I am an atheist and have been for most of my life. I don’t think about it most of the time but the horrors of this past week have reminded me that I don’t believe in god. My belief (or non-belief, if you will) is simplistic because I think that if god were omnipotent and omniscient, which is what I was brought up to believe, then how could he let the forces of evil get away with what they do? If there is a constant tug of war between good and evil, then god can’t be omnipotent, and if he’s not omnipotent, then what’s the point?  He is then as vulnerable as we are.

I don’t expect people to agree with me and respect those who don’t. Spirituality is a very personal thing, and it should be grounded in mutual respect. Religion gives comfort and solace to those who turn to it during difficult times and we all know that with the events that have taken place in the last few days, people who have lost loved ones will need their belief systems to help them get through this devastation. For the rest of us who cannot imagine what those families are going through, we will ask ourselves how someone can do what he did, especially to children, innocents every one. There is good and evil in this world and we need to find a way to understand why that is. We are essentially good people. Every now and then we are evil. Why is that? What makes a good person do evil things? Is it the devil? Was god looking the other way? How does he feel about that now?

I struggled with religion from a very early age. I used to have to go to church every Sunday but would do anything I could to avoid going. It would ruin my Fridays and Saturdays because I knew that on Sunday morning I would have to go to church. For a while my family went on Saturday nights which was much better because at least Sundays would be free. When we lived in Petawawa we would go to Giesebrecht’s Ice Cream after Mass, which definitely had a positive effect on my attitude. Sure, I’ll go to church if I get ice cream after! Eventually when I was old enough to go on my own I would always pick a Mass other than the one they were going to. I would leave the house, and instead of going to church would hang out at a take-away joint nearby that was run, ironically, by a born-again-Christian who used to listen to cheesy early 1970s ballads on the radio (“BJ Thomas is where it’s at,” he once told me).

I grew up on military bases and almost without exception I was the only one of my friends who ever had to go to church. I was a Catholic and I soon realized that only Catholics had to go; my Protestant friends never went to church nor did they have to. I accepted that as a simple truth. The Protestants must be inherently good people, which is why they don’t have to prove it before god. Not so, I soon found out. Mrs. Hicks, my Grade 1 teacher in Ottawa posed this question to her 5 year old charges: There are two men but only one gets to go to heaven.   One is a good man who never goes to church, and the other is a bad man who always goes to church. Who will it be? I thought the answer was a slam-dunk but I was wrong. It was not the good man, but the bad man who will go to heaven because the church will teach him to change his wicked ways. The good man, who never went to church, was doomed to eternity in hell. Apparently the god that we were to pray to needed that to happen in a group setting, led by a disciple who had special privileges. Private prayer and personal devotion would just not do.

As I got older I started really listening to what the priest was saying and understood the parables that taught us how to go about our lives, serving god the way we were put on this earth for. I wasn’t an especially literal thinker, but it just seemed bizarre to me that god, who no one had ever seen, and who had ALWAYS EXISTED, could send his son down to earth so that he could be crucified for our sins. We were bad before Jesus got here, and we were bad after he left. We were also very good too, and I wondered how I could have been a good kid before I actually started listening to the scriptures and paying attention? I was already doing, for the most part, what was written in that book. If left to our own devices, wouldn’t most of us be good people?

I never discussed my views with anyone when I was young, because I knew my thoughts were blasphemous.  The first time I conscienciously objected was when I was thirteen.  A friend of mine belonged to a girl’s club that held weekly meetings in the basement of the local United church. She urged me to join but I was told by the minister that I must ask my priest for permission to enter the Protestant church. I couldn’t believe it. I hung out with Protestants, wasn’t I already half-way there? I was terrified of my priest. He was of the old school, a fire and brimstone type right out of the middle ages, or so he appeared to be. He allowed me to go to the club, but said I must watch out for the Protestants who might try to get me to join their religion.  The club, as it turned out, would guide me to “Cherish Health, Seek Truth, Know God, Serve Others and thus, with His help, become the girl God would have me be.”  My priest needn’t have worried.  I quit.  It was just too religious for me.

When I went to university I learned that a good historian will always question what he or she reads, never take anything for granted, never make assumptions about the origins of documents. Never be satisfied with stock answers. Question, question, question and challenge.  I continued to go to church during holidays with my family well into my twenties, long after I’d moved away from home into my godless existence.  I didn’t feel like I had the right to just not go, which seems strange to me now, and of course I felt hypocritical reciting the long-memorized responses by rote, standing, knealing and sitting when I was required to do so.  It was then that my darkest fantasy took hold. I saw myself standing up during the priest’s sermon and shouting “You can’t possibly believe all of this, can you? Are you for real?”  I would never do that, but wanted to. I struggle with the belief that the bible is anything more than just a valuable, but strictly historical, document.

I’m not using the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy as an excuse to launch into my beliefs, which I’ve never written about in depth before. I was spurred to write this because I was mindful of what President Obama said when he was trying to console the inconsolable. He said, “God has called them all home.”

I prefer to believe that their homes were with their families, their friends, in their classrooms, on the playgrounds, in their beds, safe. But if it makes those familes, friends and loved ones feel better that some higher being is now looking after their children, then more power to them.