I have been asking questions about God for as long as I can remember.
I was sent to Sunday school as a child and christened, as many children of my generation were. That was unremarkable. What mattered was that even then the claims did not strike me as self authenticating simply because they were familiar. The questions came early and without effort. How do we know this is true. What is the evidence. Why is this being presented as settled.
That habit of asking did not come from formal study of theology or philosophy. It came from home.
My parents were not academics. My father left school at fourteen. But both of them had something more important than credentials. They had the habit of not bowing automatically to what everyone else seemed prepared to accept. They asked why. They distrusted mere convention. My father had a way of putting it that stayed with me, just because everyone else is doing it does not make it right.
Years later they told me they wished they had not had us christened. There was no drama in that admission. No conversion story. No theatrical rejection of religion. It was simply something people did because people did it, and once examined it no longer seemed justified. I respected that. It was a small example of something rarer than it should be, the willingness to reconsider what was inherited and to withdraw assent from it.
That mattered to me long before I had the language to explain why.
I had known of Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett for years before any of them sharpened my own position. The moment that did it was one particular debate.
In two thousand and nine Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry faced Ann Widdecombe and Archbishop John Onaiyekan at an Intelligence Squared debate in London on the motion that the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world. What struck me was not fury, and not performance for its own sake. It was clarity. They were not asking for permission to be critical. They were not genuflecting before religious prestige. They were making the argument plainly, directly, and without euphemism.
The debate mattered because it clarified instincts I already had. It did not create them.
It did not hand me a finished worldview, and I did not need famous atheists to do my thinking for me. It mattered because it showed what serious criticism of religion can sound like when stripped of apology and embarrassment. It gave sharper form to a position that had been developing in me for years.
This site grows out of that long process. It is not a personal crusade against believers. It is not an exercise in empty contrarianism. It is an attempt to write clearly about religion as a set of truth claims, moral claims, and institutional claims to authority, and to subject those claims to the scrutiny they too often escape.
The writers I learned from made that case with force. What this site attempts to go further on is a question they raised but did not fully pursue: what happens to unfalsifiable authority after belief has thinned out? Britain is not a believing country. But it is not quite a secular one either. Large numbers of people who would not describe themselves as religious still treat Christianity as deserving a default cultural respect they would not extend to any other institution making claims it cannot justify. That ambient deference is not innocent. It is what makes religious authority so difficult to challenge and so easy to exploit politically. This site addresses both: the claims themselves, and what the power structure looks like when the claims have quietly retreated but the authority has not.
The biography is incidental. The argument is not.