People who get to know me are inevitably surprised to discover that I wasn’t always a blasphemous heathen.

It’s hard to blame them, I suppose. After all, I’ve been known to curse like a sailor, drink like a fish and party like it’s 1999.

Consequently, it’s not exactly a secret among my friends and colleagues that I’m an atheist.

What’s not so well-known, however, is that I wasn’t always thus.

In fact, it’s been only a few short years?a relatively minute portion of my life?that I haven’t held a belief in God.

Though I certainly had developed agnostic leanings far before then, I stopped altogether when I was 22 years-old and a couple kids in Colorado shot up their high school, killed 12 students, one teacher and then themselves.

That was merely the icing on the cake?Or should I say the nail in the coffin?

First off, there was a little bit of convenient logic to justify the change.

According to what I believed, God is supposed to be a perfect, omniscient, omnipotent being, and we are here on Earth to endure trials and prove our faith in him. What kind of deity, I wondered, is so insecure that he stands idly by and lets innocents get slaughtered, just to prove that we still believe in him?

I also thought of reading Job in a freshman humanities class.

Anyone so shallow, I thought, surely is not perfect, and if God is not perfect, then he clearly does not live up to the standards that religion has ascribed to him, and consequently cannot exist.

Then again, it’s not so much that I believed that God should have intervened; I am well versed in the philosophy of free will or free agency or whatever term one might use to describe our ability to act as we see fit and control our own destiny.

Such a God, after all, would not be an impartial, benevolent deity judging us on the worthiness of our actions, but a meddling dictator interfering with the natural progression of life to force its boundaries to fit his specifications.

Instead, though I still cannot fully articulate to others the reasoning that exists within my own mind and heart, I believe it has more to do with a generalized belief that life itself is simply far too random, too chaotic for some supreme being to be overlooking it all.

However, while Columbine cemented my inability to believe in?let alone worship?God, it certainly was not the only determining factor.

As a bleeding-heart liberal, I could not reconcile my support of civil liberties and the notion of equality with the blatant, outright discrimination legalized by the supposed moral code of religion.

I know and admire some homosexuals, and the fact that, when I think of them, I see compassionate, upstanding individuals, rather than descendants of Sodom and Gomorrah, is telling.

I heard Sunday lectures that my eternal fate was more predicated upon rituals and traditions than living a righteous life dedicated to the empowerment of my fellow human beings.

I observed subjugation of women, remembered the religious contexts of historical wars and saw so many hypocrites sitting in a church on Sunday, but acting anything other than God-like the other six days a week?

And I decided that two years of teaching 5- and 6-year-old boys about God was plenty long enough.

Ultimately, I do not criticize or castigate those around me who are religious; I do not tell them that man created God, rather than the other way around; and I certainly don’t attempt to convert them to The Dark Side.

My atheism and the personal philosophy that shapes it are, in fact, of a highly laissez-faire variety.

All I ask, in the end, is that you don’t tell me I’m going to hell because I don’t go to church?

After all, you sure don’t seem to mind when the party’s at my house.

Eric welcomes feedback at: [email protected].