I grew up in a quasi-religious household. My father is/was a Moonie and my mother is Jewish. I wasn't particularly close to my father but grew up very close to my mother and maternal grandfather who was quite pious and a charming, caring and wonderful human being. I looked up to him more as a father figure than my actual father and so I of course wanted to be like him. I grew up Jewish, identify myself as Jew"ish", and for a period of time became a somewhat religious Jew. One of the moments in my life that sparked the idea of disbelief was when my grandfather was on his deathbed from prostate cancer, and he expressed his doubts about an afterlife. Also, my problem (or perhaps my salvation) was that I didn't find anything meaningful in prayer and have been highly analytical most of my life. I became fascinated with evolution, abiogenesis, and cosmology in my 20s which started heavily influencing my ideas. Finally about a year or two ago, I just came to terms with the fact that science and religion ARE at odds and ARE mutually exclusive of one another. In sum, I believe we are just self-aware highly intelligent hairless chimpanzees participating in the universe staring at itself...and I'm totally OK with that. God is a human abstract created to instill order and promote laws at a point in history when they were needed to ensure the survival of the human species. Now as we have evolved into an ethics based society we don't need religious dogma which I believe is now beginning to hinder us as a species the more we try to inject it into secular government. I am proud of my Jewish background, I am proud of my ethnic heritage, but like other Jews of history such as Baruch Spinoza, Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan, I've moved from belief to agnostic to atheist. Given the brief time I'm going to have in this life (medical technology permitting of course), I'm just going to make the most of it and try to live an enriching life, loving my family and helping my fellow man. That's me 
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“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson
“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson
