Many of the people whom I most admired claimed to be atheists. My aha moment occurred when I finally accepted their claims.

The Richard Dawkins quote, "We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

It was the expectation that two people populated the world. I knew that was genetically impossible at a young age. There was also the lack of evidence to back up most, if not all, stories.

As a kid I was sitting in church with my grandparents who were hardcore Catholics. It just seemed like the priests were no different from the rest of us and I never felt a divine presence or anything at all for that matter. I tried to go to masses with evangelicals to see "speaking-in-tongues", but it honestly just felt like people babbling incoherently.

My parents were not religious. I never really believed.

When I was young I saw all the people around me with their own flavors of religion and just assumed everyone had one they fit into so I searched. I got really into studying religion as a preteen but as I saw how people ascribed to their faiths I just got jaded I guess, seeing how they only held to the tenants they or their society already valued. Then I began looking into the holes in the stories, found science, never looked back.

I had my first real doubts when I was about 12 when I read the Children's Illustrated Old and New Testament...it was graphic to my innocent mind.

What stood out was the violence and numerous contradictions that even a young mind found difficult to swallow...

Probably at primary school, aged about 7 or 8, when I was told that not going to church was a mortal sin the same as murder. As soon as my vocabulary had developed enough I found that the word bullshit was the most appropriate. From that age on I found everything questionable and the more I looked into it, and I did for many years, the more I realised it (religion etc) didn't stand up under the slightest scrutiny.

Virtually every George Carlin comedy special as I was growing up.

There was no defining moment. My once-cherished beliefs just melted away under the bright light of scientific facts and their own absurdity. They just could not be sustained even under the burden of a lifetime of indoctrination.