An excerpt from
Like Rolling Uphill: Realizing the Honesty of Atheism

From Chapter Two: My Life

I am an atheist. I don't believe that gods exist. I also don't believe there is a supernatural realm. I didn't realize I was an atheist until I was in my mid-thirties. Up until that time I thought I was pretty much like everyone else I knew. I believed in god; I talked about god. But there was always the knowledge, deep down, that I was different. One day, that knowledge came to the fore.

It started with a little click in my brain that told me I was tired of being something I was not. All my life I've claimed to be a deep and introspective person, probably because it sounded so wonderful. But while I was thoughtful, as in always daydreaming, I was rarely thoughtful, as in thinking. One day, with a little click in my head, I started thinking...and discovered myself.

We humans like to describe ourselves as thinking beings--that's what separates us from the animals, we claim. I have come to accept that most humans spend very little time really thinking; conscious, purposeful thinking isn't something most of us are accustomed to doing. What we do, more often, is go along with the crowd, believing what we're told; we get through life more than truly living it.

Several years ago, I was sitting on a bench at my children's preschool having a conversation with the mother of my oldest son's classmate. She was (and is) a friendly, outgoing woman with whom I enjoyed conversation. While usually in a fairly good mood, that morning she said she was depressed. I can't remember exactly what her reasons were, but I do recall her saying that she tried and tried to understand God's will for her life but couldn't; she felt lost and confused.

When she said that, I started in with my usual manner of responding to godly talk among acquaintances. First, I reworked their version of god into my version of god, which at that time was the "god is love" or "god is the energy back of all creation" idea. After translating god, I'd come up with my response such as "love guides us gently" or "we must use the energy in a positive way and let all negativity fall by the wayside in order to feel fulfilled." Then I'd have to rephrase that response into terms that my acquaintance would understand before actually putting the words in my mouth. For instance, I would say, "god is speaking to you through your heart and you need to put away all your anxieties to hear him." I believe I did that when my friend expressed her frustration with learning God's will on that morning so many years ago; but distinctly I remember that after I responded, I stopped listening to her.

Something had happened in my mind and in my emotional self. Something clicked. I can still recall the feeling I had that my face had frozen, that my eyes had clouded. I wasn't looking at my friend anymore. I was somewhere else. I was thinking, as if realizing it for the first time, "I don't believe in god the way she does."

I found that I didn't want to interpret anymore. I was tired of trying to fit my ideas about deity into the typical Biblical Christian idea of deity. Not only did I feel I couldn't filter my beliefs through the sieve of traditional Christianity anymore, I felt I wasn't completely sure of what I believed at all. I drove home from the preschool that day asking myself if I really believed that there was an energy that was love. Did I really believe that there was a particular force that directs the universe? In one of the first completely honest moments of my life, I accepted that I did not believe those things.

For a few days after that, I examined the rest of my beliefs. At that time I subscribed, casually, to what was called Science of Mind originated by Ernest Holmes, who wrote the book with that title. In the Science of Mind that I knew, there was a purposeful energy that could be used in our lives. That energy was love. If you filled your mind with thoughts of love, prosperity, peace and joy, those things would come into your life. If you filled your mind with negativity, hate, envy and greed, only bad things would come to you.

I believed that reincarnation was probable and that creatures evolved progressively with each life to a degree dependant on what was learned in that lifetime. You could not, therefore, be reborn as an animal because animals are not as consciously aware--as evolved in the spiritual sense--as humans. We begin our human period as rather dumb and progress toward total awareness of god. Of course, in that belief, humans are at the top of the line and whatever else comes beyond that is supernatural.

I believed there were levels of awareness and that people who believed in the traditional religions such as Biblical Christianity were simply not as evolved as those of us who'd reached a higher level of awareness. Those who were below you on this spiritual grading scale were not to be looked down on though, because we were "all on the same path." However, I never believed in the idea that all paths lead to god, but just travel different routes; I always believed that Christianity and other salvation religions were not the correct path, but that they were the best that that level of spirituality could do in that particular lifetime.

I believed that the Earth was created as a place for our spirits to be born and reborn to learn and to play. I believed that "what you think upon grows." And I believed that there was a benevolent nature to the universe.