I am certain that we are all born atheists.
Whether we stay that way or not depends on how well our indoctrination takes, or doesn't at all.

Everyone has a different journey.

For me, it was a conscious decision. I attempted find a connection to religion several times, just to make sure I wasn't overlooking some aspect of it that resonated for me. But I came up empty. When I finally arrived at the realization that I simply did not believe, I felt lighter and free.

We are all born atheists. Then, we are indoctrinated with someone's religion. To become atheist/agnostic again, we must think our way out of the indoctrination. As apostates mature, we develop a greater appreciation of evidence based thinking and dismiss faith - which is believing in things without evidence.

I was not raised with religion. At age five, my mom dropped me off at a Sunday school. The woman who greeted me inquired if I knew about Jesus and God. When I denied knowing anything about that, she got a shocked look on face, and told me I was in danger of great evil. After that, I never had a desire to join any religion, thinking it was raving mumbo jumbo.

Was not raised to be religious in any meaningful sense, and so I grew up knowing little of it, but always assumed that the religious were basically good people with basically good philosophies. Then in my later years in education, I met with theist teachers and found that they were opposed to everything that I thought valuable and beautiful, and that they were often the most arrogant, self absorbed and shallow people who stood against every thing that seemed good in the world, for entirely selfish and greedy reasons, the shock of that has never left me.

I didn't decide to be anything. Being Agnostic just is what it is in my thinking.

I simply grew tired of christian values. There was always a greater and more profound possibility to explore the human experience. All Christians live with their head shoved up their asses. They sugar coat the world around them ,and they see life through rose-colored glasses. There is nothing simple about the life we live. Life requires people to understand its not just black and white, but all Shades of Gray in between.

I personally grew out of religion the more educated I became.

I was never indoctrinated by my parents. My dad was never religious, and my mum only regained her Catholicism as she started to feel she was getting closer to death. "Diabetics don't live past 60" was her mantra for about 15 years. She made it into her mid 70s, having spent more than a decade convinced that death was hiding down the back of the sofa.

I was religious for about 3 days in my mid to late teens. The JW's came knocking, saying they were friends of my mum (liars) and left me with a book that seemed to make a lot of sense. I made it 3 days playing by their rules, before teenage testosterone led to my need to have an orgasm outweighing my need to go to heaven (not that most of us do in the JW's version of events.) So I did, and that was the end of that.

For me it was a conscious decision, born of reason and disgust in equal measures

That's as individual as each person.

I became an atheist at age 13, when I realized the Bible is just a book of stories written by men.

Was never a believer. Mom dropped us kids off for Sunday school, shoving us into the arms of the Lord. She went home to bed. Dad never went to church.

Michigan had a hard winter that year. On the lakeside, snow drifted up to the second floor of the house.

Bored and restless, my brother, 10, and I read the World Book Encyclopedias. That's when I discovered Lee had a photographic memory. (Another story.)

I was fascinated with rational philosophers Spinoza and Descartes, who bravely defied the church and existence of God in the 17th century when heretics were burned at the stake. Their anti-theist and anti-church stance made sense to me.

Got revolted from reading the OT, hated the idea of "singing endless hosannas"....sounds like Hell to me! And now of course observing the "lovely" forms xianity is taking.....

AT some point, when you start to learn real information, you just have to give up on fairytales. Some people can't do it! One of the biggest problems in modern society is that too many people believe in fairytales. They are desperate to get you to believe in them too!!

Well, at a certain stage I stopped accepting the so called proof of the existence of God. The "problem" I don't accept what people say as proof of the non-existence of God as well...

It wasn’t a decision. I’ve never believed. As young as age 6, sitting in the church I was taken to for years, I remember thinking: do the grownups really believe this?! I already knew Santa was my parents, tooth fairy too. I saw the stories at church the same way. Just stories that people told. I knew they weren’t real. Over the years, I’d ask older people at church questions they couldn’t or wouldn’t answer to my satisfaction, which cemented my idea that it was just stories they told themselves, that they chose to believe. I stopped going around age 16.

If you simply "decide" to be an atheist you can also "decide" to go back the theism. I knew of such a person once in another forum. She always thought the idea of a god was so grand, and she really wished it had been true. One day she announced she could no longer be a member in good conscience because she had married a religious man and was a believer again. OMG, how would you deal with thoughts inside that head? I can imagine her praying for the "faith" that it might take to believe and praying along with words like "help my unbelief." This would be shere torture.

In my case logic and evidence played a big part of becoming atheist. Too much bible study cover to cover and being honest with myself about the invisible man, his kingdom, and his plan. None of it holds water.

Mine was an abrupt severing of the relationship. One day and it was over. I was taking part in a read the bible in a year and starting asking questions and was told not to worry about them!

Sometimes (like me) they are true seekers unimpressed with the surface of things and dig deeper. The deeper they go, the more they realize there IS no depth. It's all surface. Superficial. No substance, just illusion.
So, they start out DECIDING to get to the heart of the matter, and find no heart, just words. They look to get to the bottom of it, and discover smokescreens and lies.
They then REALIZE they cannot continue to believe in something so demonstrably false. This takes a while. But it's the inevitable result.
Sometimes, if if they were lucky enough to have enlightened parents, no revelations and/or counter-brainwashing necessary.
They just know.

It depends on how devoutly religious one was raised to be and how intellectually curious they are probably. If the religious views you were taught were lukewarm to begin with and you didn’t have a hugely abusive moment of needing to fight back against religion, you probably grow out of it uneventfully without thinking about it too hard. In my case it had been hammered into my head so hard, for so long, including abuse from such a young age that I had to take a decisive stand against religion and do a lot of research and introspection leading up to that move. It was a big step to call myself an atheist finally. Growing out of it was still the operating force but I had to draw a definitive and sudden line in the sand, rebuild my cosmological perspective of the whole universe to alleviate fear, and unequivocally say even if god did exist he is my enemy; this is where the bullshit stops.

False dichotomy. It can be both and neither.

I was raised Church of Christ. I an going to hell because i remarried after abuse. You only remarry from adultry. I am my happiest with being spiritual. I have religious people are the most judgmental.

I think at some point people hit a minor life crisis when they decide if one should to pray or take charge and face it head on. At that point all the disparate athieistic feelings and thoughts coalesce into a framework, a belief. And it is either accepted or rejected.

Hey. I'm new to this site - and Arkansas. (Fayetteville) Grew up Roman Catholic, but mostly I think because the folks thought that's what one should do, more than any dogmatic beliefs. They taught us early to "question everything", so the whole religion thing didn't last past the age of ten or so!

I was raised as a lutheran, in a small town where everybody “believed.” At age 8 or so, I began to see that I was being asked to believe some rather improbable things (wait a minute...talking snakes? wait, nobody else in the whole world had a boat?). The “decision” to be atheist came from the realization that what the theists believed simply made no sense.