I was raised an Anglican, and went to church every Sunday, so I absorbed a lot of what I heard. I didn't challenge it, but I wasn't very intense about it. It was just in the background.

When I was about 15, I became depressed about life, and turned to the Bible. The beginning had too much "beggetting", and Jesus in the gospels seemed a bit too angry, so I looked in the middle and found a little book called Ecclesiastes. Well, that finished me off. Even the Bible said everything was empty. I was depressed for months - until...

When I was 16, I went along to a meeting on "Cults", run by the high school Christian fellowship. I challenged a lot of what they said, but one said "Look, I can't answer your questions, but I do know if you believe in Christ you have knowledge of your salvation". For some reason, this did it. My depression instantly lifted. My heart flooded with joy, and everything appeared physically brighter. I walked away and immediately tried to convert someone.

I spent the vacation period reading the New Testament and a book on cults given to me. I didn't see any fellow believer for nearly four months, so I couldn't say I was a victim of group pressure. When vacation was over I joined the local Baptist youth group. I went there every week. I was involved in both the Anglican Church and Baptist Church. I did all sorts of witnessing. I once even joined a phone-out at the PTL club, and sometimes preached to people on the street. But I was always armed with Bible tracts when I went around school.

My conversion experience made a great testimonial. I was extremely intense about it, and expected Jesus to return at any moment. I accepted Biblical inerrancy, creation science and the other doctrines of Evangelical fundamentalism.

My family moved. I changed churches. I began to read more. I began to discover that most believers really did not take theology seriously, in the sense that they didn't systematically think out what they believed. They had a very muddled idea of what Christianity was supposed to be.

I felt called to be a teacher of some sort. I wanted to dedicate myself to God by refuting liberal theology. I believed the Bible was inerrant, and that it shouldn't have been too difficult to knock down the arguments of the liberal theologians from a really Bible-based Christianity.

Thinking that the Anglican church could be revived (it was full of too many liberals), I tried to enter a college to train as a minister. They said I was too young. So I went to University instead. I studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

I had spent some time trying to reconcile the gospel stories. These presented me with a number of problems which rested in suspended animation in my mind. Six weeks into term, we were reading Genesis 1, when the professor said that the word for firmament "raqiah" was derived from "raq", which means "to beat". He said they thought the sky was a bowl. Something snapped. I read Genesis 1 over and over again. The sky was a bowl, and the sun, moon and stars were set in it. Above it was water. There were light and days before the sun was created. And so much more. I had accepted creation science - but it was unbiblical. You couldn't even have a Ptolemaic theory with the Bible, letalone Copernicus. And all those other contradictions and problems came out of suspended animation.

Very rapidly the whole inerrancy business unravelled. By second term I did not believe in the Virgin birth, and had great doubts about the physical or bodily resurrection of Jesus. I tried reading various Christian writers. I rejected Barth, and eventually even extreme liberals like Bultmann.

That summer I gave my last testimony. I witnessed to an ex-seventh day adventist. I told him how I believed, and what my faith meant to me. At the end, I was exhausted and drained. How could I do this any longer? I had tried to stay a Christian - I couldn't accept that my conversion experience did not prove anything. I prayed a lot, but God was silent. I cried for my sinfulness and lack of faith.

But it was in vain. I was walking across the university campus, about 3 years after my conversion, and I said to myself "I am an Atheist". That was nearly twenty years ago. I still am, and I have never managed to completely get over my outrage that I ever believed that rubbish.

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