I was raised without religion. I was never told not to believe in God or anything like that. Nobody ever came out and said “God isn’t real.” It was just sorta like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, they let me figure things out on my own. When I was bad my mom wouldn’t say anything about God and “Honor thy mother and father,” she would just tell me she was calling 1-800-GYPSIES to come and take me away. I was a smart kid though so I called that number to find out if it was real or not. Come to think of it - maybe I was trying to get the Gypsies to come and take my little sister away, because you know without God in my life I was pretty evil ::wink::. My mom was raised basically the same way, although they went to church occasionally, I think it was more in a fitting in to the community sort of way. I don’t think we could have ever been considered a religious family.

I was born in Healdsburg, CA in Sonoma County, Wine Country, but when i was a little one we moved to Salt Lake City, UT. We were practically the only people on the block with only 2 kids. Our next door neighbors, The Lefflers ,had something like 5 children. There were kids all over the place! Mom told me that it was because they were “Mormons” but I had no idea what that meant when I was 4 years old so I just enjoyed having tons of kids to play with. My parents were divorced and my mom split with my sister and I to Newport Beach, CA before I was old enough to be influenced at all by the Mormon kids. Now out of the hotbed city of Mormonism, we had moved right into quite a little churchgoing community. At this point I still hadn’t made up my mind about God. I was aware some of my friends believed in Him, but all I really knew was I had never seen any sort of proof. I remember one day in San Remo park sitting in a tree praying for various things as a test. I asked God for some really simple things that SURELY he could do if he wanted to prove to me that he was real. If I prayed to God that I would find a dollar on the way home to buy some candy from the Lido Island clubhouse snack bar, then that would prove he was real. If God answered my prayer for a rainy day the next day, I would believe. But God never answered my simple prayers, so I was starting to get suspicious. This guy created the heavens and earth BEFORE he even created light, yet he couldn’t make it so i could buy some Boston Baked Beans? Right.

Around 3rd or 4th grade I did a report on the Galapagos Islands and in turn stumbled up Darwin and his theory of evolution. And thank God (get it?) I went to a school that didn’t try to squash the idea of teaching children evolution. To this day I’m still obsessed with the beauty of those islands, and whenever the “where would you go if you could go anywhere in the world right now?” question comes up on those stupid ass Myspace surveys I can’t stop myself from doing, the first answer is always the Galapagos. My doubt firmly in place, this was the point where I could officially be considered Agnostic. I had one legit Christian friend in elementary school, Mark Manderson. One weekend i was staying over at this house, he had just gotten a trampoline and we spent all day jumping on it. I pulled a muscle in my side and was in a ridiculous amount of pain. As we were going to bed that night his dad came in and they prayed together that God would help me feel better and that we’d have a good nights rest. I didn’t have the heart to tell them I didn’t believe in God but I was really weirded out. God couldn’t even make it rain, how was he going to fix my side? The next day, or maybe it was another weekend I stayed over, he and his dad took me to church. I sat in on Mark’s Sunday school class while his dad went to the sermon. The teacher was a substitute or just didn’t care that he never had seen me before because when he was handing out chalk to have kids write the Commandments on the board he gave me a piece and set me to it. I stood there with a blank look on my face and he tried to coach me, “Thou…..” I wrote it down and looked back at him. “Shalt…..” I looked up and said “Yeah, I’ve never been to Church before.” He sat me down and called up another kid in my place. The whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. It was soon after that I was confident that, until proven otherwise, there was no God.

Now I had always believed in respecting people’s religion, whatever people chose to believe was their business, then came punk rock. I’ve talked about how punk rock changed my life in terms of self confidence and open mindedness, but it also made me less passive in my atheism. It showed me that I didn’t have to politely listen to someone tell me about Jesus loving me if I didn’t want to. At the same time it made me not keep my mouth shut around people who were openly racist or homophobic, but that’s getting off track. Basically if someone came up to you and said “Hey I’m Superman!” or “There are magic faeries all around us controlling what we do”! you would call him insane or cross the street to get away from him. Why shouldn’t I be able to tell someone he’s crazy when he’s asking me if I’ve let a man who died 2000 years ago into my heart? I didn’t really like Crass but I really liked my “Jesus died for his own sins, not mine.” patch. Punk rock first showed me the actual EVILS religion can bring out. How often shitty agendas were hidden behind the guise of morality. My best friend Nick and our punk friends took it upon ourselves to start many religious arguments, and even though we were young and naive, we usually won. The most common response from the believers? “Just have faith.”

I’m an Atheist, I don’t consider that a belief in any other sense of the word that I believe things that are true. Outside of concrete proof (which in spite of how many people argue the opposite, does not exist) that there is a supernatural being, outside of God himself smacking me in the head and saying “hey… i’m right here.” I’m always going to be an Atheist. I don’t see how anyone with half a brain can approach religion in any other way. I don’t see how anyone can look at all the scientific evidence that completely contradicts the Bible and still believe. I can see maybe believing that there is some sort of higher being to make yourself feel comfortable, but that’s not for me. Like Richard Dawkins says “… modern theists might acknowledge that, when it comes to Baal and the Golden Calf, Thor and Wotan, Poseidon and Apollo, Mithras and Ammon Ra, they are actually atheists. We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”