Being that the weekend ended and I hadn’t – that is, I still found myself a citizen of this planet – I thought I’d give the other end of the belief continuum a chance.

Monday afternoon, I rolled onto the campus of Northwood High School in Irvine where the Secular Student Alliance was hosting Orange County atheist Bruce Gleason.

That a county that has so uncritically embraced “In God We Trust” in many of its city council chambers would also generate an atheist club at one of its showcase public high schools seemed incongruous. Doubly so that Gleason – part of the coalition behind the “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone” billboard on Beach Boulevard – would be allowed to cast his pagan shadow on campus. I thought our publicly owned facilities were only accessible to pro-religious messages.

Gleason, 56, isn’t just a nonbeliever. He thinks religion is actually bad. “You will never see an atheist suicide bomber,” he says. But lest you think he picks on Muslims, he told the students that if they were going to hedge their bets, they should pick Islam “because it has the least-worst hell.”

Gleason, who grew up in Anaheim and went to church to please his parents, focused mostly on the religion of his youth, asserting, “The God of the Bible is actually evil.” In support, he showed a sometimes graphic DVD that illustrated some of the Good Book’s more violent passages. Like when God had Abraham prepare to sacrifice his son, only to give the boy a last-second reprieve from the knife. That, Gleason says, was God ordering child abuse. Other passages he cited encourage or condone rape, slavery and cannibalism.

I don’t know that the witch trials have to commence just yet. Only eight students showed up to Gleason’s event which, I kid you not, is part of the school’s Human Rights Week. One student, Tina Xu, 17, pushed back a little, challenging Gleason’s statement that those who do charitable acts in the name of religion are acting in their own self interest. Gleason’s rejoinder: “You don’t think that in the back of their heads they aren’t saying, ‘God is going to reward me for this’?”

Club co-founder Joseph Suh, 17, told me his parents didn’t want him to start the club but he had become disillusioned when his family went from Mormonism to Catholicism.

“I had been told Mormonism is the one true religion, and I began to have my doubts.” He says his mom made him talk to a priest about his growing atheism. The conversation went south, Suh said, “when I told him Hitler was a Catholic.”

I don’t think Suh is going back to the path of the righteous any time soon. His first question to Gleason: “Where can we get the DVD?”

Contact 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com