faithless and proud!

The recent publicity about 'new atheism' really fascinates me. I'll come right out and say it now: I'm an atheist, and I probably always have been. I can't remember a time when I ever really really believed in any gods... the closest I ever came to faith was a belief in Santa Claus when I was young. (And that ended badly!)

I don't know how I came to be an atheist.

My father came from a family torn by religious conflict. His father, son of a strict (and venomous :-) Catholic family, incurred the wrath of that family by marrying my grandmother. She was also a devout Christian - just not of the Catholic variety. So out of the goodness of their dear little god-fearing hearts, and no doubt in accordance with their understanding of their bible, they saw it as their duty to ostracise my grandmother and try to end the marriage by basically acting as though she didn't exist. For most of her life. Nice.

She tried not to take it personally; he drowned his sorrows.

My mother's family was nominally CofE, but aside from a half-hearted attempt to get me to go to Sunday school for a few weeks when I was little, but not that impressionable, religion never really raised its ugly head in my childhood home.

I attended government schools, thereby avoiding indoctrination in early education, and as my mind tends naturally towards logic, I guess I just never learned to believe in faith.

It was only when I started Uni that I first became aware of how entrenched religion was in those around me. I began to realise that many of my friends, whom I had believed to be beings of reason and logic like myself, actually professed to being catholic or jewish or buddhist. And they weren't embarrassed to admit it in public.

I found myself in such a minority that I eventually declined to discuss religion at all, not wanting to offer myself as a constant target for conversion by the 'missionaries'.

So over the years, I've kept quiet hold of my atheism, never waivering from my lack of faith, and not worrying that I was in such a minority.

But I *LOVE* that there's now a recognised movement of atheists, ready to stand up and challenge the blind faithful, and not be prepared to listen to their dogma and pretend it makes sense.

Atheists rule!