I became an atheist at 12. My 8yo was 6 when he asked me “Why do people pray? It doesn’t do anything”. Proud mama moment.

it's different for secular jews. i never did reject the religion (and certainly not the culture) -- just the existence of a god. that happened at 15 as part of a bigger process of questioning everything i held as true. some stuff stuck, others didn't make it through the questioning. god went out the window pretty fast. it wasn't traumatic or anything. it was like "oh. okay."

g

Gratitude makes us human. Religion makes us nuts.
I was 40 before I came to some beginning level of understanding...

14 so a year after confirmation in the Catholic church. I thought it was dumb to not have sex before marriage and decided I was definitely going to have sex before I was married. The unravelling began there but had started before that when I couldn't find any clarity in the bible...too many "paradoxes" or as I liked to call them direct contradictions.
Started with free will God gave to man but if he is all powerful, all knowing and infallible then man can't have free will because God can't be wrong and already knows what we will do

My family is Catholic, I was forced to attend Sunday school every Sunday without fail. I can't honestly say I ever really believed or didn't believe. I think I was always mostly ambivalent to the idea of God. I do know I always hated Sunday school. I put up with it until it was time for my confirmation. That's when I flatly refused to have anymore parts of the whole thing.

I didn't embrace my atheism until my early twenties after I had spent a few years exploring other religions and finding not a single reason I'd need to believe such things. The universe is far too wonderous and beautiful to need sprucing up with fanciful ideas of the supernatural.

I was actually a fairly firm believer until I was 14. I had a science teacher who pressured us to learn the Method, and hammered into us how it wasn't just the physical science but all of knowledge that it could be applied to. I began to test the claims of christianity and found they didn't add up, spent about 4 years seeking spiritual truths in other ways, then came to the necessary conclusion that it was all the same, made up answers to questions primitives couldn't find the real answers to due to lack of technology, mostly.

I lost my faith like an unwatered plant. It was slow and, like it's hard to tell when exactly the plant is dead, so was my belief. I'm thinking I never really had faith to begin with. As I got into middle school I found that god wasn't even a part of my life. I still went to church, but it was a place to day dream and to thank my good fortune that these church kids weren't my friends.

When children are old enough to question Santa Claus, fairies, Disney movie realities, etc., they can be skeptical of religion.

Others question their childhood teachings when they leave home for college and work and come under the influence of more secular people.

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I remember it clearly. I was 9 and in the 4th grade. Sister Dorothy told me that my father would go to hell if he didn't attend mass. My father was the "good" one in household, so I knew that was a bunch of crap. This was such a defining moment in my life, it's the lead-in story in my profile bio.