For most of my life – late teens until mid-30’s – I was an Evangelical Christian, and this wasn’t just a social identification for me. I really believed, I really loved Jesus. My freshman year of college I went to a little Bible college in Minnesota, and seriously considered becoming a pastor or missionary (fortunately …

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I was born rural, poor and white in western Canada, a region soaked in Christianity in all its rainbow of heresies and home to one wannabee theocracy that ruled a province for some years. Prairie communities might have churches as half the buildings in town. Because the populations were/are sparse, the community villages and towns …

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It’s been difficult to be an open atheist in my society. I went into a profession dominated by religious men, and while it doesn’t interfere with the work we do, I’m often faced with smug Christians trying to prove their superiority. I am an atheist firefighter, the only one I know. And here’s why.

Actually, I prefer to call myself an ‘anti-theist’, but that usually draws empty, quizzical stares or instant loathing and contempt, both of which can be disturbingly enjoyable.  For my current and long-standing atheism, I blame Arthur C. Clark, Stanley Kubrick and Johann Strauss II.  Let me explain.

I had been an atheist for over a decade but hadn’t realized it. It took a child to make me see that. My own child. He asked me one day why I didn’t go to church like others in our family. All these reasons flew through my head in a matter of seconds, but they …

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It’s probably a sign that you’re doomed to be a heathen when your initial conception of God was not the Gandalf-looking dude from the “Creation of Adam”, but the Fairy Godmother from “Cinderella.” It was easy for me as a child to buy into fictional characters being real. The brief time that I did go …

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I became an atheist because I didn’t need to feel self-important any more.

This is a submission for the Why I am an atheist series. however it is not about me. I really don’t have a fancy story, I just read a lot of science books and got serious doubts and later read the work of Dawkins, your blog etc.

Let me digress just a little right up front……I do not like the word “Atheist” as it sounds so negative. I have considered words like “Naturalist”, “Naturist”, Universalist”  but these have all been appropriated by other groups for other reasons. I certainly do not like the word “Bright”, advocated by some atheists, as I really …

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My story begins at a very young age.  In my earliest memories my family, and in particular my father, were very religious.  I was initially raised in the Lutheran church. It seems now that the Lutheran church we attended was really quite vanilla and innocuous. However, when I was 12 the church’s new youth minister …

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