Kindergarten atheists.

I keep coming up with the same profile time and time again. The whitebread honky mollycoddled atheist. Raised in an atheist household, or with easy online access to publications by the Hitch and other authors.

You call yourself a critical thinker. Allow me to guffaw. You did not really put an effort into challenging a religious view, you simply coasted your way through Facebook Sagan picture-quotes of  dubious authenticity and called it good. You don't know what's like to be an ex-anything.

You don't know what it feels like to have your whole view of the world come crashing down like a house of cards on a shaky table, without access to literature on paper, let alone online. It simply wasn't readily available with the neat Google indexes. All you have is your (previously regarded as) holy texts and the scant science you learnt in primary school (since you just started high school).

You don't have anyone you can ask, because you're alone, your whole family invested in a religion. You cannot bring books home, even if anyone loaned them to you.

You don't know of the nightmares triggered by the fear of a godhead your waking reason has discarded. The nightmares triggered by your family and community's hostility towards the anathema you have secretly become.

That's what the closet feels like.

You don't know the fear preceding the words of that first admission to others: "I don't believe". You don't know the instant ostracism surrounding you. All of a sudden you're sundered from your youngest relatives, those little cousins you'd enjoy playing with Legos, dominoes, chess.

You have become "a bad influence", unclean, a pariah.

You wouldn't know as you post stuff while your parents pay for the wifi.

And so, you never learnt to REALLY question. You discarded faith in the godhead and mock it. Yet, you are still a prisoner of faith in gender roles, country, race, the present form capitalist society has, neoliberalism.

You are as much a prisoner of faith as those theists you mock. The saddest thing is that you don't even know it.