I left religious faith because it consistently failed to accurately explain or predict life experiences. I did not like unpleasant surprises, and wanted a better mental model of reality than "invisible beings and realms are working on my behalf because I'm a good boy".

As to why one would think such a thing to begin with ... when you are not yet six years old and all your parents, teachers and mentors tell you that these things are true and what you need to do to please god and, by proxy, them ... of course you do it. Because what else are you going to do at that age.

In my case I started having cognitive dissonance in my early teens, overt doubts in my early twenties, and made the actual break starting in my mid 30s. It goes faster for some, slower for others.

You just lack the operant conditioning we deconverts received. Only the minority of people with really good bullshit filters even as children, escape this influence if it's present in their family. I would imagine, less than 5%, and even then, it's an imperfect protection, particularly if your family is really aggressive with indoctrination.

I was brought up Catholic but became atheist when I gave up faith for being evidence-based. Faith allowed me to believe Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny were real. Now I think faith is not a reliable epistemology.

When mormons went whole hog for Bush in 2004.

You can sum up the book of mormon with "don't support governments that start wars based on lies". It got me thinking that maybe the religious folks weren't following their book at all. I took this lesson with me to bible study for the next 6 months. Once I was on to it, I noticed that bible study was not an excersize in learing gods word but an excersize in twisting the words in the bible to mean what you think they should mean. The christians go to a weekly meeting where the practice twisting words and meaning until they can come to whatever convoluted morality suits their situation today. Which pretty much explains the state of christianity in these states.