I don't know that I ever believed. I remember going to church as a child with my family. It was never a pleasant experience. My father was the catalyst for the family's church attendance. My mother was less inclined but, as she did in those early years, acquiesced to my father's wishes. The regular Sunday excursions seemed more about keeping up appearances than it did about worship and fellowship. Perhaps this is what contributed to the vague sense of "wrongness" that accompanies even my earliest memories of being at the church.

As I grew older, and my mother grew more independent, my church attendance became increasingly involuntary until, eventually, my father gave up and went to church with my older sister, the only one of my siblings that remains a Christian.

I made the jump to atheism in my mid-teens. I can still remember the moment quite vividly; driving in my old Ford LTD, a huge boat of a car with what seemed like an acre of open space in the front seats, Led Zeppelin blasting out of my fancy quadraphonic 8-track, and my mind wandering until I happened by a church and realized it was like the 6th or 7th one I had passed.

Churches, just churches, not a single gathering place for people of other faiths. It occurred to me that I could not remember ever having met someone who was, as far as I could tell, non-Christian. But I knew there were other faiths in the world and I knew those believers were every bit as certain of their faith as were the Christians that surrounded me. That was plainly evident by the evening news broadcasts and the stories of Muslims killing the Israeli Olympics team and blowing up airplanes and taking hostages.

That was the tipping point.

I realized that here in the United States we were Christians and in the Middle East they were Muslims and therefore there was a geographic significance to the faith people believed in and that meant it was a cultural phenomenon and had little, if anything at all, to do with Truth. People simply believed what they were raised to believe. As a pot-smoking long-haired hippie wannabe I wasn't going to have anything to do with that. That was when I said to myself: "I think I am an atheist".

Dangerous idea. And was both a source of misgiving and of attraction. It took several more years for me to confirm my suspicion, years in which I deliberately explored the issue, reading whatever I could lay my hands on (anti-Christian literature was hard to come by at that time and place), talking to friends, and trying to synthesize it all into something approaching a coherent world view. Eventually I went to my father and told him that I had noticed the religious belief was, to a large degree, culturally determined. I was a bit surprised when he said he had never thought of that.

"Well Dad," I said, "If you had been born in the Middle East you would be a Muslim, not a Christian."

"Oh," he replied, "I don't think so. I think I would have found Christ anyway."

"How? When everyone and everything around you is telling you that Islam is true, what makes you think you would reject your culture and become a Christian?"

"That's the power of Christ," he said. "Christ would have found a way to bring me to him."

"Then why hasn't he done that for all the millions of people in the Middle East?"

"He will son, he will."

"But Dad, imagine how many people have lived their whole lives over there and died believing in Islam! What makes you special?"

He shrugged. "I just believe Christ would find me."

That is when I told him I was an atheist. He didn't seem at all surprised, offering the age-old adage that, in time, I would come to see the truth."

(The conversation is, of course, paraphrased. It was too long ago to recapture the actual words that we exchanged but general form and content is as true to the event as my memory permits.)

He is gone now, my father, and I am so very much like him in many ways. In that sense he lives on. But I am also not like him in many ways. "I just believe" does not work for me; I need evidence, I need reason, I need intellectual honesty and objective appraisal.

And without God I am free.

Small business owner, college graduate (biology and engineering), student of life, and blogger at http://www.freedomfromfaith.com.