[Editor’s Note: “Your Skeptic Stories” is an ongoing series written by readers like you, people who have, through one means or another, discovered skepticism and critical thinking. These stories remind us that we all started somewhere and some of us are still finding our way as skeptics. Please send your story of around 1000 words, along with a 2-3 line bio, to maria@randi.org.

I am the recipient of an exceptionally privileged education that came primarily from parochial school. For 13 years, K-12, I was taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion side-by-side as equals. It only took until about the 6^th grade for me to start to question the presentation of materials. Every academic subject I studied contradicted the religious premises I was taught to accept. Becoming an atheist was the easy part but it took a lot of work to become a staunch and vocal skeptic.

There are very few resources for young skeptics. Humans are most commonly invested in issues that impact their own day-to-day lives and adolescents have their own concerns that are easily dismissed as frivolous to adults.  This doesn’t mean that there aren’t any groups that are ready to scoop up youth energy for their own causes. One of the great successes of religious organizations is youth outreach and events. I refused to be formally confirmed as a Catholic when I came of age for that and was saddened by the total social isolation this decision brought.

I wasn’t the only unbeliever among my peers but I was the only one to formally identify as an atheist. I sustained the usual arguments about being arrogant but was also slapped with the label of rebellious teen rather than critical thinker. It was frustrating to be told that my motivations for not attending confirmation classes were solely about making people angry rather than my own intellectual conclusions.

As a high school student I felt that my identity as an atheist was something personal. Although I refrained from actively participating in the religious events on my all-girls campus and openly disclosed my identity I never presumed to have the right to talk about my point-of-view with others. I accepted the idea that atheism was about taking-away and spirituality was about creating. This is a kind of internal shame that buys into the notion that if religion makes people feel happy about their lives it is good for them to have it and bad for them to have the veil removed.

I never knew how to contend with the fact that even the unbelievers in the church youth group could have fun spending time dancing and socializing with their peers. I felt as though there was something fundamental inside of me that was broken especially when I saw fellow unbelievers suspend their objective and accept the social component of church youth groups. I did enjoy doing community service projects and I wanted to attend dance parties and I assumed that I had my own obstacle to solve in regards to just relaxing and letting the whole religion thing go. Everyone else could do it, why not me?

I set my sights on college which I assumed to be a place somewhere over the rainbow where I would find others like me. I had a very, very ill-formed assumption that people surrounded by books would read them and posses the critical thinking skills to teach knowledge and not opinions. I did not find the skeptical community in my collegiate libraries and I was frequently disturbed by the abject lack of it in my classrooms. I was intimidated by those who had more letters behind their name than I. My greatest lesson in this came from my dual career in clinical HIV prevention as a test counselor and reader and program coordinator and my emerging career in sex work.

The notion that sexuality is sacred is so deep in our cultural consciousness that even non-Christians are ready and willing to suggest that there is something profoundly wrong with me for being able to enjoy my career without having driven myself insane and ending my potential for a healthy and loving romantic relationship. The claim that a woman must be inherently broken if she enjoys creating sexual pleasure in herself and anyone who cares to watch is a fallacy and a separate issue from the workplace and labor conditions that are wholly relevant discussions.

I was forced into active and open skepticism because my very life is in constant danger without it. An individual committed to rational thought will not feel so afraid of me that they feel justified in committing violence against me or turning their head when someone else perpetrates it. It opened me up to a word of applying my skepticism to social science and social moirés and it compelled me to do twice as much research.

It is deeply frustrating to me when I call out the objective science evading tactics of anti-porn and anti-sex work moralists and feminists and have my claims dismissed outright because people cannot maintain the idea of someone living my life without hating every moment of it and looking for something else. Moreover, it is difficult to create cultural change when many people involved in fighting for sex worker rights do so by rearranging religion and spirituality to accommodate it. We do not need the supernatural to justify that which can be explained with logic and governed by reason.

Today I promote skeptical thinking as a whole because I am endlessly curious about my world and how it operates. I will not settle for campfire stories or mythology in lieu of the pursuit of truth. I will always be invested in how personal it is for me. Without promoting tools for critical thinking, people will go on believing that orgasms are just as dangerous as bombs. Sex is not sacred, it is biological. The joy that religion creates in some does not come before the homicide, incarceration, and total dehumanization in others.

I am an entertainer of adults and a rise in critical thinking and skepticism may be the only thing that will allow me continue living freely on earth to exercise my autonomy and my right to make an adult choice. It is irrational to despise me outright when we are in possession of information that demonstrates that what I do causes no harm to others.

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