Saw this forum linked from Reddit, and thought it looked like a place I might like to frequent. So here I am.
I was raised Catholic. I tried to believe, I really did. But I never had the revelations or the "talking to God" moments that everyone else claimed to have. I figured out at a young age that Santa couldn't exist (strangely it wasn't the faster-than-light travel required, it was the unsustainable economics of the venture that I found suspect), but it took me a long time to become comfortable with the idea of God's non-existence. I took a soft landing approach. Agnostic theism, to agnostic deism (couldn't quite shake that "primary cause" argument for a while), to agnostic atheism, and in the last few years, strong atheism. The main influences were Darwin (and Dawkins, who helped me understand Darwin much better), Hitchens (who provided a good argument for why religion is harmful), and Ayn Rand (who gave me my first taste of atheistic, rational morality — just finished Harris' The Moral Landscape which explores that topic from a more scientific position).
I'm an INTJ, a small "L" libertarian, and a web publishing consultant and developer. And I'm posting under my real name, because I only get one life to live, and I'd rather live an onymous life. And yes, "onymous" is a word.
