Religion: I was raised Christian but my parents weren’t very observant. I started to see cracks when at my primary school we were taught about god creating the world and the big bang.

When I was 13 my girlfriend died. I turned to the bible for support and after reading it realised it was just fairy tales.

Social and political: I was a punk as a teenager. More due to my love for skateboarding and depression/anger about my girlfriend. But in that culture I started to realise how fucked everything was.

Serveral homeless people would wonder by the skatepark and we’d talk to them. Many of them we’re lovely people who had some sort of awful tragedy happen. I realised how heartless society could be. If you can’t work and function then you have no value. This was reinforced by how people talked about like they were the scum of the earth.

This was the early 00s in a rural county so racism and homophobia were rampant as well. There were probably single digit people if colour I saw in my town but again some used to stop by and chat with us / cheer us on when skating.

Again this showed how horrible the majority of people were.

So my politics became pretty simple. Everyone deserves to live a good life. That view is not very well reflected in the right.