My parents were/are atheists. My father was quietly so, and my mother was a bit more militant. I remember listening to my friends in school talk about all the things they did and church and going home and asking my father why we didn’t get to do all that stuff. My father replied that it was because organized religions often don’t make any sense. When I asked to go to church with a friend, I was allowed.
For a while after that, I lived in vague fear. I’ve always been a bit fanciful, my imagination is active, and I’ve had to cultivate skepticism. I wasn’t born with it. All the fun stories, all the rules, it was like one of my books. It was fun, and they were talking like it was all real. But then came the fear. If god was watching me everywhere because he loved me, then he saw all the bad stuff I was doing too. The idea upset me. I became scared of hell, and my parents going to hell. I remember when I was seven, there was a steep hill by my house that the kids would ride their bikes down. So many kids got hurt that one resident took it upon themselves to paint a large “NO BIKING” sign on the hill. I ignored it one afternoon and sped my bike down that hill anyway. Then it occurred to me that god had seen me disobey that sign. I ran home and sat in bed with the covers over my head. When I fell off the monkey bars the next day at school, I took it as my punishment.
That was a bit of a phase, and by the time my parents enrolled me in a Catholic school in Australia when I was 12, I had lapsed back into my un-thinking non belief. The Catholic trappings around me were confusing. Why were we bowing before we sat? When they offered communion, I had to go up to the front with my arms crossed, signifying that I was not Catholic. Instead of giving me Christ’s blood and body, I got a “bless you child” and the air-cross. A girl named Heidi once ran screaming out of the church on school grounds claiming that Jesus was touching her, but she was looking for attention and no one took her seriously. I wondered if all religions were this strange in practice. (As opposed to the “sit down and hear these stories” version I had been to as a very small child.)
Then we moved to the Deep South and my father died. I became openly antagonistic to religion, especially the version we’re served down here. I was angry because part of me thought it may be true, and I was profoundly angry at a god that would send my father to hell. He was a good man, and it wasn’t fair, it didn’t make sense. I broke up with a boyfriend in my early 20’s and suddenly got into Tarot, Astrology and Magick. It satisfied that fantastical parts of my brain without all the severeness and arbitrary rules of Christianity. I was into that hardcore for like, two years, to the point where I was almost insane. I believed all kinds of garbage. I read Tarot cards and said prayers to ancient Greek gods. I talked about Karma and Soul Lessons. I’m surprised no one committed me.
There was no one moment that I reverted back to atheism. I had two miscarriages and the grief brought my father’s death back to the surface. When discussing it with a fellow insane friend it suddenly occurred to me that it was so unfair to my father to wave his death away by saying we all needed to learn lessons from it. I needed to learn a lesson, I’m sure he would have rather lived to see his grandchildren. Then the fallacious thinking patterns I was engaging in to comfort myself were laid bare to me, one by one. I realized that I was comforting myself with crazy magical thinking instead of dealing with my emotional problems. As I started dealing with those problems, the need to carry around that crap just melted away. I began to realize that people get all kinds of things, both good and bad, that they don’t deserve, and it can’t be reasoned away with some kind of magical force without being glib or insensitive and wrong. The simple fact is that life is largely random, and that’s ok. There doesn’t have to be some grand purpose for us to be happy. It’s actually cruel in it’s own way to insist on some purpose.
With all the fluctuations between belief and non-belief I’ve been though, I’ve realized that it actually does us a lot of harm to believe in things without evidence. It harms us in all kinds of ways I can’t articulate now because I’m tired, and because this is already too long. But that’s where I am now. 
