Hi. I’m godlessgap from Sydney.

I had fundamentalist religion drummed into me as a child. I went to church and Sunday school and church camps etc. And, actually, I really wanted there to be a God. It fitted with my strong sense of justice that there should be a law-giver and a judge and rewards and punishment. (I ended up becoming a lawyer) But as I got older, and realised that I was gay and couldn't do a thing about it except keep it a secret and feel ashamed, I felt there was no place for me in organised Christianity or in the town in which I grew up. So I stopped going to church and left that place in my mid-teens. We lived in a small redneck hollow where, in those days,  it was just not possible to be anything but straight, white and Christian  - I'm talking 1950's and 60's in outback Australia.

I was fortunate in being very adaptable. I made a life for myself in the city but right up until I was about 45 I never stopped wishing and hoping that there was some sort of higher power that would in the end right all the injustices I saw in the world around me. In my 30's I decided to experiment at the fringes of Catholicism. In Sydney there was a gay Catholic group who used to meet (somewhat clandestinely) and celebrate mass. However, I soon found that bunch just as unsatisfying as the rest of Christianity.

I had long had doubts about the inconsistencies both moral and logical that I noticed in the Bible and I'd started reading books such as Don Cupid's 'The Sea of Faith' which explained how religion was just human.  I approached a priest about my doubts. He said that for people like me reading was not a good idea and that no good would come of it. Reading, no good? It was then that I finally had to admit to myself that Christianity was a fucked paradigm, just like other religions. Christianity still hates evolution and science in general. It still hasn’t gotten over Galileo.  The undeniable truth of evolution is simply too much for it to bare.

But even as a kid I loved science and the central idea behind evolution I found fascinating.  I have always been an avid reader and the idea that I should stop learning in order to maintain a faith I didn't even know I really had I found preposterous. That priest was an arsehole. After that I felt I was in a spiritual hole.

I experimented briefly with Buddhism and Vedanta but in the end I  found emptying my mind as silly as emptying my bookshelves. I then floated around in a sort of deist haze for a couple of years until I picked up Robert Wright's 'The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology', Vintage, 1995. As I mentioned above, I'd always loved science and what Wright said about the evolution of morality and altruism made much more sense than anything religion had to say on the topic. I then read everything by Dawkins from 'The Selfish Gene' through to 'The Ancestor's Tale' and finally his 'The God Delusion' along with the almost contemporaneous books by Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins. But I think I can honestly say that it was Dawkins who really made me an atheist. Clever chap! Later books such as 'Shermer, M, The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule', 2004, H. Holt & Co., New York;  Dennet, D., 'Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon', Penguin, 2007 and Victor Stenger, J.  God: The Failed Hypothesis, 2007, Prometheus, all  just confirmed what I had been convinced of by Dawkins.

Religion may have served a purpose once but it belongs as Hitchens says “ to the infancy of our species” and its time we farewelled it because the bad it does now far outweighs any good it may have done in terms of group cohesion.

I have come to realise that if we want justice we have to fight for it ourselves in this world because this life is the only one we’re ever going to get. And we should try to enjoy ourselves along the way. To do that, we need to quit feeling guilt and shame about states we had no say in bringing about – our sexuality for example.

I really have come to believe that drumming religion and its associated guilt into kids is a form of child abuse engaged in by religions in order to perpetuate themselves. It’s a very destructive meme on all sorts of levels.

But I'm waffling. I read through all of  the material on your site and don't think I can say anything that you guys don't already know.  I guess I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know that I'm glad I found you.

Cheers

Godlessgap

EDIT - fixed text color - dead_again