Faith in search of understanding

From the age of about fourteen my religious faith was marked by increasing intensity,
a common enough teenage experience. At the same time, however, I was coming to
have doubts, doubts that I found difficult to express since I didn’t possess the requisite
vocabulary or ideas, nor did I have those around me with whom I could discuss such
matters. When I was sixteen I discovered Bertrand Russell’s Why I’m not a Christian.
On reading this book all the inchoate questions I had suddenly became clear. Russell’s
book acted like sulphuric acid on the grounds of my faith; I found that they could not
stand up to rational criticism so I abandoned my faith and, for the next 14 years or so,
I was a convinced atheist—an atheist, note, not an agnostic for I subscribed to the
principle that if there was no evidence for a belief system then that constituted
evidence for its negation.