Hi, just joined, although I’ve been following Atheist Republic for a while on Twitter.

I’m Tom, I’m from Newcastle, in the North East of England.

I can’t say that I’ve ever been religious and I’ve only ever been to church on rare occasions- funerals, christenings etc.

Neither of my parents are in any way remotely religious - my dad’s side are a mixture of lapsed Catholics and Methodists for several generations (apparently my Grandad told the Catholic Priest to ‘f**k off’ on his deathbed). My Grandparents on my Mam’s side were very religious - she’s one of 7. Her and 5 of her siblings turned out to be atheists/non religious, and even my aunt who is a church goer is quietly so, and doesn’t really talk about religion.

Growing up, religion was never really talked about in our house.

The U.K. is weird. You’ve probably realised that with stuff that’s going on here right now, but in religious terms where we have an official state religion in which the monarch is also the head of the Anglican Church (it’d be interesting if we had a monarch who came out and stated they were an atheist). We have Bishops who sit in the House of Lords - the Upper Chamber of our Parliament. And yet, in all of my lifetime, being non religious, not attending worship on a regular basis is the normality, whilst being religious and worshiping regularly is seen increasingly as being a bit weird.

However, as religions go, the Anglicans are fairly benign, and aren’t creationists or Bible literalists etc.

I can’t remember when I actually decided there wasn’t a God. It was a gradual thing. I remember in Primary School when you’d hear various Bible stories, they just didn’t, even at that young age, seem particularly believable, and I can remember asking my Mam if God was real, and she was trying to tread this line where she didn’t want to force her views on me, but she certainly didn’t want to say yes either. Certainly by my teens I definitely didn’t believe in God at all.

For a lot of years, I have it no further thought, but in recent years, I’ve become more of a hardened atheist and interested in atheism - partly through science, which I’ve always had a casual interest in. I like that I’ve had a non religious upbringing in an increasingly non religious country, but if there is a disadvantage, it’s that, because that’s the norm people don’t really think or talk about atheism much.