When I was a little bitty kid, around ten, I think, I spirited my younger sisters into my room. I had something important to tell them, and it was going to blow their tiny little minds: Santa Claus wasn’t real. I had evidence. If PowerPoint existed back then, I would have had slides. My youngest sibling fled the room, crying, and the middle sibling was not convinced. Christmas morning, Santa wrote me a long letter in my dad’s handwriting urging me not to lose faith. That Advent, my skepticism started early.

I’m going just going to say it: I’m an atheist, meaning I don’t believe in god. That’s all it means. We are all different. Some atheists believe in fairies. Buddhism is an atheist religion, and there’s even an afterlife. I read Viking runes. Some of us are naturalists, i.e. we don’t believe in anything that can’t be tested with the Scientific Method. (I’m one of them.)

You may be wondering what caused me to disbelieve in God. To those in the know, this would be called my “deconstruction story,” except I don’t have one. I don’t think I ever believed in God, even as I was born and baptized a Roman Catholic. I’m middle-aged, so the motives of my child self are baffling to me, the ones I remember. However, based on the wreckage of cars I left behind, as well as of theft, bullying, court appearances, and my father’s broken legs, it was clear that I was not concerned about hell.

Between the ages of eight and fourteen, I grabbed the reins and took control over my life. Yeah, I was still a bad kid, but I was better. My grades improved. I developed mentoring relationships with most of my teachers. I got along with adults better than people my own age, and I had a great thing going on with the parish priest and his deacon.

When you’re a Catholic, you have a list of sacraments that you should at least make an attempt to complete. Ask your Irish or Italian friends. Your first sacrament is baptism, which you don’t have any say in. You also don’t have any say in your second sacrament either, because you’re in the second grade. You want it, though, because it’s the reason you have a suit.

Confirmation, they tell us, is optional. Around the end of middle school, you’re asked to confirm the commitment you made when you got your first communion. Seven is too young to choose your path, but thirteen makes you a grown-up. Confirmation is a ceremony to mark your entrance into adulthood and make the decision whether or not to stay Catholic.

By that point, I had been questioning the church, and I was seriously considering not kneeling before the bishop, where he’d be slapping me. This wouldn’t have been out of rebellion, or fear of the slap, but rather respect for the people who did believe. (My best friend in high school, Tony, would receive communion, an earned sacrament, despite that he was not a Catholic. I was appalled, even back then.) However, one look around revealed that Confirmation was not optional at all.

I was an altar boy for many years, through my doubts, because I got along so well with the clergy. I will never forget the look on my dad’s face when he saw Father’s arm around my shoulders. New Mexico had known about the pedophile priest scandal long before the rest of the world because this was where they shipped them. You’ll be relieved to know that nothing happened. He was one of the good ones.

The deacon was a friend of my mother’s, and he took a special interest in me while I flung one atheist 101ism after another at him. By that point, I was starting to realize I didn’t belong in that Sunday school class anymore, so I told him I didn’t believe in God. I think I was brave enough to say this out loud then because I wasn’t worried about losing everything by rejecting the church because I had new friends, and they weren’t Catholic, or even Christian. The next day, my mother pulled the car over to deliver an impassioned, eloquent, furious speech about why I was wrong, and God was real.

Even though I didn’t believe I’d be going to hell, I lived in fear of it. If I was wrong, and Jesus was real, then there was no way I was going to heaven. Yeah, I was nicer to people at that point in my life, but you didn’t have to dig very far for the bad. Most people were like this, I imagined. Maybe that dad over there hit his kids. Maybe that young woman had an abortion. Going to heaven was the kind of thing you needed extra credit for. I went to confession, and I prayed and prayed, and I could only fake it and hope nobody noticed.

Late in high school, we were excused from class so we could go to some kind of evangelical recruitment show in the gym. (I’m not sure how that happened with the separation of church and state.) I wanted so badly to believe, to be one of them, that I broke down in the middle of the gym, bawling, begging Jesus to take me. He never did.

In college, I studied the bible, only a couple of credits shy of a Religion minor. However, the more I read the Hebrew bible and the historical documents surrounding them, the more I saw the holy book as a collection of myths. Likewise, when I went through the Greek bible, I found a lot to be skeptical of. I won’t go into detail about this because I didn’t write this to start a fight.

I tried to believe in God another way. I remember Mom assuring me that Genesis says it took six days to create Earth and man, but why couldn’t a day be millions of years? I flirted with the Baha’i faith when I had to decide between all religions being wrong, or every religion being right. When the idea of praying to God to find my keys seemed kind of petty, I considered Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover.

I couldn’t even believe in luck. Nowadays, I do, but not as an external force, rather as the delicate, snowflake of coincidences coming together to create a perfect moment. Life is full of them. My history would get picked apart online if it were a movie.

For example, during the Great Blackout of ’03, I was trying to figure out how to get to New Jersey, and I bumped into my friend and former coworker, Mark. I had no idea how I was getting home, but Mark had a plan. And sure enough, I made it by bedtime. If I had not stopped in a bar for forty-five minutes and drank the last cold beers in Manhattan, I would not have been in that exact spot when Mark showed up.

I have been a very lucky man.

As I got older, I started looking again for something I could believe. I embraced the religion of my ex-wife. Keep in mind, she’s the one who bought a raccoon skull on eBay to put on the altar she drilled into the wall of our (her) condo. She fed it bowls of wine. The raccoon was her animal spirit.

I tried having an animal spirit. As I was walking down the steps out of a leather shop early in our marriage, I felt a pair of giant, invisible talons grab me by the shoulders. Since then, my animal spirit has been the owl, and that’s why I have an owl shrine next to my Newcastle shrine.

I tried to believe in her gods. And yet, even though I learned fairy lore, even though I became a Morrigan fan boy, even though I taught myself how to read runes, even though I used everything I learned and wrote a series of Urban Fantasy novels about it, even though I went to mass at the UU church, even though I looked in awe toward the really weird people she was hanging out with, I couldn’t just believe.

After I moved out, I came to realize that I wasn’t agnostic, I am an atheist. I’m not an atheist because the church hurt me or I realized it’s easier to sin if I didn’t believe in hell. I’m not an atheist because I hate God. I don’t blame him for the death of Newcastle. I don’t blame him for all of the horrible natural or otherwise disasters that destroy the lives of millions. I don’t even blame him for the reprehensible actions of many of his followers. I can’t blame him for any of this because he doesn’t exist to me.

I’m sure some of you knew this already. I haven’t concealed my skepticism, so I figured some people have assumed. I haven’t believed in God all my life, and it took until now to say anything directly. Apologists have a lot of shitty things to say about us, and in poll after poll, we’re the least trusted religious subgroup. Pastors tell their congregations that we’re coming to take their religion away.

It doesn’t help that the spokesman for atheists in the mainstream was Christopher Hitchens, a bottomless asshole. Who wants to be associated with him?

Coming out as atheist has changed nothing about me. I’m a guy who loves cats and used to like comics and respects his job and has a creative outlet. At this point in my life, most of my identity is tied up in my creative outlet. If you’ve never had a chance to speak with an atheist before, let me answer some common questions.

Are we just animals? Yes. To simplify it, evolution happens when an organism adapts over many generations to fit their environment. Occasionally, you’ll find an organism that adapts its environment to them. Some of them developed consciousness and imagination, and the consciousness and imagination evolved into art, religion, and culture. Our personalities evolve from a combination of instincts and environment, like any other animal, but as humans we have drama. I don’t know where that evolved from.

Do I believe in eternal life? Yes, but not how you think. Over the course of my life, I’ve encountered thousands of people, and I’ve affected them in some way, for good or for bad. These people, in turn, have an effect on someone else. And so on. Though the memory of me will fade, I will live on. That’s my eternal life.

What do I think happens when I die? Nothing. The lights go out, and everybody will have to move on with their lives. To explain why I think this is a good thing, I’m going to talk about Star Wars. Star Wars is a series of eleven movies, two made-for-TV movies, a holiday special, two Saturday Morning cartoons, as well as a lot of animated series for every age, and a number of TV shows. There’s some books, but only nerds read those. Once upon a time, Star Wars was two amazing and one fine (I guess) movies. And they were brilliant, even the okay one. They changed Western culture. Nowadays, when there’s an announcement for a Star Wars movie or TV show, see if America cares. The Empire Strikes Back, arguably the best out of all the movies, is less than 5 percent of current Star Wars content.

There was a time when six hours of Star Wars was all we had, and we loved every little detail of it. That’s how I feel about my life. My story will be over within a few decades, and that’s great because what a story it was. My life had drama! It had pathos! It had twists, it had turns! I met some amazing people and went on some great adventures. How can a day be special if it’s one in an eternity?

And that brings me to your next question: Where do I find purpose? Inside me. I know what I want to do with my life, and I do it. Writing is my purpose, drawing is my purpose, except when Oscar deposits himself on my sketchbook or keyboard. Keeping him fed, clean, and happy is my purpose, just like it was for Newcastle or any cat I’ve lived with.

Finally: Where does my morality come from? I have empathy, and I don’t want to do something that hurts another person. (I mean, I do, but it’s never my intention.) I would never have sex with someone who was not my wife at the time because that would hurt her. However, when we agreed to be polyamorous household, I had sex with someone who was not my wife, and no one was hurt. I’m more concerned with ethics than morals because there are no moral absolutes.

Those were the first questions that occurred to me, but if you have more, feel free to message me in good faith. I’ll answer to the best of my abilities. I know most of you don’t agree with me, and that’s fine. I’m not here to convert you. I just want you to understand where I’m coming from.

I’m asking that you respect my lack of belief. Don’t try to convert me, don’t try to debate me. As I hope I’ve expressed in this essay, I’ve made every effort to be a believer, and no amount of your logic or appeals to my humanity are going to suddenly make everything click. No matter how clever you think you are, I can guarantee I’ve already heard it.

My life is not empty. I have a cat who will fight me for a cinnamon roll. I have my art, I have my writing. I’m not the most social person, but I regularly chat with people who mean the world to me. It took me a long time to realize this, but the life I’m living now is more than a dress rehearsal. This world is my only home, so I’m going to try to take care of it and enjoy what it has to offer.