Wow, I guess I'm just slow! I spent 51 years believing in a god. Four years ago, having already lost my father and brother, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and that just opened my eyes. I have experienced such a freedom from bondage and judgement and actually am more hopeful overall. So many people say religion set them free and broke the chains of things like drugs or alcohol. For me, atheism set me free and broke the chains of religion. Better late than never, I guess.

11-2-1986, 2:31pm

I was around twelve years old and I had a moment where I thought to myself that the entire thing sounds like a fairytale. All the bible stories really didn’t help either. They all seemed more like the bedtime stories in books. Later in 8th grade, when I started in science class and we were learning about biology and evolution, it made so much more sense to me than the story in the book of Genesis. I asked my teacher, who I will not name, if there were any books I could read outside of class to learn more about evolution. He wouldn’t refer anything to me so I decided to research it. I found a copy of “The Blind Watchmaker” in my local library. By the time I was done reading it I wanted more. I can’t place a specific moment as THE moment but between the age of twelve and fifteen, I had stopped believing. I didn’t “come out” until I was twenty-two.

For me, there was never a time when it made any sense.

I was in Sunday school about 6 years old and the teacher was telling us a tale that included images of an old bearded white man with flowing hair and a long robe sitting on a cloud...

My childlike mind thought the adult equivalent of “are you freekin’ kidding me?”

I believe it was 2nd or 3rd grade, during catechism, the nun teaching the class was telling stories that just didn't make sense to me. When questioned, she flustered, got angry, and couldn't answer. I wanted to believe, but it wasn't making sense. By 4th and 5th grade, the nuns had labeled me as a "doubting Thomas" and my parents stopped making me go to catechism, so I was never "confirmed" in 5th grade, like my brothers and sisters. I felt that gave me license to be non-religious and think for myself. I was the only one of my 4 siblings who didn't get married "in the church" as an adult.

Over the years throughout my childhood, after being told I had a guardian angel watching over me, I couldn't understand why that angel, or God himself, wasn't protecting me from things going on in my home that were clearly wrong.

I came to realize that this guardian angel was really my conscience and that God was likely a metaphor for all authority. I disliked authority, as I could see it was often a selfish entity with an agenda which wasn't always fair. I learned to think for myself, trust my gut feelings more, and slowly unlearn the concept of blindly following authority.

Took a long time to be free of the prison of patriarchal authoritarian rule, because it was so deeply ingrained in society all around me, and I felt alone in my departure from religion, but access to library books questioning religion, shining a light on a more scientific view of the world helped with my transition in my twenties and thirties, and then when I could access the internet right from my home on a borrowed computer, I realized there were others questioning and discussing the transition online. I found my lifeline!

I was maybe four. Coming from a non-religious family, I only started hearing about it when I began going to a pre-school at a church. They had a time for reading Bible stories, which at first seemed no different to me than any other fairytale I had heard. They even had similar elements, impossibilities, and lesson pretty much spelled out in them. At some point, though, I found out that people actually believed these specific stories had happened, and that was where religion completely lost me.
I still found it interesting, though, and often questioned my religious peers in school [at that point around 5th grade] about their beliefs.
It took me until high school, when I started spending more time on the internet, to learn such terms as agnostic or atheist, though. My favorite teacher was also an atheist, and through him I learned that people could get into trouble or even lose their jobs if their non-belief was to be discovered. I still value to a great degree the conversations we had, and I quite enjoyed being one of the few that knew that he was the real "godless heathen" in the room -he always called all of his students that as a joke. He was the first adult outside of my family that I knew to be a non-believer, and that gave me more confidence to speak about my own lack of belief.
Now I say that I am usually an agnostic atheist [I don't believe in a god, but can never be 100% sure of the lack of any deities], but I'm anti-theist as a hobby since I find it fun to argue against religion on the internet and occasionally in person.

I never needed to realize it anymore than I needed to realize shit stinks, it was simply obvious from the start.

When I started reading the bible as a book.

In 2006. I was 55 years old. It was the talking donkey in the Bible that did it. I read it and thought, "Wait. A talking donkey?? This is insane!" And ever since then I knew it was all bullshit.

When I was in high school. The position against homosexuality made no sense to me because there were some gay guys in my high school who were really good people, so it didn't add up.

I am not sure exactly when. I do know that I found joy in watching stand up. It was a sort of youthful awakening to the idea that other people thought this religion stuff was a bit off.

If I may make a comparison stretch: the way deaf children are likely born to parents who can hear-I was an athiest before I knew there was a word for it. Comedians like Eddie Izzard and George Carlin were the first people to hold up a mirror that I could see publicly and show me that it was OK to think. And laugh. I will count that as my 'liberation/awakening athiest' moment.

In second grade, I posed an heretical question after an assertion by Sister Mary Contusion that nobody but Catholics go to heaven. I asked if cavemen who were good could go because no Jesus yet. She said no. I mentally called bullshit.

When I started to be sexually abused on camps by trusted church members and clergy at 10. By the time it stopped at 16, I was an atheist.

When I was a teenager and began to apply critical thinking to reading the bible.

They started late with my indoctrination for the catholic church (at about 6 years old). They really tried, and they really put a lot of effort into making it a good experience.
One of the things they taught me was that God helps those in need, loves everybody, and sees everything because he is everywhere.
Well my childhood... let's say I was in need. So I was thinking that: If God helps those in need and I need help but he doesn't help me, he might not exist because if he also loves everybody and sees everything, he cannot miss the fact that I need help.
I was around 8 or 9 at the time.

It came in layers. It started with 2 contradictions in the bible (and then grew by leaps and bounds). A perfect god couldn't have written and imperfect book. Without the book, no jesus. My religion? A good way can't be built on an evil book. After you take away everything MAN says that god says...god is very quiet.

It didnt' happen all fo a sudden. It was/is a gradual process.

It never made sense to me but i finally accepted the facrt that it made no sense 6 months ago

When i was about 10.

I first began to doubt religion when I was involved in a fundamentalists group and I knew my grandmother could not go to hell. She was a great person.. When I read the necessity of atheism written in 1933, totally opened my eyes. I was a senior by that time.

No one time, I was not raised in religion, and any interest I grew in youth just faded away. I was however one of those toddlers who like to ask logical questions, so I soon learned that the price of logic is being hit a lot. Fortunately I survived and managed to hold on to a little of the logic, though I don't think I am as good at it now as I was then.

Early....I had a lot of questions and no one gave me answers that made sense.

But, definitely by age 12-13 when I started reading about other religions and researching them in the school library.

As a child I had a friend in Casper the Friendly Ghost. Many years later I realized that adults had this same friend but he was a cross between Casper and Santa Claus.

6th grade. I was in a xian school - Forrest Hills Xian School in Decatur, GA. Strict Southern Baptist.

Started asking questions. They didn't like it.

In 7th grade I set the record for the most paddlings in a year. ?