Probably one of the first strongholds to take hold of me in a significant way was atheism. For me it happened when I was nine years old via my father and then was strengthened by the stronghold of thought that is Evolution. Growing up I was the son of an alcoholic father. It was common for me as a boy to help my mother pick up my father covered in blood and bring him into the house from where he had fallen on the concrete floor of the garage. Then for my mother and me to be subjected to a tirade of verbal abuse about anything and everything. I observed many inconsistencies in what my father said and what my father did. I just observed and put it all together. I knew not to say what I thought as a young boy.
After years of abuse I remember one Saturday night as a nine-year-old. I stood behind my bedroom door with my baseball bat in my hand vowing in my nine-year-old heart that I was going to whack my father over the head as he abused my mother in the lounge. I was going to put an end to this horror for me and my mother. I could hear my drunken father getting up and coming out of the lounge. But he turned the other way and didn’t come past my bedroom door. I lost my resolve and dropped my bat and stood there trembling with emotion behind the door. The next morning I took my rugby ball outside to the front of the property to kick and catch as a sign for my friend to come and play. But my father burst out of the front door and yelled at me to get back inside. That I was not to go outside in the front of the house on the Lord’s Day. It was not that my father was in anyway religious. He had never set foot in a church before. In my nine-year-old head I said to myself there is no God. I didn’t know to call myself an atheist at that stage. But growing up I embraced what teachers and lecturers told me about evolutionary theory and consequently had a foundation for my growing stronghold of thought.