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I cannot remember ever expressing any interest in God or Church before my mother gave me the “wonderful news” that although I was then too young to join the cub scouts (I can't remember asking to join them either) I could be accepted into the choir. Not wanting to do it didn't seem to be treated as much of a reason not to go so I became a choirboy. While I didn't especially enjoy the choir it was not particularly traumatic. I made the best of the situation, I was forced to go but then I was also forced to go to school, to go to the dentist, to kiss Auntie Olive, to wear the clothes my mother chose for me and a thousand and one other things that I didn't fully agree with the sense of. Children have a huge capacity to cope with impositions. Never read too much into the acquiescence of a child. I was taught to say my prayers at bedtime and I cannot ever recall thinking that there was anybody listening to those prayers. I cannot remember believing in Father Christmas either. In my case the efforts at teaching me about God simply failed. I did not make any great conscious decision to reject the ideas they simply did not take. I took in the stories and tried to make sense of them, but they didn't quite hang together for me. I took in the lessons of morality. This was easy and straightforward. I could see the point in morality. Hurting people was wrong. I understood stealing was wrong, it hurt people, it wasn't fair. My father was a policeman, his job was to catch robbers and other naughty men. He was a good man. I had no problems with this, there were no shades of grey here, taking stuff that was not yours was wrong. You could call it wrong, bad, naughty, a sin or evil. It didn't much matter, it came to the same thing. I knew where I stood. Lying too was very wrong. It was simply wrong to lie, in any situation. I only told lies to try to get out of trouble, because I wasn't brave enough to face the punishment I deserved, but I knew it was wrong. The idea that telling lies could be good if the cause was good struck me as wrong, sinister and evil. Those lessons have never left me.

The Church did not damage me. I went and did what was expected of me. I found a lot of interesting things in the church building and I listened to the sermons, lessons and hymns. I developed a love of church architecture and history. My mother misinterpreted my general interest in things connected with the church as a desire to become a full member of the church. In truth I was just an insatiably curious boy, put a curious boy in a church and what do you expect will happen? I suppose she expected I would become a Christian. She still to this day tells the story of how I expressed a desire to be a bishop. It made sense to me, my dad worked long hours, but the rector only worked for a couple of hours on Sundays, plus the odd hatch, match and despatch (baptism, wedding and funeral) but his boss was the bishop, and he only came around every few months. It seemed like a cushy job to me.

It was decided for me that I should be confirmed. It was decided for me in the ways that many things were decided for me in those days. I was the subject of the decision but it was not thought necessary to involve me too deeply in that decision. Confirmation was the next step. Now that I was old enough to decide for myself my mother had decided that I would. So I took confirmation classes and I did my best to believe what I was told to believe. On the day I suppose I could just about say that I didn't believe I was lying when I said the creed. But I cannot recall ever really thinking to myself that I did believe in God.

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Jesus the Man, Jesus the Myth

From my confirmation as a fully believing Christian and full member of the Church of England to my renascence as a Born Again Atheist was just a matter of weeks. I cannot recall exactly when I decided that I was an atheist and always had been, it was after becoming confirmed but before I was 12. It must have been around the time this photograph was taken. Because I was curious and eager to learn I listened to the sermons and readings from the Bible. I had quite a good basic knowledge of the stories and teachings of the Protestant religion. I did my best to bring out the meaning in what I experienced but I failed. I tried to believe the creed I recited but it wasn't right, I didn't believe this stuff. That meant saying it was lying. That meant that saying it was wrong. What was I doing there?

Christians always interpret this “rejection of Christianity” as some kind of teenage reaction, inspired by pique, or hormones or sodomy. It was nothing of the sort. I had listened to the story they were telling for long enough to know that I simply did not believe them. As I didn't believe in God I could see no good reason for me to go to church.

Children are born atheists. They are born without any belief in the afterlife and any supernatural forces; and without the knowledge that their country is the best country on Earth, and their race is the best race. Children are empty vessels which the parents and the rest of society proceeds to fill up with prejudices and unfounded beliefs.

As a child I never felt that I could talk to God when I said my prayers. I never felt that anybody was listening. I knew I was wasting my time. I did not know why the world around me existed but I was not convinced that it was all there in order to test my soul before I went to heaven. I stopped believing in religion first. It was such an obvious waste of time. I realized that I had no faith, in anything. I realized that faith was simply lying to yourself. Lying was wrong. I did believe in right and wrong, but not in forces of good and evil. I didn't like the idea of Hell, but I did not believe in it. How can you be scared of something you don't believe in? I did not want to die but I knew that death was just the end of self-awareness and the animation of the body. I knew that the question “what happens to you after you are dead?” was meaningless. It was a question that could be asked but the answer was not worth the effort of thinking about it.

I knew that the self that I am is just the product of my brain activity. Death is the ending of that activity and so therefore is the end of the self. Is that hard to grasp? I found it to be virtually self-evident. The idea of life after death was a non-starter. Death is the irreversible ending of mental processes, the self dies with the body. I knew my heart was just an organ and I knew the soul was just a mythical abstraction of the self. Maybe I could not have expressed it quite as clearly as I can now but that little boy you see in that picture knew all this.

I was born an atheist to a family of Christians. They got the upper hand for a brief time and convinced me that I wanted to believe in their God. I said the words, I hoped to believe, I tried to believe. Then a little later I saw sense. Lots of people tried to make me a Christian. Nobody tried to make me an atheist. I am very proud of my atheism, it is all my own work.

If there was one person I could thank for helping me become happy as an atheist it must be David Attenborough. The tremendous BBC television programs he made in the 1970s helped me to realize that the fundamental mystery at the heart of the human situation was no mystery at all. It was understandable. Evolution was the key. Now my strongest guiding light is Richard Dawkins, his rational view of the world is so refreshing and stimulating. I can honestly say that I have never looked back and regretted the decision I made. I have on a number of occasions noted how my lack of belief and faith has made things difficult for me but the strength I have gained has made it all worthwhile. I can face it all. I have something much more powerful than blind faith, I can take it all in at face value and check it through against my own world view and change my mind. I am free to be uncertain, free to be wrong, free to improve my thinking further.

What I do not have is the inner glow of “knowledge of God” that can distort my view of the world and make me happy against the grain of my experiences. That feeling is illusion. I prefer my reality straight, as unfiltered as I can mange. I had never been as certain of my Christian beliefs as I was of my new atheistic beliefs. Not that Christian dogmas were my beliefs, they were the beliefs I was told to have. I was taken and made to hear the message. I heard it, understood it fully (at least as well as 95% of any Church of England congregation member), and rejected it. I can never respect the views of any person who simply absorbs the culture they happen to be born into and then takes it on as their own, give me a convert any day. It would be a much more exciting dinner party with a Maoist from Arkansas and a Baptist from Beijing than vice versa.

I was already an atheist when I started to learn about geography but this was the subject that confirmed my faith in reason over myth.

I was about 13 or 14 when I proved to myself that it was science that was telling me the truth not religion. My grandfather had a farm, after he retired from farming he sold the sand from under a few hilly fields he owned. That farm was my playground and laboratory. I learned there about wild animals and plants and the importance of the soil to all life. The farm had fields, hedgerows, little wooded areas and the edge of it bordered on a peat bog. A microcosm of the English landscape.

There was a huge pile of wet sand dredged up from the bottom of a lake, the water drained off that sand and formed rivers. It formed scale models of rivers. Perfect in every detail, exactly as my geography teacher had taught me. Here was erosion, deposition, oxbow lakes, deltas and confluences. The sand was there because of glacial deposition, my teacher had taught me, and I knew he told the truth. I found with my own eyes and hands compacted sand in layers that told of glacial deposition in an age before the Bible. I did not see the hand of God anywhere. I could see the work of glaciers and their meltwater.

Glaciers had moved this enormous variety of pebbles and sand. The pebbles I found were all natural. There were no pieces of smoothed glass or rounded brick like at the modern seashore. These were pebbles of quartz, granite, shale, slate and sandstone. Mixed in with the layers of sand and clay were darker bands of sand that showed traces of organic matter, but this was not evidence of a great flood wiping the Earth clean from sinners it was evidence of a huge scouring action by ice and deposition by rivers of meltwater. I found my own evidence of the past and it told me the same story that science was telling me in school. It told me of a past far grander and far older than anything in the Bible.

I found that science answered questions and helped to predict what you would find. Religion did not. Religion could not explain science and the findings of science, it could only belittle knowledge. Science and reason could explain religion. As I grew up I learned that I was right. Science and reason did hold the possibility of explanation. Religion was simply a system of delusion.

When I was a student at University I had a badge that read Born Again Atheist. I loved that badge. Since I have been writing this site I have come to realize that I was not born again as an atheist, I was born atheist and I have reverted to the natural, wild state.

We are all born without religion. No child believes in God. Why should they?

Religion is both learned and taught. Some children want to learn it, others don't.

I have very clear memories of not wanting to say my prayers as a boy. I knew it was pointless. Why did I have to speak to a father that wasn't there, who didn't listen and would do what he wanted to do anyway? It didn't make sense to me. I resented the waste of time. I resented having to try to believe in what I was sure was nonsense.

As a choirboy I had to sing some terrible hymns. They were bad theology, bad poetry and the words did not fit the music. The resentment grew with every tortured line. Lo he abhors not the vir er ginswomb. That was the worst of them. It might have been the straw that broke the camel's back, I am not sure. But it was definitely in church that I became a self-acknowledged atheist.

I had spent several years going to church. I had listened to hundreds of sermons, sang thousands of hymns. Recited prayers. I knew it was a colossal waste of time. I was just heartily sick of trying to convince myself that it was worth trying to believe the nonsense anymore.

Once I had taken that step everything was easy. Going to church was easy. I didn't believe in God so what did it matter if I lied and said that I did, who would get angry? God? It was just easier not to rock the boat. At the age of 12 we moved house, NO, I would not join the choir at the other church. I put my foot down. My mother said that it was because my voice would soon be breaking. She could believe what she wanted. I would believe what I wanted.

Since then I have rarely been to church. Family weddings, funerals and Christenings. I usually pretend to sing. I stand up and sit down with the others. But I got married in church, and two of those family christenings were my children. My wife is a Christian. She will not discuss religion with me. She knows I will wipe the floor with her in any kind of argument. But she's the boss. She even got me to be a Godfather to the child of her best friend, I made it clear to the parents that I didn't believe in God and if I recited any vows it would not be sincere but they wanted me to do it, so I went through with the sham. I have moral qualms about lying in church but my Christian relatives just want me to go through the motions. Whatever, it is all a waste of time, it always has been.

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