coaster or a horse when God, who loved me and wanted the best for me, was so much more dangerous and unpredictable? I did nothing; I went nowhere; I made no friends. My life was devoted entirely to listening to anything my insane father spouted and trying to find some way to fit it into current events.

Strangely, this knack I developed of finding correlations between “prophecy” and current events was the only thing that provided me some comfort. It gave my life an air of predictability and security. If I could see what this all meant, then surely I could avoid the worst of the disasters to come. The closer I grew to my father and the more I paid attention to his prophecies, the safer I felt. After all, what better place to be when Christ came back to smite the world than next to His divine prophet?

Unfortunately, my worldview was shaken yet again when one of my uncles decided that he wanted a stake of the attention my father was getting from the family. My uncle was better than a mere prophet – he decided that he was actually Jesus Christ himself. And he, too, had all the revelation and scripture to prove it. My family became even more unstable and weird. Soon somebody had decided that they both couldn’t be Jesus – clearly one was really Jesus, and the other was the Antichrist.

Well. Now who to choose? Suddenly it was no longer safe to be my father’s little handmaid – what if I’d chosen wrongly, and he was the Antichrist? I lost my taste for interpreting world events and descended deeper into depression and fear.

Around the time I was 15, my mother caught onto the way my depression seemed to wax with my trips to Idaho and decided that I needed to stay in Seattle during the summers and spend time with my happy, normal, teenage friends. I didn’t go back to Idaho again until my grandfather’s funeral a couple of years later. Two years’ distance from the craziness gave me marvelous perspective. Suddenly, my entire family looked pathetic. It made me sad on their behalf, that they’d led themselves so far into insanity. My fear of the Second Coming became less pervasive, but it still persisted in the back of my mind whenever there was a threat of violence in Israel or whenever a lunar eclipse occurred.

Throughout my teenage years, I felt that I needed some kind of spiritual polestar in my life and I began learning about varying religions, trying to find where I fit. I liked the idea of a loving, kind God rather than the wrathful bogeyman I’d been raised with. I soon discovered that the Mormon church didn’t teach the kind of wacky End-Times prediction games that my family had ascribed to it, and that it was in fact a kind, caring, supportive community that believed in a “user-friendly” Jesus. I had myself baptized at the age of 19 and felt happy and secure with faith for the first time in my life.

Alas for my faith, it was not to last. I decided around the same time I was baptized that I wanted to be a biologist and work to conserve habitats and animal populations. I had very little money and, being white, qualified for disturbingly little aid from the state even though I was living ridiculously below the poverty line. I saved my money for several months and then enrolled in a single biology class to begin my education, planning to continue working and applying for aid until I could afford a full quarter of classes at a time.

My biology class utterly changed my life when we began learning about evolution.

I knew “the basics” of evolution – animals change over time in response to changes in their environment, and over time new species arise. I understood that we evolved from apes, but I believed that God guided evolution according to His plan. But learning about it on a college level completely opened my mind to the awesome power of biology and genetics. I was hooked and when my money ran out I continued to eat up every book I could find on the subject, including The Selfish Gene.

It was about this time that I began to realize that God’s hand wasn’t necessary in guiding evolution at all. It guided itself most ably. But surely God was necessary to have started the universe. This led me to a couple of years’ worth of self-education in cosmology, astronomy, and chemistry. It wasn’t long before I’d formed a clear picture of the universe existing quite well on its own without God, thank you very much.

But I still held that kernel of fear of God. What if it was all true anyway? Couldn’t God be testing me with this knowledge of the universe? Couldn’t he be setting me up for damnation, backing me into this corner of atheism so that he could ride out of the heavens on a white horse and spear me some day soon? Maybe after the next lunar eclipse? The “god box” in my brain was in an all-out war with my reason, and it was most uncomfortable. I began to have panic attacks and was even hospitalized with one especially severe one. I was put on anti-anxiety medication, which did calm me down enough to learn how to beat the god box into silence and let my peaceful reason control my thoughts…most of the time.

Around this time, I read an essay on the internet written by a young Airman. It was a to-the-point debriefing for the religious, telling them what atheism was and was not, explaining why one becomes an atheist, and what an atheist’s world view is like. I was so enchanted by this simple logic and clear thinking. I’d never seen atheism described so eloquently and simply before. I thought, “I would like to be an atheist. But what if God wouldn’t approve?” I began writing to the young man and we soon developed a strong friendship. He helped me slowly shed religion in favor of rationality. Our friendship intensified and soon we were visiting each other during his military leaves. When he was finally released from service, incredibly getting out at the height of the Iraq war, he told me that he had no home to return to. I invited him to come live with me. He accepted, and soon we were planning our wedding, which, I am pleased to say, was completely non-religious.

However, I didn’t fully let go of the idea that God MIGHT be lurking out there somewhere, waiting to get me, until my father died in 2003. The fact that trumpets from Heaven didn’t herald his ascension into the sky as a divine prophet had a little something to do with it. He simply died alone in his apartment, in his sleep with the television on, as any regular human being might die. That simple death cut the last thread of belief in God for reasons I may never fully understand.

On a recent vacation, though, I realized that my religious indoctrination still had some hold over my mind. My husband and I were both a little bit drunk in our hotel room, and a news story came on about some stupid political event or other. I think the alcohol allowed the god box to spring back to life. It just triggered something primal in me – I began to panic and cry in total terror. My husband tried to comfort me and tried to understand what I was so upset over. I couldn’t even identify it myself. What was it about this news story that made me fall completely apart? After much careful thought, I decided that I’d been trying to use it to predict the Second Coming again, and that had in turn brought up the old terrors of my childhood. How stupid, to worry about something I didn’t even believe in – and I truly did not believe in the existence of God any longer – not one little bit.

This episode made me realize how deeply my brain had been wounded at such a young age. I could still have psychological relapses into a fear that was so strong that I would cry over a fictional character’s wrath. I was so angry that I could barely enjoy the rest of our vacation – and when we got home, I headed to the local book store and perused the atheism section (which is sadly tiny, by the way). I found The God Delusion and read the whole thing during a two-day power outage with a flash light. I went through many batteries during those two days.

In The God Delusion, I found the answers to my questions about why and how my brain could continue to have this deep-seated, primal reaction to something that I knew to be false. I was so relieved to know that I wasn’t crazy that I cried all over again, but this time it was a wonderful release of all the pent-up fear and tension. After reading the book, particularly the parts about your discussion with Jill Mytton, I felt NORMAL for the first time in my life. And I felt secure for the first time in my life, too. I understood that God was a fantasy, and I understood why and how my brain continued to fear that fantasy. Once I had that knowledge in my hands, I was able to master my fear and completely tamp it out.

I feel so free and happy now, and I feel like I have you to thank for it. Thank you so very much, from the bottom of my heart – your work is amazing, inspiring, and enlightening, and it has saved my sanity. I feel that I owe you so much. I will be grateful to you for the rest of my life.