I was fortunate that I wasn't raised with any religion. In fact the only times we went to church were for weddings and funerals. Over the years I've come to find and made friends with people that are non-believers, but were once raised in families that were very religious. I've heard some heart breaking stories of how they were treated by their own families and so called friends who did things like kicking them out of the house, to banning them to have any contact with them. I just wanted to comment on your post because I very much look up to those who had the guts to come out as a non-believer no matter what others might say. Cheers to all of you.

Yes, when my mom died of cancer.

Technically, the change was when my mother married a religious zealot... My mother's family had never had a good impression of the "church", but my (former)step father's family are a bunch of bible freaks.
Needless to say, we don't get along very well.
But yeah. They got married when I was 5.

It began to change in adulthood for me, as a result of a very bad first marriage to a "good Christian girl" who developed severe mental illness which the church encouraged by advising her to be distrustful of mental health standard-of-care and to consider things like amateur counselors and even exorcisms. It progressed through various disillusionments like a divorce, to another marriage that ended in the death of my 2nd wife due to a lingering and painful rare neurological illness, along with the death of my oldest brother from a freak cancer, the death of my mother from a car accident. Somewhere in there I just couldn't reconcile these events with the dogma anymore, and for the sake of my own sanity I left a faith that obliged me to reconcile human suffering with a benevolent deity. I didn't have the energy for it even if I'd wanted to.

That was the proximal cause of my departure but I've since found, to my delight, that unbelief is a much less painful way to exist in the world. Far fewer surprises, far less pain, far more realistic expectations, etc. Even a far better basis for morality. I can trace the DNA of any lingering unhappiness in my life back to the vestiges of religious ideations and thought habits that still occasionally surface.

I grew up in the church, my grandmother was a founding member of our non-denominational community Church. I went to preschool there, and we had a pretty tight kit extended church family, 5 or so families -three generations of best friends. Father was a deacon, mom part of the youth ministry. But then my parents divorced at age 5. And suddenly I wasn't able to go to my church anymore. We had to go to a new church. Not my grandmother, or other family members, just me and my siblings and my mom. And I remember asking my mother why we couldn't go to our regular church, and she dodged the question and told me "because that's the way it has to be for a little while". Obviously I didn't understand, so I began to take learning the Bible very seriously. I told myself that if there was an answer, it must be inside this book. So I began to read the Bible all the time. By age 11 I was using Greek and Aramaic dictionaries to understand the original language and how it was translated to English. That's when I learned about the origins of what the Christians call the Bible. For me, that was the beginning of the end. I had seen the corruption of human beings, I had experienced the hipocracy of church leaders, I watched my family fall apart, and I was supposed to believe that God entrusted a bunch of monks 1400 years after Jesus death to compile an exhaustive collection of writings on the nature of God and the story of Jesus? So I dove deeper into the original text languages of the new testament to see who Jesus really was, and one day I saw it. They had completely mis-interpreted and purposefully deceived followers of Jesus as to what he was actually teaching. The stories weren't about a Jesus being a savior, they were about Jesus trying to explain the nature of God, and how one should internalize the concept of God in relation to interpersonal relationships, and overall acknowledgement that a singular God does exist.
So I continued to delve deeper. At this point I had had intensely emotional experiences during worship services, that were, in fact, true moments of clarity on how I should be empathetic and caring toward my fellow humans. So I could not, at this point, discount the reality of God, but the mythology of Jesus the Savior was unraveling more and more. So quietly I would reason with myself as to the nature of God, if God, as a singular omnipotent being, truly existed. Then I took LSD for the first time at 16. And that was the true beginning of my search for the nature and reason of conscious thought. The beauty and intensity of the natural world, the energy which flowed outward from, and passed as a connection between, all that was living and all that was natural, this experience could not be reduced, and i could find no falsehood in the truths which it set forth to be discovered. Since then I have tried to correctly define the nature of the energy of creation. I do not claim to have an answer or truth of any kind. Only that I can express one statement of reality. There is a center of energy, out from which all of creation has come into existence. That is all I know to be true.

I grew up in the church, my grandmother was a founding member of our non-denominational community Church. I went to preschool there, and we had a pretty tight kit extended church family, 5 or so families -three generations of best friends. Father was a deacon, mom part of the youth ministry. But then my parents divorced at age 5. And suddenly I wasn't able to go to my church anymore. We had to go to a new church. Not my grandmother, or other family members, just me and my siblings and my mom. And I remember asking my mother why we couldn't go to our regular church, and she dodged the question and told me "because that's the way it has to be for a little while". Obviously I didn't understand, so I began to take learning the Bible very seriously. I told myself that if there was an answer, it must be inside this book. So I began to read the Bible all the time. By age 11 I was using Greek and Aramaic dictionaries to understand the original language and how it was translated to English. That's when I learned about the origins of what the Christians call the Bible. For me, that was the beginning of the end. I had seen the corruption of human beings, I had experienced the hipocracy of church leaders, I watched my family fall apart, and I was supposed to believe that God entrusted a bunch of monks 1400 years after Jesus death to compile an exhaustive collection of writings on the nature of God and the story of Jesus? So I dove deeper into the original text languages of the new testament to see who Jesus really was, and one day I saw it. They had completely mis-interpreted and purposefully deceived followers of Jesus as to what he was actually teaching. The stories weren't about a Jesus being a savior, they were about Jesus trying to explain the nature of God, and how one should internalize the concept of God in relation to interpersonal relationships, and overall acknowledgement that a singular God does exist.
So I continued to delve deeper. At this point I had had intensely emotional experiences during worship services, that were, in fact, true moments of clarity on how I should be empathetic and caring toward my fellow humans. So I could not, at this point, discount the reality of God, but the mythology of Jesus the Savior was unraveling more and more. So quietly I would reason with myself as to the nature of God, if God, as a singular omnipotent being, truly existed. Then I took LSD for the first time at 16. And that was the true beginning of my search for the nature and reason of conscious thought. The beauty and intensity of the natural world, the energy which flowed outward from, and passed as a connection between, all that was living and all that was natural, this experience could not be reduced, and i could find no falsehood in the truths which it set forth to be discovered. Since then I have tried to correctly define the nature of the energy of creation. I do not claim to have an answer or truth of any kind. Only that I can express one statement of reality. There is a center of energy, out from which all of creation has come into existence. That is all I know to be true.

Third year of Christian Ministries undergrad!!

There was internal strife in the church. The preacher preached how getting angry was a sin. After church I asked if Jesus never sinned and getting angry was a sin, what about the money changers in the temple? I don't remember his answer, but I do remember his backpeddling. I've questioned since. Still no evidence of supernatural.

My world started changing the moment I stepped out of my comfort zone and studied what they tried to scare me into avoiding: apostate information. I thought, if it’s false then I need to trust myself to see that. If I can’t trust myself to know what is or isn’t true, then how could I be certain I haven’t already been lied to? And now it’s easy to see why they so want people to avoid it. Because those people will learn the inconsistencies and absurdities of everything they were taught, and can then start down the road of figuring out what they actually believe and why.