I grew up in an atheist family, in the atheist city. I’m close to being a lifelong atheist.

In kindergarten a religious teacher told me about God and Jesus. She taught us that we have to pray to God, and then he will answer our prayers. One day, my mother was taking me to a local clinic for a dentist appointment. As we were walking towards the clinic, I decided to pray God to make my dentist sick: “Dear God, please make sure my dentist isn’t at the clinic today, make sure she’s busy or sick or something like that.” My prayer got no answer—the dentist was there and I had my teeth fixed that day. This was the last time I prayed to God. My empirical experiment suggested that God does not answer prayers, so why bother asking him for things in the first place?

I stopped believing in God at the same age I also stopped believing in Santa Claus. It wasn’t just unanswered prayers, I noticed also other inconsistencies. On one hand, I was told that God created Adam and Eve; on the other hand, humans descended from monkeys. Yet somehow Adam and Eve weren’t supposed to be monkeys. I was also told that God lives in heaven. Yet I knew that people flying airplanes and space ships hadn’t found him there.

A few years later school history lessons proved to me that Christianity was definitely false. By the time I was about 10 years old, we were taught about Homo erectus and also other species of archaic humans. My history lessons progressed from there to Stone Age to Mesopotamia to Ancient Egypt, then the Minoan civilization and Ancient Greece, followed by Rome. My history course included information about the religions practiced by each of these civilizations. I concluded that if Ancient Egyptian or Greek mythologies were false, then Christianity had to be just as false. I had lost my belief in God long before I was old enough for biology lessons about evolution.

I grew up in an atheist bubble. At school I knew only one teacher who considered herself Christian. I also had one classmate who once told the rest of us about her Sunday school. That’s it. All other people I knew were either nonbelievers or preferred not to speak about their religions. I imagined that only elderly and poorly educated people who lived in the countryside still believed in God.

I didn’t have access to the Internet up until I was already 15 years old (now I’m 27). My family was poor, my mother didn’t have enough money to buy a computer or pay for Internet access. Websites in my native language were (and still are) scarce, thus I mostly visited English sites. I was shocked to find out that so many Americans were religious. It didn’t make any sense to me. I could understand why people in the developing world still believed in various gods, after all, their access to education was severely limited. But I couldn’t understand how religions could be so prevalent also in the USA or various European countries.

I first stumbled across American atheist activist content when a friend of mine sent me a link to one of Seth Andrews’ videos from the “Bloodthirsty Bible” series. It was fun, so I let YouTube algorithm select for me and play more related videos… up until I started running into one anti-feminist video after another. Sexism is something I strongly dislike, so I quit searching for any more atheist content at that time. Stumbling upon a form of bigotry that seemed prevalent within a group of content creators was off-putting.

Over the following years, I periodically ran into atheist content every now and then. I found out that there existed also atheist activists and content creators who didn’t seem to be misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, racist, or generally bigoted.

And here I am now, writing an atheist blog. I do not plan to write arguments defending God’s nonexistence. I’m familiar with the cosmological argument, Pascal’s wager, laws of thermodynamics, etc. similar standard arguments made by the believers. I know how to refute these ideas. Yet I don’t intend to write these refutations. Other people have already done this before me ad nauseam for decades. I see little point in beating a dead horse. Besides, I assume that most of the readers here are nonbelievers anyway.

Humans already know that there is no God. Thus the question becomes: What do we do next?

Religions prescribe certain lifestyles, moral rules, attitudes. They present a ready-made set of instructions for how to live. Once we are nonbelievers, we should no longer accept these antiquated rules, instead it’s up to us to figure out in what kind of society we want to live. For example, religions tend to insist that women are inferior (pardon: different) than men or that trans people are evil. As nonbelievers, we have to discard such religious arguments that defend inequality. If there are no secular arguments in favor of sexism and transphobia (there aren’t), then we have to oppose these old forms of bigotry.

This is what this blog is going to be about—how to live in a world in which “because God said so” is no longer a valid argument.

Of course, I do intend to write also about other topics. I am an artist (by the way, here is my online portfolio), thus there will be blog posts about art. I am a polyglot (I speak six languages), I also have a master’s degree in German philology, so I will be writing about languages. In my opinion, languages are really fun and exciting. And we have several dogs in my family, you can also expect dog photography from me.

I’m reluctant to write any “about me” section with biographical facts. Where I was born or how my body looks like ought to be irrelevant; instead it should be my ideas, my words, and my deeds that matter. The only personal fact that I consider relevant would be that my preferred pronoun is “he.” I am also fine with “they.” And I work as an artist; I also take commissions, in case anybody here wants to hire an artist/graphic designer.