Antonio Michele Rizzotti was born on February 14th 1951 in Tangier International, now known as Tangier Morocco. At the age of two he moved to his ancestral town of Spilimbergo, Italy, with his parents, Giuseppe Rizzotti and Elda Pietrella, and lived there until the age of five. His father immigrated to Montreal Canada in 1953. Three years later Michael crossed the Atlantic with his mother and sister to join his father.

In Montreal he attended French school until university. In 1970 he enrolled at Loyola College in economics. He switched to theology one year later. He graduated with a Bachelor in Arts with a major in theology and a minor in English literature in 1974.

The same year he enrolled at the Départment de Sciences des Religions at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). The department applied a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of religion (phenomenology, sociology, history and anthropology of religion were among the many approaches used). He graduated in 1978. His masters’ thesis L’Interprétation Religieuse de l’Origine Mythique de la Nationalité consisted in showing that the inauguration of monuments in honor of national heroes were civil rituals that  mythologized historic heroes and consecrated political ideology.

His book God, Myth, and Metaphor: The Profane Reality of the Goddess was published in 1992.

The Net Age web site was first published in 1999.