Hi, I’m Andy (though for fun I sometimes use the alias Arch Stanton online), a human born in 1973.
Up until I was about 8 years old, our family didn’t go to church regularly. Shortly after I started third grade, my dad died of suicide, and after that, my grandparents pressed my mom to have me and my siblings baptized. About a year later, I started going to Catholic schools until nearly the end of 8th grade.
For a while I was interested in Christianity and read the bible, and listened to bible stories on tape. But I started having serious doubts about what was said about the Christian god and what I was expected to believe about prayers by the time I was … 12 or 13, and they’d resurface pretty regularly. I was probably agnostic by the time I was 18 and sometimes since then vacillated between believing a god exists and not believing at all.
Several months ago I decided to just forget about the idea of the existence of a god and decided to “embrace” atheism. I looked up a few books about morality and atheism and quickly found the subject of Humanism and got a few books. Right now I’m reading Good without God by Greg Epstein.
I got into Star Trek when I was 10 years old, which seems like it’s in the spirit of Humanism. A couple years ago I read a bio of Gene Roddenberry and discovered he was an atheist.
I also was big into Marvel comics (especially the X-men) when I was a teen. And probably was influenced by the ideals of “peace” and “equality” that were presented by both X-men and Star Trek.
In my twenties, I became a huge Beatles fan, and later a fan of John Lennon’s solo work and admired the work he and Yoko did for the causes of peace and feminism.
So for me to become interested in Humanism seems like… not a very surprising development. 
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Welcome aboard. Anyone who likes Sir Patrick Stewart (ST:TNG and X-men) is cool in my book. Gene Roddenberry put a lot of humanism into Star Trek, especially ST:TOS, but you probably knew that. Your upbringing into religion sounds similar to mine, with some differences, of course.
Anyway, feel free to jump right into the conversations.
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Destiny. 
'73 is one of my special years too, but that’s because it’s my high school class, graduation and freedom*. 
Sorry to hear about your dad, that must have been rough on you.
As for the Christianity, God thing I was fortunately in that my parents weren’t particularly invested in Christianity. They felt their duty was to introduce us to Christianity and church and that we’d need to figure it out for ourselves.
I was big into Jesus for a few years, but by 16/17 had enough with the hippocracy and jerks pretending to be oh so holy, yet also nasty and petty at the same time. Another decade(ish) of doubt and exploration, before the concept of “God” and “Heaven” with it’s eternal “Afterlife” no longer made any sense.
Fortunately, while this was going on a deep appreciation and a life time of learning about our Earth and her Evolutionary story was developing. Yeah, could say I turned into a tree hugger. Now in the past couple years, after many decades rumination, I’ve had various ideas coalesce into words that I keep trying to get some feedback on.
So if you’re curious:
Here’s my homemade philosophical underpinnings.
(7.01) An Alternative Philosophical Perspective - “ Earth Centrism ”
(7.02) Appreciating the Physical Reality ~ Human Mindscape divide
(7.03) Being an element in Earth’s Pageant of Evolution
(7.04) It’s not a “ Body-Mind problem ” it’s an “ Ego-God problem .”
Give them a spin, see if any of it resonates with you, or if it irritates I’d love to hear why.
{ * the thing still gives me the backbone tingles.}
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I’ve bookmarked your blog for now. 