@Zardoz,
Zardoz wrote:
I was not an atheist until high school, my mom was fond of saying it was the teacher's fault, but they had nothing to do with it. If a teacher had expressed any atheist values at the time they would have been run out of town on a rail. I need only watch as each church claimed the other to be a fraud and out of all the churches in America, they had found the one true church. How fortunate they lived where the only true church could be found.
The first time I consciously confronted the question I was a kid lying in bed. I didn't recall then or later what prompted me to think about it. I thought, "If there was a god, Mama wouldn't have such a hard life." I spent the next week or two arguing it out with myself each night in bed. I accepted that death is final. But I had heard a minister state that without god there is no morality. After a struggle with myself, it burst out of me, "Inside." I took that to mean that we are born with morality. No supernatural authority was needed. So I didn't wait for science or societal influence to mold me. Nothing in my experience has ever shaken my conviction.
