Note: Based on feedback I received, posts on this blog are now longer and with more photos.

I don’t know the exact age, but around eight years of age, I feasted on a zombie . . . er . . . received my First Communion.

I do remember doing a lot of thinking about god . . . and testing god. She . . . He . . . it failed miserably. 

Over the next few years, I graduated from testing god to challenging it, trying to provoke a response. That was also a form of testing, albeit a bit drastic. I’m not sure exactly when god became a non-thing for me. I still went to communion, but before going to communion one had to go to confession. I had a standard list of “sins” I confessed instead of kneeling there in silence . . . I claimed disobedience of my parents, telling a few lies, speaking the name of god in vain. Admittedly, I didn’t exactly know what that last one was. I sort of knew it had to do with cursing, but I didn’t typically curse. At least, not that I remember.

By my early teens, that whole church thing was a mild but bearable annoyance. Sometime during my high school years, I told my parents I wasn’t going anymore. Used logic and everything, something along the line that it made no sense “faking” going to church; if there was a god, it would know.

It would be many years later I would learn the word “atheist”, and years after that I would hear the word skeptic and learn there were others like me.