When I was very young, my parents and sister and I all went to church together regularly, and at night my mother told me to say my prayers. Being very young, I recited the "Now I lay me down to sleep..." prayer, it being the only one I knew. But the part about dying before I wake worried me, so I asked her about it. She said not to worry, because little children didn't go to hell anyway. So I asked her when would I be old enough that I wouldn't automatically go to heaven. She said, "I don't know, twelve I suppose."

So I worried about this for a while around the time I turned twelve, especially since I was feeling the stirrings of puberty. But it turned out that this was also around the time that my father got fed up with the church and stopped going. I think my mother kept going because she played the piano for our church and she enjoyed that. I talked to my father about this, and he expressed his general doubts about religion.

My father was a philosopher at heart, and a deep thinker, and I admired him and tried to emulate him. So I ended up, after one last stab at it, leaving the church as well.

This "last stab" was mainly because I was smitten with the preacher's daughter. I went to church and got "saved", thinking this would finally reveal the deep secrets. I was very disappointed. I was the same, the teaching was the same, etc. It was nothing at all. That's when I left the church for good.