I was brought up to go to the Church of England by my mother. My father was very much more sceptical, but he turned up now and again. Whilst I was a teenager I got very interested in C.S. Lewis' books, "Mere Christianity", "The Problem of Pain" and of course the Narnia stories. Then when a friend from school, who had become a Christian introduced me to his church friends, I was more of less dragged into the more serious Christian scene, however I continued to go to Church of England.

This continued through University, where I rapidly got drawn into the Christian Union with its narrow perspective on everything. I continued to be associated with the Church of England for most of my time there and into work after University.

A major turning point took place at work where I met some Jehovah's Witnesses, and convinced that they were wrong, started to get seriously into theology, NT Greek and so forth. I felt that the Church of England was too feeble, and moved on via a roundabout route into a highly-structured independent Charismatic church, where I remained for 7 lonely and depressing years.

I eventually left that church in disgust at a huge and ugly falling-out amongst the leaders, but I still believed, and went as a visitor to a number of churches for the next 10 years or so.

A second major turning point came when a chance Internet encounter brought me up against creationism, which someone from the old church had become involved in. After some time devouring The Talk.Origins Archives, I found myself thinking much more clearly about a subject which had been largely ignored in all my time in those churches. When I spoke to Christians about this, I found at best a morass of confusion and at worst outright lying and dishonesty about the whole subject. The final straw was a conversation on the net with a guy who runs a creationist website called "The True.Origin Archive".

I spent a few weeks contemplating subjects like Biblical Errancy, prayer and charismatic gifts, and particularly Hell, and generally surfing the net to see what other people said, and I put some thoughts up on my web site, before at the end of July 1999 I finally decided I had to take a grip on myself, say that there was no way it all hung together and that I was no longer a Christian. I don't like labels, but I think "atheist" is the most accurate, where that is defined as "I don't believe in a god" (weak) rather than "I believe that there is no god" (strong).

I have to say I have felt ever so much more confident in myself since then. Maybe the contradictions and general doublethink was bugging me subconsciously all the time.

Please feel free to surf into my website and feed back any constructive thoughts and ideas, and use anything useful that you find (although acknowledgement would be appreciated). My hope is that it, and also this site, will help people avoid wasting quite so much of their lives as I did mine.

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