Don't forget SFG75 – because I know that you know from a discussion elsewhere – that I've been there, done that and got the t-shirt.
For the sake of this debate, since we now seemed to be lapsing into: 'oh you're an atheist so you don't know what faith feels like', I'll repeat my own story. The point being that I am well qualified – by dint of personal experience of faith and of religion – to comment.
My father was (well, still is, since he's retired but a 'supernumary') Methodist minister. He has loosened up a little over the years, but was very much of the fundamentalist evangelical hellfire and damnation wing when I was a child.
There are only bits and pieces of specific things that I remember, but by the time I started becoming sexually aware (around 12), I had imbibed enough to 'know' that sex was sinful. Since it was sinful and masturbation (although I hadn't a clue what it was called) made me feel dirty and unclean, like a leper, I couldn't tell anyone. I prayed for years for God to remove these awful feelings, but of course nothing happened. Partly because of what my father did and partly because (as a result of his job) we moved a lot when I was a child, I never developed any close childhood friendships – the kind where I might have mentioned such things to my peers and found out that I wasn't unique. I was around 20 before I discovered that sexual 'feelings' were natural.
When I was about 13, my father's local circuit hosted a US-style evangelical 'crusade' over two weeks. My sister and I were taken to plenty of meetings and eventually, in such heightened emotional circumstances, the inevitable happened and I was 'born again'. Strange to tell, God still didn't do any better in terms of answering my prayers and stopping me feeling horny, though. However, I went around reading Jack Chick tracts (they're obscene and that guy should be given a serious smack), handing them out to other girls at school, organising prayer meetings and being generally unbearable. I think I kept that up for about a year and then the intensity started to gradually fade away – although I still 'organised' a Christian folk group for a few more years and later ran the Christian Education Movement group at school.
Later on, I drifted away from organised religion, but the general religious belief stayed, after a rather mawkish and sentimental fashion, together with the guilt.
Fast forward to late 1999 and I moved into a new job. Almost immediately, I met someone who, very quickly, became the sort of confidente I'd never had. Loads of things poured out. To all intents and purposes, at the age of 36 going on 37, I started to go through the adolescent experience I'd never had (my parents used to boast that I was the most trouble-free teenager in history). Things fell like dominos. Religion was not, at first, amongst them. I clung to it. But during a boozy conversation one evening, I had stated that, while I didn't do organised religion any more, I still believed in a god. This new friend asked the simplest of questions: "why?" Nothing happened immediately, but about a year later, I was filling in the census form and, when it came to the religion question, I automatically filled in 'none'. Only then did I realise that it was all gone. And with it the guilt – perhaps it was more that, in a series of gloriously liberating experiences during the preceding 12 months, I'd finally shed guilt when it came to sex. With the guilt gone, there was no longer anything to hold me to any superstitious beliefs.
The following years saw my mind almost explode. My working vocabulary probably came close to doubling. I started reading far more widely, in fiction terms as well as in non-fiction. I started exploring philosophy as well as history. I started writing fiction and have subsequently been published in the UK and in Germany.
As the friend in question said, it was as though my mind had been locked in a cage.
I don't feel any sense of loss – quite the opposite. I feel liberated. I feel that I can think now.
