Like you, I once felt very strongly about my atheism. I suppose it started about the age of 8-10. I was a very precocious child and started worrying about things like where all the water had come from for the Flood. After all, the highest mountains were pretty high, and since all of the water seemed to be in the sea already there couldn't be enough in the clouds to fill up the whole earth, could there? My Sunday school teachers tried the usual "God can do whatever the Hell he pleases" [I misquote, but you get the gist] arguments, but I remained unconvinced - it seemed like cheating, somehow. Why set up the world in a particular way and then arbitrarily change the rules? Then came earlier parts of Genesis. The whole universe? In six days? Well, of course, that was a metaphor, said my teachers? maybe it meant six Ages. This was I think a kind of personal epiphany (if you'll forgive the pun). I started looking at the Bible with a far more critical eye. After all, if these bits weren't true, or not Literally true, then maybe the whole thing was made up. The closer I looked, the less it seemed to stand up to scrutiny. Both my parents had been Methodists and although they themselves were not very caught up in it all, they had the usual "quiet faith" and their families were closely involved in the church community. So they encouraged me to go to Sunday school. I have no doubt that some Christians will say: "aha - your atheism is merely rebellion against your parents!", but that argument cuts both ways (and what's God if not the Ultimate Parent? A way of still being able to run to mummy and abdicate responsibility for your actions?). Well, maybe it was rebellion, at least partially, but I'd like to think there was always a bit of scientific rigour there as well.

As I became a teenager, I read more, and realised the so-called Gospels were actually quite divergent, and that Jesus' birth had been so "miraculous" that only two of the four had seen fit to mention it, and even they both disagreed on the facts. These kind of discoveries became important as a lot of my school friends got involved in a local Christian youth fellowship and slowly started being poached by the school's Christian Union (CU). Confused teenagers, vulnerable age, seeking certainty and reassurance -all of that. It got quite worrying, and my dwindling circle of atheist acquaintances found ourselves having to defend ourselves at every turn from the usual arguments that you outline on your pages, not to mention all sorts of other psychological pressure. We were three, they were many, they had attractive girls - ah, the honey trap - as beloved of the CIA. All this could be ours, if only we would succumb! They would play good Christian, bad Christian - some would adopt us, being nice, doing things for us, others would argue in relays, like a police interrogation, never giving us time to collect our thoughts. We three ended up founding our own anti-CU, the Satanist Or Demonic Union (SOD U). Not that we were Satanists, of course, since that presumed a belief in God, but the name sounded good. The school refused to allow us to become a recognised organization, alas. I suppose that this phase - of coming through two or three years of concentrated brainwashing - led me to my strong feelings about (i.e. against) religion.

Eventually I left to University, and a more rational existence. We still had a Creationist in our chemistry class, though, and I have choice recollections of him trying to argue about the world being created in 4004BC with a Professor of geochemistry. Fundamentally, rocks are old, and you can prove this by potassium-argon radioactive dating, and if you refuse to accept that then you have to abandon virtually the entirety of science, which is otherwise quite good at making testable predictions. As I have aged so I have mellowed. I like a good argument, but arguments with religious people are rarely very good ones. There was a time when I used to argue the toss with Christians, but now I simply can't give a toss. Irrational beliefs are the ones least susceptible to change. Such people operate from a subjective, experiential point of view - they believe they have had a religious experience. I have had a couple of experiences that I might have interpreted as religious had I been of a different mind-set, so I can understand the power of the experience. I only differ in my interpretation of it (was it God, or was your mind playing tricks on you? William of Occam to the rescue!)

I once thought that God was talking to me, too, but I was on LSD at the time and so was comfortably able to dismiss it when I was straight again. Maybe He was talking to me, but if He wanted to convince me he picked a bad time! Earlier, when I was 11, I had complications arising from a botched appendectomy. I developed peritonitis and spent several weeks in intensive care. During an operation to remove the infected parts of my abdominal cavity I was clinically dead for a couple of minutes. Although obviously anaesthetised at the time, I still have clear recollections of the standard Near Death Experience - floating above the operating table, long tunnel with a pinprick of light at the end, rushing wind that seemed to be dragging me along, sense of total and utter panic (that bit was non-standard - most people report being blissed out). I never made it to the end of the tunnel - so I can't tell you what would have been there.

Pity.

For some reason I just wrote the whole thing off. I was only 11 - strange things happen all the time when you're a kid - this was just another one. As I got older I assumed it had been some side effect of the drugs. It was only when I heard a radio phone-in at the age of about 18 that I realised that other people had had the same experience and I became interested in it. Maybe it was because I was already a pretty convinced atheist by then, but I never assumed it had been a spiritual experience. After some searching finally I arrived at a physiological explanation that satisfied me (oxygen-starved brain slowly shutting down - dislocation of spatial sense followed by dimming of vision and then 'tunnel' vision - the centre of the cortex being the most light-sensitive and last to go - rushing sound in ears again white noise as the hearing goes).

A few years ago I agreed to be quoted in a book about it. The author who interviewed me said I was the only person he had ever met who had not ascribed a spiritual meaning to the experience. I think there may have been an element of selection bias there, though - he was a Christian looking for "evidence" of God (shurely shome mishtake?), and hoped to use this. Once I might have boycotted the book on principle, but I thought, ah - at least he gets a dissenting POV this way, and who gives a damn anyway? He's exploiting gullible fools, so why shouldn't I? Take the money and run!

This has been a strange, long and personal ramble considering you're a total stranger (but at least the site confirms you hold similar beliefs to mine so we have that in common). I suppose it's easy in agnostic and apathetic Britain for us to take a relaxed attitude to this kind of thing, but there are parts of the world where it really matters - like the USA, where some states want to teach "Creation Science" (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) in schools. So keep up the good work, but I hope it doesn't take over your life. It would be a shame to escape the grovelling to God only to have to waste your time dealing with morons who can't spell. In the long run the sweep of history will carry us away and our petty arguments will all have been academic. In the mean time we only get the one life, so we might as well enjoy it - and there's more to life than banging your head against some mad bugger's wall, to freely quote Pink Floyd.

Richard Hands London