I believe at a very young age, I realized that adults used religious doctrine for selfish reasons. Raised Roman Catholic in a Cajun french community, I experienced the restrictions on females, distorting biblical teachings to control groups and often the sheer impractically of some of the rules..ex. not eating meat on Friday. Lol good for chickens
Maybe...I just don't buy the man made God with all the different flavors of the month. More inclines to go with native Indians evaluation of our place in nature. Respect and kindness

I always felt like it was weird, silly, and unbelievable... at age 10 and 11 my parents had me in a Catholic school because the public school outside the base we were stationed at was not accredited with the state. The Catholic school was. I was stunned at how many things about the Catholic religion were tweaked different compared to the Baptist upbringing I seen. I mean stuff like purgatory I had never even heard of as a Baptist, yet it was mentioned almost daily in Catholic School back then. I really had a sense of "How are these religions getting all this different crap out of the same book?"

Lived in Italy for 4 years after that and it becomes clear the Catholic church is a financial machine. And not a very friendly one either. One day I'll tell the story of the Catholic Orphanage I worked at as a Boy Scout overseas, for some kids Eagle Scout project. Grim, grim, grim. First time I saw my Navy Pilot dad cry.

That was as a kid... where it seemed stupid and ugly.

As an adult Ive learned to hate it. My parents retired to a small town where my mom grew up. They started attending church regularly and my mom even started playing piano. My dad has slid slightly right wing, and now mumbles anti-abortion stuff from time to time. But my mom... She has gone from saying stuff like...
"See that little girl walking down the street? I feel so bad for her. Her mom is in jail for drugs. Apparently she is here in town living with her old step dad who was married to her mom back when she was like 3 to 7 yeara old. Now 13 and he's the only family she sort of has, and he's a drinker. I pray for her."

And after a few years it became...

"See that girl? She's the new little slut in town
Her mom is in jail for drugs, and all the other relatives are dead. Somehow she is living with the guy who used to be her stepdad when she was little bitty. He has his other kids every other weekend, and he's always drunk. He's probably raping her and its just a matter of time before she gets shipped off for selling meth!"

My mom has literally gone from being concerned about all people to openly despising most of them. And its not old age. It's fire and brimstone hateful Baptist rhetoric rolled out every Sunday.

Not something bad but something good. When I was very young I figured out that I valued truth over fiction and after analyzing church (fiction peddled as truth) stories I discovered Faith (assertions based without evidence) claims were not consistent with realty. This taught me to question all faith based claims.

Nope. Education, logical and critical thinking, and an open mind willing to question all that I had been taught won over in the end. Thank God!!!

Watching too many people arguing about issues in Bible...I used to love to talk with preachers..and I believed and still believe Jesus was about love...If you don't get that concept you've missed the boat...I can not stand a person going to church all the time and are hateful, arrogant and just down right mean......then have the nerve to judge me cause I said fuck.....huh

Yes, I think it was because Jesus didn't bring me a pony one year for Christmas. No, wait. That would have been Santa Claus.

Not childhood, but my nephew's murder pushed me from agnostic to atheist. So many incipient comments about how "things happen for a reason." Just no. There is nothing divine or preordained about it. The only logical conclusion is that there is no plan, and therefore, no divinity.

Absolutely none. I read about other myths before I read the Abrahamic ones. They were just stories and I have seen nothing about them that makes them real... or contributes to someone being a loving and caring person. My ex wife has a ton of issues, and I can't tell you how many stem from catering to domineering parents that were pointing her to different denominations and telling each other they were wrong.

Nope. Like you I began questioning the narrative early on. It never made sense to me and the questions I asked were never answered. The hard part was learning to live around those who bought into it, including my parents.

If the bad thing that happened turned you away from religion — well, it wasn't ALL bad.

Yes

They made me go to Sunday School once (it was a condition of membership of a youth organisation I was part of.) I dropped out of the organisation rather than attend a second time. School was something I was already forced to do 5 days a week. I wasn't going to volunteer to do it again for one of the remaining two.

I've never really been religious, but I suppose there were times when I was younger that I didn't question it. We sang hymns in school that were all about how lovely God was and how he makes our crops fertile and stuff, but I never gave it too much thought either way. I'd recite The Lord's Prayer parrot fashion along with everyone else. (Great fun when they move you to a Catholic school, and you continue into "For thine is the kingdom" after everyone else has shut up.) But I think once I seriously started to debate God with myself, none of it ever made sense.

Something bad? Oh, yes. Horrible. It was all the stupid. It burned. It hurt.

Okay, that was a little tongue-in-cheek, but it really was the reason for me to walk a different path. I asked questions and got dumb in return. Sometimes I got a little sputtering and not even an attempt at dumb.

I had a rough childhood...being shuffled from one relative to the next...but Ive always been curious and asked questions...I was brought up for the most part...strict christian.....Im STILL curious and asking questions...thing is...the answers to many of my questions have led me in a different direction than I was taught as a kid.

Yes religion itself is that bad thing that made me turn away run away fight to stay away from the bigotry of faiths. ...age 5 I hated the Santa Claus lies, Ishtar boy bunny laying candy eggs on digshit lawns and alleged vaginal virgins birthing alleged baby gods in dirty donkey stables LIES HELL THREATS HEAVEN BRIBES my dead cat not allowed into heaven when she was run over by an xian car. ....fuck faiths. ...jail theocrats. ...quit prEying to the flag. ...for decades I cut out the gibberish sound gawd from my IN (empty hole) WE TRUST money scratch the lie off my coins

If anything, my bad experiences in life led me to turn to God early in life. It was reason that turned me away from God. My father, a lukewarm believer, always said, "God gave us a brain for a reason."

The only bad thing that happened to me in church was that I got married, and that was my own stupidity.

I never really accepted religion, god, or biblical fairytales. I remember thinking at a young age that they were absurd.

None.

No - just common sense.

My bad experiences regarding religion or a belief in God weren't stemmed as much from childhood as much as from adulthood. However, growing up, my mother hit on priests. But as an adult, I was married to a man who was a Church of Christ member, which is basically like a cult. Since we had both been married before, we had to be voted into the church, even though he grew up with this religion. After twelve years of trying to follow all the church rules and my exes rules, I left the marriage and the church and never looked back!

It didn’t make any since to me. The fact that an all knowing god set up two innocent man and woman then punished them for what exactly they were predestined to do. Another thing that baffled me was the whole Hell thing. That probably has to be one of the most disgusting things any human could come up with. An all knowing god would already know in advance which people would be going to Heaven and Hell so what exactly since would it make to just go ahead and allow the ones he would already know is going to Hell to even be born just to send them to Hell when their time comes to be born then die someday?

The turning away from religion thing just always made sense to me. It was logical. The bad somethings that happened to me as a child only turned me into an A-hole.

Nope, other than a couple heartbreaking breakups, some depression, and some poverty during college, I've honestly lead a fairly charmed life.

I turned away from because it was morally bankrupt and a lie, not because I was "mad at god and rebelling"

As afamily when I was very young, we were not religious at all." At seven, my mother became a JW. Parents divorced almost immediately. I was forced to participate in JW and resented it greatly.I was very observant of how other faiths manifested, and quickly came to the realization that they ALL were nothing but mind games with no factual basis.

Lied to since birth. Beaten in the name of religion. Even had a fanatic make it a joke about beating me, all in the name of religion. Also was offered $500 by said fanatic to run away from home. Fanatic would regularly steal from me. My mother turned a blind eye and ignored the actions of the fanatic she married.