Every human has a brain and all brains are a bit different in how reality is perceived. Brains are easily manipulated and indoctrinated for various reasons and purposes. You just have the brain that is logical in how it interprets what it observes and rejected indoctrination. IMHO

Interesting.... I have 3 brothers and 4 sisters. All grew up in a very repressive religious environment. I am the youngest and the only one that took partway with beliefs. All my siblings are religious, some more some less but all nonetheless (actually the whole freaking family). Now, that's a very good question. Why am I wired differently than all if them? I don't know but I can tell you this much...it does not bother me a single bit. Also, we all are old enough that even today when we speak on the phone and they try their sales speech, I can tell them ( with love if course !!) Go to hell....and then life goes on. By the way, if God really exist then he truly hates me because guess where I live to? Yup, bible belt !! ? Anyhow, long story short..it should not be a big deal, don't worry about it. Cheers !!

I am the same way.
For me it was kind of simple really. As a child they told me about God, which I believed in as a child does "He's got the whole world on his hands"
Then I saw the world
AND I read the book
and I knew the match game---and they did not match
That was the first crack for me, and I was just a child.

By the time I was of the age of reason I did not believe, but I wanted to understand (and therby believe right?)
BUT the more I learned, the less I believed because it lacks cohesion and integrity and ethics and, and and . . .

SO I could not believe
Perhaps you did a similar thing on the intuitive level?

Because you are a freethinker. Who thinks outside of the biases of politics and religion. Welcome you are among like minded people here.

you can see the forest for the trees? you see reality, that scares other people..

It is an interesting puzzle. Perhaps in a large family one consciously or unconsciously tries to distinguish themselves. More likely, I would think that with 10 siblings looking at the same things more or less at the same times, different perspectives would naturally evolve. There could of course be some other more singular reason for the difference. I am curious what you might say were the reasons that you may have come out different? There is some evidence for features of our brains having something to do with the likelihood of religious belief. With 10 different recombinations having to occur with the parent stock, Perhaps your dice rolled to the least likely combination of features that make for belief. It can be hard to say why anyone ever fails to adopt the basic worldview held by their caregivers.

Because you are capable of rational thought?

There's always a good apple in every rotten bunch.

When I was a kid, maybe between four and six years old, my mother took me to church for Good Friday (I think) when there wasn't a normal service. Instead of the mass service, it was adoration, but I was too young to understand what that meant and knew only that it wasn't the same as a normal day. So, I asked her what we were doing, and she hushed me, and pointed to a large cross containing a monstrance (a display for the host), and told me that if I was quiet and really concentrated I'd see Jesus. Well, that sounded cool as anything to me, so I really focused. Nothing. Some kids have an overactive imagination or are more suggestible, though, and may have imagined seeing Jesus or something, but my brain didn't work that way. And I think therein lay the difference for me. Although I believed for years, straight through my late teens until ~20, I never had those "spiritual" experiences, those deeply emotional responses that so many believers seem to have. I think that made it easier for me to recognize that it didn't make sense and to accept that without falling back to these personal experiences and insisting that they must be real. So, perhaps something similar is true of you and how your brain isn't as susceptible to those supposed spiritual experiences that help reinforce religious belief.

You saw/heard something that you didn't like in religious environment. You have critical thinking.

I don't really know but suspect that you have an open questioning mind and didnt allow yourself to be force fed anything unpalatable - Sounds also like you didnt mind not being part of the crowd - I wasnt either- I think some of us grow up just being individualistically ourselves and not going with the party line but questioning .

You may have been challenged when you were young. My father always asked me questions to make me think about the how and why of something. "Which came 1st, the chicken or the egg?" Or maybe you saw an injustice and someone followed that with a religious saying or belief that made you question how they got from point A to point B. Or someone may have used something from religion to make you feel guilty so you would do something they wanted you to do or thought you needed to do......Like tell you you wouldn't go to heaven if you treated your brother bad or hit him. That probably made you mad that they made you feel guilty and that started you thinking. Whatever the trigger was you obviously questioned their thoughts on the matter and used logic to come to the decision that you came to.

Thanks to all who responded. To answer a few of your questions... I have never believed... I remember at an early age thinking the whole thing seemed ridiculous. I have tried to find some truth in it... but haven’t. I’m 60 so don’t think that is gonna change. Another interesting thing is I’ve never been afraid of death... pain, suffering yes but not death.

As for my upbringing... we did not go to church, we did not pray as a family. My mother was a free will baptist. My father a drunk baptist. He died in a car wreck when I was 7.... and I remember being very glad. I was emotionally disconnected to my parents and older sibling, but very connected to my younger siblings(last 5 of us) until the last ten years.... three have grown so devout that I find it difficult to even be around them.

I served six years in the Army, and 22 years with the Bureau of Prisons. I have lived in many different areas of the US and Germany.

I’m a better person now than I was when I left the south at 22 years old. I’m happy about the life I lived and the success I have had.

Thanks again

I'd like to hear why you think you turned out different. Can you remember when you first started thinking about whether you believed or not?

I'm not the only atheist in my family, but I'm the loudest. What did it for me was once I read bible, and read the horrid and heinous acts just by god himself over the stupdiest things I simply asked myself, "if this god exists, does it deserve my loyalty? My praise." I said no. I often have these sorts of conversations with myself indeed. But I say realistically, the question shouldn't be whether or not you think god exists or not but rather if it deserves your loyalty and praise. If the best way it can garner and earn worshippers is by having children shot up in schools so his followers can promote him, then the answer should be either "no, fuck you, go fuck yourself" Either will do.

We all are some combination of personality, upbringing, culture, and experience. It's a fool's errand to figure out for the most part.

I didn't see through / reject Christian fundamentalism until middle adulthood but I also was spared many of the side effects -- the self-loathing and guilt for example that many such people experience. I tend to credit it to having unconditionally loving parents who formed their beliefs and ideals around child-rearing practices before they got mixed up in fundamentalism, and thus tended to insulate us from its worst features. But ... my particular denomination was also a bit headier and more pseudo-intellectual and openly distrustful of subjective experience and so my family was also not immersed in the more sawdust-trail, fire-and-brimstone, holiness tradition, too. Who knows. It plays out how it plays out, I guess.

It's like pizza. If you had pizza constantly crammed down your throat, you wouldn't want it anymore

I have no clue just wanted to say HI!! Cause I am identical twin - same egg and all - but my twin joined the Methodist church when we were kids, I rejected it. She stills goes to church on Sundays. Then there's politics, she voted for Bush and trump. I think she has a bit of negrophobia (a writer name Chancy DeVega came up with that term), she has a girlfiriend who is black but mostly thinks very little of people of color.
I have asked the same question - how did we both pop outta the same womb and be so opposite?'t think there is answer. As long as everyone respects each other.
Thru this site it is nice to see we are not really the odd ones.

LOL! Did you parents model free thinking in front of you? If not, maybe you are just intelligent and think for yourself.

It's ... well ... it's a mental thing. If you were normal you'd be in the holy house belting out hymns at least twice a week, blessing everyone you meet, and amen-ing most of what you hear. You would be picketing at gay weddings, refusing to bake cakes, and shouting down those who oppose our Fearless and Exalted Leader, the Trumpenfuehrer. But you aren't, are you? No. You had to go and be different. Rational. ABNORMAL. There is no cure.

I'm sorry to have been so brutally blunt, but that's the way it is. You don't fit. Round peg trying to slide into a trinity shaped hole.

On a serious note, we all get wired up a little differently. You just happened to get lucky and your logic nodes and rational rails got connected. It is possible to slip into stupid city, but with regular reinforcement from this group that is made up mostly of certified sinners, such horrible things can be avoided. You can remain a proud --- misfit. A member of the demon possessed. A card carrying, baby eating heretic bent on destroying christian family values. A miscreant.

Glad you're here, kiddo.

It is how we are wired. Not everyone is wired the same.