I drifted in and out of belief throughout my childhood and adulthood. I didn't stop believing in the "metaphorical cult" as fernapple puts it until middle age when I decided to transition. Since this condemned me to hell for almost all xtians and the magical unitarians (yes magical, they incorporate wicca into their practice where I attended) didn't attract me any longer. But my first dalliance with atheism was when I was a teen and taking confirmation classes for the Roman Catholic church.

Sorry this will be a long one, I can't make it shorter.

I took a more convoluted route, since like many in the UK I was raised as only a nominal Christian, with little real contact with the actual faith. I did however grow up thinking that people who embraced such a selfless value system, as that preached by Jesus, must be basically very good people, though my family cast doubts on the validity of the more extreme forms.

I did however, like many in the UK, where the schools were largely controlled by the church, end up going to a Christian school. Where I was sadly disillusioned, to find that many who preached and followed Christianity, were often in fact quite horrible people, and their professed Christian values shallow. While being raised to ask questions and respect science and evidence, I soon found it hard to believe literally as I was asked to. Especially so, after my school teachers forbade the reading of the classical literature of Rome and Greece. Because, they said, it was wholly out of date, immoral, and of no worth in the modern Christian world. So of course being a child, and being told not to do something, I read all of them I could get. I only half understood them, and I do not now, agree with much of what I read, but they did tell me, that there were alternate views to the Christian dogma, and that the Christians did not have a monopoly on virtue. (Also that my school teachers told lies.)

I was then, at about thirteen or fourteen, introduced to the metaphorical cult, where religion is seen as a metaphor, not to be taken literally, but to be interpreted as containing deep wisdom, ( Often hidden and cryptic wisdom. ) which is today, the main cult among the English clergy. And for a while it seemed to resolve all the problems. But then at higher education I met a school master, perhaps the most horrible and dishonest of all people I ever met, who espoused the metaphorical cult as his main ideology, but used it to justify the most horrible extremes of racism, class bias and sexism.

At which point I learned that wisdom could not be based on interpretation alone, and that things which are most open to interpretation, but are still treated with respect as supposed sources of deep ( Magical.) wisdom, are the natural intellectual weapon of the criminally minded. And I became aware of the deep dishonesty of a clergy, who preached literal belief to the congregation on Sunday, and reaped the benefits of that, while talking the metaphorical cult among themselves on weekdays. Who poured scorn on science, yet made claims that their wild metaphorical interpretations came with the same rigour, and the same value as science. The relativists, many different ways of seeing the truth, but all equal, view, and that hard work, courage and rigour, such as that shown by science, is essentially effort wasted, when equal wisdom comes, equally well, from sitting comfortably in the warm, reading confirmation biased literature written by fellow theists.

At which point I lost it with religion.

I was probably around 7 years old, when I started questioning what the nuns were teaching in catechism class. The fact that my questions couldn't be answered satisfactorily and my inability to believe I had a guardian angel watching over me, had me questioning during my whole childhood. I was the only one of my siblings who was allowed to drop out of catechism, never got confirmed, nor married in the church, where all my siblings did. My family was fine with me being the odd one out during my childhood.

I would never try to talk someone out of believing what is core to their sense of values, but I don't mind saying things that get them questioning. I got a little bit of grief from family members in my later years. My younger sister seemed to want to paint me as unenlightened to her children. Whatever.

I prefer to just be happy with my thoughts and leave them to theirs, unless and until they impose them on me. It was mostly my in-laws, later in life, who took offense with my spiritual views and excluded me from family gatherings since I wouldn't believe in their reason for gathering during the holidays. No matter anymore, since I left their family to be on my own. Now I don't feel like I have any family, except for my children and grandchildren and that's okay with me.

It was at age 30 that I realised the importance of falsifiable evidence to the human condition, and that all theists were complete failures at producing such evidence.

I have a very dear friend who is losing her faith; she sees the disjunction between what she was taught about the Biblical God and the actuality of human suffering.

28. A paragraph in Age Of Reason made me read the book and that put an end to dogmatic beliefs. I was a newly baptized Mormon, at the time, so this was significant. I have regretted it ever since (SMH. That's not true).