Welcome to The Heathen’s Guide

From the Author. Welcome to the new HeathensGuide.com, complete with a forum, news, sales, video, Q&A, and all things web related.

While most of my posts are either fun or furious, I thought I should start off the Welcome screen with a bit of background on The Heathen’s Guide and how it came to be.

I spent most of the 1980’s and early 1990’s wandering about North and Central America, actively involving myself in as many faiths as I could. For the most part, what I found in every religion were decent people with good hearts that wanted to serve their god. From the Mormon Temple in Utah, to the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, to the Harmonic Convergence on the shores of Vancouver, the people I met really, really wanted to be and do “good”.

But there was always a problem.

In every religion in every country I visited, not one rabbi, minister, druid, or Evangelical healer could show me anything “real”. More importantly, I began to notice that the sales pitch for believing as they do was the same in every religion. In each case, what these people believed seemed sound and reasonable as you listened to them, but in the end they all rested the entirety of their religion on an “article of faith”. Believe that one thing, and everything else they say makes perfect sense. Disbelieve it, and it all falls apart. From this, I came to understand that what religions you are (and what god you worship) really is defined by which unsubstantiated claim you choose to believe.


In the early 1990’s I gave up looking for answers in churches and mosques. If there was anything to all this, I figured I had to go to the source. As I had no access to gods, angels, or other preternatural creatures, “the source” was formal education. I would take the same courses that these ministers and priests took. Learn what they were taught. Maybe then I would understand…

By 1995 I was in my forth year at Queen’s University at Kingston, doing a Ba. Hon. in World Religions with a Minors in Classical Studies. For four years I’d tried to reconcile what I was learning with the faiths I’d seen. It was impossible. I watched as my classmates learned the same history and archeology that I did, and was amazed to see they went on to pulpits where they spouted they promptly ignored what they were taught and spouted only the same dry fluff I’d heard in pews my whole life. A friend of mine (a minister) summed it up well. He told me: “Religious services are for little blue-haired old women. They’re not about truth or what’s real. They’re there to make scared people feel better.”

That’s when I lost it. I locked myself in my apartment and started typing, dragging up every bit of real history I could find to show people the lust, greed, murder, mayhem, and sheer stupidity that have gone into creating the religious myths we know today. What I came up with was the very first edition of The Heathen’s Guide to World Religions. Now, thirteen years later, I am still finding more facts and history to add to the list of things that are never taught in Sunday school. The Heathen’s Guide (now in its seventh edition) continues to grow and expand. It’s in almost every country now. Translations are being done for release in Chinese, French, Italian, and (of all things) Czech.

None of this has given me “the answers”. I am an atheist now in the true sense of atheism: “without a god”. But I know that religions don’t have the answers either. What they have is a kernel of faith, taught to them by people like my classmates, to keep them in the fold.