Hi. I'm new here but a couple of years ago I used to visit InfidelGuy.com quite a bit and was a subscribing member (still a member, just not a subscriber).

Lately I've been checking out some atheist's videos on YouTube and one of the video posters had some info which led me to this site. I can't recall which one. Anyway, I decided to subscribe here for a while as it looks good and is just what I'm looking for at this point.

I am absolutely not a scholar or in any way able to debate or argue
at the level of many of the other members here. In fact, later today I'm going to have to again look up the word "ontological", which I've forgotten since the last time I looked it up while reading some stuff todangst wrote over at InfidelGuy's a while back

(by the way, if you haven't before you should check out one of his websites called A Candle In The Dark. I like to go there and learn about logical fallacies from time to time. http://www.candleinthedark.com/ )

Brief history.
I never took religion or the idea of a god as portrayed by any religion seriously until I was 17 and had taken a psychedelic substance. It is too complicated to explain right now but I came to believe that there must be a God and then spent the next 20 years (in between normal life stuff) searching for and trying out various gods and belief systems, trying to make any of them make sense. I read parts of or all of the major religious books and many philosophy and "new age" books over the years and thought and thought and thought and discussed and affirmed and anguished and ended up still unable to pray without feeling like an idiot or have any of it make sense to me in a logical way.

I was new to the Internet in 1998 and something came on the news about Madelyn Murray O'Hair and Atheists. I thought..."hmmm...let me Google that" just for the sake of learning what Atheism is really about for the first time. I stumbled into Adrian Barnett's site called Wasteland of Wonders http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/  and, basically, by the time I'd stumbled out  I was well on the way to being an Atheist myself. For the next few days I continued reading many of the other popular Atheism websites and pretty soon the whole funk of having this imaginary God/Judge/Fearmonger looking over my shoulder dissipated and a huge weight was lifted. What a relief!

Well, that's probably too much information already but
just a couple more details...

I'm married. My wife is also a non-believer but doesn't do any
thinking about it or join websites or discuss it at all. It is just a simple matter to her. So silly it is hardly worth discussing. To me it is really interesting trying to understand how/why people come to have religious beliefs and I am kind of in search of the holy grail of arguments that might help people to more easily accept that there is no and could not be any god of the type that any religion (that I'm aware of) describes.

So far my wife and I have been pretty secretive about our non-belief.
Every single other member of my family is a strong
Republican evangelical believer. It is funny because,
just like happens at work, although I've told them I don't
believe any of it they forget and will later speak to me
as if I am a believer. I assume this is because I'm
a nice guy and they are in autopilot mode where nice
must surely mean christian.

Or they are just in denial and can't accept that it is true that someone in their midst actually, really and truly does not believe. Or maybe they think it is just a phase and I will come around to their viewpoint if they just keeping up their god-talk.

More unnecessary details:

I'm way into photography and Photoshop.

I play guitar, drums and a tiny bit of keyboard.

We live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and have attended 1 local Atheist group meet-up but they generally meet in places where it would be a 60 mile round trip for us so we haven't gotten involved much.

Thanks for reading. See you around