Having grown up in secular Holland in the 1980′s I don’t need a reason to be an atheist. One’s an atheist by default. Those attending church on a regular basis are either few and far between or tend to live in the heavily segregated villages in the Dutch ‘Bible belt’. The only interesting question that [...]

My parents were Church Of England, mildly practicing (more my mother than my father). My grandparents were strongly practicing C of E (as strong as that gets anyway – that is they went to church every week and all that). However – my father works in oil and his job took him around a lot [...]

I believe two varieties of atheists exist, which I call “small-A” and “big-A.” Small-A atheists comprise more or less ALL atheists; small-A atheism is simply the fact of not believing in any gods or practicing any theistic religion (at least, not with the understanding that any of it is real in any sense but cultural). [...]

Because I don’t understand what you ask me to believe in and because I don’t think you do either. Because I don’t put a name on what science doesn’t yet know.

My journey to atheism was not long or difficult. I was raised in a Reform Jewish home that was not particularly religious. I grew up in a city where there was a fairly large Jewish population in the suburbs, but there were very few other Jews within the city. My sister, two teachers, and I [...]

A Deconversion Story Of A Non-Converted What bad thing happened to you to make you hate god so much? Well, besides the fact that it is impossible for me to “hate” something that I think of as a fictional character in a particularly poorly written collection of essays, nothing. I’ve led a pretty charmed life. [...]

I was born into a christian family. We weren’t fundamentalists, religion wasn’t the center of our lives. We did go to church every Sunday morning and I went to youth group every Wednesday night. Neither were overbearing and you were allowed to believe whatever you wanted, so long as it was still christianity, except, that, [...]

I grew up Catholic, and had argued myself to the “correct” conclusion, that the Church’s teachings and morality were soundly defensible via logic. During college, however, my views on morality, especially but not limited to sexual morality, changed, forcing me to re-evaluate the logical connections I had previously accepted. (I remember vividly one time, while [...]

I am an atheist more as a result of an application of another rule in my life more than any other reason. I live my life by a simple rule as follows: “The world is full of claims being made, 1000s a day, and it is impossible to consider them all. When a claim comes [...]

My childhood sounds like the word “jesus,” repeated until it falls into noise, and you realize that it never meant anything to begin with. My mother used to repeat it in the car, on road trips. She spent twelve hours of reminding us of this: jesus said that he had no mother, no brother, and [...]