Raised religious? How did you come to realize that what you were taught as a child was not true?

Here’s a quick summary of my story: I was raised Catholic and grew up believing in the whole shebang... it’s what I was told and taught all my life. My tiny suburban town was predominantly Catholic and I went to Catholic school until High School. To be embarrassingly honest, I was unaware that there were other religions until I was 12 or 13. In 1993, at age 14, I started studying other religions of the world much to the chagrin of my mother. I had to go to the library and read about them in secret. In 1996 I stopped believing in Catholicism and refused to go to mass anymore. Then in 1998, I fell in love with Buddhism. I considered myself “spiritual, not religious” for a long time after that. In 2009, however I went through a brief period where I started attending church again. It was a non-denominational Christian Church, and very different than the Catholic Church I attended in my youth.

However, a few years ago, I began questioning what kind of God would allow children to be tortured and innocent people to be slaughtered daily - and it just didn’t add up. If God is all powerful, all knowing, and all loving, why not stop the atrocities? Why not make himself known?

Then, in 2016, I heard the term cognitive bias and starting considering that I may have been seeking proof of my own beliefs all along, while ignoring all other, opposing views. I started reading about the brain and specific out of body experiences (something that had always fascinated me and that I considered proof of the spiritual realm) but this time, I tried examining this phenomenon from a secular/scientific standing, and I discovered that so-called spiritual experiences, like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, can be recreated in a lab with electric impulses.

Nowadays, I am a straight-up skeptic. Honestly, I’d like to believe in a God, life after death, and so forth (it was comforting) but the reality is there’s just not enough evidence to convince me.