I’ve never been able to believe in gods. I don’t think I ever really tried. My first clue was probably when I was about four and my older sister started telling me about her personal relationship with god and how he spoke to her. I kept trying to ask just *how* he spoke to her. Was it a voice in her head or did she hear it with her ears or what?

And it turned out there was no voice. She just ‘knew’ somehow whatever it was god wanted her to know. In other words, it was just a *feeling*.

When I asked how she knew it was god and not her brain, she just insisted that she somehow knew the difference. I knew immediately that this was no kind of answer at all and proceeded to ask everyone else I could find about their relationship with god.

The results left me in no doubt that everyone was just making this stuff up. The most common response was indignation or open anger. The idea that a child might be challenging their relationship with god really seemed to piss people off. But I never once got an answer that made any sense to me. Never once was the claimed conversation with god distinguishable in any way from just thinking or feeling.

But my family was pretty religious. I went to Sunday school and church and I was confirmed… And then when I was 10 or so, the penny finally dropped. I didn’t have to pretend! It genuinely hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that I could just refuse to go. It had never been presented as an option and I’d never realised that I could *make* it an option.

And so I came out. And it was hard. 30 years later, my parents still think my atheism is a phase I’m going through. They are smugly confident that I’ll undergo a presto-changeo deathbed conversion if my increasingly obvious mortality doesn’t frighten me into belief before then. It’s infuriating that they think so little of me and there’s no doubt that this is the biggest contributor to the rift that’s existed between us for decades.

They refuse to take me seriously because I don’t believe in something I cannot believe in. Which is ironic on several levels.

It gets better. But sometimes it gets better because you stop caring what bigots think of you rather than because they’ve come to understand your position.

I’m 25 years old, bisexual, and I come from a very strict Christian background. I started doubting the legitimacy of the Bible at about the age of 9. I couldn’t make the “spare the rod, spoil the child” beatings I was receiving align with the God that had his son welcome little children into his arms.

I kept going to church out of fear. Fear of rejection by my family and friends, fear of violence and verbal abuse, and fear of mortality. I kept going for years! By the time I was in my teens I was very effectively brainwashed into thinking I believed.

I still had some doubts. They became more pronounced when I noticed that I was strongly attracted to people from both genders. Thanks to the teachings I’d experienced in church and the way that many people in my life talked about homosexuals I slowly became a mess. Christianity taught me to hate myself and deny something that forms part of the fabric of my being.

Anyway, it all started to come to a head a few years ago when I started studying theology at a tertiary level. As I examined what I thought I believed I realised I couldn’t do the mental gymnastics required to keep on fooling myself. Reason saved me.

I came out to my family just yesterday. They haven’t said a word to me about it yet. I’m a little bit anxious that this will change the nature of my relationship with my family. So far though, my friends and my boyfriend have been very supportive. I feel happy with myself, with reason, and with my future. ^_^

let me tell you that being black and atheist in america ain’t easy. i have been a born again atheist since the age of twelve. my parents used to send me and my four brothers to sunday school with pennies for the collection plate. well one sunday the teacher said to tell our parents to stop giving us pennies for the collection plate. needless to say i was teed off. my father worked hard supporting 7 people. so for the next couple of sundays we skipped church, gave our pennies to the corner grocer, who gladly accepted them, in exchange for sweets. then it was off to the park. well you know that the big sky daddy wouldn’t allow us little black kids to get away with such blasphemous behavior. one sunday he retaliated with a torrential rain storm, thus necessitating my stepping boldly to mother and confessing our sin, and what the teacher had said. well the words out of my little mother’s mouth, against the teacher/church can’t be repeated. needless to say we never went back, and this started my quest about world religions, major and minor. my conclusions they are all the musings/rantings of mad people high on heroin.

one sunday i stopped at a grocery store in the hood. an elderly lady in her sunday-go-to-meeting hat and suit, asked me what church i attended. i replied, none. she said that i needed to come to her church and get “underneath a teaching minister.” i politely informed her that the problem in the black church was that the minister had too many women “underneath” him. i felt as though i was in one of those e f hutton commercials, when e f hutton speaks everyone listens. the silence was deafening. a gangbanger would have had a better reception. i hurried to my car thinking, these people are just as bad as the klan. when i ask christian friends why a loving god would allow slavery, 6 million jews to be killed, children going to bed hungry while wall street prospers, bush to use his name to enter into middle east crusade against muslims, and why an omnipotent god needs our money etc. their response is-all will be revealed in heaven. won’t they get a big surprise when they arrive in heaven to all the “for whites only ” signs, and oprah sporting a maid’s uniform. justice delayed til heaven is justice denied on earth. i have been blissfully without religion for 48 years.

Non-believers are misunderstood. Most believers get a lot of good, positive benefits from their faith, so they are mystified when anyone thinks faith could be a bad thing. It’s very much like having someone tell you the guy you’re in love with is no good for you. You can’t see it and you wish they’d mind their own business.

I was raised as a believer and I had a childlike faith until I was 14 or so. My temperament was to go to extremes, so I was even more devout than my parents intended. At 8, I read in the Bible that the body is a temple, so I gave up chocolate. I read the parable of the rich, young man who was told to sell all he had and follow Jesus. After that, I started putting my entire allowance of fifty cents in the offering plate on Sunday. My mom actually scolded me for that, but I held my ground and quoted the Bible in my defense.

As I grew up, I shed my faith for selfish reasons. I wanted to explore sex and partying and the religion I had stood in the way. It took a couple years to dismantle my beliefs. I read Hesse and Sartre and talked to people besides my parents. Then, it hit me: God made me this way. There’s no way He’d plant a sex drive and a sensuous curiosity about life in me and expect me not to listen to it. My instincts became my new God and I followed them religiously.

During this time, I still had the indoctrination of Heaven and Hell in the background, and I was easy prey for anything I encountered: Buddhism, Taoism, New Age, Masonry, channeling. I considered myself a seeker. But I was seeking with my emotions, trying to find the set of beliefs that gave me the most pleasure or personal importance.

I stopped drinking when I was 29 and realized that my selfish life had played a role in how things had turned out for me. I adopted new principles of helping others and being a decent person who cared about people. My life changed. At first, I thought God must be helping me, because I hadn’t been able to help myself. As years passed, I became more aware of the world around me. 9/11 made a big impression. Bush’s reelection in 2004 alarmed me, too.

In the last 5 years, the final pieces of a belief in God fell away. I realized that everyone is an atheist. They don’t believe in all the gods beside their own. I also saw that, if God existed, He played favorites. Why would he help me have a better life while kids were abandoned to terrible fates every day? Heaven and Hell were completely ridiculous. Why should wonderful, loving mothers and fathers who happen to be Hindu or Muslim go to Hell for adopting the religion of their parents? Absurd. If there were such a God, we would have to rebel against Him, out of concern for each other.

What overcame the beliefs I was raised with? At the end, it was concern for human welfare. Prayer, Hell and creeds all have nothing to do with human welfare. I found inside myself what we all possess: a conscience and a set of humanistic values given to us by evolution that help us live in tribes. Altruism, acting for the greater good and being concerned for the welfare of others are our natural, human birthright.

Believers often catch me here and accuse me of playing God myself. They say I’m a selfish renegade who lives by no rules but his own. Not true. There are rules for living among my fellows on Earth. I didn’t make them, but no god did, either. Further, it is a false choice to say that since I don’t believe in God, then I must be making a God out of myself. Nope, nice try. Some people do that, and I suppose I did that when I was a hedonistic young man. But not now. I have principles which guide my life with other people; I didn’t invent them, Nature did, and I am subject to them. Believers tend to ignore this possibility.

So, while I may seem to prattle on, finding the faults and foibles of religion like it’s some sort of obnoxious hobby, there is a reason for it. The reason is that I don’t like it when ideas are placed above human welfare. I am a humanist.

To believers, this is the same as worshiping a false god, but here’s the problem. How can you tell which is the real God? If you use a leap of faith to do that, then there is no good way to tell which way to jump. If you want to plant your stake with Jesus, go ahead, but don’t think for a minute that you have any better reason to do so than the Jew, the Hindu, the Muslim or the Pagan have to throw in with their God. All faith claims are equal.

I have a lot of friends who are believers, but don’t believe in Hell, and, like Oprah, think all paths lead up the same mountain. Sounds nice, but there are two problems. One is what I mentioned before, that it says that all religions are equal. Fundamentalists hate that, with good reason. If they’re all equal, why not go to a different church (or none) every Sunday (or Saturday)? If they’re all equal, then Holy Communion is on a par with Crystal Healing. Some people can’t go along with that.

The other problem is more serious. The various religions teach different things, things than can not all simultaneously be true. If all religions are just manifestations of the same God, then God can not be said to actually have any of the qualities of the various religions. He must transcend them all. At some point, he becomes so nebulous that he is synonymous with Nature, or Being. We already have words for those things. When we get to that point, God doesn’t exist.

We can’t have it both ways. Either the One, True God is the God of one of the world’s religions and all the rest are wrong; or He is something no one has thought of and they’re all wrong; or there isn’t one.

I haven’t mentioned rationality or scientific thinking, but if we needed a push to get over the tipping point, they provide it. All the arguments for God are fallacious. The most compelling to our intuitions is the Argument from Design. Darwin did away with that one. Prayer only seems to work when we count the hits and ignore the misses. Yahweh’s famous omniscience, omnibenevolence and omnipotence are contradictory. If He is omnibenevolent, He can do no evil, therefore He is not omnipotent. These lines of thinking are the driest and least interesting to me. The human factor is paramount.

There is no good way to tell which God is the real one, or if he exists. Given that fact, we have only our humanity to go on, but this is more than sufficient. If we subjected each decision to whether it benefited people or not, we would live fulfilling lives. We would hand out condoms in Africa, we wouldn’t terrorize our children with tales of Hell, and we would treat women and the weak with the same respect we give ourselves. And we would live in the Natural world, free of supernatural bogeymen.

When we turn to angels and gods for comfort, we trade away our freedom and our very minds. We go a little crazy, or a lot. There are some scary parts of being human, but we’re all in this together and the last thing we need is a comforting story to blunt the facts. We need to be angels to one another.

Does the excuse “I’m not perfect but I’m forgiven” give Christians the right to treat people badly?

I was brought up a Christian and attended church with my family. I started working with some Christians and trusted them.

They started to scheming and being deceptive in order to get what they wanted, justifying it the guise of ‘just doing business’. At first I prayed for help and strength to endure working with them, after a long time I finally decided to stand up to them, but by then it was too late. Again more lies and more praying – I started thinking that my prayers weren’t answered but she was asking for forgiveness and getting away with everything and I was being punished, maybe I wasn’t praying hard enough? The consequences of their actions were hurting me, my family and others and there was no remorse on their part.

I started to read about forgiveness and then I got mad because in the bible it’s not your works or actions that count, it’s your faith that will ‘save you,’ so no matter how much damage they did to others they can still go to heaven, even if they don’t repent or make up for their actions.

I decided then that I didn’t want to be anywhere where they went for eternity.

I started looking deeper into my religion and found some great websites that confirmed my beliefs that there is no god! Because of those ‘Christians’  being bad ‘witness to Christ’s’ ways, we are now happy atheists and know we need to believe in ourselves and doing right to people here on earth and not worry about after we are dead and buried.

They can go on believing their bad behavior ‘that never happened – it’s been forgiven’ while they continue to their conniving, deceitful, immoral ways – still hurting other people.

Now we are happily atheist, and they go to church every week to sing in the choir and gossip and look good to their ‘church family.’

I am 13 years old, and I’m an atheist. I started thinking about religion after reading The Prophet of Yonwood when I was eleven. The book said something about one religion knowing they were right, and another religion knowing they were right too. When I turned twelve, I became an on and off atheist. I know this because I remember crying and asking god for forgiveness after getting an erection one night, lol. Anyway, for the second half of being twelve, I realized that there was, in fact no God. I then entered grade eight. I go to a Catholic school by the way. I keep utterly devastating my religion teacher’s arguments, and have turned at least one student atheist. I did this by showing sexism in the church among other things. I have only came out as an atheist to one of my friends, and he turned out to be very tolerant. I have not told anyone in my family yet because they are all psycho-Christians. I am also currently writing a book on atheism, which I will hope to publish (under a pseudonym of course) I really hope to be able to come out as an atheist to my family soon.

I was raised by Christians, grew up learning to believe what my parents believed. In middle school, I really started to get serious about what I believed. I decided that it really did matter what I believed and that I needed to take those beliefs seriously. I became very active in the church.

I continued to become more and more serious about what I believed, because I saw God as being the most important thing in my life, indeed, in the universe. It was around this time that I started listening to a preacher named “John Piper” who taught me that my purpose in life was to glorify God, and that God was most glorified in me when I was most satisfied in him.

Through middle school and high school I wanted only to be close to God, I tried to worship him and bring him glory in all that I did. I “prayed without ceasing”, as the Bible says.

In the hallways at school walking from class to class, before and after school I would walk the halls, praying over the school and asking God to do great works in that place. When I went home, I would read my Bible, which I carried with me at all times, in my backpack or pocket. At one point, I regularly spent 7 hours a day praying and reading the Bible and worshiping God. I downloaded sermons online. I read the Bible, and Bible study books. I went to church at least 3 times a week. Everything in my life was saturated with God and with my religion.

Additionally, I did everything I could to keep my mind and body “pure”. Whenever I failed, I felt ashamed and horrible and I was disgusted by myself for even thinking “sinful” thoughts.

Later in high school, I became more and more obsessed with religion. I wanted so desperately to feel close to God, that I started to convince myself that I was actually hearing the voice of God, and even the voice of Satan. God “revealed himself” to me in a variety of ways.

At first, it was just minor, relatively harmless things. I saw patterns in the world. Good things would happen that I would attribute to God, and bad things would happen that were either tests from God or attacks from Satan.

It wasn’t long before I started attributing thoughts to God. I externalized my thoughts and desires and attributed those to God, but at the time, I didn’t understand what I was doing, so I thought that God was actually planting these thoughts in my head.

Eventually, this became extremely dangerous. I started to hallucinate, and attribute those hallucinations to God’s work. I saw visions, I heard God and Satan speak audibly to me. I believed that both were at work in my life, and that I was caught in the middle of “spiritual warfare”.

I talked to several people in the church about this, and to my parents, and everyone I spoke to was encouraging of these thoughts. They believed that God was doing great things in me. They also believed, as I did, that Satan was trying to strike back at me because he saw what great potential I had to do good works in the name of God.

Eventually, God started to tell me some very strange things. For a long time, I had a crush on this girl who was a few years younger than me, but never acted upon it because of her age. In high school, I finally started talking to her, and we became fairly good friends. It was around this time that I really started to think that God was speaking to me, and I started to believe that God was telling me that I would fall in love with and marry this girl.

At some point, I told her this, and she probably thought I was crazy (who can blame her) so she stopped talking to me, and wanted nothing to do with me. I was so embarrassed by this that I stopped wanting to go to church. I still believed in God, and still spent hours reading my Bible and praying. But without the constant reinforcement that I received from my church, and now having the prophesies that God gave me proven false, I started to question what I really believed.

I still heard the voice of God from time to time, but I was less sure about aspects of religion that I had grown up believing. I started to question, and that led me into a depression, and then the voice of Satan started to become more powerful.

At its worst, I remember standing over a cliff in the middle of the Grand Canyon. I had climbed up a rocky hill in my sandals, tearing up my feet on the way, and heard the voice of Satan telling me that I was worthless and couldn’t do anything right, and that I might as well kill myself. I rejected that voice though.

At the time, I attributed the strength that saved me to God, but such attribution is unnecessary and unjustified. I saved myself from that fate. I knew in some part of my mind that I was just as worthy as any other person, and that I didn’t need the approval of anyone, much less this invisible force. But I couldn’t accept that knowledge yet, and so I continued to try to believe in God despite all that had happened.

I did start questioning what I believed though. I started reading the Bible and thinking about things from a different perspective. Rather than start with a conclusion, and look for supporting evidence, I started with the evidence and followed it where it led.

Stephen King has said, about writing, that it can’t be something that is forced, you can’t push characters along and railroad them into doing whatever you want them to. You must present them with a situation and allow them to play it out naturally. Knowledge and science must work the same way. We must start with evidence and see where it leads. I wasn’t ready to let go of God because I had known him all my life. I grew up with him. But I started asking “who is this ‘God’?” I wanted to get to know him honestly rather than project all of my own preconceptions onto him.

The first thing to go, was my belief in Hell. I decided that there was no way that any loving, intelligent, powerful creator would have any need for an eternal torture chamber. It’s just absurd, and if my God was truly loving and forgiving, everyone would be welcome into his heaven from myself, to Gandhi, to Adolf Hitler. In my search for who God was, though…all I seemed to figure out was a bunch of things that God couldn’t be. He wasn’t a God who sponsored any kind of Hell. He couldn’t be the God of the Bible, because the more I read of that God, the worse I realized he was. And he couldn’t be the God who had spoken his prophesies to me, because those prophesies had been proven false. So what God did I have left?

Maybe I couldn’t believe in any kind of God at all.

I wanted to believe in God, but the God I believed in didn’t match any kind of God I’d ever heard of before. The deistic God that I was left with didn’t have any use for me, and was indistinguishable from a God that didn’t exist. Maybe that was it after all. Maybe the God I believed in simply didn’t exist. After all, the God who I had believed in through high school certainly didn’t exist. As Richard Dawkins puts it I was an “atheist with regard to so many gods.” Maybe it was time for me to go “one God further”.

My first glimpse at godless philosophy came before this, actually. I think it was in my Junior year of high school. In an American Lit. class that year, I was exposed to transcendentalism, naturalism, and Edgar Allen Poe. These three very different things all had the same basic effect on me. They started to open my eyes to new ways of thinking. While I did not accept naturalism or transcendentalism as true, I was fascinated by the concepts, and some small parts of them did ring true to me.

Reading Edgar Allen Poe opened me up to the horror genre, which I fell in love with. I started reading authors like Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk, who first introduced me to nihilism. I disagreed strongly with nihilism, as I thought my life had a very specific purpose, but something about it really attracted me from the very beginning.

Perhaps even then some part of me recognized the truth that there is no intrinsic meaning to life. The idea that we are simply here, and our lives are what we make of them, and we can give our lives meaning by living for what we love and value. Or perhaps I was just a rebellious youth who was fascinated by anything that went against the authority of what I believed.

I rather prefer to think it was the former.

When I finally started questioning what I believed, I remembered these things that I had been so interested in back then, and I looked them up again. I immediately threw out much of transcendentalism, because a lot of it is quasi-spiritual nonsense, but I kept coming back to nihilism.

So…what was left for me in this life? No God meant no meaning. No God meant no morality. No God meant no afterlife. No God meant this was all I had. But this life was awful. This life sucked. I was living this life just to get to the next, and what was the point if this was all I had.

I became very depressed following my realization that there was no God, but eventually, I came around and saw the beauty of the world. I realized that nothing had really changed in me except what I believed. And that had such great repercussions. It meant I was free. It meant I got to enjoy life now, and I didn’t have to wait for an afterlife. But I was still moral. I hadn’t gone out killing and stealing and committing crimes and sins and horrible deeds. I still had joy, I loved writing and reading and talking to friends.

I could live a better life now than I ever had with religion. I could love, I could live, I could laugh and enjoy life. I was free to live my life happily and to love others and do what I could to ensure that they were also free to be happy. And that is exactly what I intended to do.

Firstly, I should probably clarify that I grew up in Australia, and that I’m still only 18 years old, so this is all quite recent.

My parents raised me I an environment sort of outside of religion. I knew it existed, vaguely, but didn’t really know much about it. Whenever I asked my parents if they were religious they always responded that my grandparents were, which I always took to mean that they were, too; it took me a long time to decode that sneaky misdirection.

One of my first experiences with religious belief in real life was in primary school in around year four or so. I asked my friends what they believed happened to them after they died and declared that I believed in a form of reincarnation, without the notion of karma – when you die, you black out, and then wake up again as some other random new person. One of my friends said she believed in Heaven. I thought this was downright fascinating. Really? People believed in Heaven in real life? I’d always thought that was just something people did on TV, like how in American TV shows you would always see those fire hydrants, or how kids in TV shows were always going out and kissing and stuff like my friends and I never did. It was completely honestly the first time I had ever met someone in real life who believed in Heaven.

My next exposure occurred when I was in year five. My parents planned me to go to a Catholic high school, beginning in year 6. I should clarify that religious high schools sort of worked differently where I lived. There were basically three different kinds of schools you could send your kids to – public schools, which were cheap but not very good, secular private schools, which were wonderful but expensive as hell, and catholic schools, which were somewhat expensive, but not prohibitively so, and of pretty good quality. So it wasn’t like some kind of cultish school where all the students were from fundie families – I knew heaps of people at school who were agnostics or atheists like me. It wasn’t a big thing at all. (Of course, my primary school was public.) It was sort of a sign of my family’s utter apathy to religion that my grandparents on my mother’s side were ostensibly Irish protestants and yet they never had a single objection to me going to a Catholic school.

So, anyway, that was the next time I really encountered religion. I had to have an interview with the vice principal before I entered. Beforehand, my mother took me aside and murmured that if they asked I should say that I went to church once a week. Nowadays I’m not certain that she was entirely serious but at the time I took her at her word. And it confused me. I had no idea why I would say that I went to church when I didn’t. What was the point? I just didn’t understand at all. In the end, the subject never came up, and I got into the school.

Of course, the school still was Catholic, so there were some religious things. Every morning in homeroom we’d say prayer, although in later years we didn’t have to participate if we didn’t want to and honestly kids just mostly used it as an excuse to dely the beginning of classes anyway. Once a term we would have a whole school mass which we would have to attend, but we weren’t obliged to do the prayers or take the eucharist. And we had some religious education classes, but not many, and they ended up being general motivational or philosophy classes just as often.

In the beginning, I just basically went along with it all. I said the prayers and did the sign of the cross. (Once the teacher made us do it over because I’d done it with my left hand which apparently wasn’t allowed!) I took the eucharist. I didn’t question any of it, but neither did I really pay attention to any of it.

In year eight, I was in one of those classes. My earlier apathy had morphed into something more like irritation, and I was pretty scornful at the idea of spending so much time on religion. But it never really occurred to me that I didn’t believe in it until one day. We were studying something in RE class that couldn’t be justified. It wasn’t philosophy. It wasn’t motivational. It wasn’t even interesting. It was something along the lines of the places St. Peter went to preach the gospel – something completely unnecessary to non-Christians and almost completely unnecessary even to those. (Funnily enough, the class was taught by the same vice principal I’d had an interview with it before!) I was just sitting in class one day complaining mentally about how ridiculous this class was when it hit me – I wasn’t Christian. It sounds stupid that it took me so long but I’d honestly never thought about it. My parents said my grandparents were Christian so they were, right? So I…well, no, that didn’t make me Christian. I’d never thought I was. I had, quite genuinely, NEVER thought about it.

So for a while I kinda lived as a quiet atheist. I made fun of the stupider aspects of religion, but so did my Catholic best friend. Like I said, there, it was kind of a non-issue. But, unfortunately, that was not the end of my story.

Some time a little after that I discovered Wicca. I was always very interested in fantasy and the idea of magic, so I fell in love with it instantly. I say ‘the idea of magic’ deliberately, because while I loved reading and talking about it, the actual depth of my belief was…limited. It was one of those strange things where I liked the idea of it so I pretended that it was true, dismissing as irrelevant the fact that I didn’t really believe in it. On one level I was aware, I think, but I never admitted it outright. And my disbelief showed itself in other places. I’d to psychic tests and routinely get completely unremarkable results. I would get tarot cards whose findings beared no relation to reality whatsoever. I’d cast spells that would have no effect. And I never really went out of my way to do any of the above – although I claimed to believe in all this sort of woo, when it actually came to casting spells, nine times out of ten I couldn’t be bothered. If I truly believed that these things worked, wouldn’t I have tried harder to use and rely on them? I’m grateful I didn’t, however. I hear many stories about completely sane and rational people being taken up by this sort of thing due to all sorts of fallacies like confirmation bias, and while I’m not sure why I didn’t ever really get taken by that I’m glad I didn’t.

So I just sort of drifted away from it. I read it for a while and declared I was Wiccan. But, no, that wasn’t a proper ceremony – I’d do one on the next festival. Oh, wait, I forgot. Well, the next one. Ahh, but, my family’s home tonight and if I disappeared for a while they’d ask why and it’d be embarrassing to explain. (See? Even then I kind of got that the belief was stupid.) Next time. Oh, but now it’s too late, and I really wanted to do it outside… And so it goes.

And that’s really how I became an atheist – I just sort of drifted out of Wicca. For a while after my parents would occasionally bring it up but soon I guess it became obvious I was no longer interested.

But my real first contact with the atheist community came in year ten. A year or so earlier I’d seen a book while glancing through the philosophy section of a bookshop – ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins. It seemed very popular, and it immediately attracted my interest for saying outright something I’d believef for a long time. However, I was too embarrassed to ask for it, so I just sort of let it go. But in year 10 I did work experience at a library, and on one of my breaks I came across that book and decided to read it while I ate my lunch. It was so interesting! There were so many ideas I’d never heard of! (To give an idea of how truly sheltered I was, when Dawkins mentioned the argument against evolution about it being ‘statistically improbable’ that this could happen by chance, I grimaced and acknowledged that this was something I’d wondered about myself!) And I’d never even realized there was such a controversy about all of this! By this stage I was a lot more aware of the Christian majority and my place with regards to it, but all these stories about what it was like for atheism in America was just horrible! What appealed to me most of all, though, I think, was how logical it was. I had always valued intelligence and rationality, but to find an entire movement – one I had agreed with for basically my entire life – devoted to it was, well, incredible. I was hooked!

Somehow, I ended up searching atheism on the internet as well and came across Ebon Musings, a website devoted to essays on atheism. This was even better, if possible! The arguments here were just so logical, so well-structured, so irrefutable, it was like a breath of fresh air! Even now if I ever feel myself overwhelmed by the anti-intellectualism of the world I can just re-read one of Ebon’s articles and remember that yes, the world is still good in places.

As for how I came out to my parents, I’m not totally sure, but I think it goes back to my mum finding The God Delusion in my backpack and asking about it. I think she was a little impressed, and became quite interested in reading it, too. After that it was like the unwritten rule of silence was broken and we all discussed atheistic ideas pretty openly, with the possible exception of my younger brother who honestly just seemed apathetic about the entire subject. My friends probably just found out in the natural order of things, as I did about their religious leanings, and that was that.

And now? I follow several atheist blogs and am proud to consider myself a member of the atheist community. My atheist identity is very important to me, as are my skeptic, humanist, and rationalist identities. I had an extremely good experience in coming to see myself as an atheist and out myself to others, and for that I’m very, very grateful. I only wish that every atheist could have had a childhood like mine. (Except maybe for the painfully boring RE lessons, maybe?)

I grew up in rural West Virginia and like most of the area’s children grew up a “good little christian boy.” I went every Wednesday night and every Sunday (Morning and Evening.) I believed wholeheartedly in the entire church dogma. For 16 years this continued I went to “Church Camps,” I helped to “convert” people and “save” them. When I started College, I wasn’t near my home church so I stopped going to church all together. This started to clear the brain washing that had been done over the years; however, I still considered myself a “Christian” until at the place I used to work we hired a college student who was a theology major. He had studied and learned just how many errors there were in the bible. He showed me a glimpse of the truth. So I began to study on my own. Looking back over the bible and reading what other people had found. I’m currently reading the S.A.B. (Skeptics Annotated Bible) which outlines the errors, lies, failed prophesies, and mis-quotes in the bible. I’m also working on showing my wife that same glimpse of truth that my friend showed me.

Ever since I was a baby, my mom always took me to church. Of course I didn’t know what it was because I was at least 5. When the preacher was speaking, I never listened. Ever. I would always be doing something else. But then one day I woke up and was ready to go to church. While we was in church, I asked my mom “How do we all know god is real?” “Do we have proof?” She responded with,”God is a religion.” So I said, “What is a religion?” She sighed and said, “Its what you choose to believe in.” She already had me confused. If we don’t necessarily know if god is real, then why should we believe if we don’t have anything to prove it? Then I looked at her and said, “What if I don’t believe in god?” “What if my religion is different?” She said,” Our whole family believes in god. If you don’t, you’re not part of the family’s beliefs and you’re not normal.” So I said,” Then I’m not normal.” She looked at me funny. “What do you mean your not normal?” “Mom, if I don’t have proof of god being real or the devil being real, then I don’t believe.” She said,” Then if you don’t believe, get out of the church immediately. I said, “Fine.” So I left. From that day on, if I never have proof, I won’t believe.