Author’s Note: As this is intended to be a therapeutic piece for myself, and an inspirational piece to other atheists, I concede that the piece is long winded. You have been forewarned.

I was born into a Catholic family in Champaign, Illinois, home to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My mother was a Lutheran, and my father was raised by a strict Irish Catholic family. Both grew up in lower class families, and money was tight. When my parents graduated high school, my dad went and lived on a farm and raised pigs, and my mom began work at the local newspaper, with neither ever receiving a college education. They married soon after graduation.

When my sister (who is ten years older than me) was five, my mom believed that my sister would be in the zone for the nearby public elementary school, which was only three blocks away. Instead, my sister was selected for an elementary that was infamous for its notoriously delinquent student population (the school is now a correctional facility for kids out of detention centers). So, my mom did her research and discovered the local Catholic grade school. Tuition was over $4000 a year, and to cover expenses, Mom and Dad took on other jobs. Dad started a lawn care business and Mom began managing taxes and things for other family members. My mom began the RCIA program, through which an adult becomes Confirmed in the Catholic Church. Soon enough, my older brother began school, and I followed two years later.

Grade school was an awkward experience. I was an awkward, antisocial kid who enjoyed being alone. I did not feel lonely, partially because I always thought God was there. I absolutely loved everything the teachers said about God: the metaphors, the biblical stories of ancient men parting seas and building massive boats. It all played wonderfully on my mental movie screen. I “talked” to God; I even have memories of regurgitating my religion lessons to my faithful Border Collie, Lucy (who, sadly, could not defend herself from my proselytizing). Religion classes came to be associatd with positive things: candy, parties, and fun! My mind made that connection subconsciously. However, as the years wore on, I “talked” to God less and less. It just didn’t occur to me as a necessary thing to do, because I obviously wasn’t doing it right. I wasn’t experiencing the “voice of God” that the teachers told me would be there.

In fourth grade, I had a life changing experience. I was introduced, forcibly, to theatre. My teacher was concerned about my antisocial tendencies, and had a conference with my mother. My mother then signed me up for Oliver!, the musical. Long story short, I hated it at first, then came to love it, and became a lot more friendly and sociable. However, I can safely say that the most life-changing aspect of the whole experience was the fact that I was exposed to entirely new schools of thought, most notably, liberalism. My parents were always conservative (and still are), and all I ever heard growing up was that George Bush was good and the Dems were bad. Of course, I took my parents’ side, not yet being of reason. I had never heard people talk openly about gay people without sounding hateful, and I had never heard anyone speak such rational, genuinely good thoughts. Thus the seed of doubt was planted, as well as a newfound love for the arts.

The years progressed with little change, save for the meeting of my girlfriend of four years, with whom I recently separated. My family rarely went to Church. We were very much- in the words of a close friend- “two timers;” we attended basically twice a year. This only changed for our Confirmation processes, during which we attended every Sunday. The year Confirmation started- 7th grade- was awful. My hormones were raging, and I became depressed and angry, all natural things for a teenage boy. I had a piss-poor attitude about school, and my grades suffered accordingly. It was at this point in my life that I began to really look at what was happening in our world. I was especially concerned with gay rights, as I had many homosexual friends being in theatre. I began to become genuinely apathetic about my faith, which was not helped by the fact that I was going through the Confirmation process. I began to feel guilty, and guilt perpetauted anger, which perpetuated more guilt, and so on. Over that summer, I found a deep peace with the realization that I didn’t have to be Catholic. I could still be a Christian and still be a good person! Eighth grade year was smooth sailing, barring one incident that still sticks in my mind to this day. Before Confirmation, my eighth grade teacher stood in front of our class and looked all of us in the eye and asked, “If you’re not one hundred percent sure you don’t want to do this, then don’t. Don’t just do it because your friends are.” I should have opted out. I should have said no. But no one was going to, and there was no hurt in going through with it, right? But, when the day of Confirmation came, I felt absolutely nothing. I walked down the aisle, went through the motions of saying the prayers and bowing the heads, but I felt like I was betraying myself, because it just felt empty. However, these feelings soon passed, and I rationalized that I still thought the Catholic faith was correct, but the Church itself was wrong.

That summer, everything was going fine. I had to drop out of a show that I was in in order to be in a religious workcamp that would give me service hours for school; we were required by the high school to have completed at least 150 service hours. That always pissed me off; being a high school student is punishment enough without tacking on unnecessary requirements for graduation. So, the week before the camp, my girlfriend of two years called me and said she wanted to talk. She broke up with me, and I became really depressed because I loved her very much. So, here I am at this religious camp, completely emotionally vulnerable, and surrounded by proselytizing. I made it through the camp with the help of a good friend of mine who came with me (who is non-religious now). However, I started to become concerned about being Christian again. I became concerned about attending church regularly (which ended up not happening). By the end of the summer it was out of my system, but the effects were felt throughout the summer, eventually subsiding as school started. I eventually got back with my girlfriend, and it was like nothing had changed. However, during the interim, I was depressed, and thought about suicide more than once (unfortunately, I believe I have medical depression).

High school was a new frontier; I didn’t know what to expect. The local Catholic high school cost around $6000 a year, and my parents took on yet more work, even volunteering at the local sports arena to help pay for tuition. I met plenty of new people, many of whom became very close friends. Religion became increasingly complicated. Now, not only were we expected to be Catholic (or, at the very least, Christian), we were now soldiers of God. We were to become learned in apologetics and arguments for the Catholic faith. We had retreats, were encouraged to pray often, and took one Theology class a quarter. We also attended all-school Mass at least once a month. I sang in the choir, as the apathy put forward by students in the congregation was just unbearable. Our Theology classes Freshman yearwere Old and New Testament; it was mostly a blur. The teacher was young, but frail. She was actually a very bad teacher; I’m not just saying that because she taught Theology. She was legitimately bad. As I was not yet versed in common atheist arguments against the God of the Old Testament, I just sat back and got an easy A. I enjoy studying religion, so I occasionally was interested by some of the philosophical arguments put forward, and asked many questions when I found something interesting. However, the highlight of Freshman year was my Biology teacher, whom I’ll call Jim. Jim was a native of Florida, and an ordained minister at a nearby Protestant church. He had a hilariously inflated ego, and frequently included pictures of his “beautiful wife” and “super-smart kids” in his lesson plans; he also thought he looked like Steve Austin, and showed us pictures of his college baseball days. It was well known that he often obtained his notes from Wikipedia, and he didn’t check our homework for correct answers, just completion. My best mate and I frequently filled his photocopied worksheets with smart-ass answers, the most famous being a rhyme we called “Beaches, Sneeches, Leeches, and Peaches” and a worksheet I filled entirely with characters from Watchmen; I got 100′s on both. Long story short, I could not respect him. When the class inevitably came to the subject of evolution, his position was vague. He acknowledged evolution within species, but he was obviously uncomfortable with the subject. Of course, since he was Christian and we were Christian, we got the talk from the point of view of intelligent design. Though, I must give him credit, he at least attempted to teach evolution objectively. Looking back, especially now that I have heard Hitchens demolish the notion of intelligent design and evolution, I realize that ultimately, ID and evolution are academically irreconcilable. Eventually, our class got on the subject of abortion (abortion was a very hot topic at school; many students were members of our school’s pro-life group). Actually, it was a surprisingly civil talk; my best mate and I were the only ones who were vocally pro-choice / pro-woman. We stood our ground well, and eventually resolved to agree to disagree. However, the one thing that irked me about the experience was that a very “pro-life”, very vocally Catholic girl (who already annoyed the living piss out of me anyway) obnoxiously muttered, “No, no, you’re wrong, life starts at conception, etc.” WHILE WE WERE TALKING, intentionally just loud enough for us to hear. My friend and I were polite and respectful while the “pro-lifers” argued their points, and she was just ridiculously disrespectful.

Sophomore year was interesting. I began to experience some depression because my ideas toward religion were becoming increasingly less apathetic and more “let’s stop some of this religious bullshit.” I was still determined to be somewhat Christian, because even though I didn’t know it was called Pascal’s Wager, I employed Pascal’s Wager; Hell scared me. I tried to find ways to accommodate my Christianity into my very liberal views; I even went so far as to Google “Christians who smoke weed.” Yep, it was that bad. It was during Sophomore year that I decided that I would graduate a year early; it was actually fairly simple, as all I had to do was finish my service hours. To my friends reading this, it’s time to come clean: religion played a huge role in my decision to graduate. It’s along the same lines of attending a Muslim school and having to keep quiet about your religion I also wanted to do it because I wanted to get to college, because I have no issues with knowing what I want to do in life. So, I began my graduation journey. No real hijinks occurred during the year, though it was the first year that I heard that not attending Sunday Mass was a mortal sin, and that I would be damned if I didn’t attend regularly; unfortunately, this came from one of my favorite teachers, a man named George. I went through some depression again, but never reached any severe lows.

That summer, I had an issue that hurt me deeply. My girlfriend (same one, whom I will not name out of respect for her privacy) began seeking a religion more conducive to her beliefs. She began attending the youth group run by a family friend at a local Protestant church. She really got into it, often praying in front of me, and becoming noticably religious. I didn’t have an issue with this; I was actually jealous, and halfway considered attending the youth group myself. However, after a few weeks, she told me she wanted to talk. We sat down, and she told me she wanted to talk about sex. Long story short, she told me she wanted to pull things back a bit. I said, “Ok, you want to wait to have sex,” being completely fine with the idea; we were sexually active, but didn’t actually have sex. She told me that she meant literally regressing to practically no sexual contact, except for kissing. That really hurt, because not only did I enjoy the intimacy, but it provided a physical representation of the love that we had for each other. Eliminating it just felt like a rejection of myself; cue the depression. However, the icing on the cake came in the form of ten phone calls at 3:30 in the morning. After I answered, I was greeted with the sounds of anger and crying. Turns out she had been cheating on me with a guy from the youth group. I wasn’t surprised; she had been hanging out with him often. Not wanting to be the suspicious boyfriend, I just let it happen, trying to control my jealousy. But I responded in the best way I could: I forgave her. I told her that we would talk about it when she was ready. Ultimately, things eventually got back to normal, and she stopped attending the youth group.

Junior (or rather, Senior) year was the year that I became an atheist. A few things led to the official acknowledgement of my atheism. For one, Theology this year was Church History and Church Vocations. Church History was not only dreadfully boring, but the teacher (a woman whose name I will not use out of respect) was so self-righteous in her teaching. She practically skipped the Inquisition, and she cheered the stories of the saints who demolished the idols and artifacts of “false religions” (redundant, I know). Quite frankly, some things she said were just downright ignorant and just… not ok. This continued until 2nd semester, which was Church Vocations. It was the biggest exercise in bullshit I have ever experienced; it actually hurts to think about it. We were taught about how women can’t be priests because they aren’t men and Christ was a man; we were taught that homosexual thoughts are disordered but not sinful, and homosexual acts are sinful AND disordered (an argument which I thoroughly destroyed); how the Catholic faith is the only true faith; honestly, it was the most hateful spew I have ever heard, wrapped up in the nicest package of supposed love and charity. Well, my true moment of awakening occurred one night in February (or January?) when I happened to catch a comedian by the name of Bo Burnham on Comedy Central; he was performing a stand up act called “Words, Words, Words.” I immediately fell in love with his sarcasm and double entendre. Then the show came to a point where he rapped about Catholicism and religion… and something just clicked. I researched his stuff online, and in searching his name, I came across references to Matt LaClair, which brought me to a transcript of the boy’s speech on a blog called the Friendly Atheist. As I read the words of LaClair, I realized that I could never support any religion. After I read the speech, I delved into the annals of Friendly Atheist. I loved everything I found; it resonated on such a personal level that I stayed up until 2 a.m. just reading and absorbing. As I decided to go to bed, I sat back and realized that I was an atheist. I immediately felt happy and fulfilled and assured and joyful and and and… just complete. Everything made sense. I was not depressed by the idea of not having an afterlife; in fact, I was imbued with a new desire to live every day of my life to the fullest. I realized then that atheism gives me the hope that religion gives to people of faith. I found a taste of true happiness in that moment.

The next few months saw some interesting changes. I became happier; I felt more outgoing and confident in who I was. I began to research scientific explanations for supposedly miraculous happenings, and found that there was a rational explanation for almost anything. It’s odd; although I was never particularly religious, let alone Catholic, I had some viewpoints and biases ingrained into my thought processes that I didn’t even notice we were there. I didn’t even know about the horrible and evil passages of the Bible, and I had never taken the time to think about just how much of an asshat the God of the Old Testament is. I had officially been successfully indoctrinated by the single most despicable entity in my world. I had to relearn how evolution and intelligent design are inherently conflicting. I read and read and learned and absorbed and became so fantastically enthralled by my discoveries of this new existence that atheism became my religion. Looking back, I understand why some people accuse atheism of being a religion. We have our idols and our prophets, whom some atheists follow… wait for it… religiously. The vast majority see them for what they are, but some take it too far and begin this weird idol worship that just seems odd and out of place. I understand that we need our sense of community and leadership, because atheism is as political and social as it is religious, but our strength is our rationality. Keeping things in perspective is what we’re supposed to be good at; that’s the only thing that’s going to keep this movement strong at all. Also, looking back, I see that I was evangelical in my atheism. I occasionally made the mistake of saying, “Hey, if you wanna check out this website, it’s great for learning about atheism!” I was the Jehovah’s Witness of atheism; in retrospect, it was a douche-y thing to do. It’s what many religious do – they find something that resonates with their psyche, and they assume that EVERYONE will resonate with the same concept in the same way. The fact is, different shit makes different people happy. No one has the right to enforce their particular version of happiness on anyone (unless that version includes good things like “eat food regularly” and “don’t stab people;” Those are invaluable) My best friend and I became closer. He considers himself an agnostic / nebulous believer in something, but he’s right brilliant, and he understands the atheist perspective on things. We often have hours-long talks about religion. However, I had a very odd moment of growing up one day. I posted my status on Facebook as something to the effect of, “I get to meet with the SSA :)” You know, something harmless and benign; nothing caustic or inflammatory at all. However, my mom asked me about it one morning, and when I told her the SSA was the local campus atheist group, she exploded. She accused me of trying to hurt my parents and intentionally being proud and arrogant. She bitched at me for days, screaming at me to take the post down. She had a very unreasonable reaction: she was worried my principal would prevent me from graduating because I was an atheist, and almost called him to let him know what I’d done. WHAT THE FUCK; that is not a healthy reaction. Looking back, I think the status flew in the face of her vision of being a perfect parent and that a belief in God was something she wanted to be able to say she had taught her children. She had a very rough childhood, and her mother was only nominally a parent; she was very distant. Anyway, so this personal hell (see what I did there?) went on for about a week until I caved. I fucking caved. I’m still mad at myself for doing it. I love my mother, but caving just made me feel spineless. It was odd though; my dad wasn’t angry, but it made him very emotional. He actually cried. Dad never cried. He cried, and I cried. I think it was an odd moment for him. His son was stepping away and making this decision, and he realized we legitimately didn’t agree on the subject. It was occurring to him that I was becoming a different person, and I imagine that’s an odd moment for a father. Since then, we haven’t really talked about religion, though I occasionally poke fun at the fact that they don’t attend Mass at all and pose the occasional question about religion to him or my mom. My mom doesn’t mention it, but she has pulled the “I bet you wish you had God NOW!” card when I have crises or when times get tough. I get pissed and call her out, and let her know that I didn’t really pray all that much when I thought I was religious, either.

So, my story is winding to an end; or rather, it’s just beginning. I’m studying Computer Science at the University of Illinois, and I’m constantly becoming more and more comfortable in my new skin. I participate in discussions when I can, I read ravenously, and I live the life of a seventeen year old on the verge of the most exciting years of his life. I thank any reader for making it this far, and I wish you the best in your lives, whoever you may be.

When I was in my teens and younger I aways had an interest in philosophical issues. My parents said that I asked questions like “who was I before I was born” and “where did everything come from” at an early age. My parents, not being particularly philosophical or religious did their best to answer these with nominally protestant answers.

Since these questions continued to both me, I jumped at the chance to go to church services with friends. Baptist, Methodists and the mainline protestants just were not that interesting to me so I didn’t attend church regularly until I found the Pentecostal.

My parents didn’t like the Pentecostals because they thought it sounded like a cult but to me it was like a getting a completely new family. Unlike my family, these people were warm and openly loving towards one another, they were not reserved with their emotions and they would sing and be very expressive at church.

At 16, I became very involved in the church completely at my own initiative. Soon I was in the church band, played in a Christian Rock band, attended every service available and completely changed my life around the church and new faith. All my time was spent at church or with my band mates, or with my new girlfriend I found at church.

I threw myself into studying the bible and read it many times. I carried a bible with me everywhere and wrote sermons for my youth group and I had visions of becoming a minister.

During this time I encountered some problems with the faith. My youth minister discouraged me asking too many questions about the bible and its history. She strongly discouraged me from studying any outside philosophers saying, “Philosophy is for the weak minded.” I was also I little uncomfortable with the more ‘magical’ beliefs of the Pentecostals, such as speaking in tongues, faith healing and fainting/religious ecstasy.

In senior year of high school, I went on a weekend retreat at Oral Roberts University for potential students, with the hope of becoming a minister, however I believed my grades would not be good enough to get in to the school. With college out of my reach, I decided to join the Navy as a Hospital Corpsman (medic). I figured I would be able to help people in this role without fighting, I was a big Walt Whitman fan (one of those crazy philosophers).

So right out of high school, at 17 years old, I left home for the Navy. In boot camp I met lots of people of different religions, I worked as the ‘religious petty officer’ for my boot camp group and generally was cut off from my religious support system. At this point my religious ideology was overwhelmed with the much stronger brainwashing of military training. The deprogramming / reprogramming continued with Hospital Corpsman school where I was exposed to medical and science issues, even more diverse people and their religious beliefs. At this time I was too busy and was not interested in attending the bland military religious services.

The subsequent years of living in California, I was exposed to Eastern religions, mysticism, new-age, and other crazy ideas that seem to make a lot more sense than Christianity ever did. These people didn’t try to control what I read or call philosophers “weak minded,” they actually encouraged reading and study.

After leaving the military, I stayed in California and started college. I was a perfect student, received very good grads and went on to university (UCSB) where I earned degrees in Math, Physics and (a minor in) philosophy.

I discovered the atheist movement at this time (1998) and found that there were MANY people like myself who could not reconcile religious belief, religious texts with reality. These were not zealots who ‘hated god’ or religion. Most of them started losing their faith by studying the bible just like me, many were experts in the bible and philosophy and very far from weak minded.

Years later, I looked back a little ashamed that I was so easily deluded in my teens but instead of anger or resentment, I feel compassion towards people struggling between their unsustainable faith and reality. It has become an issue of Harm Reduction rather than one of antagonism; I see religious belief as fundamentally harmful to the believer.

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.

I guess that I have always felt godless. It was the pressure of family and friends that kept me in the belief system in which I was raised. It has been a long journey to where I am now. It includes spending time as: Episcoplian, Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism, Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, and my final godless status.

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.

As a kid, my mother made my brother and I go to her Lutheran church, Sunday school, and vacation bible school. Although my mother was somewhat religious, my father never joined us at church and neither ever talked to us much about religious issues. Growing up, I found church to be boring (I would draw on the slips of paper they laid out for people to take notes on throughout the service instead of listening) and, as I was rather shy around people I didn’t know well, I found Sunday school and vacation bible school to be rather stressing. I don’t think I ever thought the stories I learned from the bible were “real”, however I did believe in God and prayed every night for him to “take care of” all my deceased pets in heaven.

By the time junior high came around, I was pretty apathetic about religion in general, but my mother decided I needed to be confirmed in our church. This meant going back to Sunday school and going to (and taking notes on) services every Sunday. Being more aware of what was going on around me than I was a few years earlier, I began noticing all the hypocrisy, gossiping, and generally un-Christian behavior of much of the congregation. Actually having to listen to the sermons made me realize how hateful and misogynistic the Bible really is, and I would sit in church seething with rage through much of the service.

During Sunday school, they thought it would be helpful for us to learn (somewhat) about other religions, so that we would “know” why ours was the “correct” one. This, however, had the opposite effect for me. I found some of the tenets of the other religions more appealing than those of Christianity. It also made me wonder: if there are all these other religions out there, how can we be so egotistical as to assume the one we were (most likely) born into is the correct one and all others are wrong?

I definitely realized I was not a Christian (although not yet an atheist) during one Sunday school class when we were discussing Hinduism and the idea of reincarnation. The teacher asked “who here believes in reincarnation?” I found this idea to be very appealing — that what you do in this life comes back to you in the next. So, I raised my hand. The teacher then told me, “no, you don’t, because you’re a Lutheran and we don’t believe in that.” “Really?” I thought to myself, “You’re going to TELL me what I believe?” This was the beginning for me — beginning to look at all religions critically, to use my mind to think rationally about the world and how it works, to becoming an atheist.

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.