I’ve always had a tenuous relationship with God. I never felt him as a spiritual presence, but more of a factual one; no different than knowing there was a stop sign outside my window or magnets on my refrigerator. I accepted God’s existence in the same fashion as a Saturday morning cartoon characters, the same way I would laud Batman as being a righteous defender of justice.

It was no different to me than washing my hands after supper or looking both ways before I crossed the street. God simply “was” – a welcomed addition to the impressionable mind of a child that would believe anything. No different than cleaning my room so I wouldn’t get in trouble. I prayed at night so I wouldn’t go to hell. With the ten fingers on my hand, I associated each one with a different thing to be thankful for. My thumb referred to food. My index finger referred to family. I attempted to use big vocabulary when I prayed, imagining God to have this knowledgeable, all-hearing voice that I had to live up to as one of his children. When I died, I imagined I would transform into an angel myself and have some kind of job in heaven, where I’d talk in commanding vocabulary like our Heavenly Father. When I spoke to him, I used words like “thou” and “musn’t.” If my first fear was that God would think I was a sinner, my second was he would think I was stupid.

It’s difficult to decide where my early devotion to God came from. I view it as a two-way street. On one side, there was a general love for the universe and a desire thank him for the existence of family and friends. On the other side, I was absolutely terrified of going to Hell. When I was very young, one of my friends told me that if you cursed seven times throughout your life span, you would be damned at Heaven’s gate and fall into a pit of fire. By the age of seven, I’m sure I unknowingly bypassed my limit, and yet sheer denial kept me believing that I only swore six or five times.

As I got older, I started to speak to God less and less. It wasn’t active avoidance. When I fell asleep at night, I forgot about God and didn’t have anything interesting to say. As a fourth grader, I was more interested in Pokemon and Jackie Chan Adventures than I was about speaking to an enlightened, bearded man that I have nothing in common with. I’ve heard people say that they don’t like to vote for politicians if they don’t find them relatable. They find Clinton to be a corrupt politician and Trump to be a corrupt businessman, both out-of-touch with the happenings of the middle class. As I entered middle school, I prescribed to this theory as well, but brought it to religion. In all the stories and pictures I’d absorbed in church, I didn’t think that God and I had anything in common. While he may have created me, it was strange praying to a figure when there was really nothing material to talk about. Were we going to talk about fourth grade or what I'd watched on television the night before or why my parents were getting divorced?

I don’t think it’s fair to say that I became an atheist. I also don’t think it’s fair to say that I became an agnostic, a term that refers to people who “don’t necessarily believe or disbelieve in a higher power.” All of these belief systems make me think about passion and opinion. If you’re going to identify as something, that makes me think you care enough about the subject matter to conform to a group. It felt strange to identify my belief system, because I genuinely didn’t care about religion at all.

When I grew older, I became less focused on my selective role in the universe. I realized that billions of people had died before me and billions would die after. It became hard to fear hell when I realized, if hell existed, I would simply be one of an infinite amount of voices being tortured on a metal contraption. When I came to terms with my own futility, as just another human being, it became difficult to care about what happened.

Still, religion was always a persistent factor in my life. It wasn’t because I felt a need for it, but more because I was genuinely trying to understand. In my grandmother’s house, there were hundreds of Jesus statues and Catholic symbols in glass cabinets. When I crept downstairs to her kitchen at night to get cookies, I would feel intimidated by the Virgin Mary’s stone eyes looking back at me. I would go to sleep on her couch, my feet bundled under the covers, and try to decipher exactly what I was scared of. Was it that they were going to condemn me? Again, I didn’t really fear burning in hell anymore, so I didn’t feel threatened. I would lay on her couch very late in the night, too frightened to go to sleep as my mind rambled through hundreds of questions.

It wasn’t really a single event that made me realize what about religion scared me. It was more like an escalation over time. When I think of becoming a non-believer, I view the revelation like a random slideshow of events. One slide, I’m walking through New York City with my friends on one of my first trips there without my parents. On another slide, I’ve woken after a high school cast party and I'm walking back through my childhood neighborhood. The sky is pink and blue during daybreak, and in that moment, I just feel a quiet sense of peace with the world around me. There’s no need to believe in anything. In the confines of my own head, I’m secure in my belief that the world is a beautiful place.

I took several more classes on religion in college. As we spoke of thousands of “isms,” many of which sounded the same even if they argued to sound so different, I remember feeling lost and perplexed. Why is there such a manic need, during our short time on Earth, to search for answers that we can’t find? When we’re surrounded by those we love, why do we look over the hurdles to death and dwell over what’s going to happen next?

At one point during one of the lectures, a professor asked any atheists or non-believers in the room to identify myself. When I raised my hand, it actually felt awkward, but what I was lying about? I wasn’t religious. I didn’t care about religion. By that logic, shouldn’t I have been an atheist?

Somebody else in the room asked me, “Why I find it hard to believe?”

That was when I was struck by why religion scared me.

I viewed the Earth like a giant experiment tucked beneath a glass dome. While there were beautiful things happening beneath the dome, religion made me feel like all of those things were being scrutinized and analyzed for the sake of an experiment. I thought of all of our human achievements, art and music and science, and wondered why these had to adhere to a higher power. During our short term on this planet, why couldn’t we live exclusively for the love that we create for each other?”

I replied, “I’m not an atheist. For me, atheism implies that you have an opinion. I don’t care about religion, so when I have a debate about it, it makes me feel like I’m scrambling for a platform to stand on. I don't really care one way or another. Right now, I'm alive."

I don’t object to God’s existence, nor do I object to the existence of any spiritual entity. When I tell people that I don’t associate with any religion, they sometimes ask, “What makes it hard for you to believe?’

This to me suggests that there’s a necessity; that there’s a human urge I’m missing out on by not prescribing to a belief system.

Nothing makes it hard for me to believe.

There’s just the simple fact that I don’t need to.