me

I think it is as good of time as any to tell you all that I am an atheist.  I know that this fact alone may make some of you who are reading this to stop reading.  This is just me.
Most of my family knows and when I first told them it was like I was come out of the closet. My parents are not religious, but like a lot of people still thinks there is a god and there is a heaven.  They don't judge me, but they also do not understand.   My in-laws on the other hand may know, but the subject has never been discussed and they probably don't want to know. My grandmother, aunts, and uncles are all religious and are all very concerned about my eternity.
Let me say that I did not come to this realization quickly.  I grew up in a household of no religion.  I had almost no exposure to it except by friends.  This made me more interested about it then most I think, so in middle school I started my journey. This journey was not well accepted by my parents, but I had to go on it and they couldn't stop me.  I went to so many churches I lost count.  Some of them I went to for months and others I went to just a few times.  I was searching, for what I wasn't exactly sure. I told myself that I just had to find the right one, the church that made me feel, I don't know, like my questions were answered. I continued this all through middle school and high school.  By the time I got to college I had met my future husband.  He was a Mormon, which my parents were really freaked out by.  This is when my religion/god search really speed up. I started to take religion classes at the college and doing a lot of my own research.
The more that I looked the more it became very clear to me why religion is so popular, why it would get started in the first place.  Everyone has all of these questions that I have and everyone wants answers. It occurred to me that it would be really easy to just pick a religion and have them tell me what to do with my life, how to live, why things are the way they are.  The point is these questions are not easily answered. They are big questions that probably will never be answered.
People are scared of the unknown.  Instead of getting comfortable in the unknown they put up blinders and stop questioning.  I can't.  I question everything.  I am comfortable in the uncomfortable.  God is a too easy of an answer for a too complicated of a question. Zeus does not create thunder, Poseidon does not rule the sea, and God did not create this.
I usually don't tell people about me being an atheist for a while.  People have such a crazy idea of what an atheist is.  I also get a huge kick out of knowing someone for a while and finally telling them.  Their reactions are priceless. It usually goes like this, "You are! I had no idea. Wait so you don't believe in God at all?".
I want to do my little part in making it okay for someone to say that they are an atheist and to change the stereotype of what that means.