Luckily I never had a religion...was born into a freethinking family.

I was a questioner starting at a young age, but had a devout belief in God/Jesus as a Catholic until I was 9 years-old. I was a logical-thinking child. I did not understand how just one group would go to heaven and other good people would go to hell. I could not understand the claims about God being all-knowing, hating evil and all powerful, but let child be abused from parents even if they prayed for it to stop. In college all the science that I learned supported my view that if there was a power higher than a human, it was humans as a group. It also did not help that I went to Catholic school, and saw "The Scary Dying Suffering Jesus" every day at church and before school. Really, a dying suffering dude, at a place for children, it is very odd when you think about it.

I also remember walking the long walk to school from church in long cold winters. The girls wore flouncy skirts with just tights and were not allowed to wear pants like the boys, after I while,Then, I also figured something was not quiet right with the whole church situation but could not name it. My lack of belief, as another person stated, became deeper as I was able to think abstractly as a child.

It was very gradual, but I was having serious doubts in grade school. Too many inconsistencies.

@GlaslowII
Good for you, and shout out to your uncle!

For me, the deal breaker was reading the Quran in my mother language, i.e. Persian, followed by the history of Islam. I never looked back since.

when I was 14, I had a science teacher who spent more time on the scientific method than on the actual discoveries of previous science. he would bring it up all the time, show how it related to shit like dating choices, learning to skateboard, everything, as well as showing how it developed the science that we do know when the lessons were about established facts and theories. He just hammered it in.

I started looking at everything through the lens of the method, and the logic behind it, and started seeing massive discrepancies in my religious beliefs and the bible, and the things I'd been told about my religion. I kept digging at it.

I immediately became skeptical of mainstream christianity, like within a couple of weeks of starting the journey. I started looking at fringe christian groups, the hippy groups, and that didn't pan out, so I started looking at other religions, at that point still trying to hold on to some kind of spirituality. Nada.

It took 4 years of exploring a lot of beliefs and systems, but by the time I was out of high school I was an Atheist.

I was born and, after a few years, started to hear stories about a magic wizard who lived in the sky. I assumed right from the first time that these were just stories like Jack and the Beanstalk, Winnie the Pooh and all the other stories I heard. The dinosaurs I saw in books, though, were real - there were whole museums full of fossils to prove it. So in other words, I was born an atheist; it came as quite a surprise when I found out some people believed the sky wizard was real too.

I wasn’t raised particularly religious but did some time in Baptist, Lutheran and Catholic Churches and even a stint in Catholic school. I really tried to believe but I just never did. In fact, I’m convinced that most people, no matter how religious they pretend to be, deep down don’t truly believe. Instead, they fake it in order to fit in and reap the benefits of association with the other fakers.

My interpretation of what "God" is evolved over time, initially. My first shift away from Christianity was acknowledging that I believed God was more of an essence than a being, or that God was simply "all that is". I maintained this view for awhile until I asked myself, "well, then, why call it 'God'?".

Prior to all that, the earliest steps were having unresolved questions about dinosaurs in the Biblical era and other obvious contradictions and inconsistencies present in Christian scripture.

It started in my first church school class. It was about the walls of Jericho. I just was so sceptical that marching and blowing horns could have worked. Anyway, it just never really "took".

I called myself an agnostic until I realized that even though I tried to create some religious belief that was self-consistent and compatible with physics, I still wouldn't believe in god(s).

God created the entire Universe and doesn't interfere (violating physics) using miracles? Does a god, working within the constraints of physics, deserve the title?

So now, the only time I entertain thoughts of gods is when I read about demigods in Manga or watch Anime. I even support the protagonist struggling against "entity-X" in "The Evil of Tanya".

Good for you, To paraphrase Hawking's statement: Yes no one can prove or disprove the existence of God. All one can do is to provide reasonable explanation based on Science. This is utterly wonderful enough to fulfill the mysteries of existence and console ourselves that God is unnecessary to live a happy,satisfying and morally upright manner.

Growing up in a very religious family and going to church all the time, I always heard things that made me question a lot of Christian thought. Once I got old enough and focused enough to start researching the religion I was raised in, I started to get the answers. The more I researched the less Christian I became.

briefly, i was raised as a secular jew, which means religion was not spoken of much in the family. we celebrated the holidays. we ate jewish food. my folks spoke some yiddish. god? not really part of life. he made a nice occasional invisible friend but that was that. i don't think i ever prayed in my life. age 14 i decided to check it out more and study judaism. after a year of that i realized that while i found talmud study interesting, i wasn't making friends or feeling close to anyone at shul. i stopped going. then i discovered that something my folks told me as fact, and which i had just accepted, wasn't true. they'd told me long-haired boys were dirty and rebellious and i found out that this was incorrect. i decided to question everything else i knew, too. some stuff withstood the test. god didn't. oh well!

g

There were a few pivotal points in my life that led me down this path. The first was just this "is that all there is" feeling I as i was growing up. But a hypocritical lying creep as a minister in my church sort of finished it off. There were also my hyper-religious freako relatives who wouldn't allow alcohol at my parents' twenty fifth anniversary party. They were just no fun. I think I found hypocrisy at every turn in the church as I was growing up. All of this coupled with the fairy stories just made me go 'meh' when it came to religion.

You are a product of your operant conditioning, as are theists.

I was raised from the cradle in Christianity and for all practical purposes that was in fundamentalism (my family converted to that when I was 3). If one were to look outside my house they would find gouge marks where I was dragged kicking and screaming out of that by life circumstances that forced me to admit that the Christian mental model of reality was almost exactly backwards.

...I’ve never actually asked my mother ..but assume it was a fairly painful experience, for both of us

I looked into comparative mythology, and realised the Christian story was just one more myth, with no more particular truth to it than any other. Perhaps it is a little more cleverly constructed around historical elements, but ultimately just another story.

My path to atheism was very different. My family (including my extended, very large family) consisted of Irish Catholics. We went to mass regularly, said grace, etc. However I thought it was all wrong at a young age (probably at about 8-10). I have always been a very avid reader and read the bible (both old and new testaments). I also read many other things. I read everything with a very CRITICAL eye. Religion quickly made no sense to me. It was very obviously made up to control people.Science and the natural order of things did make sense however. So, I very deliberately became an atheist. I kept it to myself (mostly) but by my late teens I just put it all out there. Still do!

I am very analytical, brought up as a Baptist but never could believe blindly. Now I am an Atheist, just seemed the natural evolution of being analytical.

Reading the bible cover to cover began the process.

I can't remember the exact date - what I do remember is that following a conversation with a born-again - I asked "are you bat shit nuts? I never worked for that guy again and it was quite likely mutual. It was at that point that I began to question everything - be it "God" or Aliens. It was therefore only inevitable that I would become a non-theist.

Reading the bible and a couple of other religious documentation things put an end to my theistic thinking. I also had a short deistic thought process but observation and love of science also put an end to that thinking.

I became agnostic/atheist gradually over last 10 years or so. if we are "gods children", why do frown gay people and others that don't fit the mold. Since, the world is so messed up has to be biggest proof there is no god. the bible is full of contridictions which the fools except. I have never believed in ghosts etc. Plus, I haven't put christmas decorations in 3 years. The biggest push was my mother implying I would go hell if I became an catholic. She and most my family are baptists. Agnostics/atheists are opened mind and rational people. Nobody in here has a problem that I'm attracted to men.

I’m pretty sure I always was. I had doubt very young in childhood and didn’t even know the words agnostic or atheist.. let alone their definitions. The whole religion thing made no sense from the start. The evolution from agnosticism to atheism took a bit longer.

I had the usual childhood brainwashing of religion. I was told i must attend Sunday school for my soul to be saved by a gang of Christians that visited my estate. At secondary school in Religious education i spent more time growing eyes in the back of my head because of an unruly bully we had in the classroom who would punch other children in the face when the teacher wasn't looking than listening to the lesson. Where was God then?
Anyway fast forward another Ten years and i attend a fellowship called AA and that's when the force-feeding and the brainwashing of God really went into beast mode for me.
I was told that to stay sober i must pray every morning and every night to stay sober, plus attend as many meetings of AA as possible.
I did that for Eighteen months and i still drank again and to top it all i ended up in and out of homeless hostels in the UK for the following Twenty months after.
After going through all that not only did i realize there is no God but i saw that while i was praying to fictional entity i was not dealing with my problems properly.
The biggest frustration waking up one morning and realizing that you have wasted years putting your trust into lie who not even there to help you, when you could have spent the same amount of time doing a better job yourself.

I became agnostic when I went through puberty and abstract thinking clicked in.