My own unconscious and conscious biases, including religious ones, inevitably started at an early age. I am an only child. My parents were lovely, caring people. As I grew up I wasn’t aware of belief in God playing any part their lives. Not that they were ‘unbelievers’. It’s just that as far as I know, religious beliefs just weren’t a factor for them, and thus they were not for me either. 

The first time I really thought about religion was when I was sixteen and started dating my first girlfriend, who was a Christian. I joined her in going to the Methodist church and was open to her beliefs as this didn’t seem to affect our relationship. After we had been together a couple of years she went to a teacher’s training college, studying to be a teacher of Religious Education. I didn’t mind her having what I had come to perceive as ‘these funny ideas’ but the thought of her spending the coming decades ‘indoctrinating’ children made me very uneasy. I said that if she was to pursue this path we had better break up. She did continue, and we parted our ways.

We both felt a lot for each other, so our break-up stuck a knife into my heart. In my case, the Christian religion ceased to be primarily an intellectual issue. My subsequent negativity and antagonism were evident in doctrinal discussion. But the deeper issue and motivating factor, which few were aware of, was the hurt caused to and by a precious broken relationship. I had become a militant atheist.