I had just turned seven when my highly religious parents decided to assist at a church orphanage. For almost another seven years my brother and I lived as virtual orphans, eating the same food and obeying the same rules as all the other children. Then my father decided he wanted to establish a printing workshop in Palestine , (now Israel ). He would be publishing Christian literature in Hebrew, Armenian and English. For six years and nine months I worked in Jerusalem , first as a book-keeper for a car agency and garage and then as a printer for the Government Printing Works.

I returned to New Zealand in September 1938 and continued an active relationship with the church. My brother and I went into the printing business trading as Cooper Brothers Ltd. We specialised in Christian literature. I married and had a family.

We received a cable from my father telling us that mother had died. She was fifty seven years old. It was not the fact of her death so much as the three years of suffering in and out of hospital which affected me. I could see the printing staff through a window eating lunch. I would do anything I justly could for any one of them. But there was God, supposed to be loving and all powerful. Yet my good mother, who had given everything she had in serving her God, had to suffer and die without even seeing her three grandchildren. My mother's death became the trigger to set me on the journey of my life. For the first time, I seriously question religion and God. Was I a better employer than God? There was no love or divine justice shown to my mother. Was God without compassion and powerless or was he there at all? For the first time I was looking at God in reality. I wanted to find out the reason and 1 wanted an answer.

For about ten years I searched various religions and philosophies. Then, a little over the age of forty, I completely rejected religion. I resigned from the church, bought my brother's shares in the company and ceased printing Christian literature. We need solid provable, scientific reasons to believe in almost anything.

I took one of my well used Bibles down into the garden and ceremoniously burnt it. I was purposefully challenging the mythical God. My actions were inviting his retribution. But God was dead, there was no response as the fire burned up the supposed 'word of God' just like any other combustible material. I became an honest, born-again atheist. I had taken my life back and wouldnever give it away again. I did not want the imputed virtue of a Christ. I reasoned that borrowed virtue is unjust and of no value at all. I became a person of dignity and worth in my own right.