I was raised in what I suppose is a fairly typical Christian American household. When I was younger, my parents were Lutheran, though not particularly devout. As I got older, my parents expressed some regret that they had not raised me more actively in the church, and we began attending a large Presbyterian church down the street from our house. But things really changed for me when, at 14, I was introduced by my older brother to an evangelical church. I became "saved" and, for the next several years, was a fervent and devout believer.
As time went on, certain questions about my faith troubled me. I embarked on a personal quest to study Christian theology and philosophy, that I might grow stronger in my faith. Within a year, I was an apostate. Rather than strengthen my faith, my study of theology had revealed how vacuous the foundations of Christian faith truly are. I remained, for many years, a "theistic agnostic". for nearly ten years, I still held on to my belief in some sort of higher power – however vaguely defined – as an explanatory mechanism for the existence of the universe, the root of morality, the complexity of life, and as a guide for a personal sense of meaning.
But I soon recognized that I had no way to know whether my beliefs were true; without evidence, my beliefs were arbitrary. And upon reading Stephen Hawking's classic bestseller A Brief History of Time, I realized that invoking a god did not truly explain the things I thought it explained – it only pushed the question back a step. It was around that time I began to comfortably call myself an atheist. My ignorance of science began to dawn on me, and I was overcome with a rabid desire to soak up as much knowledge as I could about the world – a desire that consumes me to this day, exemplified in the modicum of popular science books and magazines littering my apartment.
I began a blog in 2007 called The Apostasy. Wanting to venture into broader areas of skepticism and pseudoscience, I shut it down and started The A-Unicornist in 2009, which continues today. Now, I have the privilege of working with Bud and Tristan – two of my favorite bloggers – to create a new forum for freethought, and I'm very excited for what the future holds.
