By then, I had read enough to realize that anyone named Jacoby, or its many European variants, was undoubtedly a Jew. I was 16 when I figured out that my father was Jewish. Did that change your thinking or intellectual development? When you were a teenager you learned you were half Jewish. Indeed, a lot of these people are already under the illusion that this is a theocracy. I am interested in atheism only because it is not considered respectable (still) in the United States, and this quirk (in developed countries) is closely related to the many problems created by those who wish to turn us into a form of theocracy.

Unlike my friend Christopher Hitchens, I never participate in debates about the existence of God. I am not a 'militant' atheist, in the sense that I have no desire to 'convert' people to atheism. For a time, I explored other churches and decided that, for me, none of them made any more sense than the other. Certainly, by age 13, I didn't believe in Catholicism. There was no one moment when I knew I didn't believe in God. My mother would say, 'Well, you don't have to agree with everything that Sister says.' Not exactly a conventional response from a pre-Vatican II Catholic mother. What kid learns about such things except in a Catholic school? However, my own parents were anything but conventional in their responses when I'd bring questions home.

Because so much of my formal education was devoted to promoting the Roman Catholic religion, I learned about some things that seemed utterly ridiculous to me long before I would have learned about them otherwise. I think that for me, being raised Catholic (or, rather, attending Catholic elementary schools) probably made me an atheist sooner than I would have become otherwise. How did that affect you? And do you remember the moment when you knew you didn't believe in God?

The great agnostic by susan jacoby