I was raised Presbyterian and stayed active in the church until I left for college. I was fond of most of the people at the church, and I loved the tradition. I would say that my upbringing in religion was relatively moderate, although I certainly picked up on the message that the only way to be moral was to have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. I went to church camps, my friends were in the church youth group, and I even volunteered on the church session as a youth representative.

When I went off to college, I began to understand why science is so irreconcilable with theology. I took biology, geology and astonomy in my first two years of college. It's not as though I had believed the creation story literally--I knew that it was mythological to some degree, but soon the lines began to blur. I knew that there was far more credibility in modern science, and science began to crowd out truths claimed by the Bible.

Also, since the university was church-sponsored, I was required to take a religion course. I took a class called "Biblical Literature & Life" my freshman year. The professor began the class by referring to God as a "she." Our reading assignments focused largely on the atrocities and the not-so-Christian stories found in the Old Testament. She was removed from the university halfway through the semester, so we never got to cover the New Testament with her.

The second semester of my freshman year, I had a religious and philosophical debate with my roommate and his friend. They were agnostic/atheist and there was nothing I could legitimately argue, and it quickly became an ad hominem fight on both sides. I began to feel the ground of faith disappear under my feet, but I wasn't about to surrender to a worldview held by these two people whom I could not stand.

At the same time I fell into a deep, 3-month period of depression. I reached out to a friend who was kind and whom I knew had gone to Jesuit Prep school. I broached the topic of religion, and he simply asked me if I had joined the church willingly or if I was raised in it. I told him I was raised in it. He then said "that's why you believe, you were raised to believe." I was shocked to learn that this friend was also a non-believer. Finally I reached out to friends of mine who were in a Christian fraternity. There were some of the nicest friends that I had met, but their clean way of living left no room for people like me who liked to let loose and have a beer and a cigarette. They also had no qualms to tell me that the faith in Christ would assure them salvation, but nonbelief would assure damnation. Not just death and annihilation, but damnation in Hell.

The depression came to a head on Easter weekend my freshman year, when I felt that the time had come to make a decision. I shuddered and cried as I privately decided that whether I could believe it or not, I had to remain Christian. I sat alone in my dorm room, sobbing, feeling guilty and at the same time feeling like my true self was being destroyed.

From there I began a slow road back into faith. For 11 years I gradually became more committed to being Christian, studying the Bible and theology, attending worship services and trying to evangelize.

Finally church politics in the Episcopal Church, which I joined in 2001, became too much for me to handle early in 2004. I began studying Christian apologetics more intensely, debating doctrine and looking to sources outside the church. My Christian peers' response to my questions was for me to read more books by Christian authors. As I looked at the hypocrisy and backstabbing that was going on in the church, I stopped going to church after 2 1/2 years of near-perfect attendance. A less-than-holy visit to Rome in March 2004 and more studying, followed by investigation into Biblical inconsistency led me to the realization that I had serious doubts not only about Christianity, but about God himself.

As I began reading books in support of Atheism and Secularism, I figured that if my faith could withstand my findings, my faith would be stronger than ever. If it could not, it was not a faith worth having.

By April I was Deist, by May I was agnostic. By June I could finally comfortably say that I am atheist.

I have found a more real meaning in my life, one that does not require submitting to an all-knowing but unknowable, all-seeing but invisible, and all-powerful but absent deity.

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