A confession: By the standards of most established western churches, I could legitimately be considered a heretic. Read on, and you will learn why.
Here is my history with Christianity in the briefest form:
My paternal grandma was a mean Christian Scientist who turned me off to all manner of churchgoing.
I was an only child. My dad died when I was fifteen. A few months later my mom got sent to an isolation ward for many months with spinal meningitis and then my friend Eric, also fatherless, moved in with me. Eric was a prodigy you could read about in a memoir of mine. We became a sort of two-person book club (we invited friends but they got bored and dropped out). Eric and I read a lot of books, among which were Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian.
When my mom came home and Eric moved back in with his crazy mother, the model who inspired the character I call Cynthia in several of my books, most notably the For America collection. We still hung out together and discussed philosophical stuff, but also he began telling me about troubling premonitions. Then he died in a car crash.
Though my mom sent me to a psychologist, I couldn't find any reason to face the future with anything but dread. Then, a couple months after Eric died, I read Crime and Punishment, a Feodor Dostoyevski masterpiece.