Growing up in suburban (though, by most American standards, quite URBAN) New Jersey (Morris County, to be exact), I was raised by a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. The belief in my house that there were different but equally valid paths to God always confused me as a child. Honestly, this is the master of the f**king universe we're talking about. One would expect He'd have left slightly more explicit instructions about how to make him happy. Perhaps he'd have left the odd note behind, which, to modern eyes, would read as a series of phrases in ancient languages, with each recitation of the phrase growing more modern, until it reads in modern English (or perhaps another language) "Everyone go Catholic," followed by yet-to-be-understood recitations of the phrase in future languages that will only be understood after our language has evolved sufficiently along the course of history. But I digress.

In case it wasn't apparent, I am a terrible Christian. I ask far too many questions, and I was no different in my youth. I was always terribly disappointed by the conflicting nature of the Bible, and of the answers given by "learned" church-peoples (what I called them). When I was taught how to pray (which you'd think would be an instinctive act) at the age of six or seven, I was blown away by how scary it is. You're going to talk to the all-powerful creator of the universe, who knows all, sees all, and is infinitely powerful. I was always terrified I'd "slip up" and lie during prayer, or, for a flash of a moment, pray to the devil in some kind of prayer experiment, and lose my soul to an eternity of torment. Furthermore, I was really confused why we had to memorize ways to pray (specifically the Nicene Creed). God knew what we were feeling, right? Couldn't we just love him and Jesus and he'd know it? Why'd we need to stop our days and tell him? Ironically, the act of praying sowed the seeds of legitimate doubt.

Years later, thanks to some very un-Christian decisions made by my mother, I was off to Catholic school. Morris Catholic High School, in Denville New Jersey. Go Crusaders. Woo. While there, I met some of the most despicable, moronic, self-serving jerks I'd ever met in my life... as well as some nasty students. I won't mention his name, but suffice to say the "President" of the school, Father "Rat" was a really villainous, scheming rat of a man (with bad teeth to boot). He struck me, as a freshman with an overactive imagination and a love of comic books and animated films, like how I would depict Satan. With his little white collar and black shirt, he'd roam around and bully students with flashes of gingivitis and that nasally, irritating voice. Anyway, he wasn't a nice guy, but we were supposed to believe that, because he was an ordained priest, he was closer to God, Jesus, and the rest of the gang than the rest of us. Enter into my life someone I WILL name; Mr. Ward. Mr. Ward is one of the kindest, gentlest, most genuinely good men I've ever met, but he was a layman teacher, and therefore, when it came to God, was not as authoritative as "Father Rat". Remember my habit of asking questions? Suffice to say, by the time I graduated from high school, I had been officially excommunicated by the Catholic Church, banned from the school grounds following graduation, and had my name removed from the school's roster of alumni (only by the grace of the ACLU was my diploma saved). The local bishop even got a signed letter of excommunication for me. I didn't know they still did that. Again, ironically, it was a function of religion which drove me further away from belief in God. A pattern was developing in my mind, and it was fast growing into a philosophy.

In college, I ran into very few atheists. In fact, the only "outed" atheist I met at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, PA (go Colonels. Woo.) was one of those silly far-left Marxist types (he even wore a beret and refused to bathe. Bonus points if anyone can explain to me how those qualities somehow make one a better revolutionary for the proletariat). At that point, I thought I was most like a Jew, with a very pragmatic outlook on God, and held a loose belief in an impersonal God. I figured he probably didn't get too involved with our personal lives, and it stood to reason that he was just kind of "out there" doing whatever it was he did with his time (skee-ball is as good a theory as any). Going through the USAF's ROTC program (Det 752. Go Raptors. Woo.), religion wasn't really a big deal, and most of my colleagues were very understanding of someone who had very little faith, just as long as they believed in something, and believe in something I did. That is, until Field Training.

For those who are unfamiliar with ROTC, its a program which allows college students to attend university classes while going through a part-time officer training course. The idea is that, after four or five years of college, a student is ready to commission as a new officer in the military, ready to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Anyway, for those of us in the USAF's program, Field Training is like an Officer's boot camp in the middle of the summer between our sophomore and junior years of university. We go, get yelled at, do lots of retarded things like make our beds a certain way, and generally prove that we're capable of handling ourselves under stress and in an unforgiving environment. While there, we were challenged mentally as well as physically. It was really the first time in my life I'd ever needed a little backup from the Big Guy Upstairs. For the first time in my life, there was an honest, no-strings-attached appeal to Him for help.

It didn't come. There I was, running my tenth or eleventh lap of the black-topped track behind the OTS buildings in Maxwell AFB in Alabama, sucking wind as cadets passed me on my right and left. I think I was passing the water fountain which leaked all twenty-eight days we were there, when I realized the culmination of decades of thinking. After analyzing all the data, after computing all possible explanations for why God didn't do what I was told he'd do, the only rational explanation was that "He doesn't f**king exist".

It was a curious feeling. There was no rush of emotion, no startling paradigm shift. I don't even recall breaking my stride. It just clicked, much in the same way a math problem is solved to satisfaction in one's head. There is no God, and that explains everything. All those questions finally had a nice, rational answer to them. Amputees weren't healed because God didn't heal anyone. Evil existed because nature doesn't care about people and humans can be jerks. Science trumps faith. The universe has no purpose but that which I give it. Nobody is going to make me run faster; it is on me to push myself.

Only weeks later, after returning home a proud graduate with another spiffy do-dad on my uniform, did I ever really think back about what kind of significance that moment held. Again, there wasn't any strong emotion or "eyes opening" event. It was a curious feeling at the base of my brain; it was natural.

"There is no God," I thought with a smirk. "I knew it all along."

Whaddya know? There are, after all, atheists in foxholes.

(by the way, my spell check wants me to change 'deconvert' to 'reconvert'. I think my computer is trying to evangelize me ;)

Now you've compelled me.

Wow, what a story.

Looking back like you, I've been an atheist for 20 plus years. Some of our experiences are quite similar. I too denied science in favour of religious nonsense without ever truly believing my erroneous choice.

I'm not bitter though, I met the love of my life in the church, so I'm thankful for that. But, damn, I threw away so much money. I wonder if I can sue the church to get it back? I can only wish.

Daylight atheism has been fundamental in me being honest with myself.

Without giving the guys a head the size of a pumpkin, this site is doing a top job and I'll continue visiting it while it exists.

Or just treat every day as blasphemy day ;-)

When is blasphemy day? I think it's time for me to fully come out.

My story- it's too long! All I can say is that rationality won in the end.

From the time I was a young boy, I apparently never took religion all that seriously. My mother tells me that at the age of seven or eight I used to argue theology with my grandmother (her mom), who readily encouraged me to think freely and question things.

I went through the motions as a kid and into my teens, doing things like going to church when my mom made me (a liberal Methodist church it was, home to our local PFLAG chapter), getting baptised and confirmed and going to church camp each summer.
But I never bought into the whole thing.

When I got a little older, into my late-teens and early-twenties, and was going through the start of my sexual coming out process, I briefly entertained the whole Wicca thing, and went through the motions on that for a couple years (including reading a laughable book on the subject. I recall a spell they mentioned for getting a job that involved doing some tricks with pennies and water and candles and prayer and then putting a whole lot of job applications. Guess which part was more relevant to the task at hand?), but lost interest. I went through the whole Buddhism thing for about three weeks as an effort to get down someone's pants (it failed, thus pointing out that while there may indeed be many valid reasons to change religions, doing so to get someone in bed is not one of them).

Eventually I sort of drifted in my late-twenties to my current state of total atheism. I'm much happier this way. It's certainly a lot less complex. :)

First time this has been written down anywhere. I'll see if I can avoid rambling too much (yeah right).

My family moved around a lot when I was young. It wasn't until my mother married my stepfather that I began going to church with any regularity, the Episcopal church he belonged to already. I believed what the priest told me: God loves me, He became incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ to save me (though how exactly that worked, I didn't think much about at the time), He also appears as the Holy Spirit, blah blah blah. The church was moderate and mostly apolitical, as far as I was aware, so early on I was sure that the Bible wasn't meant to be taken literally. I believed that the message of love and compassion I was told was in there was the most important thing, not the specifics. It was Christianity of convenience. Going to church was something I did because it was what people I knew did, unless they're lazy and want to sleep in on a Sunday so they weasel their way out of it.

I got full tuition to college, fulfilling the dream my mother had for me since I was young, and went off to school to study psychology. Halfway through freshman year, I realized I hated the psychology program, and felt deeply unsatisfied with my life. All that work for all those years...and that was it? But I wanted (still want) to help people, to be a source of comfort and support, and I thought my Jesuit priest and nun professors were awesome. Hey, I thought, I'm Episcopalian! They have women priests! So I changed my major to dual in English and Theology, with the intention of going to seminary after I graduated.

Six months later, I'm home for the summer, reading Karen Armstrong's 'A History of God.' Now, I'm aware of Ebon's criticisms of her, and I think they're well founded and I agree with them. The "all the religions are the same deep down, really" namby-pamby wishful thinking she promotes is naive at best and deluded at worst. However, I didn't know about her philosophies at the time. Her book was the first more or less neutral description of how Judaism, and Christianity and Islam following it, arose in the peoples of the Middle East that I had read up until that point. So it got me thinking.

I had read Augustine in my freshman Philosophy class, and he hinged a great deal of his theology on Original Sin. But I was coming to realize that Adam and Eve probably never really existed. If there's no Adam and Eve, if that story is just a metaphor for an ancient writer to express his thoughts about the human condition. then there is no Original Sin. If there is no Original Sin, what did Jesus die for? The idea that he died to save me from naughty acts I committed or would commit seemed patently silly. If this is God dying and rising again, anyone who believed should through his divine magic woo automatically not sin. He's freaking GOD. But obviously that's not the case.

I just couldn't come up with a good answer for why God had to take human form and be crucified. To understand us better? He supposedly made us in his image. What was there for Him to understand that he didn't already put there? (So I thought at the time.)

So if Jesus died for nothing, maybe he wasn't really God.

That pretty much ended me being Christian right there, which also put an end to my plans on being ordained. Once I was over the Jesus hump, I did some bouncing around and dabbling to figure out just what I did believe concerning God or gods. I was taking classes on Buddhism as part of my Theology requirements, which as many here may know, is not theo-centric. The Buddha accepted that there were gods, but claimed that they were on the same wheel of samsara as everybody else. The fact that Buddhism lives side by side or is integrated with the religions that preceded it in many parts of the world was a sort of model for me. I was also reading up on various neo-Pagan religions. What emerged from all that was the general idea that there were beings out there, they were more powerful than me in some ways, but not all powerful. Some were benevolent, some were malicious, but we were all reincarnating again and again, with enlightenment as the ultimate goal. This is in a nutshell the belief system I held for several years.

Then I became pregnant by a guy I had only known for about six months.

After my parents divorced, my father saw less and less of me until he just quit altogether - that was seventeen years ago. I know first hand how easy it is for a parent to simply leave. Yet here is this man I'm just getting to know who's willing to marry me and raise our son together.

On top of that, pregnancy is a crazy thing. It seems like you're just dragged along for the ride by these chemical processes you can't see and only know about when they make you throw up or burst into tears. Yet I ended up with this absolutely amazing kid.

Why did I get a great family out of a careless night, when other people get abandoned? Why did my son get to be born to parents who love him and can financially take care of him, when other children suffer, are abused, or starve? It's not just. It's not right. Yet it continues to happen, perpetrated by people that delude themselves into thinking they are not bad, because it's not really their fault, or because they are better than those they are hurting.

This is, of course, the classic 'problem of evil', which is usually addressed from the basic premise of an all powerful yet somehow all loving God. I had already moved on from that idea, but now I was beginning to see that I couldn't accept that there were little-g gods around, either. Cruelty and suffering are just too widespread. People convert to new faiths or become more entrenched in their supposedly "good" religion, but it's just a facade and their interior motivations don't change. If they do good things, it's because the impetus to do good was already part of them, not because of some higher being. There's no evidence anything is influencing us other than measurable, detectable physical factors. So why believe in any gods? The idea that there are beings out there that somehow need our worship, the idea that we have to worship anything, now seems silly and a waste of time.

I'm pretty sure if anything is discovered that could by any stretch of the imagination be called a god, it's completely uninterested in human beings. However, I choose the label "atheist" over "agnostic" because I'm not just leaving the question up in the air, but actively living and making choices on the premise that there isn't one. I live Without gods. I'm happier for it.

Sorry this is so long. Thanks for providing a place to share, and thanks to everyone for your stories. They are a pleasure to read.

I was confirmed a Lutheran at a nice midwest liberal church. Not the pushy types, and real nice people. I went to camp and enjoyed all of it. When we moved to NJ my mother tried to find a similar church, but couldn't and just gave up. Dad was the type that said religious belief was important, but always seemed to have an important golf game "for business" on Sundays. There was a girl next door who was one of my first new friends in NJ and she invited me to be a part of her church's youth group. I remember the kids meeting at my house one time and discussing how you can't go to heaven unless you accept Christ. For some reason, a question popped into my mind and out of my mouth, "But what about the people who were born before Jesus or never heard of him through no fault of their own?" Well, the quick answer was that all these people would go to a kind of waiting area after death and then be judged by their life deeds during the second coming and go to heaven or hell then. I thought, "That's not fair. That's not the God I believe in." So I told my mom. She handed me a book by James Kavanaugh entitled "The Birth of God". He was a priest who left the church. That convinced me that church was not important for belief. Several years later, she suggested a book by Elaine Pagels entitled "The Gnostic Gospels". That had me wondering why those books weren't in the bible, and how did all this Christianity stuff come about anyway? So I read the history of Christianity and the whole bible. All of that made Christianity very easy to walk away from, but then I wondered where I could find my "God". I got into reading about Native American beliefs and really thought that was it. God the Great Spirit. I blended that in with New Age stuff- holding crystals, reading The Celestine Prophecy, squinting my eyes in order to try to see auras, etc. I still wasn't quite sure I had found the tradition that fit my idea of "God". Then I got an job at a high energy particle physics facility and a whole new world opened up for me- quantum physics. Maybe my "God" could be explained by that! I read Edgar Mitchell's The Way of the Explorer and joined the Noetic Sciences Institute. I loved their articles. I read Deepak Chopra who loves to use quantum physics to explain God. But after awhile, I read some of the works of physicists who were very upset by this science/religion blend, and I began to see their point. So I decided that the "God" I believed in wasn't there either. Then a change in my life caused me to move to Kentucky. Suddenly I was immersed in this in your face christianity all the time, and struggling to maintain my personal belief. One day a thought came to me (maybe from god?!Only kidding). Maybe the reason I still could not find the tradition or philosophy that explained my "God" was because my "God" was all in my head! God was imaginary!! Why it took 30 years to figure that out, I don't know. Last year, I bought Julia Sweeney's DVD of her stage show, "Letting Go of God". Not only is it funny, but she went through many of the same phases I did. And I love her little scene of god sitting by her front door with his bags packed ready to leave looking small and insignificant. It really fit what I felt. So that's it folks. Now I gotta work on afterlife thing. It is much tougher in many ways to let go of that than letting go of god, but I'm not going to take 30 years this time! Thanks to everyone for sharing and listening!