I am an atheist. I was born a Catholic, but after I had traveled

In the voice of one who has seen the world’s wonders and its wounds, Guy Laliberté — creator, wanderer, and visionary — spoke these words: “I am an atheist. I was born a Catholic, but after I had traveled to Northern Ireland with some Catholic friends, and we had a horrible experience with the English Protestant police, I lost all taste for formal religion.” In this confession, there lies not rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but the sorrow of a man who sought the divine and found division. It is a lament for how faith, once pure and radiant, can become chained to hatred and conflict — and how, in that binding, the sacred loses its light.

To be born into a religion is to inherit a story — the story of one’s people, one’s gods, one’s place in the cosmos. But when that story is turned against itself, when it becomes a weapon rather than a path, the soul recoils. Laliberté’s words carry the weight of centuries, echoing the cry of all who have witnessed belief twisted into violence. His atheism is not the denial of spirit, but the mourning of what humanity has done to it. For what he lost was not merely a faith, but a trust — a trust that the sacred could dwell in the hearts of men without corruption.

In the ancient lands of Northern Ireland, faith had long been a flag of war. The Catholic and the Protestant, children of the same Christ, became enemies in the name of heaven. Streets ran with suspicion; neighbors turned their eyes from one another. It was there that young Laliberté, traveler and dreamer, looked upon the faces of men who prayed to the same God but raised their hands against each other — and his heart turned cold toward formal religion. For what good is ritual when it cannot teach compassion? What is the worth of a creed that divides those it was meant to unite?

History bears many such wounds. Think of the Crusades, when knights, bearing crosses upon their shields, slaughtered in the name of peace. Or of Galileo, condemned by his own Church for daring to speak the truth written in the stars. Again and again, humanity has confused dogma with divinity, forgetting that the divine, if it exists, needs no chains, no banners, no battlefields. And so, many have turned away — not from the eternal, but from the arrogance of men who claim to own it. Laliberté stands among them, a modern heir to an ancient disillusionment.

Yet within his rejection lies also a new kind of spirituality — one unbound by temple or scripture. For to lose faith in institutions is not to lose the capacity for wonder. Look at Laliberté’s own creation: Cirque du Soleil, a festival of art, motion, and human brilliance. In its colors and its courage lives a belief far older than any church — the belief in beauty, in unity, in the shared breath of all who dare to create. Perhaps this, too, is religion, though unnamed — a faith in the power of life itself.

Let the wise not judge his atheism as emptiness, but as a mirror. For his story asks each of us: what is faith, if it cannot survive the sight of injustice? If it breeds division, is it not already dead? The truest religion may not dwell in walls or words, but in the actions of those who love, who create, who refuse to hate. To see God in humanity is greater than to argue about His name. To live kindly, without need of heaven’s promise, is a holiness of its own.

So let this be the teaching: whether you kneel in prayer or stand in disbelief, let your life be your creed. Seek no glory in names or doctrines; seek it in understanding, in compassion that transcends the boundary of belief. If you find divinity, let it be in the laughter of a child, the forgiveness of an enemy, the courage to create where others destroy. For the religion of the future, as Laliberté’s journey reveals, will not be one of temples or titles, but of hearts awake — hearts that remember that all men, whether believer or skeptic, walk beneath the same vast and silent sky.