I was around 12 years old when I began to feel that religion was an oddly complex system. Life seemed simple enough to me: You live, and then you die. Religion added a lot of extra details, like the existence of God and heaven and hell, and the need to pray. I had questions about all these things that no one seemed able to answer: If God created everything, where did God come from? Why does life exist?

My mom was raised Pentecostal but believed that all forms of Christianity were OK, so she agreed to let my grandma take me to her Catholic church. Though I was baptized, I never went to religion classes or had a First Holy Communion, and no one in my family ever explained religion to me. It was a part of the culture, and often people don’t think much about culture, they just follow it.

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As an only child I had a lot of free time to think, and I’ve always liked to ponder things. I remember thinking about the way my mom and I would say a prayer before bedtime, asking for protection from all evil, including people and spirits who may want to harm me or our family. As I grew up, it started to seem a bit unrealistic: me, praying to some guy I had never seen to protect me?

I had never seen physical signs of this God character, and I didn’t see any evidence that he answered prayers. Sometimes I would see my mom unhappy and wonder, “She’s a good person; why would God allow her to suffer?” By this time my mom had stopped praying with me, so I decided to stop praying altogether.

Doubt Turns to Disbelief

The summer when I was 12 was a difficult one for me. My mom had a new boyfriend and though he was nice, I felt as if he was taking her from me. I had been used to it being just the two of us at home, and now she and her boyfriend were always going out. My mom would leave me with her best friend and that friend’s kids, who lived in the apartment beneath us. I had a lot of fun with them, but I missed my mom.

This, plus trouble with my friends, and maybe some hormones, contributed to a feeling of sadness and I became a little depressed. I thought that now, more than ever, I needed God’s help. So I started praying again, hoping he might help me out a bit. Nothing happened; I was still sad. My doubt solidified into disbelief: If I was clearly in pain and this guy who could supposedly help everybody didn’t help me, then He must not be real.

Soon after, I began to feel that not only was religion false, it was damaging to society. This grew out of conversations I had with my mom’s best friend’s 15-year-old daughter. Whenever my mom would drop me off at her house, we ended up talking about anything and everything.

One day, we got into a particularly personal discussion and she revealed to me that she was attracted to girls more than boys. She felt lost in terms of her faith because she was gay. She was told that feelings she couldn’t help were against God’s plan.

This revelation made me think about the things religion stands for. I’d never read the Bible, so I didn’t know exactly what it said about homosexuality, but I knew that being gay was generally disapproved of among most religions. I thought it was silly that she had to feel judged just because she might love someone of the same gender.

Telling My Mom

My mom and I have always had a good relationship, so when anything major happens in my life, I want her to know about it. It took me a while to bring up how my views on religion had changed. When I finally did, we were watching a movie in my room and I was hardly paying attention to it, because my mind was occupied with this topic. Suddenly, with the movie playing in the background, I asked my mom what her view on God was.

She looked confused and answered, “Well, God sees everything, hears everything, and if you’re a good person in your lifetime, when you die, God will take you with Him to heaven.”

This concept had never made sense to me. I’d always felt that people do what they do and there are certain outcomes that don’t have much to do with justice. If you’re a good person and a tragedy suddenly strikes you, does that mean you deserved it? Or the bad people who get away with doing bad things—should they have gotten off easy? People rarely seem to get what they truly deserve during their lifetimes, and a heaven where good people finally get what they deserve seemed like wishful thinking. Based on science, the sky is just the sky: There’s no proof that heaven exists anywhere, which made it difficult for me to believe in it. Nor could I accept that it’s possible for someone to see and hear everything.

I just told my mom, “I don’t believe in that anymore.” She was quiet for a while. Then, a little angrily, she asked me why. I explained to her, mostly using references to homosexuality.

“Mom, supposedly in the Bible, it says people have sinned if they sleep with someone of the same gender. That doesn’t make sense. Why can’t gay people just love whoever they want and still trust ‘God’ to be there for them?”

My mom didn’t have an answer to this. I discovered that she wasn’t the only one. I would ask my religious peers or family members questions similar to those that I asked my mom. Their response was usually, “You just need to have faith.” This wasn’t enough for me. If I have faith that a cheeseburger will save my life, that doesn’t give the cheeseburger life-saving powers. So, if I believe in religious ideas that seem equally outrageous, why should that make any difference to what’s factually true? To me it wasn’t logical.

image by YC-Art Dept

Searching for a Belief System

But I still wanted something to believe in. Religion obviously worked for other people, and I thought there might be something out there for me to believe as well. I was also eager to find answers to all my questions about life. And something in the back of my mind kept saying that God might exist, and I didn’t want to perish in hell for not believing. With all these things going on in my head, I wondered whether there might be a god who was different from the version I’d always heard about. I began to explore other religions.

One thing that bothered me was the idea that the “creator of the universe” had to be a male. I found that a bit misogynistic (hateful toward women) and thought, “Hey, why can’t God be Goddess?” I considered Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as variations on the same patriarchal, or male-dictated, views. But I had a friend who practiced Wicca, a branch of paganism (a belief system with many gods) centered on nature, and she told me that Wiccans see men and women as creators of one spirit. She explained that women are highly valued in Wicca as the givers of life.

This appealed to me, so I practiced Wicca for a couple of months. Part of Wicca involves sending positive energy to the universe with spells; that part I couldn’t really do, because I didn’t know where to find the herbs and oils I needed for the spells. So I just did the spiritual things, which I figured were more important anyway: I meditated, and I tried to be nicer than usual to other people, which actually made me feel better about myself.

But in order to be a true Wiccan, you have to have a Book of Shadows—a scrapbook of anything Wiccan that appeals to you, such as certain spells or herbs that work for you. You also have to have an altar, where you pray and do your spells and offer your gifts to God and Goddess. You should have a pentacle there too, which is a symbol of protection from evil, and I didn’t know where to find one.

Overall, it was a lot of work. I think that religion should consist of beliefs, a good lifestyle, and positive behavior toward other people. Ritual isn’t necessary to me. Although I believed in many Wiccan ideas, I didn’t consider it worth the effort to be a full-fledged Wiccan.

Could I Invent a Religion?

It seemed inevitable that religions invented by other people would include aspects I didn’t agree with or preferred to do without. As I thought about this, I remembered The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon, a book I’d read a couple of months before my spiritual journey started. The book is a memoir of Runyon’s teenage depression, and in it he describes creating a religion with his friends. He intended it as a joke, but I thought it was awesome that he could take his own ideas and beliefs and call it a religion. I was already exhausted trying to find a religion made for me, so I thought, “Hey, why don’t I make my own, like Brent did?”

Brent’s religion was based around the Ace of Spades card. The leader of his religion is called the “Ace,” and all the members wear black. I elaborated on this and came up with my own system. In my religion, a member would choose a card from a standard deck that had some type of personal meaning for them. A person could also invent their own card based on existing cards—for example, my own card was the Ace Queen of Spades and Hearts.

I incorporated pagan beliefs with cards and random stuff that I found interesting to make a “religion.” There weren’t any practices, just beliefs, like the idea that everyone is their own god and has power over their actions. I actually had a notebook where I was coming up with interview questions to ask prospective members. But after a while I found myself thinking, “This isn’t a religion; it’s more like a cult.” I had unintentionally made my religion more satirical than serious, so I abandoned it.

All I had intended to do was to give my atheist or agnostic friends—who either don’t believe in God or don’t think it’s possible to know for sure—something to believe in and be a part of, and to give them the idea that they are the only ones who control their lives. There were about five or six friends who had views similar to mine. One friend in particular had brought up the same question that started my whole journey: where did God come from? She and I talked about when we’d first started thinking this way, and our parents’ reactions when they found out.

Satisfied With Who I Am

It was good to have peers I could relate to over these things. At times, I felt lonely because I know that I’d get harshly judged for my beliefs if a lot of people knew about them. I think if people don’t have support and encouragement to think for themselves, they are less likely to question what they are told. So I liked the idea of setting up some sort of group where other atheist and agnostic teens could come together and share ideas and support.

And in fact, now that I’m older and surer about what I believe, I feel even more strongly that I could use a group of people to discuss my beliefs with.

In the end, even though it put me in a minority, I decided to stick with being an atheist rather than going along with any particular religion. I realized that believing that a god created everything feels far-fetched to me, and I prefer to think of things without conceptualizing a god. I have been calling myself an atheist for about two years now, and since then I’ve felt no need to look into religion further.

When I started to question religion, the religious people I spoke to would often say things like, “God is protecting you and wants you to believe in Him and be a good person.” To me, as long as you live your life without doing harm to others, you’re being a good person—and you don’t need to believe in God to be a good person.

Of course, there are people who are religious, but are not dogmatic about having a very rigid set of rules or beliefs. They believe in God but they don’t try to tell you what God’s plan is, or what God wants, or what’s going to happen after we die. I see no problem with this kind of religious belief. If a person finds that religion helps them in their personal lives or makes them feel at peace, that is their right.

But I know now that formal religion is not for me. It doesn’t make sense to me. These days, I don’t feel pressured to accept a set of beliefs; I don’t have to pray; and I can just be nice and spread my positive energy to as many people as possible.