Religious attitudes are often formed during childhood and how you are raised is, not surprisingly, a major factor in how you will develop as an adult. I was very fortunate because my parents were not religious (although I knew they were definitely not agnostics or non-believers). God for them was an acknowledged presence, but we were essentially on our own. When, as a child, I asked them questions in order to better understand the barrage of fundamentalist religious propaganda I got at school, in the popular media, from my friends, from everywhere. Their response was very wise.

"Some people believe there is a god, and maybe there is one, one who made the world and teaches us to be good." When I asked about Jesus I was told "He was a very holy man who taught that we should live good lives and help our neighbors as best we can." When I asked about going to church, they told me "You're free to go if you like, and you were baptized as an infant so if you choose to become a Catholic you will be able to accept the other sacraments if you ever want to." And when I asked about the Bible I was told "It is a beautiful and holy book written by very wise men to teach us to live good lives and to respect one another. But it was written a long time ago and has been translated many times, and many of the stories in it probably never happened."

I was never propagandized at home, either way, indeed, religious discussion was avoided, and the religious influences I received away from home were so contradictory and baffling to me I simply could not accept them. Belief in a God was one thing, that did not seem particularly unreasonable to me; but the Trinity, the Resurrection, original sin, the infallibility of Scripture, the Devil, the efficacy of prayer, heaven and hell, and the ridiculous blackmail choice between Paradise or eternal torture, the whole absurd doctrinal baggage attached to Christianity was so inconsistent with common sense that even as a child I found it inconceivable that any good and decent God could possibly inflict such nonsense on us. What could these people have been thinking? And of course, the KIND of people I noticed were most devout and convinced struck me as petty, mean and very intolerant people, sometimes verging on cruelty, at least by the standards by which I had been brought up. I was old enough to intellectually realize that the shortcomings of the faithful need not be an indictment of the faith, but the contrast was still a great influence on me.

By the time I was a teenager, I was completely and totally free of any religious ideas, although I was reluctant to totally abandon the core concept of a Supreme Being and the hope of an afterlife. One day, I finally realized that this was just what I wanted to believe, and that I really had no real reason to do so. I remember the exact moment. I was in Junior High.