I was born Catholic, started doubting some things in second grade and was encouraged by a priest. I am 75, still searching and found out I know less than when I started. I sometimes wish (briefly) for the ability to swallow anything hook, line and sinker! I think religion is important to start a person on a journey, teaching that their is more important things than accumulating a bigger pile of rocks.
I have just decided that the world is perfect just the way it is. We need the positive, negative & neutral forces in balance. This is eluded to in certain religions. The Hitler & King are necessary! I still meditate & talk to Howard! Thank You for listening John West Plains, Mo

First when the churches took a strong stand against demonstrated science, then when they became political, I was gone, after reminding them that Christ said "My kingdom is not of this world", yet that is just the opposite of their present teaching. Then in the early 90's, via the new internet I ran across a list of 300 contradictions in the BuyBull, I was always taught there were none. I took my BuyBull and opened the front door and threw it out in the front yard in an emotional state as if I had just become unbaptized!

I doubted it when I was young and I couldn't get straight or logical answers from ministers.
Q: Why is Christianity right and everyone else wrong?
A: Because Christianity will live forever and all the rest will die.
Q: Why are so many religions similar in so many principles?
A: Because most religions imitated Christianity.
Q: Why is the Catholic Church always right?
A: Don't all religions believe they're right?
Q: What does Saved save you from?
A; Burning in hell.
Q: So accept Christ or burn in hell?
A: It's a choice.
Q: So when Job proved his faith he got a new family and new wealth?
A: Yes, that's the reward for obedience to Jesus.
Q: So what happened to Job's family and servants who were taken away by marauders? Job was back to partying and they were living in slavery?
A: Please leave.

I was in 2 grade ccd class ( Catholic ) we were told by the teacher to draw a picture with markers or crayons...to honor or commemorate Jesus dying on the cross...for Easter...( really freaking morbid to be teaching children ya know) anyway..my little artist brain was like drawing a happy sun with smiley face...some rolling green hills( cause you know the church and school totally doesn't talk about geography or where this all supposedly took place) I drew a big brown cross in the middle..and two small crosses on either side of the big cross...( to represent Jesus and the two people we were all told he was crucified with) well....looking at my drawing I felt it was wrong and too empty..so I drew 100 other crosses all in the background..I felt like hey this is what it should look like...I was beaming with pride...I walked up to my teacher and showed her...she immediately said with a frown " this is wrong, only 3 crosses should be in the picture" I asked why and my teacher got angry and said " it's in the bible and that's what happened" I looked at her and said she was wrong..she got madder..I then said " how do you really know? Were you there"? ( she was not happy...I got sent to the naughty desk and had to practice saying hail marys ...this was the beginning of me knowing RELIGION was bullshit..I was very young...and just knew..

when i was in the throws of being an ardent born again christian at 18 years old,
going to an all Black church,
and being told by the pastor that "slaves obey your masters" was a way far beyond my ways & to never question god, god's work, or god's preachers.
yet, i stayed.
blame it on youth and a sucky upbringing.

When my 11 year old sister does; I was 19.

As a teen. I had read and studied and it just didn't make sense to me. Later in my twenties I went back. Again through study and research I realized I don't believe.

I was never religious to begin with and for the most of my life was ambivalent about the whole subject. However, when religion started taking over politics, I became more firm in my belief that there is no such thing as a god and that religious beliefs are simply superstitions made up by early man to explain what they did not understand.

About 13

Around age 11.

I was in my early to mid teens. I was brought up going to church 2 or 3 times a week. And it was a pleasant enough experience. But as u learn about the world u realise that the bible is a load of bollox. Morally the book leaves a lot to be desired.Then of course its torn to pieces by modern science.

It wasn't easy at first. Id say something against the bible and then have that thought god would punish me for that. But by my mid teens the brainwashing was reversed and I was free to embrace the truth.

I did stand as god parent to my first niece in my late teens. Seeing it as just a thing people do. But a year later when asked to be god parent to my second niece i refused on the grounds i didn't believe in god. It didn't go down well lol

I was born a neurotic and an intellectual. My mother took me to church and sunday school as maybe about 9 or 10, but I was unable to participate very long, maybe not even a year (can't remember) because---delusion was/is obvious to me, and I could not share in it.

My grandfather was a minister so I was in church regularly from birth. I’ve always been a very logical person and as soon as I was old enough to understand what they were trying to teach me, I realized that it made no sense. I asked questions and never got any answer other than the memorized dogma. No one would ever try to explain anything to me. I was simply told to “Just believe it.” I stopped trying to make sense of it but also realized I had to keep my doubts to myself.
As an adult, I started having intellectual conversations with, ironically enough my minister grandfather (a very intelligent man.) He’s the person who told me the truth about certain lies perpetuated by the church: Xmas, Easter, etc. He inspired me to educate myself even further. All these conversations were kept between us. He never retired from the church but I’ve always wondered how he could set me on my agnostic path and still believe his own sermons. My suspicion is that he died with his own secret doubts.

My real "crisis of faith" was in college — basically a period when I stopped accepting the authority of others who made claims without offering anything of substance. But I don't know that college was the first I had doubts. Despite being reared strictly Catholic, I recall at a young age asking skeptical questions (e.g., how do we know who wrote the Bible, how do we know it's true, what do we really know about Heaven) but I got the boilerplate responses that effectively shut down critical thought, like "it's just a mystery" and "God works in mysterious ways" so I accepted the dogma for the better part of two decades. I attended a structured Catholic college and it was there that I realized that nobody had real answers. I think it was in an ethics course when I really started to call Catholic doctrine nonsense, when I found myself deeply at odds with the official position of the Church on various ethical scenarios. It was from there that I started questioning things like the divinity of Jesus, and started looking at other religious traditions, until I started questioning why I believed in a God at all, and slowly these giant holes in the fabric of my faith caused it to unravel until nothing remained.

in high school

Around junior high. I grew up Catholic and had to take an after school religious class once a week. Obviously abortion came up in the class and it didn't make sense to me why it was supposedly wrong for people to use to make choices about what happened to their own body. Why should someone be shunned and "damned to hello because they invoked their bodily autonomy? Also, as a History student, the bloody and nonsensical timeline for Catholicism just did not add up for me. Among many other things . . .

8-9 years old

As long as I can remember. My earliest memories of the topic are of me as a non believer.

I was in the 3rd grade, daily ritual of saying the Lords Prayer and Pledging Allegiance under god was not comfortable for me, not knowing why I felt this way at that time
I stood up to do both as my mind at that time did not grasp the concept of being defiant. I have read many so-called Holy books and still was not satisfied with the intricate contradictions in the writings to explain religion or god. Loving god did not exist for me with all the wars and genocide that have been occurring since "time".

My son was extremely ill in the icu, and I felt a religious feeling when he recovered but realized it was just my profound relief masquerading as what I had been taught was religious enlightenment.

I think that I have always doubted it. I have always been one to seek the truth, and not buy into fairy tales. Oh, I like to pretend and loved make-believe as a child. However, I never got mixed up between fantasy and real life. I think that is the problem now with many people. They want the fantasy and insist that it is the truth.

When the reality of life didn’t coincide with the doctrine I was told to believe. It was like trying to force a round peg into a square hole - it didn’t work!

I always (from the age of three) thought that it was just a bunch of stories... Which it was. Later on as i experienced christian fundamentalist bigotry, hate, fear and loathing up close and personal, i decided that their religions were all teaching them to be the way they behaved toward the 'others', that is, anyone outside their religious group. So, i opted out of all of them by the time i was twelve. I attended and participated for a couple of more years to keep peace in the family, but that was it for me.

I was around 16 possibly a few years earlier, I had to go through a Lutheran catacism which
I truly hated, but it was for the beginnings of all childhood religious BS, my mom wanted to make my grandmother happy. I even had a photo of the westernized Jesus, that I was really quite perplexed about, at the time.... I had just become aquainted with Darwin, and soon after I had sort of a hero in Madalyn Murray. My first atheist soul mate. I watched as these pious christian bitches called her, and her daughter (S?) whores, and devil worshippers...On Phil Donahue, who was also from Dayton. I also met a man at an atheist meeting who at the time debated fundamentalists on radio shows, Frank Zindler....We went to Antioch college to watch a lecture about 'Soft Bodied Fawna', by Steven J. Gould. Frank told me that my awareness at less than 18 was very rare, but facts of nature, cemented it all.. that's it for now...

I was about 12 or 13 when I realized all the biblical stories were total fiction, but I guess partly due to my Catholic upbringing, and attending Catholic school for 12 years, it took me until about my mid-twenties to embrace the theory of evolution (since it was never taught in school), and I soon went from believer to agnostic to a militant atheist; meaning that though I don't go out of my way to mock the religious, I have no problem making a 'holier than thou' religious zealot cringe if he/she tries to push their asinine view on me.