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First, thanks for the link, innominate (did I spell that right?). Great site.

Second, warning for one and all, this is a long post.

I'm 45 and a new Grandma! (7 weeks old.) I've been Atheist for 17 years, agnostic for 4 years before that and, though I didn't look into converting 'til my early '20's, 23 to be exact, since age 17 no longer believed Jesus was the Messiah. It was studying the Bible -- get this laugh, to get closer to God and understand him better -- that caused me to lose my faith. I was raised basically Dutch Reform by my strictly religious mother though we went to different Protestant churches.

Basically everything was a sin to her. Breathing was a sin. She was a very violent hellfire and brimstone type. Spare the rod and spoil the child was her creed. The mother in Stephen King's "Carrie" (a story I'm fascinated by because of this similarity and also because, like Carrie, I was a skinny -- hard to believe if you saw me now -- painfully shy teenager afraid of my own shadow) reminds me greatly of my own mother. My mother literally did, when she thought our behavior sinful or not to be born screech "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live at us". It did have the effect of making you make a hasty exit from her presence and give her some peace. She couldn't kill my love of rock music and the '60's culture of my childhood. I think I was born at the right time. A child in the '60's who came of age in the '70's but my mother couldn't even get us to stop watching "The Monkees" and "Soul Train". We'd take a beating to watch them. Once we had a TV that is. Until I was 12, they were a false idol and a sin. My father finally wore her down. Took him long enough.

My father was raised Catholic but converted to Protestant to marry my mother. Needless to say this led to a life-long enimity between her and my minmere (grandmother), her mother-in-law, the length of their marriage anyway, that I never understood as a child but which I look back now and say aha. My evil mother led my father away from Catholicism! This was his second marriage. He had one earlier with one child that he signed off and let the child's stepfather adopt him so he wouldn't have to pay child support. This is probably the best thing he ever did for the half-brother I've never met. I doubt my father really believed much of anything though if you confronted him and asked him he'd give the usual lip service and say he did. He was no better than my mother except you could avoid him somewhat. Dad was always screaming "children should be seen and not heard" and he meant this literally. If he heard you, off would come the belt and he'd beat you for disturbing his peace. This doesn't explain the morning when I was seven and got up in the morning to find Daddy shaving with the bathroom door open. I had never seen a man shave before and stood there watching in utter fascination wondering what Daddy was doing. I didn't say a word or make a peep but he must not have like my watching him shave. Without a word of warning or snarling at me to scat or anything to give me a clue I was doing something wrong, he turned around and punched me in the jaw with all his strength. Knocked out a tooth that time and I have hated him ever since. He used to try hard to win me back after that but was unable to. I'd ignore him and he'd sing "Beautiful Dreamer awaken to me" and it'd only piss me off more and I'd turn my back totally to him. He finally got the child that was seen and not heard but it did not make him comfortable.

My earliest years in a small town, Dad dragged the eight of us to an Alliance church which my mother refused to attend. Again we didn't get why. Then we moved (when I was seven, just before the shaving incident) to the inner city and neither took us to church. Both were rather bigoted Archie Bunker style and probably would have died before entering a black church in a neighborhood where only one family besides us was white, I had one latina friend and one Native American and everyone else was black. Nevertheless, my mother (this was in the mid-'60's) did sign the permission slip for me to leave school early once a week and attend religious education in the black church near the school. I couldn't tell you what denomination it was 'til this day. There was more horsing around by the kids than actual paying attention to the lessons. During this period, Dad, and my mother would turn in her grave if she found this out, we somehow knew not to tell her, did sneak us off to mass one morning but bored with the Latin we didn't understand, we started fooling around and embarrassed him and he never did it again.

We moved again to another small town, somewhat between rural and suburbs, not real country country as in farms etc but not quite suburbs either. We didn't go to church the five years there but after 20 years of marriage when I was 14, my mother finally had enough. I did learn something useful from her in that the only thing that kept her from being a battered wife was that she hit back when he hit her and she was bigger than him. When they fought it was a draw and eight kids cleared the room because when neither could beat the other up they took to throwing whatever came within reach at each other and objects would fly through the air. No child wanted to be caught in the crossfire. Anyway, when I was 14, my mother with dreams of living in a newspaper shack until she made it big as a country singer packed up her four youngest (I was the oldest of that four) and tried to walk us to Tennessee. I kid you not. I wish I were. Fortunately, some kind person saw us -- a woman and four teen and pre-teen girls -- on the highway divider and took us to their huge farm and talked my mother into going back home the next day and drove us all back in her station wagon.

My mother left my father a bit more sanely the following year, returning home to the farm country she came from, going home to mother and dragged us to the Dutch Reform church she was raised in. After a school semester, she rented a house from a farmer she'd grown up with (the cows came up to our backyard) and it was closer to the next largest town and we wound up in their school district, much to our relief (the first school had kindergarten through 12th under one roof; your choices for high school -- business or agriculture). This other town was a college town, albeit a state ag-tech college, and at least had a grade school, a middle school and a high school with the usual high school electives. My aunt, who also lived on a farm in this new school district, convinced my mother to start attending the Wesleyan church with her and her children. I'm still wondering how she convinced her because my mother used to rant about this church. She thought it too strict because women's hems had to be below the knee and sleeves past the elbow. Meanwhile, she only allowed our hems to the top of our knee, which we learned to hike up skirts under blouses when we left the house or change into our mini-skirts and short shorts when she left for work. When she had me captive in church, she kept slipping me pamphlets on the evils of that rock and roll she couldn't break me of. One turned into three when I bought that Simon and Garfunkel album and she realized I was listening to those heathen Jews!

I did question a lot when I was small that which made no sense. How could God kill all the innocent babies and animals when he had Noah build the ark and flooded the earth? Why did he put the fruit tree in the Garden if he didn't want them to eat from it? Things like that that she couldn't adequately answer. I spent the summer on my aunt's farm when I was 12 and going to that Wesleyan church accepted Christ that summer. It was so easy to believe in that quiet household where there was enough to eat and I was even given a small bit of spending money. In high school, I got real fervently religious and began reading the Bible for an hour a day to better understand God and get closer to him. I slept over at my best friend's house, Catholic though not fanatically, and impressed her Dad by whizzing through the Bible category on Jeopardy. (I still do, btw, though I'm not as sure that's anything to be proud of. It horrifies my daughter even though I explained trying to unlearn the brainwashing she was never subject to is rather like trying to unlearn the alphabet. It freaks her out that I still know hymns by heart and that it takes an effort to not join in automaton when they're sung.)

But, actually reading the Bible cover to cover instead of suggested reading by those trying to influence you was rather enlightening as it led to more questions than answers. The first thing that jumped out at me rather glaringly was the stark difference between the Old and New Testaments. Now I admit Judaism was always an interest of mine because I thought Jesus was the Messiah the Jews waited for and this was re-enforced, not by Simon and Garfunkel, by a best friend in the sixth grade who just happened to be Jewish and was eager to tell me all about it. So I came to the conclusion that Jesus couldn't possibly be the Messiah and my beliefs for the next six years were rather Jewish. I didn't pursue conversion 'til I was 23 -- they aren't convert or burn in hell -- and when I did the rabbi was impressed at my knowledge, admitting I knew more than many born Jewish. (Because studying Judaism had been a hobby of mine since I was a kid and I read everything I could get my hands on.)

I went with a Conservative temple, liking the middle of the road approach so to speak, neither too strict or too lax. I went to temple every Sabbath and took Hebrew lessons and but the thing is, they read Torah every Sabbath as part of the service and, to my surprise, used to church, have no hesitation interrupting the rabbi's sermon to ask him to explain a point or question something he said (my first Sabbath did this ever shock me and to my even bigger surprise, he loved it!). Those questions, theirs and my own, kept raising their ugly head. When I met my non-Jewish ex-husband in the middle of this, I dropped the nonsense cold. Because conversion isn't necessarily compulsory with believing in their God, I told myself it was too hypocritical when I was marrying a non-Jew but I know, in hindsight, that the Judaism wasn't really squaring with me either.

The next four years, though I didn't call myself that then, was my Agnostic stage. My husband was Baptist but not a church-goer and agreed with me on not forcing religion, even through baptism (a custom I found and find barbaric), on a child. When people asked me what I believed, I shrugged and said I don't know and I don't care. If God would condemn me to hell for not knowing then that's a God I don't want anything to do with anyway.

But somewhere in the back of my mind, I was still thinking. I didn't voice doubts aloud except to declare the above and refused to discuss it further. (It's doubtful I would have joined in these message boards had the internet been around back then.) When after my divorce, my ex molested my daugther, I angrily -- and this seems to fortify the angry at God argument to which I say bull$hit -- said outloud, "No God exists that would allow something like this to happen to a beautiful child like that." When I voiced those words out loud -- and it did take guts and maybe it took anger to have those guts -- I realized that I had come to the conclusion somewhere over the last four years that there was no God. Obviously, of course, even if this didn't happen to my daughter, similar are on the news every night that are tough to square with a loving, merciful god. I think this declaration would have come even her father hadn't turned out to be a perv.

I have been adamantly Atheist ever since and my daughter, who I skipped state with when family court failed to protect her from her father, was raised Atheist. To pleas that I should baptise her or to be fair, teach her Chrisitainity, I had one reply, "I have every bit as much right to raise her as I believe as you do to raise yours as you do." I still firmly believe this and believe Atheist parents should do all they can to protect their children from childhood indoctrination if you want to be PC; brainwashing if you want to be honest. My daughter thanks me for this. Now, to be fair, she'd hear things and ask me about them and I was honest with her telling her what I thought or what I was raised to believe or what my understanding was of someone's belief. Every single damn time, my daughter, no dummy, would wrinkle her little brow and protest "But that makes no sense!" What could I do to that but laugh (and borrowing from an anti-drug commercial at the time) and say, "What can I say? This is your brain on religion."

20 now, she just had a baby in early October. She and Daddy are nonbelievers. Daddy was raised Christian but not in church and is not as bold as her and I yet at being outspoken in his disbelief. I watch him and see so much of my first tentative steps away from the madness and am patient with him and sometimes have to tell my daughter what it's like because she gets impatient. We took him to the Godless March in Washington and he loved it! Shortly after that, he had the guts to tell his mother he didn't believe after sweating over it quite a bit only to find she already suspected as much. So far, so good. Nobody's been after them to baptise the baby or anything. It was brought up but dropped immediately when they made it clear that they would not be doing so.

Sorry this was such a long story. Thanks for listening. I didn't really see much way to make it shorter. It's been quite a life thus far. Of course, I long ago came to realize and accept that I will always march to my own beat and thus, even though I think boredom is way under-rated, will always have an interesting life so to speak though perhaps not by most people's standards. I'm no social butterfly. But I like my life and it is good.

I've been a long time member, since our exile in that other state for her father's crimes, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and have read Dan Barker's "Losing Faith in Faith". I love it and am glad I bought it. I also have his "Friendly Neighborhood Atheist" album and would have a tough choice picking a favorite but the one I most appreciate is easy. It's "Life is Good" which he dedicates to those of us who have thrown off the yoke of childhood indoctrination. As he says in it -- and I just love the play on words -- "Life is unbelievingly good."