This is the first I've heard of sleep deprivation playing an explicit role but I suppose it may have helped lower your cognitive defenses / resistance to finding better ways to explain and predict your lived experience.

We all have besetting problems that we expect religion to fix or at least ease and when that doesn't happen, the ship of faith tends to sink. In particular religion has a habit of being not just wrong, but 180 degrees wrong when it comes to problem solving. I can't think of many things other than sleep deprivation that would do a better job of shortening your fuse concerning religious bullshit.

. . . apologies if you have already heard this :

have you heard about. . . the dyslexic, atheist, insomniac who stayed up all night wondering if there really is a DOG

g: 681

. . . a good read :

[goodreads.com]

This is the first time I've heard of some of these factors. Very insightful!

I was a very hyperactive child. And I am told that when I was a year old, my mother tried to throw me out of the second floor window. I was saved by grandmother they say.

I cannot deal with your loss of faith but I hope you get some kind of relief from doing that.
I have a view from the other side of parental sleep deprivation. I have what must be normal sleep deprivation when I went through bringing up three children of my own to adulthood.
However this is about my own experience as a child and how I drove my mother and father crazy with constantly going into the bedroom and complaining that I could not sleep. This was from 8- to 10/11 years old. I cannot pronounce on the troubles of your two boys - it may be entirely a malfunction of the body but in my case it was mental anxiety and over-activity and this may be a clue to the cure of their troubles.

I am convinced that if someone had stopped up with me for a complete night then I would have seen that I would have been able to function for most of the next day. Have you tried exercising their minds and taking the pressure off "HAVING TO" sleep? Now I know ( I am over 80)that if I cannot sleep it usually takes just 1hr of normal mental activity and just forgetting about the actual time of night -does the 'trick'.

There are definitely techniques for building up to routines that help you set a pattern which ends in sleep and I suggest that you seek out a sleep therapist.

Sleep deprivation is not good for you. It actually is used by religious cults to brainwash people.

"My Profound Duh Moment," was when I was reading Atom by Lawrence Krauss. After leaving my Christian faith and becoming an atheist the only question left that bothered me was how everything seemed so ordered but yet was not made for us. Lawrence Krauss mentioned "Cosmic coincidences," events that occurred that allowed to eventually develop on the earth in the universe, and that bothered me until it finally hit me: those things being "cosmic coincidences," fits perfectly with everthing that we know about the universe and the world we live in. The age of the universe compared to when the earth showed up, how small a speck we are in the universe, how the earth seems to be an anomly in the universe concerning life, the age of the earth compared to when life even showed up, how life normally is in biological evolution and we are an anomaly, the random pain and suffering in the world, the millions of different beliefs about God and different religions, etc., all fit perfectly together in one coherent worldview of naturalism. I was an already atheist but that day was when I fully became an atheist with my entire conscience.

Andrew

I liked your story and especially one line:
The reason things hadn't been making sense is because it's all nonsense.

After my son was born and with so much acid reflux and waking up every couple hours to nurse, I thought I would never have another full uninterrupted night of sleep. He got better, but between work and school stress, I never got a quality sleep for years. I finally got 6 to 7 hours of sleep now. I still wake up in the middle of the night and my brain races through pending things and other ongoing stress situations that I need to find a resolution. I hate that.
I hope your kids get better soon and that you can eventually go back to a normal routine.
Hey! At least you woke up for all the good nonsense.

No, I have always slept like a log. Similarly, I have always been rational, used logic and common sense basically from my early days as an adult. Couldn't in good conscience continue believing in illogical things. If anything, since my early adult life I have never had one single night where I couldn't sleep.

Liked your story

In my late teens I was balancing 3 things in my life, a full time job at night, a full school load at a gifted school and a full love life with a highly sexed gal from Montreal - there just wasn't much time for sleep. For almost a year I would sleep for 24 hrs on Sunday, then just cat nap for maybe an hour each day until Sunday rolled around again, by Friday the hallucinations would start but I needed the work, the diploma and the gal so I did this until I graduated, quit the job because I was going to university out of town and the gal because that's just how things go when you are 18 years old.
What it did for me was get me to stop smoking pot and reassess a lot of things in my life, I was already an atheist but not as solidly grounded in godlessness, I think any shock to a person's routine can shake loose concepts and ideologies that are flawed and no longer work in their life, concepts you would probably just continue to go along with if your routine wasn't altered drastically.

Sleep deprivation???? When I was going to church it was so boring I usually fell asleep during the sermon.

I wish you all the best.

I have rarely been sleep deprived. My exit from religious brainwashing happened when I decided to research the scriptures. My purpose for researching the scriptures was to prove to skeptics that the scriptures were true. However, I discovered that they were false. My research showed me that the scriptures are full of false prophecies and contradictions. Also many of the stories, such as Noah's Ark, for example, contradict scientific knowledge. I gave the church one last chance, revealing my findings to a bishop, hoping that he could show me that my research was flawed. Instead, he initiated my excommunication, and I was expelled from the church. That's the best thing the church ever did for me. Now I am free from religious bondage, and my personal integrity is intact.

I've always had trouble falling asleep, no matter what. Now, it's a lot better.

Extrapolating, would that imply that insomniacs have a greater proportion of agnostics?

there's a reason that sleep deprivation is used for interrogations and mind altering.