I always enjoy this kind of conversation. People emerging from incarceration in a prison of the mind gives me joy.

My journey started with a conversation with my father around the time I was to be confirmed Catholic.

During that time, my confirmation sponsor was my father’s best friend. I spent some time with him every week or so for a little while, and we’d have chats about our shared superstitions and delusions and why they are important to us. Well, at one point for some reason I don’t recall and is unimportant now, I decided that I wasn’t sure I was ready to be confirmed. I think at the time that I was acutely aware of what that said about my ownership over that relationship, and I wasn’t sure that was a commitment I was ready to make.

As far as my father was concerned, if I was not ready to make that commitment, he would not be willing to help me pay for college and jumped directly to how I would have to move out the day I turned 18, get a job or join the military and probably get killed in a war, and then go to hell because I’m not Catholic. The important takeaway here was that he was basically telegraphing the reality that he would disown any responsibility for my life if I wasn’t certain I wanted to dedicate myself to the same cult he was in.

So I got confirmed. I might be cognizant of the importance of commitments and doing what I say I’m going to do, but I’m also not stupid, and a middle school kid can’t manage any part of their own life without support of their parents.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that up until that period of time, I was devout. I’d drank the kool-aid, I was an altar boy and considered seminary for a while. Following this ultimatum, I was not interested in that any longer, but I still went to church with my parents until college.

Once I went to school, I only went to church on xmas every year, and then only because I loved my father and we had a tradition of playing guitar and singing for the xmas mass. It was just him and I, and I know it gave him joy for us to sing hymns together. That was the extent of my religious involvement for a while, and during that time I was very much on my way out. Not yet “certainly” atheist yet, as I was a bit confused about semantics for one, and innately fearful of eternal damnation as I was raised to be straight out of the womb.

During my last year in school, I lived in an off-campus party house that was on the side of a “mountain” in Vermont. One of my routines was to wake up every morning and run up the mountain, look over the land, and run down again. This was not a particularly large mountain, but it was also not really a rock and bigger than a hill. Let’s call it a mountain.

One day, at the top of this mountain, looking over the lakes, the mountains, the streets with the cars as tiny as points on the landscape; observing the green earth and the moon still visible in the sky, I said aloud for the first time “I don’t believe in god.” I remember the moment as clearly as any I have available in my memory from that time. At that point, it was 2001 and the “four horsemen of new atheism” hadn’t yet written their seminal works on the topic. I also had no particular feelings against cultists other than pity, and I had an overwhelming sense of freedom and a bit of anxiety as I now had to consider what morality was all about… since in my world, morality was tied to religion.

I feel as if my comprehension is considerably better with the advantage of 20+ years’ adult experience since that time. I’ve lived more than half my life free from superstition and have a much better defined worldview… but that doesn’t matter to this comment. :)