Category: The Faith I Left Behind

I had a fairly normal childhood. Most weeks I attended Sunday school, sorting through crayon nubs to color pictures of farm animals, children, and disciples all clustered around Jesus with looks of adoration.

I was fifteen years old (I am now eighty-nine) when I discarded the myth that there exists somewhere an entity that created the universe and, by the way, also the human species.

Since, by derivation, atheism means “without God” and agnosticism “without knowledge (of God),” there is really no difference in meaning between the two terms—so why not choose the one that has the less dogmatic tone?

I am no longer a Catholic because it defies reason. And while I feel so very lucky to have escaped, I’m angry that it took me several decades.

What changed my mind about Islam? I’d like to think that my mind changed me.

Becoming an atheist doesn’t happen overnight. For me, it’s been a lifelong process.

At age eighteen, I attended an all-boys Catholic high school wearing a gold cross attached to a necklace.

Surely, I could make anything happen just by willing it into existence. Except that it didn’t work that way.

I liberated myself from theistic paradigms and found myself immune to emotional appeals to believe in what, I was sure, was never true.