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I've always been one to question things. The questioning started with the sexism in the bible (among other  things). The bible is a most horrid book. And then I noticed the way Xtians behave. They do what they please and behave badly and then go to church and get absolution from it.

Then they continue about their business. Then they believe those crazy fairy tales.

I am educated in science and don't believe that nonsense.

Athianarchist, I've always been skeptical about claims of the supernatural. Things just didn't fit when someone would tell me they saw a ghost or had a vision or witnessed a miracle. I was raised quasi-religious, but thankfully my father was/is a non-believer and both parents never really forced anything on me. They let me discover things on my own. Any exposure to religious people was always weird. So I never really jumped into it with both feet.

What solidified my non-belief, and even disgust, was the 'Boxing Day Tsunami" of 2004. This devastating, natural disaster made me understand that no supreme being would ever allow that many people, including children, to die. Nothing supremely benevolent could exist.
I've said before that I first remember doubting at the age of 8, in the mormon church, after my "high priest" father laid his hands on my head and said "Receive ye the holy ghost.", and I felt nothing.
However, I'm starting to think that it may have been before that because I've always loved science, and that may have started me thinking and doubting at an early age.
Hard to say, as I don't remember a lot about my youth, but I do remember as a teenager thinking that logically either only one religion was true or none were.
I imagine a lot of you will wonder why it took me 60 years to completely throw-off the shackles of religion, given that I loved science all my life. Well, I wonder myself. I do see three things that may have been factors:
#1: I was thoroughly brainwashed into the cult of mormonism. I was taken to church every week, starting as a baby.
#2: My parents were kind and loving, so I had no reason to doubt them for a long time.
#3: FEAR: Although mormonism doesn't teach a literal fire & brimstone hell, they do teach that there is a finite time (a period of time less than 1000 years, depending on the seriousness of your sins), in which you will be in horrible mental torment looking for the just wrath of god to come upon you because of your sins, and that fear will be just as horrible as literal fire & brimstone.
There is also the fear of not being worthy to inherit the highest heaven where your righteous loving parents and siblings are, and where there will be eternal learning, along with other desirable things. Things you will never be able to obtain, throughout all eternity.
Thinking about what you're missing for eternity is a very real hell and causes a great deal of fear, especially given the fact that there are so many things required of you that it absolutely seems impossible to ever be righteous enough to reach the highest, desirable heaven.
I was also programed to believe that questioning the church allows satan to gain control of me, and deceive me into thinking I know the truth when I don't. That was the final fear that I overcame at about the age of 60.

When I was about 10 a friend died during unnecessary surgery.  Somebody -- my Sunday school teacher? -- wondered aloud whether he was in a state of grace at the moment of his death.  If so, he was already in heaven.  If not?  Well, he would already be in hell for all eternity.  I thought "What kind of god would do something that disgusting to a kid?  For that matter, how would anybody deserve that kind of treatment?"  This was about the end of World War II.  Should that happen to Hitler?  If anybody deserved it, he would.  But I couldn't consign even him to such a fate.  Therefore, hell is a fraud.  My other choice would have been to see that, if hell was allowed to exist, then god was a fraud.  I wasn't ready for that yet.

My Dad is a Pentecostal minister and we grew up in a few VERY Evangelical churches. Lots of speaking in tongues, laying on of hands, "dig deep to donate to God", if it's not of God it's of The Devil, End of Days stuff.

I was exposed to a lot of people having very intense emotional reactions from a lot of adults being "moved by the holy spirit" type stuff and I noticed that never once, did I feel what they felt. I never heard the voice of the lord. Never felt moved to tears or compelled by any unseen force to do anything. Even when everyone  around me was clearly sharing an experience, I was just a kid in the middle of it.

Whenever I talked to my Dad about it he just said to pray on it and to try harder to listen to The Lord.

I prayed, I read, I studied, I questioned, I got in trouble for asking questions and not accepting "because God" as an answer.

By about 14 I had sorted out that whatever it was that let people experience God, I just didn't have it. It took another 15 years or so or reading, studying, questioning every religion I could get my hands on to eventually sort out that it's all man made.

I started to doubt while in a Catholic school religion class. When a nun told me that when someone hurts me I should turn the other cheek, I was telling myself I had only two cheeks.

Years later I edited that. For a woman I really like, I have four cheeks.

For me it was bit by bit: understanding that the Bible did, in fact, contradict itself and that these contradictions were real, not just "apparent." Realizing that some of the stories, Job in particular, could not be literally true and still be describing a good and just God. Moving on to recognize that the diversity of human language did not begin at the Tower of Babel. There was no worldwide flood. Genetics teaches us that it takes longer than Noah's ark to bring us back to a common ancestor (why do we not know the name of Noah's wife, considering that we are all descended from her? You would think her name would be more widely known). Man was on earth long before the Adam and Eve story would have taken place.

Once you recognize Adam and Eve as a myth, the whole notion of Christ's sacrifice becomes impossible to accept as a necessity. And then you realize just how non-credible the resurrection story really is. BAM! You're done.

That's how it was for me, anyway.

I think I simply was lucky - there was no aha! moment.

I was born a non-theist and managed through chance and temperament to reject indoctrination.  As a child, and much to the embarrassment of my parents, I was asked on two different occasions not to return to Sunday school until I stopped asking inconvenient questions and laughing at the "lessons."  It never took root.  

They sort of gave up on me after round two.


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