Breakfast out table next to us bow their heads in prayer.

[elocs]

38. As a Christian, I studied the Bible deeply in order to bolster and defend my faith

and came out the other side an atheist.
The last 2 years before I retired I worked at the Salvation Army as a custodian. In my interview I did mention a passage in Matthew. A month after I had been working I told my supervisor with whom I worked closely that I was an atheist (he is a strong Baptist). You could have knocked him over with a feather because based upon how I treated people there, the clients and homeless, he assumed I was a Christian. But what surprised me the most is that he respected my decision and promised he would never try and witness to me or to get me to come back into the fold, and he didn't.

As an atheist, I do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is much of what Jesus says and teaches that is admirable and would make a good philosophy. Even in the Old Testament there are things like a concern or for animals or an admonition to treat strangers well because the Jews were once strangers in a strange land themselves.