PART TWO
The DAILY indoctrination in RC schools, which includes the promised eternal happiness and the threatened eternal suffering, is very effective. Quitting required trauma and my mother gave it to me.
At 26 I was in college trying to make my life happier than my father’s life. My mother drove 150 miles (one way) to tell me I was too lazy to get a job. In the trauma that followed, I decided that my parents were not capable of love so there was no god capable of love. I threw my parents and their religion out of my life. I took a while to settle on agnosticism but it sufficed for 52 years. Ten years ago I tossed it for atheism.

PART ONE
I don’t recall which came first in 11th grade in a Catholic school.

1. Being told it’s sinful to doubt. The nun was talking about doubting Catholicism, but I took away that limit and asked “If I don’t doubt, how can I learn anything?”
2. Being reminded to honor my mother and father who were occasionally violent. I gradually decided that parents have to earn honor and my parents, though they worked hard, had not earned it.

As a 5 year old child I saw the pattern of lies by all believer adults and concluded alleged gawds were just like alleged Santa Claus and alleged Easter bunnies and alleged vaginal virgins birthing alleged baby gawds in dirty donkey stables every midnight December 24-25 ....all jokes at my expense like teeth fairies instead of human dental morphology....I did not like heaven bribes and hell threats and my dead cat kept out of both squished under car wheels and buried in our back yard.....reality has always been preferred by me over religious lies

In spite of being raised in a rigorously repressive household (my mother was the church organist), church services, Sunday school, choir practice on Wednesdays -- my life was miserable. For all the investment I was forced to make in religiosity, the only benefit I could expect would come after death. Clearly, other people were enjoying life while they were alive! My scepticism began early, but I only formalized it in my 60's.

The absurdity of it all after having experienced it with the Worldwide Church of God & the House of Yahweh. Lawd have mercy, put a stop to my misery!

For me it was rational thinking, reality and the craziness of followers.

One of the most serious issues is that your religion is right while all the others are wrong. This idea has no basis in reality.

By the time I was 15, I had read the Bible 3 times from cover to cover. Each time I read it, the more I saw that did not make sense, or which I knew not to be true. Further, I did not like being depicted as a sinner just for having. normal human thoughts and urges. From there increasing knowledge and education took over.

At age 13, I became an atheist when I realized the Bible is just a book of stories or fables written by men. Like Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Michigan had a hard winter that year. Bored and restless, my brother, 10, and I read the World Book Encyclopedias together.

I was inspired by rational philosophers Descartes and Spinoza, who were bravely anti-theist (anti-god), anti-church and anti-clergy in the 1600s, when heretics were burned at the stake. They had to go into hiding. Their rational philosophy writings inspired the European Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment Period was was a philosophical, intellectual and cultural movement of the 17th and 18th centuries. It stressed reason, logic, criticism, and freedom of thought over dogma, blind faith, and superstition.

There were undoubtedly many issues but the one that stood out was when I went to a leadership meeting and was told that we could not question anything we were being told by the higher-ups . I had always questioned but thought the good outweighed the bad. At that moment I decided to step down from my position and I did so as soon as I returned home.

The models of the natural world that come out of science are far more useful than the models that come out of religion. Putting it simply, "It [science] works, bitches!". There is also the issue that different religions and different sects within each religion often contradict each other. Again putting it simply "Therein lies madness!".

My own journey out of theism started with Karl Popper's idea of falsifiability, the upshot of which was "Nobody has ever provided any falsifiable evidence to support the existence claim of any god in the last 5,000 years.".

Even from an early age I had a hard time believing what was being taught to me. Raised catholic and saw the BS at an early age. Eat meat on fridays, go to hell. Change the rules and I guess all those in hell got an "out of hell card," and some burn ointment. 400 years behind on truthful science, no problem. We'll get around to the truth someday. And lets not even mention all the pedophiles who run the scam.

Welcome to the asylum. Enjoy your stay.

I was born an atheist.
Indoctrination didn't take.

I simply stoppef listenong to the preachers as I realized that every faith had different beliefs and vould not be right. I then spent years alone without any outside influence in intensive study of the Bible. I did not care what people said I wanted to know what god said. It becane apparent that the Bible conflicted with itself so much that the Christian God could not be real.

My motivation for studying the scriptures was to convince others that they were true. I studied the prophecies of scripture and compared them to history. To my shock and dismay, I discovered quite a few prophecies that were never fulfilled, and the time for their fulfillment had passed. As I continued to study, I found not only false prophecies, but lots of contradictions, and stories contradicted by science. That is what convinced me that religion is a scam based on mythology.

Philosophy classes at school. Although I was never into religion.