I wonder what goes on inside God's head -- I noticed He got a haircut today. Is that even God? He moves like God, he drinks like God -- but He seems a little more social than normal. He's sitting at the bar instead of his usual table in the corner.

I feel as though atheists hold the burden of proof when it comes to questions about supreme power. At a party in Des Moines a few years back, the topic of religion was foolishly (and drunkenly) brought up. When it came out that I was an atheist, I had some chick I barely knew screaming "but what about the animals!?" in my face for half an hour. What about the fucking animals? No one was questioning her beliefs, why should I get the 3rd degree from someone whose religious views were -- as far as I could figure out -- ambiguously centered around the spiritual lives of dogs?

Our culture is so deeply rooted in religion that we have this tendency to assume God exists. In a conversation about religion, if I were to respond "yes" to the question of whether I believe in God or not, it is unlikely I would be questioned on why I would hold that belief, or what I believe God is -- and they would never find out that 'God' is the nickname I use for a solitary, quiet drunk who frequents the bars I usually go to. I think God -- should He exist -- has enough of a sense of humor to spend most of His time as a mild-mannered barfly in a town full of people more likely to read the Bhagavad-Gita than His own book.

I'm going to jump into this feet first: I am an atheist. Let's just get that out there.

I look back at the preteenager who first began to question God I see a shy kid who was perhaps a tad too literal and introspective for his own good. My development as an atheist is more marked by a desire to break the bonds of this phenomenon of assumed belief in higher power than any sort of personal catharsis leading me away from God or the church. No specific doctrine or individual influenced me to accept the idea of atheism. In hindsight, I believe I was motivated by an underlying desire for a worldview that is universal and non-contradictory more than anything else.

I was raised a liberal ELCA Lutheran -- liberal in the sense that the ELCA (or at the very least, my family's church) was less bound by the hierarchy and dogma of Catholicism, nor was it confined to the passionate protestant "individualism" of the Missouri Synod. I am proud of my Lutheran roots; the lessons and values instilled in me by my family and church are an essential part of who I am, and only a fool would denounce that which had played an integral role in his development as an individual.

My desire for a universal worldview was balanced by an unwillingness to break the social bonds that tied me to family and community; and perhaps because of this I spent my adolescent years searching to redefine the idea of God rather than reject Him altogether. Eastern thought, philosophy, science -- they all could be rationalized into a belief in an ambiguous God, but ultimately left me with the dissatisfied feeling that such a belief was contrived or misleading. In the end, it was the literal definition of "God is a deity" that did me in; I could not bring myself to believe in God no matter how hard I tried to bash some other idea into His place. At the bottom of this search I was left with only my belief that there is no spiritual power above humanity, and fully resigned to atheism and asprituality.

But where does that atheism come from? Defined as a belief there is no God or deity, in the end atheism is ultimately just that: a belief. So in order to understand where atheism comes from we have to explore the nature of belief and attack the idea from the back door.

Joe Heffron recently wrote a particularly eloquent piece for this magazine pondering the nature of absolute and concrete faith. In it he hints at the dichotomy of faith: the everyday use of the word (what I would call 'faith' or little-f) and the belief in the irrational ('Faith' or big-F).

Big-F is a tricky concept. It is bound in the absolute and the irrational; a belief that cannot be proven to be true or false by any rational means. Given my limited knowledge of his philosophy I would shy away from using the work of Kierkegaard as an example, but in reading about him I came to an understanding about the nature of faith that should be addressed here. Little-f is grounded in the external, the ethical; the idea that a person should act in a particular manner under such-and-such circumstances. You can rationalize and give concrete reasons why they should act that way, and as a result little-f holds an external, universal quality.

Big-F on the other hand is grounded in the internal, the religious. I may be able to outline a plethora of rational arguments for atheism, but my efforts would be futile; I will never be able to convince a true believer God does not exist. Likewise, that believer could rationally argue day and night why I should believe in God and get nowhere with me. This, in hindsight, strikes at the heart of why I began to question the existence of God and my eventual disbelief in Him: I have never felt the influence of a higher power, and any rational reason I have been given to believe in Him appeared to me as circumstantial evidence and could not be accepted without a reasonable amount of doubt.

Regardless, big-F has a mysterious quality to it, and I would not go so far as to say it isn't prone to dramatic swings of one sort or another. Give the case of Pascal, a man rooted in the rational pursuits of science, who dedicated his life to religion after a miraculous recovery from an illness. But even Pascal described his faith as the natural order of life and not a rational theology; his study of science grounded in proof, yet his believed his faith was outside the burden of proof. If I ever experience such a dramatic swing in my faith it would have to come from a similar personal catharsis and not from logical persuasion, for the root of big-F is internal and cannot be rationalized. I would not rule out the possibility of such a catharsis in my own life, but my atheism is set so deep within my personal faith I don't expect to have such an experience any time soon.

The very act of exploring the nature of belief brings up a good point: it is possible to go beyond the question of God. It is a superficially polarizing question; by answering in the negative it has shaped my development as an individual as much as any thinker who decided to affirm His existence. Yet life is not as simple as the question "does God exist?" What about death? Loneliness? Addiction? The ethical? Attitude, love, pain? What about being? Or nonbeing? Nothingness? Mortality? What of our search for the absolute? The landscape of existence is far richer than the mere question of God. One needs to go no further than the great existential thinkers to realize this; among them are believers and atheists alike.

I feel as though I am on the cusp of something; it tickles at the shadowy edges of my consciousness just waiting to solidify into an object I can view and contemplate and verbalize. And if I come across another life-changing revelation, what comes next? Existence is a series of questions with no real answers; the more we ask the more we will understand, and with understanding comes further questions.

My taste in philosophy is similar to my taste in wine and cigarettes: dry and with a bite. My current fascination is with the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno, a Christian thinker who has an interesting view on God to say the least; he once proposed a character based on himself to a novelist friend, a character who, "since he carries God in the marrow of his soul has no need to believe in Him: it is a reflex action." He also tells of a conversation with a peasant one day, where he proposed the hypothesis that there may be a God who governs heaven and earth, a Universal Consciousness or Conscience, but even that would not be sufficient reason to assume the soul of every man was immortal in the traditional and concrete sense. And the peasant replied, "Then, what good is God?"

He saw the evidence stacked against any sort of afterlife, but he strove for immortality anyway. Unamuno's work is full of clever contradictions, and with a wit and passion he accepted his own contradictions wholeheartedly; for at the bottom of every religious and philosophical pursuit -- no matter how abstract -- there lies a man, conflicted, grasping for answers and trying to satisfy his need of survival.

In the end I feel turned off any set of beliefs unwilling to accept the contradictions and anguish that lies at the heart of being human. I am not placated with easy answers; I prefer to revel in the tragic mortality of life rather than sweeten it with ideals. If we remove ourselves from the essential questions of life -- if spend our lives striving for some unattainable ideal state -- how are we to learn to accept the pain and joy of our daily lives? More than ever before utopia has been removed from our sights, the great city removed from the horizon; the road we plod along has no destination; yet we continue to move forward anyway, for to do otherwise would be against our nature. I'm excited to be moving. What use do I have for rewards? When on a journey the road is what is important.

Talking with a friend over dinner the other day, she revealed to me she hadn't really thought about religion in at least five years. Looking back she realized she has just been living her life, no regrets. When you break it down, we could contemplate God and existence and the absolute forever; ultimately it's entertainment, it's bullshit. The important thing is to hunker down and live life already. If you have any sliver of doubt in the existence of an afterlife, I would heed this advice. I could shut myself in my room, paralyzed with fear of nonexistence; but to tell you the truth I'd rather just go out for drinks and get on with living.

Which is precisely what I'm going to do right now.