I was never religious. Just lucky I guess!

Religious lies !

hypocrisy, followed by educating myself

I grew up in a catholic family, and somewhere around the the 7th or 8th grade, they have this "voluntary" activity (voluntary meaning your parents voluntell you you'll be doing it) called a search weekend (actually four days), which amounts to an extended brainwashing session.

You arrive at a designated location on a Friday afternoon. A building (usually a catholic school) with all of the clocks removed and all of the windows blacked out so you can't tell what time of day it is. Over the next four days, you are bombarded with catholic doctrine constantly and allowed very little food or sleep.

Now... even at this age I knew damn well what the hell brainwashing was. Yet, they kept on telling us, "it's not brainwashing because the Pope approves it".

I remember thinking to myself, let me get this straight: Does this mean that if there is a turd on my plate during dinner, if the Pope says it's not a turd then I should go ahead and eat it?

I survived that four day crazy fest, and it wound up having the exact opposite of the intended effect on me. It turned me off of organized religion completely.

I was raised in a family of devout Methodists. We went to Sunday School and two services on Sunday, and "prayer meetings on Wednesday. By the time I was 15, I had read the Bible from cover to cover 3 times. At the age of 17 I was elected as president of our Methodist Youth Fellowship subdistrict covering 2 counties.

My movement away from religion began in my early to mid teens. I did not like the way that normal human thoughts and urges made me feel sinful -- a bad person. Each time I read the Bible, I noted more and more implausible stories and inconsistencies. By the time I had read Revelations the 3rd time, I was convinced that it was written by a raving lunatic.

When I went away for college, I stopped going to church and ceased all religious activities. I was an agnostic for a long time, taking the position that I did not know and simply did not care -- that religion was simply irrelevant. That remained my stance until my forties, when I shifted to a totally atheistic stance and have become stronger and stonger in that stance over the past 35 + years.

Simply reading the holy babble turned me atheist.

I was raised Nazarene. My grandmother was very devout and I loved to read. Whenever I did something she didn't like she'd tell me to read the bible. So I did, multiple times. Reading it over and over made all the inconsistencies glaringly obvious, then when I went to science class and realized how much sense the secular view of reality made in contrast, I came to the conclusion that christianity was just old myths that people were still clinging to.

Read Bertrand Russell "Why I am not a Christian" when I was a teen. That was the game changer for me

I was raised a Mormon in a small town in Utah, I went to college and became a nurse. As a 16 year old I attended a sunrise testimony and was more move by the environment than by the words. It just didn’t make sense to me. I studied my way out. My parents and one brother were so angry at me. My other brother blazed the path for me. I also married out of the church and that helped. I now attend a Sunday coffee with other like minded survivors.

I was raised Roman Catholic, did a good +10 years in Sunday school or CCD as it was called. Personal I don't think I ever had a faith, as a child I believed because that's what everyone told me to believe. Kinda like Santa Claus or the Tooth fairy, slowly I started to realize that what these people are telling me can't possibly be real. By the time I reached my teen years I was self aware enough to be a full on atheist and was encouraged by my mother to not voice my belief ( or lack of) to anyone as it would in her words "kill my grandmother"
You maybe interested to know I do have a brother and a sister that continue to believe.

Oh and my grandmother passed away.

Natural causes, it wasn't my atheism that killed her.

Religion.

I was raised as a generic christian but encouraged to think for myself. Eventually, I heard another christian kid tell someone that they were going to hell for the sole reason that they didn't believe in God and that the morality of their actions was irrelevant if they didn't believe. In that moment, I decided that such a god must be evil if all he really cares about is being worshipped and began questioning from there.

Just got woke bro.

Quite simply, and this happened at a very young age and to quote Matt Dillahunty....;This shit made no sense'

At the age of 8 or 9 it didn't stand up to my limited abilities to scrutinise it and it festered from there.

I thought god was leading to be with catholic cult. A family member had a problem with that. I don't need anyone to tell me what to believe. She told me your a baptist and should now better. So, I left the baptist cult and became an atheist. It's hard to believe how closed minded I was. Well, I do come from a very religious family. I'm sure if I told them I'm an atheist, it wouldn't go well. I shouldn't be ashamed of my beliefs or sexaulity. I found being an atheist very liberating and wished I did this years ago.

.....Seems every Book has a page on Hate and or Damnation.....

Below is what I wrote in response to a similar question back in February. If you genuinely want more detail, I wrote a chapter of about 6500 words about it in an autobiography (for family) that covered the first third of a century of my life. Too much to put here, obviously, but I could email it if you think it would be helpful for your research.

Between the ages of 3 and 12 I lived in a household that consisted only of me, my parents, and my father's aunt (I have no siblings). My parents were church-goers, but (luckily for me) far from fanatical: they went once or twice a month (taking me with them, of course). Only my great-aunt was insufferably religious, but not in an evangelical way, more in a strict Presbyterian sort of way — no games, whistling or excessive noise allowed on Sundays, for instance. I think it was she who started me thinking this whole religion thing wasn't all that great.

Then there was Sunday school, which I utterly disliked. It was on Sunday afternoon, so if it was one of those Sundays that I'd been to church in the morning, I'd lost pretty much the whole day. And it involved learning by heart some bible verses and bits of the shorter catechism, which made even less sense than the bible.

My great-aunt died when I was 12. I think by that time I was well on the way to being an atheist, and when I found out that Sunday school, unlike day school, wasn't actually compulsory, I simply stopped going. Church itself I didn't mind so much, and I can even remember one sunny, frosty Christmas morning that I practically dragged my parents there. But I was already on what my mother would have seen as the slippery slope away from faith. After a number of months of futile attempts at prayer, following the guide at the back of my hymn-book, and after reading Fred Hoyle's The Nature of the Universe, I decided that Christianity was not for me.

My mother was very unhappy about it, and always hoped I would 'return to the fold'. My father never expressed an opinion at any stage, as far as I can recall.

I grew up in North Carolina, in the Bible belt, as southern Baptist. I attended many churches until I left the state at 16. When I was 15 my father committed suicide. I was still pretty religious at that time, and looked to god for help. I prayed for the next two years that things in my life would get better, but instead they got severely worse. Eventually I decided that even if there was a god, he didn't care about me, and I wasn't gonna care about him. That eventually shifted into my current belief, of atheism.

Translating John's Gospel in the King James Version from the original Classical Greek during my senior year at a Roman Catholic prep school was the natural progression after my mother stopped our family from going to church when the minister began injecting politics into religion. I was 5, and I am so happy religion was never forced down my throat by anyone-- certainly not by my parents-- not even the Catholic high school I attended, which focused on critical thinking and the analysis of facts.
The exercise in the translation work we did was very revealing. The English version is little like the original John wrote on Patmos in the original Greek and revealed the KJV for what it is: translated by monks for the benefit of the clergy and the aristocracy. Common men were still illiterate and religion was the way to manipulate the faithful.(sound familiar?) Remember, the Catholic Mass was celebrated in Latin until Vatican II in 1962.

Methodist, and simply growing up and learning about science and religion, no one thing individually.

Raised Catholic.
First conflict was in early catechism when confronted with virgin birth. When I asked how it was possible I was told it was a matter of my having faith. Even at that age I knew people must have their heads in the sand.

I was raised Catholic, twelve years of Catholic school, etc. I left the church when I saw the hypocracy of the priests. Once, a priest refused to give Communion to a woman who was not wearing the required chapel veil (or hat). He thoroughly snubbed and embarrassed her. Second, I had a priest unzip my dress, zip it up quickly and laugh that he was "only kidding." Once I left the Catholic environment to go to UCLA, I had culture shock. I then realized how well I had been brain-washed.

This is a tough question because it was so long ago. The best I can recall is that it was a natural evolution. It wasn't just one thing that led me to be a non-theist. I read a few articles that raised questions, I hitched-hiked around the country making a few memorable observations and I listened to several people far more intelligent i.e., enlightened than I am and without really thinking about it I was asked one day if I believed and I said "no". It was really a watershed moment, not the most significant event in my life.

I was raised Catholic - I went to catechism, I attended for one year a Catholic school, I attended services at all major church-related celebrations and I was an altar boy. I didn't encounter any negative experiences. At the Catholic school, there was a nun that took an interest in me - she saw that I was not on the same level as my peers when it came to certain subjects and she took upon herself to catch me up to speed. As an altar boy, I served at several funerals, at the conclusion of which the priest would take us out to get ice cream. This only happened after funerals and while I didn't get the mindset - we had a lot of fun. Overall, my experiences with my church or the others I attended as I was going through my journey were positive.

The only negative experience I had (likely not relevant but I gotta tell the story) happened in 1976. After completing catechism, I received a statue of Jesus holding the world in the palm of his hands. Not long after I was placed in foster care. One of the first things I did after arriving at my first foster home was ask for a safe place to store that statue. I was given a location in the basement that was never accessed. Two months later I was being sent to a new temporary foster home - on the day of the move I went down to retrieve the statue only to discover that the world had fallen out of the statue's hands and broke into several pieces. It proved to be prophetic.

Well, I was raised to think about things, and exposed to various beliefs (intentionally). Though raised Catholic, through confirmation, my mother is Jewish so we also learned and participated in important Jewish holidays and customs. It was kinda neat to learn it all, though as I got older I better understood that Jewish is also an ethnicity and culture, not just a religion. We rarely attended Jewish faith activities; emphasis was on culture. I'm grateful for that, still.
Around age 16, I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease. Not going to deep dive on it now, but it was the clear turning point of questioning why God would create, present such challenges? That questioning never left, though my engagement in faith activities continued to diminish. The final step? Well, I graduated with a social work degree. Helping others through difficult times confirmed my lack of belief in God.

...seeing socialists feed on each other in their greed, hate, and certainly inconsistent morality, coupled with a theory of causation that cannot even explain why they're socialists