I am here with Galen Brodis. He is the son of a Baptist minister who actually became an atheist later in life.

And the reason I wanted to talk to him this particular week is because he just won a really

fascinating lawsuit in the state of Illinois. We're both from there and I wanted to

talk to him about what that was all about and why it's relevant. So, Gailin, before we get into the lawsuit, can you give us a little background about yourself, your story, how you got into atheism, and we'll talk about the lawsuit after that.

Sure, yeah, thanks for having me on, Hemet.

The, this, I'll try and kind of cut to the chase on the on the a little of the background as you said I was raised in a

primarily Southern Baptist although my family wasn't really that strict about what kind of Baptist we were.

But I was raised in a Southern Baptist family.

My father was a minister for basically all my childhood.

What happened was for me, like a lot of people who end up becoming

atheist later in life I did a lot of studying. I went to Christian college for a semester

and just got fascinated with philosophy and theology and even though I didn't stick around at that

college it just kind of sparked something that I think is sort of a curiosity that I had about a subject

I hadn't really thought of and I spent a lot of time probably about to be

honest about six or seven years where I did a lot of studying and I did a lot of

actually engaging with atheists I went to lots of atheists blogs and kind of

interacted with people. It's the same kind of story you hear from a lot of people.

There's lots of stereotype breaking and things like that and actually almost five years ago

I just sort of had a realization that I'd come so far that I was a I was sort of across that line

and was kind of across it before I realized that it actually happened.

And so that's about five years ago.

So it's been kind of an interesting process from there kind of getting acclimated to that.

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