Religious Conversion Goes the Other Way

Re “It Must Be What Birth Is Like” by Mary Rourke (Oct. 22): I found the article both interesting and moving, but your readers should know that conversions go the other way, as well.

I was raised Roman Catholic, but I knew by age 13 that it just didn’t make sense. I searched for decades for a new religion before remembering an anecdote I’d read as a child, with this punch line: “Hercules’ task was to clean out the Augean stables, not to fill them back up again.” I realized that I couldn’t find a believable deity in any religion. It was like birth, like awakening into a new world of pure and unfiltered reality, of truth.

I am now a serene and committed nonbeliever.

KAY M. GILBERT

Santa Monica