My parents were, and still are, fervent Baptists, and so I was raised in the Church from birth. I was something of a sceptic as a child (my mother still recounts how, aged 3, I announced that I no longer believed in Father Christmas because, “there are too many children for him to visit in one night”. Admittedly, this doubt was quickly quashed by the realisation that no Santa meant no presents…) but was nonetheless so heavily indoctrinated that I happily accepted as truth the stories, with their accompanying pretty pictures, in my Children’s Illustrated Bible. After all, Mummy and Daddy said it was true, and so did the pastor at our church, and so did my teachers, and my friends, so what was to question?

My friends and I were regularly dispatched to various Scripture Union holiday camps – the basic premise should be familiar to anyone who has watched “Jesus Camp” – and it was at one of these that I became “born again”. Aged about 10, I sat down one evening with one of the youth leaders and announced that I was giving my life to Christ. I have to confess, I don’t remember much about the conversation – there were a number of pamphlets to be read, and a prayer I had to recite, although I don’t recall the specifics – but I do remember the youth leader asking me how I felt at the end of the process. My reply was, “I feel sort of… lighter.”

But I didn’t. In fact, I felt nothing, save for a vague sense of silliness. Suddenly it seemed a bit ridiculous to be sitting in that room, surrounded by Christian literature, looking into the beaming face of the youth leader as I asked a long-dead Palestinian to make me a better person. Nonetheless, I pushed this mild feeling of discomfort aside, and, beatific smile firmly in place, went to rejoin my friends, all of whom had been through a similar process in the preceding years. Their support, I rationalised, would help me through this moment of doubt. It did. I was baptized the following year, and spent the next half-decade or so raising my hands in church services, speaking in tongues and generally getting over-emotional in the cause of religion. I proselytised to my long-suffering atheist/agnostic schoolfriends, on one occasion giving a memorably incoherent rendition of Behe’s “irreducible complexity” argument to my evolution-subscribing friend on the bus home. It should have suggested something to me that I, a member of the debating society and widely-regarded as one of the smartest kids in a highly selective school, should have had my argument so thoroughly demolished by a boy who had got into said school on a hockey scholarship. But I was a believer…

The vague sense of silliness had stuck with me though. I always felt a bit self-conscious praying aloud, or speaking in tongues (it didn’t feel particularly divine, and I never seemed to be able to speak in French or German, or even Latin, which would at least have had some practical applications – just “bagahabfalamalabollifilliblahashmaz etc”. If that’s the language of Heaven, it’s no wonder God has a hard time making himself understood…). Things came to a head when a visiting pastor to our church (can’t recall his name – he was from Singapore, I think) held a real humdinger of a fire-and-brimstone service. Lots of people were “slain in the spirit” (ie. got over-emotional and fainted), but the high point was when one member of the congregation, whose name I shall keep anonymous to preserve his dignity, went up to the front of the church and announced that, owing to the demonically-inspired TV programmes he had watched as a child, he was possessed by the spirit of He-Man.

That’s right, He-Man. Not Beelzebub, or Azazael, or Mephisto. He-Man, the Most Powerful Man In The Universe. Unfazed entirely by the fact that He-Man is A FICTIONAL CHARACTER*, the visiting pastor proceeded to “cast out” this evil spirit; a process of much shouting and wailing, culminating in the possessed man raising a hand and shouting, “By the power of Grayskull!”

Weirdest. Thing. Ever.

After that, I found it impossible to take church seriously anymore. I started to be the lone voice of dissent in the Youth Group – having actually read the Bible in its entirety, I was in a much better position than any of the other members (or the leaders!) to qualify my arguments. I took particular issue with St Paul, who, to my teenage mind, had perverted the original teachings of Jesus and created a Church entirely out of step with its original premises, and had great fun debating with the rest of the group. In retrospect, I think they had rather less fun than me. Finally, I stopped going to church altogether, and by the time I went to University you would have been hard pressed to recognise a modicum of Christianity in my personality.

The departure of Christianity from my life had left a large, God-shaped hole in my psyche, however, and I was ready and willing to fill it. For a while, hard-left political ideology served as temporary Polyfilla of the soul, but eventually I had to admit that the other Socialist Workers scared the crap out of me. Through my newfound practice of t’ai chi ch’uan, though, I discovered Taoism. Now here was a religion I could get behind! No actual god as such, just a vague, undefined and nebulous “force of nature”. No dogma save “follow the Tao”. No priests and catechisms, no evangelising, no afterlife to aspire to or live in fear of. I have of course, since learned that Taoism has all of these things, but even now, I retain a soft spot for the most basic “Tao of Pooh” form that I originally encountered.

The problem with the sort of New-Age spirituality that I gleaned from Taoism, though, is that it comes with a lot of baggage. As a t’ai chi practitioner (and later instructor) I was encouraged to believe in the “chi” energy that Taoists say infuses the universe. This led on to Reiki (I’m a fully qualified Reiki Master, y’know – meaning that I paid a few hundred quid to hold my hands above some equally deluded hopeful for half an afternoon), crystal healing, kinesiology, dowsing, naturopathy, and a whole slew of others. (To be fair, my personal jury is still out on a couple of these: acupuncture, for instance, seems to work even if only as a placebo, and t’ai chi is still one of the best martial arts and forms of physical exercise that I’ve encountered). The irony was that I nonetheless looked down my nose at practitioners of those esoteric arts to which I hadn’t subscribed. Homeopathy came in for serious criticism (it’s WATER, FFS!), as did iridology, astrology and palmistry, and don’t even get me started on yogic flying… but I failed to realise the hypocrisy of my position for quite a while. When enlightenment came, it came slowly – but my trusty inner cynic won through in the end. I think the final straw was quite recent; an online debate with a very old and dear friend (whose personal journey had paralleled mine, but resulted in quite a different outlook – he’s a very devoted churchgoer) on the reason for our diametrically opposed views prompted me to re-read The God Delusion et al. I sat down, took a look at my thinking, and changed my religion on my Facebook profile to “Atheist” – you don’t get a more sincere declaration of nonbelief than that!

*re-reading this, I see now how that wouldn’t have been a problem.