I had a father that stimulated my curiosity with astronomy and biology early on and as a child treated the belief in a God (Jesus) similar to the likes of Santa Claus and always questioned. My parents never went to church, but had Christian friends and family that prayed and sometimes went to church.
I did wonder about a supreme being creating this universe as an adolescent, but subsequently people like Carl Sagan & Richard Dawkins reinforced the importance of science as a way of thinking in that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that was back in the 80's and way before Dawkins "The God Delusion" which I've never read, but do have most of his books on biology and evolution. Also, actually reading the entire Bible at an early age helped too...hehehe! ; )

As a kid I was always scared of ghosts. Enjoyed horror movies but would sleep with lil figurines of Hindu Gods under my pillow for protection

In the sixth grade I joined a Catholic convent and we had a class dedicated to Bible studies. That was the first time I actually had formal education in religion. We also had a class where we had to sing hymns etc. It didn't make sense to me that a God would need us to sing praises to him every week like robots. I actually got pretty good at the class itself and was the school gold medalist for a couple of years.

In the seventh grade I started noticing inconsistencies in the Bible. I decided to start reading it from the beginning and note down the verses that just didn't make sense. Before I got out of Genesis I had a long list. Went to the teacher who obviously couldn't justify things other than say God moves in mysterious ways

That was the point for me where a switch flipped in my head I guess. From there it was pretty easy to take similar questions to other religions and beliefs. It was easier for me since my dad had always been an atheist and always had my back. But he never tried to change my belief earlier. He figured I d grow up eventually, which I thankfully did.

I read books about it, and found out more about it, the psychological damage it causes, human suffering. impedes human progress

Reading Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller and Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell led me to be comfortable questioning the church. I think that being comfortable questioning was the beginning of my deconversion. When you stop relying on others to interpret the Bible for you, the cracks begin to show.

To be honest, religion was never on my radar until 9/11. Before then it was just something you did once or twice a years with family. I never really thought about, i didnt define myself as atheist or agnostic or religious, and the question of God was more along the lines of 'do aliens exist and what are they like'?

9/11 changed all of that. It made me hyper aware of religion and how bad religion is. And the very long history atrocities that happen because of religion and faith and wanting to either please god or enter heaven.

I started formulating a concept of religion as the practice of "valuing an idea over life". By valuing an idea over life itself it becomes easier to end lives. I developed a strong dislike of religion and the ideas and thinking it supported. They got God wrong. Worse they were using God to promote bad ideas and cause harm.

So I started looking at God as an idea, a concept. Not an actual entity. I finding it unlikely a specific entity created a universe and behaved in human ways with human emotions thinking and needs. It seemed more likely that God was incomprehensible. But possibly still could exist.

As I learned more science especially biology and chemistry, I became more aware of how self consistent science is, as in the rules of science alone are enough to explain the universe. God didn't seem to be needed to make the universe function, or even to start it off.

As of now, physicists are saying that all of physics describes only 5% of the known universe, and we have a lot of the universe we don't understand. Could the actions of a grander entity be discovered? Sure. But my expectations are low. It's more likely the rules that exist are mathematically self-consistent and need no rules-writer.

On the social front, i think it would benefit humankind to get rid of religion permenantly and replace it benefical parts with something that relies on science and open discourse. No more of these sectarian bs dividing the people. We need to treat religion as a memetic virus that destroys minds, treat those affected as sick, and help them heal from it. I do not support belittling or making fun of religious people - they are mentally affected, it's a sickness, and we need to help them recover.

It just happened
My consciousness and awareness evolved

Two books gifted to me from my father: "A Friendship with God" (Walsh) and "A New Christianity for a New World" (Spong). Both gave me "permission" to critically assess the crapola being spewed from thr pulpit. Once that ball got rolling, there was no stopping it.

Life and reason

Believer for 30 years. I had a near death experience caused by a narcissistic wife. For 10 years I thought I could change her just by bringing her to church and god saving her. It was wake up call and I thought if I could be so wrong about my wife what else am I wrong about. One day I decided to try hypnosis out to deal with the pain she caused me. It immediately worked and I started to learn about it. The more I learned the more I realize how you can manipulate people’s emotioms to think positively. It just dawned on me one day that this is what religion is self hypnosis. We are manipulated emotionally to act certain ways. I’m taking hypnosis classes and there are actually a few preachers in the class

Sapiens A Brief History of Mankind by Yuval Noah Harari
There were other factors, including studying logic and reason and getting out of the daily bubble of the insulated extreme evangelical environment

I lost my religion and party (GOP) due to behavior of my Christian friends when Obama became president and during the Trump presidential campaign.

The vicious hate memes of the white supremacist/white evangelical Trump followers on my Facebook page, all MK (missionary kid) childhood friends from my Haiti mission, made me feel ashamed that I had EVER believed in such obvious nonsense.

Acquiring and processing data as we grow is interesting and how we arrive at different times and places. The mythologies we are given to explain our experiences. When we move on to the next stage [if we ever do] for me, there was never an Eureka moment. Just a unending process.

Re-reading Genesis sealed the deal that no way could the Bible be taken literally on any level.

For me, it was just observation of all the terrible things that happen in this world on a daily basis. It’s certainly not the work of a loving, omnipotent being. If it is, then it’s terrible work and he totally sucks at his job.

I knew when I prayed for a bike and didn't get it!

Kidding aside... I was raised by my parents who were Unitarians. (Look it up) They wanted me to be well enough rounded to make my own decisions when the time came. I could not have had better parents and I revered them and how they handled things. I sometimes wish they would have pushed me more (sports in high school instead of working a job) but it was not their way and I now see the wisdom of their choices.

The book I read was the Bible... Several forms of it over the years, when I was 12 to late teens. In researching how Christianity got its start and grew... It became clear to me that religion was all a crock... Only designed to give meaning to life and to keep people in line. Obviously there were other reasons...

I started identifying as Atheist a long time ago and it wasn't until I found this place that I decided that I guess I am truly Agnostic. To me, "faith" is trust that is earned over time. Trust comes from proof and evidence. Now I know there isn't a be-all, end-all god out there... But I cannot prove god DOESN'T exist... So I feel the need to identify as Agnostic.

You cannot prove god exists and I cannot prove that god doesn't exist.

There in lies the rub!

When I was 12 I got my hands on a college biology textbook. I slowly read it and the more I read the more I realized what nonsense the religion my parents had shoved down my throat was. By 13 I was an atheist.

I lost my religious faith approximately in 3 stages in this order: Faith in church as claiming authority to speak for God. Faith in the Bible as divinely guided. And Faith in the concept of an sentient, unified guiding force of the cosmos that is supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and gives a flying fuck about us individually---uh, I mean, who is the essense of Love (while being rageful and demanding impossible things of his creations that [he] intentionally created deeply flawed.

Anyhoo. I lost all three "faiths" by the time I was 20. First was faith in authority of the church: that was really because in my mid-teens, starting to be aware of social issues and people's struggles, I heard too much self-righteous, hypocritical bullshit from the pulpit of my own church.

Second was specific: An exchange student year spent in Germany, where I learned in the high school religion class (NOT even close to being Sunday School) that the Bible is chock full of errors, contradictions, and gobblety guck morality lessons. Learned a bit of its history of construction as well. Bye bye infallable word of god.

Finally, I had to overcome fear of punishment to let go of belief in God. It took me another couple years in college for it to percolate, but I eventually figured out the impossible oxymoron hinted at in the first paragraph above. That is, my belief in God was squarely defined by the road map laid out by the Church and the Bible. "God" is an amorphous term that can mean anything related to the power(s) running the cosmos. How it is portrayed is the role of religion. I had to realize the notion of an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God who is personally and lovingly concerned with me is an IMPOSSIBLE CONTRADICTION with the Christian concept of a wrathful, demanding creator of billions whom he knew would fail his tests (because he made them so flawed and he knows all in the future). In fact, the idea of anger is impossible with something all-knowing and all-powerful, because absolutely nothing could ever surprise such a being, nor could it actually threaten such a god or that god's concerns. The whole fear-of-punishment based paradigm crumbles. So why believe in something when the evidence doesn't add up, you see through the purposes of the social control manipulators who peddle the stuff, and you no longer have any reason to fear cosmic punishment for disbelief?

Mine kind of evolved over time. My father was an Atheist but didn't object when my mother sent us to Sunday School. I think he believed it was necessary to have that kind of knowledge. I started questioning the teachings at Sunday School when I was nine and was constantly told to "go read your bible", which I did. It just created more questions. I stayed "involved" with religion all through high school, probably more to be part of the group then anything else. After high school, I stopped going to church and didn't resume until I got married. But I was still searching. My husband was raised as a Catholic and after we got married we went to a Marriage Encounter that was sponsored by the Catholic church. It was different than anything else I had been exposed to, although I did go to mass with my sister, who converted about 5 years before that. I decided I wanted to that too. I was baptized on Halloween in 1981. The priest of that parish noticed all of my questions and offered to teach me biblical history and accepted. I'm still studying that. After 15 years in the Catholic church, where I never felt welcome and my kids were starting to complain, we left the church entirely. Shortly after we joined an Evangelistic church. The churches I grew up with were Methodist, Lutheran and Unitarian. We stayed after in that church for about five years, until my daughter died. For some reason, they seem to think that the death of teenager was contagious and I was shunned. I continued to go to services hoping they would come around but after 3 months I realized they were not going to do so. I turned my back on the church and on God. I had been studying comparative religions and had learned a lot about Wicca and Paganism and decided that was the direction I would go into next. But even with that, I had a hard time accepting the idea of a deity. After 15 years of trying to be goddess worshipping Pagan, I realized that I couldn't buy into that either. That's when I started calling myself a Humanist and/or Atheist. I am now readying several books that I feel validate my lack of belief in Christianity in particular.

For a group of non-believers , we seem to fill a lot of space discussing religion .

Lived in a somewhat rural area , with a very small town near by . Church was so small that the preachers didn't stay very long . They didn't agree with one another . One preacher encourage the preteens and teens to show up regularly for an evening social . The next preacher seemed to think any social activities were forbidden . At another somewhat rural church , the preacher arrived to a beautiful new church and a beautiful new home , and began complaining from the pulpit about the fact that although it came with a washer and a dryer , they didn't have a clothes line out back , and his electric bill was therefore high . Idiot couldn't put up a clothes line ? ? ? Bible had too many contradictions . Women were required to be stupid .

I would not consider myself as having ever been a "believer", however, I was taken to church when I was a child. When I was probably 6 or 7 I had decided that gods and goddesses were created by ancient cultures to justify the questions for which they had no answers. As scientific information became available, and then accepted and understood, the NEED for gods and goddesses became obsolete. I have never seriously entertained the thought that there was a "higher being", I'd established that there was not, and had a logical and understandable reasoning to dismiss that concept!

I grew up Catholic (eg Altar Boy). Dan Brown's books probably had the most impact that led me to questioning the bible. Religion is a big time business. Full of lies and always needing money.

For me it was a long process, but I'll try to sum up.
Raised Roman Catholic (what we used to call "Holiday Catholic" ie only attended church for the major holidays)
5th grade transfered to the local Catholic school where the nuns were strict, but not sadistic. The priests were angry authoritative hypocrites, and all got mad when I asked uncomfortable questions.
High school I found the internet and wicca. Got really into Celtic mythology and history trying to figure out who I was. Wicca seemed hokey and made up. Catholicism/Christianity seemed no better.
Found Deism and followed that for a while. The idea that "all gods are equally valid" appealed to me and seemed a "safe" bet.
Then, funny enough, I watched The Incredibles. There's a point at which the villain talks about giving everyone super powers and says something along the lines of "...if everyone is special, then NO ONE is!"
That stuck with me and led to the thought, "If all gods are real, what if none of them are?"
Thus began my climb out of the religious black hole and into the light of atheism.

For me it was a gradual process. I had issues with unanswered prayers ,,,,even after having been obedient, paying the tithe and "doing the Lord's work" in the church still there was no guarantee that the prayers would be answered. Then the biblical inconsistencies ..oooh and the speaking in tongues crap...even after l had fornicated all week ...plus l didn't understand a thing l was saying but still had to do it so that l could fit in...then my own sexuality but l still had to attend the church until l moved away from home for college. At that time l didn't give a shit about religion.

I was raised Lutheran and only had a small quibble with it while going through that confirmation thing. I then went to a Lutheran college for my first degree and also took 5 religion classes while there. I also had some more small problems with the contradictions, atrocities and indoctrination things of the book and LCMS things. Those things also caused me to teach a couple of the adult bible study classes at the last LCMS church I was a member of. While doing those things I was also struggling with the immoral, delusional, nasty, prudish and more behavior of the believers I was associating with..Despite that I decided that it was time to read that book from beginning to end for my third time and while doing that all of those things I stated above finally started appearing. I also looked at my college notes and some other apologetic things to try and reconcile them but ultimately couldn't do that.