Here's a wonderful guest post written by Isaac Wolfe from the Sexy Atheist. Enjoy!
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It was Christmas night, 2009, when I finally decided that my threshold for bullshit had gotten clogged, and so help me I would clean it out with my bare hands.

I laid in my sister’s bed – the only bed in the house – underneath three duvets, as my sister couldn’t afford to heat the house much above 50°, the absolute minimum. From the living room, I could hear the sobs of my sister (who slept on the couch) as well – she had received a very offensive gift from our father. Tears slid down my face, and I absolutely wept, feeling that I was responsible for the whole predicament. Actually, I kind of was.

What the hell, world.

After a long, harrowing spiral, I had finally crashed with a bang on the floor of a bottomless pit. Months ago, I had lived in a fancy, middle class house with my father, complete with a plasma TV, a grand piano, and a mother-fucking chandelier. Now I lived in a three room apartment with my sister – a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room / kitchen.  We’ve subsided on rice, ramen noodles, and extremely salty canned food. Exclusively.

I was scared shitless about the future. So, I did something very instinctual, and, well, rather hypocritical.

Prayed.

That’s right, I, Isaac Wolfe, atheist and sexy teen extraordinaire, prayed. It was a funny sight, really. Wearing nothing more than my boxers, I was just a curled-up lump on a mattress. Enjoy:

I’m pretty sure you don’t exist, but hey, there’s no harm trying, right? It’s me. Yeah, that kid who got caught skinny dipping in the creek that one time – but seriously, you don’t expect families to have picnics that far upstream! But, that’s besides the point.

The reason I’m here tonight, is, well, because I’m kind of in a predicament right now. A suckish one. I've heard you're omnipotent and all, so I suppose you know the details. Wanna, uh, help me out? If it's no trouble?

Um. Thanks.

Bye.

…Are you still there? I said bye. Get off the line.

///

So how did I end up in this sticky situation? Well, let’s start at the beginning.

For most of my life, I lived with my mother. We loved each other, absolutely and irrevocably. So, when an opportunity came up in Florida, which involved a lifestyle she had always dreamed of but didn’t include me, I severed ties with her in the only way that would work: telling her that I couldn’t stand living with her, that I was moving to my father’s house and she was leaving to Florida, that’s that. I followed through, and so did she.

Unfortunately, there was a problem. My father was – is – a fundamentalist, conservative Christian with anger problems to match. That was all fine and dandy at the time – my mom was a casual Catholic, and I supposed that I loosely believed in God as well, so it wasn’t too different. The only contrasting thing was that now I had to go to church every Sunday, instead perhaps a couple time a year. That was fine with me – Christianity was fascinating, especially the reactions it invoked. I was content for a time, and so was my father.

Until I figured out that my attraction to other men wasn’t just a phase.

Until, at the local library, I picked up a book called The God Delusion in passive interest.

Until my father, after installing spyware on my laptop, found out what these two things had resulted in.

And that was that. After enduring screaming and threats, a forced encounter with a ‘re-orientation therapist’ who tried to tell me that my sexuality was to be feared and hated, and finally a physical encounter, I was out on the cold October streets, with nothing more than a duffel bag full of clothes and a backpack full of textbooks.

I had basically nowhere to go – my mom was essentially excised from my life, and telling any of my friends about the whole ordeal would likely culminate with an investigation by child services, destroying any chance of me seeing my father again. However, in a burst of intuition, I walked to a café on the other side of town, where I waited for my sister to arrive at her shift. Without even requiring an explanation, she took me in.

We survived, barely, my sister working overtime, paying not for only one mouth but two. In school, contrary to intuitive thought, my grades skyrocketed as I put on a fake cheerful mien to erase any suspicion that something in my home life was awry.

Which, eventually, brings us back to Christmas night, and my adventure praying to a non-existent sugar daddy. Gift-wise, that night, I received a journal and some shabby books of my sister’s that I could have borrowed any time I wanted. My sister, from our father, received a five dollar bill taped to a piece of paper that condemned her for harboring me and told her that she was going to Hell.

As you may have guessed, after my plea for help, I waited.

And I waited.

And you know what happened, babycakes? Absolutely nothing.

So, after crying some more and waiting for my sister’s sobs to turn into snores, I put on some clothes and walked across town to my father’s house, where I snuck in through the window (unlocked, just as I had left it) and took the laptop from my room (which I had left there, for some stupid reason). And then, when I got back to my sister’s apartment, I opened the laptop, connected to the Wi-Fi of the nearby McDonalds, and sent off about ten e–mails to the first businesses I had come across online, telling them that their websites were dull and that I wanted to rewrite them for a small price.

None of them responded. Except for one.

Within a week, I was two-hundred dollars richer. I surprised my sister by whisking her out to a fancy Italian restaurant, and telling her to order anything her little heart desired, except for the mushroom raviolis because god, seriously, they’re disgusting. And then from there, everything got awesome. Web copywriting became an actual source of income, and my sister and I stopped living like weird Asian hobos.

Now, you’re probably wondering: what the hell is the moral of this story?

A while ago, I received an e-mail from a man, who compared me to an odd bunny rabbit that liked to jump up and down and point out that the tooth fairy wasn’t real. I’m an atheist too, he wrote, but I don’t understand why you’re trying to take away religion from people. It might not be your cup of tea, but why try to get rid of it for the people it means something to?

That’s where my story comes in handy. We atheist bloggers are not trying to exterminate religion as a whole (usually), we’re trying to exterminate the kind that causes people to attack their children, the kind that makes people fly themselves into the side of buildings. Are you a liberal Christian who can differentiate between what’s obviously a reflection of the social times in the Bible and what’s the core message? Awesome, you rock, join the party.

People like Raithie and I aren’t trying to be some big meanies taking away some precious part of your life. We’re just trying to prevent sob stories like this, by giving people the ammunition and awareness to determine their beliefs with, or if necessary, fight with.

The fact of the matter is that there are many kids in the situations similar to that I described, and the fact of the matter is that they probably aren’t as bad ass as me and they won’t find a way to fix it.

And, as sad as it is, at the end of the day, some god will not come down and fix their lives for them.

If no god existed, would you still want to believe in one? 

The most interesting question still remains to be "if you're parents were Hindus instead of Christians, would you still be a Christian?" (presuming it is a Christian who is answering).

However, the former is still an interesting musing, methinks. Willful delusion certainly gets you out of the nasties and I think it could be revelatory of one of the motivations behind belief, of course, assuming the answerer is honest with themselves. Regardless, I think it's a worthwhile pondering and I'd be interested to hear a theists point of view on such a question.

I haven't had time to put together a blog post, so instead, I humbly offer up this essay I wrote last year. If you find it waffly at times, I had a page limit to reach and a designated title to stick to...

Given title: "Let's stop all this pretence! Let's tell each other the unvarnished truth for a change!"

Little white lies are everywhere. They're so darn tempting that we can't help but incessantly fall prey to their irresistible allure. We never tell Mary that her dress is actually hideous for instance, or that it was her that was completely out of line last weekend. No, instead we choose to coat the truth in a thick lathering of misinformation and deliberate omission; crafting a rich broth of blatant and bubbling mis truths. This is done usually out of a desire to prevent offence and to conform to an imposed societal etiquette; but it's also of vital necessity for a general social cohesion.

Humans are communal creatures. Our durability as a species is a result of us living as a collective unit. It is therefore essential to suppress the volatility that would undoubtedly erupt if humans were to express all of our basal and abrasive ponderings to others. So, it's understandable that evolution would endow us with a sufficient sensitivity to cautiously tread around peoples egos and to comfort them through the flimsy guise of falsehood. However, this inherent and ingrained sense of responsibility to console others by means of deliberate misrepresentation seems to have evolved to an extent that we persistently lie to even ourselves. The most dominant being the pretence of religion.

Humanities most valuable asset is the mind: its capacity and enigma is astounding. Our lumps of grey matter, safely encased within our cranium, allow us to experience overwhelming emotion and curiousity, to cultivate novel and vastly complex ideas, to innovate, to advance and to understand. It also deems us worthy to gift us with one of the most powerful and cutting instruments in our mental toolkit: logic. People use and appreciate the effects if this immaterial implement every single day. Its influence stretches from deciding upon the best way to organise the teacups in your dishwasher to sending astronauts to the faraway reaches of the cosmos. It demands reasoning and evidential support, and because of this, it works. It is the basis of civilisation and it allows the world as we know it to be.

Yet, somehow, as soon as religion and mortality are considered, all requirements of logic and standard reasoning go out the window. People immediately discard all semblance of skepticism and rationality when it comes to their own particular brand of fairytale, it seems. Tell someone that an invisible, flying and undetectable squirrel follows you around all day and you'll be met with nothing but ridicule. They'll rightfully demand substantiated proof, and until you comply with sufficient corroboration, they will inevitably continue to laugh and jeer. "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence", they'll proudly recite, and then by the next breath, blindly profess their legalistic loyalty to the one tiny, and just as unfounded, segment of Christianity that they happen to subscribe to by pure chance of birth. It's a dumbfounding contradiction.

So, then why are these fundamental axioms so readily dismissed once religion becomes involved? Why can't we accept the ugly and unvarnished truth, in exchange for a glimpse at the thrilling rawness of reality? To me, the answer is simple. Religion stems from a very primal and influential fear. When brooding over our own mortal predicament, rationalities answer - that your essence fades alongside your palpable self - becomes disconcertingly unappealing. No one wants to hear of dissolving into nothingness. No one wants a void of unending vacuity. This answer, this blunt reality, however unlovely and unromantic, is all logic has to offer on the subject. So people reject this utterly distasteful notion, and instead, allow their own revulsion over the prospect to fully justify its impossibility without indulging in any of the typical routines of reason. Fueled by our own intrinsic abhorrence over our all too delicate existence, we desperately cling to the soothing and whimsical fantasies religion has to offer.
Simply put, we lie to ourselves in order to glaze and soften a profoundly unpleasant reality.

However appealing and fanciful this sugar-coated notion may be, it's nothing but a child-like pretence, and frankly, the world deserves better. Is it not enough that we, such a select few and despite such astronomical odds, are the ones who get to appreciate the monumental privilege that it is to simply be? How presumptuous must one be to demand or assume eternity, when so many get only nothingness? This thought obviously isn't of concern for some. Yet there's a definite value, as well as a liberating honesty, in settling with this far from fantastical truth. Realising the fleeting and fragile nature of our glimpse at life, is the only way to truly understand its rarity and significance. Its constantly lingering presence may cast an unwelcome shadow at times, but it's a stark and much needed reminder to truly value our brief witness to the cosmos.

Its time to stop the pretence.