Always been an atheist?

Always been an atheist? :

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I would like to know if you have, pretty much, always been an atheist.

All of my family members who were important to me were atheists, at a time when that was not particularly common. My immediate family were Unitarians when there were Unitarian Churches available and participated for social and fellowship reasons rather than religious reasons. When I was very young we lived in a small town where the liberal Presbyterian church (I think) was their substitute. The Unitarian Sunday School had a heavy emphasis on 'The Church Across the Street' and we would frequently go to neighboring religious institutions on a Sunday or Saturday if appropriate and then come back and discuss what we learned for a few Sundays before it was time to visit the next group. We were also encouraged to accompany friends to worship services and report back to the class what we learned.

It never occurred to me that God was anything but a unifying myth for the other churches, and I never was tempted to "believe." I did however gain an intense interest in the content of the myths and spent much of my spare time trying to figure out what it was that the various groups got from their worship. I spent more time with Catholic myths due to my choral music avocation, as large choral works are mainly settings of Catholic prayers and the Mass. Catholics since the Renaissance have recognized that "music is fundamental" and have encouraged musical expressions of their beliefs.

The result is an atheist with no need for God or any god for that matter, but I do appreciate the various religious myths and have no issues with those that choose to believe in them. The Abrahamic myths which are not tempered by a clear understanding of the Synoptic Gospels are misogynistic and hateful IMO and to the extent that they try to impose their misogyny and hate on the rest of us they should be opposed, but I don't see much that can be done within their church walls. Hate and misogyny fill the plate and attract the weak males that pay the bills, so I doubt an outsider can do much to change anything. When they come onto a forum like beliefnet we can hammer them with the facts of the rest of the world (I would have used truth, but they think they have a trademark on the word.)