It’s hard to know where to begin but I guess I’ll start by talking about my parents, both of whom are Roman Catholics and very devout. So devout in fact that my father actually wanted to be a priest and would have been if his parents could afford to send him to school. In those days, 1950’s Ireland, not too many people could afford High School so my parents had to work when they completed their primary education. My father often told me of the times when he went to school and how strict the Christian Brothers who taught him were, especially when it comes to religion. He would often be beaten if he didn’t know his catechism, and was often beaten with bamboo shoots, hard. Which sounds pretty brutal to us now but it was just the norm then, a small price to pay for saving a child’s soul. My mother was raised in much the same way, religion was never really challenged, the Roman Catholic Church had more authority over the people than the state did and more authority over the state than the people did, that’s just how it was.

I was always subjected to religious stories and iconography and maybe I did believe it at first, as kids do, but I honestly can’t really remember believing. I remember sitting in church every weekend and being bored out of my mind. I remember looking around at all the Stations of the Cross mounted on the walls as ornate and most likely expensive wooden carvings. I remember going through the motions of kneeling, standing and sitting at the appropriate times. I remember my fathers booming voice singing from the church choir, his voice being the loudest and one of the best, certainly the most distinctive. I remember being in Catholic school and learning about Catholicism as a fact instead of a theology. The then principal, a Christian Brother was very strict and used to smack us with a long plastic ruler even though it was made illegal by the time I was going to school. I hated that place then and still do now.

Before I was born my mother was diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia and spend some time in a mental institution, her delusions would, and still do often include tales of demons and devils, god and the angels. This most likely had an effect on my conversion, if that’s the right word, to Atheism or Agnosticism. I see her condition now as I see all religions, delusions of the mind. As a teen I was what some would call ‘troubled’. I was frequently in trouble, sometimes involving the law. Looking back now I can see it was my way of trying to get my fathers attention, I was the last of nine kids, no condoms for Catholics. If you couple that with my mothers’ illness it was easy to understand that my father was just worn out by the time I arrived. One of my ‘bright ideas’ at that time to gain attention was to steal from a church, not the smartest idea, especially considering how devout my father was. To him it was a holy place of worship; to me it was just a building. My father was very well known and respected in my town and the surrounding towns, a good god fearing man. My actions hurt him badly and for that I am truly sorry.

One day, while at the dinner table, the news was on T.V and it had a story about the Pope saying that homosexuality is bad or evil or something, I can’t really remember the exact story. I commented to my father that I hated the Pope and people like him. He got very angry with me and claimed that the Pope was right, ‘Gay’s are evil’ he said, something that cut right to my heart, he wasn’t to know it but at the time I was struggling with my sexuality, I now identify myself as bisexual, something I’ve never told him.

As I grew older I found myself believing in Christianity less and less, some things just didn’t add up, didn’t make sense. I doubted that Jesus had ever existed, even as a man let alone a god. I felt lonely in a way, deprived of some loving god that everyone around me seemed to have but no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t believe. Then everything changed a few years ago, I got my first PC, I got an internet connection and I searched and searched. I read about all the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and I found no peace, no saviour to latch on to. The more I read the more I disliked these religions, all the lies, the wars, the persecution. I had never known about Atheism or Agnosticism growing up, it was always Christian, Jew, Muslim or Pagan, I’m not sure even my parents knew the difference between Atheism and Paganism. So when I read about it I was amazed, here were millions of people just like me, at last I knew who I was, I was an Atheist. But even that didn’t last long, the more I read about Atheism the more I found it didn’t disprove the existence of gods but rather disproved the existence of the Abrahamic gods.

I still doubt the existence of a god so much so that I would call myself and Atheist at times but I feel that without proof of non existence either I can’t really commit. All I know is that the god I was brought up to believe in is an impossibility. I consider myself extremely lucky that I was born in a more progressive time, that I have access to so much information that my parents, sadly, didn’t.

And I hope future generations can continue to learn and evolve as I have and the world can be free of the tyranny of organised religion.