“There is exactly the same degree of possibility and likelihood of the existence of the Christian God as there is of the existence of the Homeric God.” - Bertrand Russell

Few if any people in the world today would put faith in the Gods presented in the epic poem The Iliad of ancient Greece. Most Christians and Muslims would treat such theistic claims as humorous folly akin to a child believing in the tooth fairy. The majority of Atheists would concur with the addendum that Abrahamic Monotheism is as equally daft.

The above notion was part of the reason I became an Atheist at the age of seventeen. My parents had provided a solid foundation of religious belief in the assumption that it would be a bedrock from which to either continue to build or reject when I was old enough to choose. Both my parents were agnostics but each held great interest in all the religions of the world, past and present. I was baptised Roman Catholic shortly after birth and would later go through my first Holy Confession and Communions, as well as attending an all boys Roman Catholic Prep School where prayers were said twice daily.

As a child, I strangely never questioned the existence of God and took for granted the religious teachings as truth. I did the same with Father Christmas who in many ways was more magical and endearing than Jesus Christ. It could be said that the terrible revelation about the non-existence of the bearded man in red shook the foundations of my religious core just a little too much, thereby weakening the essence of ‘belief’ for the aftershocks of later contemplation and study. If one highly regarded invisible charachter was fiction, then what about the rest?

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