I remember questioning my mother about Methuselah being 967 years old and things like that. She told me to study the Bible and pray about it and I would understand when I got older. I really wanted to believe but the older I got and the more I knew the harder it got to believe. At age 41 I was forced to accept that the Bible didn't make sense.

My mother raised me going to Christian day care facilities and Sunday church. They made me memorize quite a few of the more popular verses. But everybody there seemed fake. I had questions and their answers were robotic. They were frequently easy to confuse and anger when challenged. Always deferring to "You just have to have faith." ## puke ##

I was probably about 8 when I openly defied the existence of God. I remember sitting outside yelling loudly and daring "him" to appear.

I remember a time in my 20s in the military. Our mail was delivered to us at work and was in the break room. I was in the break room getting coffee, and noticed some kind of atheist publication in a coworker's mail slot. I was a little shocked. I talked to him about it, and he made it seem like no big deal. I remember thinking "I don't really believe in god, but I'm not an ATHEIST!" LoL!

I don't know if I ever REALLY believed. I know there was a period in my teens when I really WANTED to believe - I went to church and youth group regularly. But it just never felt right. Then, I didn't really think too much about it for a long time.

Years later, when I was almost 40, Dawkins published The God Delusion. That was the turning point, I guess. Then I discovered the Atheist Experience podcast. I binge-listened to every single episode they made. I worked mostly alone in an office at the time, so it just played all day long. Sometimes, I'd put on headphones. The year after The God Delusion, Hitchens came out with God Is Not Great.

So, it was around 2006-2007 that I became OK with the label "atheist."

always, actually pantheist describes me better

I grew up going to church, etc., but thankfully got away from that. I started saying I was agnostic when I was maybe 19-20, and became very confident with calling myself an atheist when I was maybe 22-23. It seems like it’s been longer than only a few years since I’m 24 now.

For me, it was a pretty gradual process. I was raised in a Christian household and sent to a Catholic school until eighth grade, so my beliefs were pretty strong until then. I went to a public high school and discovered a whole new world, new music and started questioning things. It was in college that any doubts I might have had vanished and I knew there were no gods. Critical thinking and learning about other cultures, studying mythology and history... really opened my eyes. This is one of the reasons I think the first two years of college should be mandatory and available to all!

I didn't start calling myself an atheist until I was 10 because that's when I started using the internet and I didn't know what to call a person who didn't believe in God before that.

I started to "come out" as an atheist at around age 40. I had been living in Texas, and working as an attorney, and felt intimidated to express my views due to the common belief that atheists are amoral. I didn't want to be judged by family, friends, judges, and colleagues. At a certain point I just decided to face the backlash and be open and honest when the subject came up. I certainly felt more self actualized and honest which helped me to become a better person.

16 years old

It was a gradual process to get there, but I made the decision to become an atheist in February 2015, and pretty much identified as one from the very beginning.

Looking back on it, it wasn't just one instance, it was many instances that kept leading me on the path towards being an atheist. It was an "A-ha!" moment when I took the plunge, but it still took years of "soul" searching to get there.

Well it just didnt seem real to me. I decided to do some research and get other points of view. what i was hearing made a lot of sense, so i still try to get more information . I try to use reason , logic and what seems to be the truth. whatever is true is what i think is real

Began to see through the BS in 2nd grade, but I remember it still upset me that god was watching me go to the bathroom in 5th grade (They said he was always watching us, right?) By 8th grade I was pretty sure no one was there & within a year or 2 identified as atheist.

If you mean by publicly identifying as such, it was after my wife ran off with one of our friends. I didn't think there was any remaining benefit to putting up with the flawed arguments, or of "going along to get along".

If you mean by internally recognizing that I didn't believe and was no longer trying to deceive myself into believing, it was a few years earlier. I had been trying to build some logical support for my continued belief to strengthen it, and each attempt led me closer to concluding that it was unsupportable at all.

Hello. I guess ever since I was a little kid I never really believed in God, per se. I always believed that there was a Unity between everyone and everything and the belief in quote-unquote God figure was trying to express that. I can't say that I ever had a moment here I thought everything that they ever taught me was a lie! I guess that's kind of because my dad was never very Jewish. He didn't know Hebrew he didn't like going to Temple oh and that's another thing I was raised to reform Jewish which is Jewish very light and kind of humanist and as I was growing up in this movement of Judaism which was somewhat more secularized as time went on even more so than the more religious other Jewish groups. At the same time reform Jews who initially were very against tradition and ritual and all this kind of stuff head covering the prayer shawl that was frowned upon when I was growing up. But by the time I was about 12 or 13 women and men started wearing the head coverings and the prayer shawls and it became what it is now which is most people or a lot of people maybe half where them and half don't. in this environment of moral ambiguity and people questioning and doing their own individual things I guess I was influence by that individuality of belief. I was taught that you didn't even need to believe in God to be Jewish which is actually true you're Jewish because your mother is Jewish it's an inheritance. so in some sense more than just being a religion Judaism is somewhat tribal in that it goes by buy lineage and there is conversion but it's really not frowned upon but it's it's not sought after.

I have always been very connected to my ancestral feeling of being Jewish. The Jewish community that I grew up in our family was not well accepted but I'd have to say that we were also not well accepted outside of the Jewish Community either.

Fragmenting myself from the people who were fervent Jews and even died for their face or were killed just because they were thought to be Jews always made me feel like I needed to hold on to that part of my identity for their sake because in a way they did it for me and all of their descendants. so my Assurance anything Jewish is for the most part not religious and I would say not even cultural in the same sense that other people consider themselves cultural shoes although I love a good cream cheese and lox and all that kind of stuff but that's not what makes someone Jewish.

I guess I I would be remiss if I also didn't mention the effective learning about the Holocaust and World War II and the rest of Jewish world history. Often times whether I think myself to or not other people will respond to me in that way and sometimes it's not going to be good and so that kind of pushes me back because whether I like it or not it's there and it influences me and it influences others opinions of me. so I guess I can sum it up by saying that you'd he's into me my Judaism is about my identity more than it is about my face although I'm very interested in and I'm profoundly interested in history and science and all kinds of different things and I think learning about who I am as a Jew is part and parcel of that interest in history.

So as an adult I've almost never really gone to Temple on my own or synagogue although I have tried it's just hard to find a community especially in Central Florida where I live on the West Coast. I did live in Israel for 2 years I studied some Hebrew and I thought of living kibbutz, it didn't work out. 9/11 happened I felt like World War 3 was starting and I came back to be closer to my family.

Some more out of respect for my ancestors I do keep a little kosher not a lot. I avoid pork and shellfish and sometimes I'm back and forth about eating milk and meat together. aside from the fact that sometimes it's really hard just separate that in this area of the world all of the time, it does taste good and at the same time though it is not the best for digestion at two different kinds of proteins and enzymes cancel each other out. So I think I am going to try to do it more but more for Digestive reasons.

I am a pretty self-aware uncertain things. I can say that based on the way my friends and people throughout my life have addressed me and describes me I think I can say I'm nice person. And I think that one reason why I'm pretty explicit I'm eating this way is because when I eat this way it's a teachable moment somebody can say yes I'm mad at you and she was nice. You don't know how many times I've met people and I didn't tell them then I'm Jewish or something and then I hear it 3rd hand from other people, telling me about other people they know who've never met a Jewish person before and these people end up either loving or hating me before they've even met me! So meager kosher observance can also be an opportunity that provides an opportunity for teachable moments. I don't fit any stereotype about being Jewish not in my appearance not in my behavior not in how much money I make or my preoccupation with money. I love to provide that two people who are stuck in a stereotypical world who only think within stereotypes.

College. After taking some philosophy courses with close examination of other religions, the contradictions started to show.

At 12 knew I did not believe in a god, nor that jesus ever existed, was a non-believer, until I found the name that fit perfect, atheist...thru and thru

It wasn't an instantaneous thing for me. Took a few years for me to eventually come to the conclusion of atheism. I guess the time I can formally say it is when I was 20. I didn't announce it until I was 22 or so. Was kind of afraid to for awhile, and eventually so many people kept ask it that I just decided to say screw it and deal with the fallout.

I remember probably the last time I prayed as a Christian, I was about 11 or 12, sitting in my room.

My step-dad had been in the picture for several years by then, generally abusing me (which my mom defended). I was just starting to recognize the abuse, which had recently started including sexual assault (which I also didn't understand or stop when it first started, and when I did, it gradually got more violent as he kept upping his offensive, and me my defensive). They made me see social workers, but when I told them what was going on at home, without even understanding it was anything incriminating, the worker told my parents what I said and then I got punished once we got home.

I basically reached a point where I realized if god wasn't answering my prayers, it was either because he didn't exist, or wasn't someone worth believing in.

I was proudly atheist for a few years until we finally moved out, which triggered the post part of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which in turn was so traumatizing it caused me to develop multiple personalities as a coping mechanism so someone else could step in when the PTSD was kicking my ass. Anyway, experiences with that made me believe in reincarnation for most of highschool, then spent a lot of time in psych wards about a year later. The multiple personalities had only lasted about a year before the others all disappeared or converged. It was like all of the closest people, closer than any non-telepathic relationship could comprehend, dying at once, tearing me apart, and being fed with memories and emotions that weren't my own and muddled my identity. One of the other patients was Wiccan, and some of their beliefs resonated with me and helped me cope, so then I was spiritual, non-religious for a while, still leaning toward reincarnation but also acknowledging that may not be right (whether that meant some religion was more right, or there was nothing).

Then I stopped believing anything specific, my only belief being "I don't know. Maybe there's something, maybe there's nothing, maybe there's something none of the religions have gotten right". If any human beliefs were right, or close, I thought it was by fluke, not because we'd actually interacted with another plane of existence, or had any actual evidence. Probably a few months ago, I realized if humans never existed to bring up these ideas to deal with their own existential crises, it would seem really absurd for there to be anything. I think people are more inclined to believe even the possibility of it because we're raised with it being normalized. I now consider it highly unlikely that there's anything, which is a relief, but none of my other beliefs were enough to deter me from death or feel obligated to life anyway.

Was non-religious growing up.

Became a Christian late teens/early twenties.

Reverted to my natural state about mid-twenties.

Became a conscious atheist late-twenties.

I always knew from four years old, that it was a story and not a very good one at that - I was read really good stories and learned to read for myself really easily - I didnt know the word for it till I was fairly old about fourteen I went on a CND rally with my best friend and there were lots of older teens there who pretty much filled us in on everything we needed to know

When Jesus came from the Heavens and said, "there is no God."

I was very young. My parents didn't like it. The church youth group (that I was still dragged to) didn't like it. I didn't care cos I was 'trouble' lol

Catholic school

I tried so many Christian churches throughout my life. My 32 y.o. daughter died of an accidental overdose and it shattered everything I believed. I was told that God would never abandon me or give me more than I can handle.WRONG! My trying to undoctrinate myself has been a long and odd process. But once I realized there most likely isn't a god watching over me, I decided how I wanted to live and felt such liberation. What I didn't expect was at 59 years old, when I came out 5 years ago, that I would lose friends, not to realizing just how Christian America is and how in that, there is some real bigotry against anyone who doesn't believe as your run of the mill Christian does.

I've never believed in God, gods, or so called supernatural stuff. If it existed...it would be natural!