I got saved when I was 11. My husband (now ex) got saved about 5 years into our marriage. He immediately became obsessed with the bible. He would read it for 2 hours a day, highlighting half of it and taking notes in a notebook. I found myself jealous of God. Through the next 5 years or so we went to several different churches, a few different denominations because he always ended up having a problem with the preaching after awhile. We settled on baptist eventually but still went to 4 or 5 different churches in that denomination because he would have a problem with the preaching. His constant critiquing of the sermons was getting really annoying. Church wasn't fun anymore. After awhile, I thought if you can't beat them join them. I started a discernment blog and started critiquing charismatic preachers like Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer. I actually started to get a decent following, if you can call 50-100 views per blog post decent. Anyway, the more I picked at these sermons, the more I started realize there were some issues I had with the bible itself.
I had doubts in the past but had just pushed them aside, but now that I was so deep in examining scripture, I couldn't help but have more uncertainty. I eventually just faced my doubts and moved on to more scientific endeavors. I watched Youtube videos on the big bang theory and evolution. I listened to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I listened to Aron Ra talk about how Noah's flood couldn't possibly be true. I got divorced because my husband hated me doing all those things and got very angry about it. It's been a rough journey but I have new friends and this site and I'm doing good.

I think it was this video. I came across it in my early 20s and realized it made a really good point. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I never truly believed what I was taught as a kid. Also, just being around religious people in general upset me more and more the older I got. They're very hypocritical.

The dirty dozen (to say the least)

1. Non-relevance
2. Lack of reason
3. Made no sense
4. Ignorance
5. Superstitions
6. Primitivity
7. Fooling of people
8. The business of religion
9. Out of step with the times
10. Slavery
11. Women and child abuse,cruelty, violence
12. Lies, Lies, Lies

Brought up as a freethinker, I was taught to review all the evidence and make up my own mind on religion, as with all other things. The evidence just never stood up to scrutiny.

The Bible. I read it cover to cover when I was 11. I dropped Christianity so fast after that.

This may sound too silly, but as an 11yo preacher's kid, one of my pet hamsters escaped and chewed on the bottom of my blue jeans, cutting holes in them. That night I told god that I wanted them to be like new, didn't happen. So began my path of doubt, my path has led to me now being a Pantheist!

Also the fact that the main document that historically Christians use to verify the authenticity of Jesus was written by Flavius Josephus. He was a Roman historian who was jewish. The biggest problem is that Josephus was born 5 years after Jesus died. How can anyone born 5 years after Jesus death testify to him. Also the gospels were found 40 to 50 years after his death. We don't even know who wrote them. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were names assigned but we have no idea. It would be like myself writing on the history of america in the 1950's and how things were but i wasn't even born yet.

When I was in the 5th grade in a southern California public school, back in the early '50s, every Friday afternoon we could get out of class and go to a bible lesson. It was the usual religious stories for kids. But there was something that always seemed odd to me. When the teacher talked about not going to heaven if you didn't believe in God. I thought about those people who never heard of the Christian God. In jungle tribes or other remote places. But they were good people and did all the things that "good" Christians would do. What would happen to them. Well they could not get into heaven because they never heard of the Christian God. That just did not seem fair, (Christian), to me. I think that is when I stopped believing in a God.

It required no more than simple reasoning to escape the captivity of theologies. I don't dignify them by calling them religions. That goes double for describing their hapless captives as 'religious'...

The return to nascent non-belief in gods and other myths was a matter of reasoning; no science or other crutches required. Learning more about women and what wonderful strong, balanced, beautiful and even miraculous creatures their manifestation of our kind is played a central role in that reasoning. Observation of both males and females on the personal level is sufficient. On social and historic levels cinches it.

The least gifted of our kind somehow enjoy almost exclusive leadership on lower social levels and absolutely exclusive on highest levels of all social (theological and philosophical) and political institutions in our world.. What kind of creating god, if such a thing was real, would place the lesser equipped sex in charge of the species? Why would a loving god who wished to foster the best human attributes turn us over to the least pragmatic, constitutionally weakest, shorter-lived sex to 'head' human families and societies? Seriously, THAT is all one needs to disclose the corrupt nature of so-called religion.

After disclosure of this nonsensical arrangement, all one needs to confirm it is to observe the decaying condition of human civilizations over the last 6,000 years. Which sex is the most prolific source of overt violence and destructiveness? Which sex, even in early childhood, shows the most aggressive behaviors; with a love of hitting things with objects, throwing objects, physically combat one another and or assert power via physical bullying? It doesn't get any better as we approach adulthood.

In fairness, we know that females exhibit/act out destructiveness in more covert ways. We are all damaged and I don't think a god that was able to 'create' us would do such a bone-headed thing as putting males in charge. Based on my reasoned observations, I can't even imagine such an entity even being male in the first place.

We are what we are, in my view, because of the 'brine'; because of the 6,000 year long soaking in the brine of male domination and destructiveness. Our ways of living were devised by and have been overseen by males and they are corrupt, corrupting and pathogenic. That no god would be so stupid should be enough to convince anyone that gods belong on the heap of other absurd myths cast aside as children mature and, one can only hope, begin thinking independently.

George Carlin's stand-up routine about religion, titled "a bullshit story" is what pushed me over the edge about 6 years ago... never considered myself a Christian, I identified as a sinner and figured I was destined for hell... never enjoyed church or most church people and now I can clearly see why it's because it's bullshit!

I was raised as a Mormon. In my twenties, I decided to prove by logic and history that Mormonism was true, so I could convince my friends. I started with the prophecies of Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism. The more I researched, however, the more convinced I became that Joseph Smith had NO gift of prophecy. He was just guessing at the future. Sometimes his guesses were close to right. Other times they were way off. So, I came to the conclusion that Joseph Smith was a false prophet, and that the Mormon church was a scam.

Later, I applied the same method to the Bible. I discovered that the biblical prophets had no gift of prophecy. They, too, were false prophets. I concluded that the Bible, too, is a scam.

Having announced that I was no longer religious, people from various religions tried to convince me that they had the truth. But all the "proof" they offered turned out, when I studied it, to be false. I read the books of apologetics that they suggested, and the more I studied them, the more convinced I became that they were bogus. They were based on faith alone. They were not based on truth, history, evidence, reason, science, etc.

So, eventually I became a full-fledged atheist. I know now that religion is a scam based on mythology.

I turned 11 and read the bible. So much for things people wanted me to believe.
I enjoy the idea of higher beings, as found in SF literature ( Asim0v, Heinlein, Anderson, Sturgeon, Wilhelm)

i was raised a secular jew and was never religious, but i did (until age 15) believe, in a vague way, in some kind of personal god, sort of like an invisible friend. as a lonely and abused child, i needed a witness and this god filled that position. i didn't read about religion or anything like that. i just felt the need to examine my beliefs one day after realizing that my folks had gotten something wrong and i'd bought into it (it was silly; they said long-haired boys were dirty and i found out that simply wasn't true) and god went right out the window. it was a tad startling in its way but not a huge shock, and it didn't take any big philosophical delving or research. i just realized that there was no such animal.

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I was very young, sitting in church, looking at the crucifix in horror after I found out god did that to his only son.

This a great question/conversation piece. For me it was the following conclusions:

1. It is beyond apparent that the universe is indifferent (e.g. natural disasters, famines, genocides, etc).

2. The notion of a personal god, that interacts with people, loves them as a parent does their children, has plans for their lives, "lives in their hearts" etc. is absolutely absurd.

3. Evangelical/fundamental christians are blinded by their own emotional keyboards which they themselves play in wanting to believe they are encountering the supernatural. The fact is it is nothing more than their mind, will, and emotions controlling the psychological marionette of what they delude themselves into believing is their spiritual life. By this they bend themselves in the direction of indoctrination and thus waste their lives on insanity...

In 1992 after reading William Bramewell's 'Gods of Eden' I asked my Father, who had served in the mission field for ten years, and was a protestant minister for 40 years, "How many times was Elohim(gods plural) changed to El(god singular) when the King James Bible was assembled." His reply was short and quick, "Twenty six hundred times the word 'gods' was changed to the word 'God' in the Old Testament alone.

For me it was The Naked Ape. I had strong doubts as a teen, but that book in my 20s closed the deal.

Reading the Bible did it for me

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

Hypocrisy: I felt disgusted by Christians who removed their Sunday manners with their Sunday clothes.

That year, Michigan had a long, hard winter. My brother Lee, 10, and I decided to read the World Book Encyclopedias. It was fascinating reading about rational philosophers Descartes and Spinoza.

I chose rational thinking instead of magical beliefs.

I grew up in a preacher's home and I became one myself. There was no book or person who served as a voice of reason for me. I woke up one morning and realized I was tired of fighting off my doubts, and I gave up believing.

I quit believing because the God I preached about never once showed himself.

Yes, there was a specific book that sealed the deal in helping me to become atheist. That book is the Bible. Some even add the word "holy" to the title. In reality it is a mutt compilation that finally got assembled about 300 years after the time of Jesus. Two thirds of the NT part of it are attributed to a man named Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul, and he did not know Jesus nor did he ever meet him. I could go on and on.

The Bible has about as much validity as "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter."

Finding my way out of the cult of Mormonism opened my eyes to the fact that to a greater or lesser degree ALL religions are cults and based on the same nonsensical precepts that the LDS was.

It was more a matter of stop the emotional reinforce than the arguments itself.
My mind was always seeing something wrong, but as far as I was going to church I had my emotions filled and the cognitive dissonance could continue.
When I moved from one city to the other, and started going less and less to churches, I see this emotional feedback fading away and suddenly what I already knew started to make sense.
I went from "the churches are all failing but the scriptures are true" to "the scriptures may contain errors due to copying and retelling etc but the message is true" and finally "the message is just common sense plus superstitious bullshit" at this point I could say I am atheist and then I could start thinking into what works and not what cosmic nanny dictated that was right.

Good question. Always a atheist. A few times Nature has been so incredible that I thought, “Surely?”. But it never lasted long. But Boy, the first time I saw the Grand Canyon with the sun going down on a stormy day....nothing prepares you for those moments. I always come back to reality though!

I was falling off a cliff of credulity having been raised a Catholic and having attended 8 yrs of Catholic school. It was really not making much sense when I began pondering it. But, at first, I succumb to really bad information. I watched Zeitgeist which really took me down a rabbit hole of terrible information. Later found out how terrible the information was they were peddling, but it took me down a rabbit hole of reading books, and watching lectures and debates about Christianity and comparative religious studies. The more I read, the more I began to believe, that like Moses before him, Jesus was a fully fictional character. Not that many years ago, Moses was believed to be a real person whose stories were accurately reflected within the Bible. But today, most historians agree that Moses as portrayed in the Bible never actually existed and there was no Jewish exodus from Egypt. Most Christians and Jewsish adherents won't accept that, but among Biblical historians and archeologists, it's very widely held these days. While currently not as widely held, given the information we know to be historical within the Bible, I believe that the same will be accepted about the non-existant life of Jesus. But, I'd have to say, Richard Dawkins' book The God Delsion, was one of the most influential for me in helping me see reality.