"One night I prayed to know the truth. The next morning I discovered I was an atheist."

That's what I lightheartedly tell folks when they ask about my religious beliefs. Actually it was neither as simple nor as sudden as that. My escape from religion was a gradual process which spanned a period of several years. Though it shouldn't take you quite that long to read this post, I'll warn you now that it is rather long. But if you like, I'll tell you of my journey.

I was born in Cincinnati during W.W.II, and was reared in a "respectable" mainstream Protestant Christian household. At the age of four (following my family's move to another city) I had a terrifying experience in a nasty little concrete-block fire-and-brimstone church -- lots of jumping and shouting and screaming, activity I was not at all accustomed to in grown-ups -- thoroughly alarming and upsetting to a sensitive little tyke who had been raised on "Jesus Loves Me." I was sobbing uncontrollably when Mom finally "rescued" me and took me home. Fortunately, she decided that we should look for a different church. Although this episode in no way affected my young belief in God and Jesus, it was my first decidedly negative experience with religion.

In the main, my religious upbringing was pretty laid back. Once Mom had found us a suitably "civilized" church, we settled into a routine of Sunday School for an hour each week. But other than that our life was pretty secular, except for one or two exciting and uplifting (to me) school Christmas performances of excerpts from Handel's "Messiah." Belief in God was expected as normal and proper, but we didn't make a great fuss over it as some are inclined to do. I was never baptized. We didn't attend Christmas or Easter church services, but treated these holidays mainly as family reunion, feasting, gift-giving, and fun-for-kiddies occasions (which was just fine with me).

I don't remember learning much in Sunday School, except that there were people, such as Jews and atheists, who did not share a "proper" Christian belief, and hence were immoral and evil. And probably treasonous, too, for those were the "McCarthy - HUAC" days. It therefore came as quite a surprise to me when, while I was in my mid teens, Mom finally revealed to me the reason that Dad never went to church with the rest of the family: He didn't believe in God! This revelation did not shake my own religious faith, but it was nevertheless a real eye-opener. It awakened me to the fact that people who did not believe in God and Jesus are not necessarily evil, for Dad was one of the most conscientiously (though quietly) virtuous and ethical people I have ever known.

It was in elementary school that I learned about dinosaurs, prehistory, and the concept of humans as an animal species. In junior high school I learned that the earth was billions of years older than the human species. And in high school I was introduced to biological evolution. I was even cast in a minor role in a school production of "Inherit the Wind," which introduced me to the term "agnostic" in the form of the real-life character Clarence Darrow, and brought me face to face with some of the glaring dichotomies between science and fundamentalist belief. It didn't shake my mainstream faith, but it convinced me that some religious beliefs were pretty antiquated and stupid in light of modern knowledge.

After high school I was still religious in my mainstream Christian way. I had shed the biblical creation timetable in much the same fashion as I had shed Santa Claus and the Easter bunny years earlier. But I still held to the belief that God was the creator of the universe. In order to reconcile this with my gradually accumulating scientific knowledge, I reasoned that God had used natural processes -- including evolution -- as tools over billions of years, rather than a series of miraculous "let there be" commands spanning a mere week. Though some of the biblical stories were goofy, I saw, God and his works were far grander than I had ever supposed.

Then one Wednesday evening my best friend invited me to attend church with him and his parents. Having nothing better to do (I thought), I agreed to go. Flashback to age four: fire and brimstone, evil is everywhere, we're gonna fry if we don't get saved! This time, however, the experience didn't traumatize me, for I had caught snatches of this odious crap spewing from radios for years, and was by this time fairly inured to it. But it did set me thinking.

My respected friend's belief in "fire and brimstone" Christianity, and my own belief in "love and peace" Christianity, were equally intense, yet fundamentally incompatible. They could not both be the word of the same God, could not both be right. And if one was wrong, perhaps both were. To resolve the difficulty, I tried to imagine what might happen if I were a visitor from Mars to Earth, having no religious experience. I wondered what unmistakable sign would guide me, as a stranger to earthly religion, to the One True Faith (whatever it might be) and away from all others? The more I studied the matter, the more it seemed that there was no such sign. Despite the Christian bias of my own youth, I had to admit that there was nothing compelling about Christianity which did not have some equivalent in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or for that matter in the old Norse, Egyptian, or Greco-Roman religions.

During the next year or two I drifted into a kind of Christian deism (for want of a better term), in which I viewed scriptural miracles with increasing skepticism, and Jesus as a great teacher but otherwise a quite ordinary and mortal human being. Yet even if it wasn't the deity of a recognized religion, God was still necessary, I felt, as the creator of life and the author of morality.

In the spring of 1965 I enlisted in the ASA, the intelligence branch of the Army. Following training I was sent to Europe, where I found myself, along with a number of other non-fundy Christians, in the unaccustomed day-to-day company of a number of Jews, agnostics, and even a Buddhist or two -- on the whole a pretty decent and fun bunch of people, I discovered. Even amiable the cigar-chomping post chaplain was an okay guy, especially since he made it a point not to preach to our religiously diverse group at the compulsory monthly training sessions, but rather dismissed us for that hour. But then his tour of duty was over. The chaplain who replaced him was something else.

The Rev. Captain Gasquet, an Episcopalian fundamentalist (a most curious bird) from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, came to us by way of some unspeakable hole in Vietnam, and he was perhaps the strongest single influence on my religious life. It was from his preaching, especially to the many non-Christians in our unit who were, according to him, eternally and horribly damned, that I got a good look at the side of religion which I had only briefly glimpsed before. Chaplain Gasquet straightforwardly slashed through the love-and-peace trappings of Christianity and revealed the grotesque hatred, ignorance, fear, and superstition which lurked at its core. I can truly thank that man and his fervent belief for giving me the final, hard shove I needed to confront the ghastly, bloody, insane and deformed horror of Christianity, and ultimately to discard it altogether. Furthermore, I earnestly wish him whatever eternal reward he deserves for that kindness.

In the years after leaving the military I went back to college -- not as a serious attempt to earn a degree, but just to improve myself. In the process I learned enough to render the notion of life as a miraculous, planned occurrence unnecessary. And I came across and pieced together, bit by bit, a humanistic set of values which turned out to be far more self-consistent and pertinent to the modern world than a petrified decalogue of biblical taboo. It was becoming clear to me that the universe behaved pretty much as might be expected if God didn't exist, or at least didn't care. It gradually dawned upon me that in the grand scheme of things there was in fact no grand scheme. Even as an explanation for things as yet unknown a deity was entirely superfluous. For indeed experience had shown that religion had never truly explained anything, but merely served as a fig-leaf cover for the shame of human ignorance. God performed no observable function and had no valid purpose. The question entered my mind, "What is a god without purpose and for which there is no evidence?" "Non-existent," came the obvious answer. The blinders of dogma and the yoke of dread were finally off. For me the universe now shone in a wholesome new light, the comforting glow of reality no longer distorted, either by the almost cartoonish artificial "glory" of myth and miracle or by the dreadful glare of hellfire. I was free!

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