This time ten years ago I was likely finishing work at the local burger joint that provided my first paycheck, ready to head home and chat with my boyfriend online before heading to bed. My thoughts were turned to work the next day, my Dad’s birthday on the 12th, and seeing my boyfriend the following weekend. I was ill prepared for the magnitude of the morning’s tragedy – at nineteen that kind of fear and uncertainty just wasn’t fathomable. I clearly remember awakening to commotion the next morning around 9 AM, and seeing my father glued to the TV. I didn’t quite understand what was happening, only that a plane had crashed into a building in New York City. I’m sure everyone remembers the events that followed – the realization that this was an attack rather than an accident; the rumors, shock and sheer terror that followed.

I still cringe at the remembrance of those images that flashed across the screen for weeks to come; being an empathetic teenager, I shed a lot of tears for the victims and their families. I put a flag on my car antenna, gave a little blood – gave in to the patriotic fervor that temporarily swept the nation. In all my youthful naivety, the broadening of my perspective and the realization of violence within my scope of observation was both painful and enlightening. I learned a lot about myself in the weeks that followed; I learned to be skeptical of wild rumors, even without the help of Scopes.com. I pushed through my sense of impending doom, and stopped being petrified every time the “terror alert” jumped to orange. I lived with the knowledge that fellow humans in a city I once visited perished by the thousands at the hands of horrifically misguided individuals.

Those old enough to truly remember that day, or any of the wars and tragedies that pepper the history of our species will likely agree that these events somehow settle into your psyche, and you cannot help but be changed in some way.

Here’s to all the members of my species – may we live on and be better for it.

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Literature which celebrates the counter culture of religious non-conformity often stems from the mouths of the angst-y and the intellectual. The younger set of those on the brink of self-discovery and the scientifically minded academics saturate the blogs, books and editorials on the subject of non-belief.

I found Homemade Atheist refreshing in that the author hails from a demographic somewhat alien to my own experience. Ms. Smith’s foray into the skeptical world-view came after a lifetime as not only a believer, but following many years teaching Sunday school and supporting her husband the reverend. Her journey encompassed many of the common realizations that dawn on our ilk, from the randomness of nature to the absence of answered prayers. She slipped oh so slowly from devotion to her deity, to dubious belief, and finally into the label of Atheism which I proudly share.

Not even the sorrowful passing of her partner in life pushed her back into the arms of the faith she had abandoned; yet another experience I can empathize with. My own brush with the death of a loved one left me surprisingly devoid of any revival of dormant beliefs in an afterlife – though my said experience was made somewhat more painful because of that lack of belief.

Ms. Brogaard’s book is an important glimpse into the long life of one who turned from faith to a life of joyous realization that all our successes, failures, desires and dreams belong to only us. No invisible force, no divine dictator, no fantastical father figure orchestrates our every more. There is no fate, only the fruits of our own labor.

I think a story of de-conversion cannot be much more poignant that.