A little bit about me.

I lost my faith before I was a teen despite the Old Testament being told to me at infant school as if it were fact and my Mother telling me the stories about Samson and Daniel. My Father told me about George and the Dragon too, only in his version, the dragon wasn’t there at the first time of calling so George retired to the pub. Years later, I understood why the student teacher had insisted I tell my story once more when the class teacher returned. It is fascinating how we order our world as young children, perhaps even more fascinating when we invoke invisible magic friends to give it order when we are adults.

I wasn’t brought up in a faith other than at school. My parents were Christians in the loosest sense of the word. My Father, a scrap metal dealer, had more fiddles going than you would find in Dublin on St Patrick’s Night. Indeed, he was arrested on bonfire night back in 1974 and charged with fraud. He made the front page of the local paper. The case collapsed.

I had a ‘vision’ one night during my sleep that pushed me back towards faith for a few months but by my teens, it really was all finished. At 15 I wrote to the local paper to complain about the legislation that required a ‘collective act of worship’ in schools, every day. They dispatched a photographer to take my picture and I was published for the first time. That put paid to my under-age drinking for a time. A week later and the replies were printed. I was slated. One comment that is etched into my mind is’ “One only has to look at the beautiful trees and birds to know there is a god”. Another is, “I blame all the shameful sex and violence we see and hear on TV”.

Aged 17, I was given a book to read, ‘Another Roadside Attraction’ by Tom Robbins. He did theology and the book was about finding The Source, via the Vatican catacombs and the body of Jesus which was found there. Soon after this I had dated a student of Politics, Philosophy and Economics who was at Oxford. Scary as it was, it broke my ‘Large City’ mentality and I ended up moving to an even larger city and mixing with some extraordinary people, not afraid to speak their minds.

So at 19, I was having regular sex, had a brilliant social life and knew that there was no purpose or meaning to our lives other than what we chose to give it. There was no deity, no reward in heaven, no nothing just an awareness of this amazing opportunity that had been given to me to ‘walk this way but once’ despite astounding odds against. Bill Bryson says it so well in his book ‘The Brief History of Time’.

Fast forward several bad relationship choices, a wife, three children, a further wife and two additional step children and we have arrived at the present. Just for the record, I let my oldest two girls be taken to church by their Grandma and didn’t make my views known until I was asked directly. Their mother was agnostic at best, a believer of ‘something’ at worst. Both girls (now 19 and 17) are atheists and both are lesbians. I doubt there is any correlation there but I know they don’t feel any guilt about their sexuality.

My son is quite gifted at maths. He is too logical to believe in macic. His teachers told him that he had to sing hymns in ‘religious assembly’. I told him he didn’t as it was an infringement on his human rights. Don’t you just love the Human Rights Act?

Anyway, since the internet put me in touch with like-minded people and I could watch videos and hone my thoughts, I have become an anti-theist. I now see religion as a disease.

The main Abrahamic faiths are convinced that theirs is the ‘one true faith’ and with that assumed territory comes at best, the teaching of creationist stupidity on schools and at worst, the mass slaughter of innocents. That is why I and many others get angry. We don’t want people who are incapable of understanding the process of scientific theory, but are willing to cherry pick the ‘scientific facts’ that support their crazy assertions, being able to force their views on others, particularly if those ‘others’ are children expecting to be educated.

The English Defence League was protesting in the Midlands yesterday. They don’t like Islam very much and they have racist affiliations. People were out in force to demonstrate their loathing for such tactics. However when a bishop, priest, pastor, preacher or whatever tells their followers that gays are abhorrent to society, women are second class citizens and contraception will not be tolerated, people seem to accept this as the norm rather than getting out there to take them on.

This may be changing with the ‘Protest the Pope’ demonstrations despite the media colluding to present the protector of rapists in a good light. The more we anti-theists become organised, the more we will take-head on the messages of condemnation, the bullying and the discrimiation that emanates from the pulpits of our green and not so pleasant land. How can people take them seriously when they are dressed in their finery and dictating morals to us? What gross act would the church have to do for people to finally turn their backs on it?

I think the idea of randomness and no meaning are so scary to so many people that they will cling on to their faith at any cost. A friend of my wife admitted as much when we were discussing the mass genocides that the god of the Old Testament had sanctioned. She said that even if God had been directly responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she would still believe in him as she could not imagine an alternative.

Go to church. Ask questions, challenge, heckle if needs be. We do it to politicians and some of them actually talk sense.

As PZ Myres said this week;
“We need to address the disease. And if you're one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you're part of the problem and we'll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.

There is another motive for our confrontational ways, and it has to do with values. We talk a lot about values in this country, so I kind of hate to use the word -- it's been tainted by the religious right, which howls about "Christian values" every time the subject of civil rights for gays or equal rights for women or universal health care or improving the plight of the poor come up -- True Christian values are agin' those things, after all. But the Gnu Atheists have values, too, and premiere among them is truth. And that makes us uncivil and rude, because we challenge the truth of religion.“

Like him, I am unable to compromise on reality.

“It's all about the truth, people. And all the evidence is crystal clear right now: the earth is far older than 6,000 years. Evolution is a real, and it is a process built on raw chance driven by the brutal engines of selection, and there is no sign of a loving, personal god, but only billions of years of pitiless winnowing without any direction other than short-term survival and reproduction. It's not pretty, it's not consoling, it doesn't sanctify virginity, or tell you that god really loves your foreskin, but it's got one soaring virtue that trumps all the others: it's true.”

I’m pleased I got that little lot off my chest.