Please give your reasons for why you became an atheist if you have any that are specific.
Looking back, I can see that religion (we were Piscos) in our household was a matter of manners rather than belief. When I was a kid, now and then we went to Sunday service (which is how I'm able to sing the hymns (if any) at Christian funerals and weddings). I also went to Sunday school, and sang the kids's hymns and put my coin in the collection plate and generally learnt the ropes, though my overall reaction was disconnection.
Thus in time I discovered that if I helped clear the table after our fairly formal Sunday dinner, there'd be a moment when I could slip out through the laundry, get my bike, and take off. A few of these and my parents got the message.
Even so, when I was 14 and the church was holding its usual classes for the now largely omitted ritual of "confirmation", I had this sense that my failure to understand what the deal was could be traced to my lack of knowledge, and it seemed logical to me that once I was confirmed, became an insider, as it were, they'd let me in on all the secrets, especially about the afterlife. I ignored the bad omens about this ─ for example, every time I wanted to hear a clear exposition of how the afterlife worked, I'd be cheerfully told "Read your catechism" or "We'll come to that later". both replies being entirely false. I was confirmed regardless, was excited at the idea that all would now be revealed, worked out after a month or two that absolutely nothing was different, and gently faded from the scene.
I ceased to think about religion till the end of secondary school, and in my student days supposed I was an agnostic. It didn't really matter among my friends.
(One aside here, though. In my student days I drove a cab to get some income, and after a year or so noticed that when I'd had good luck, I'd heard myself thinking "Thank you, TG" where, I also noticed, TG stood for 'Taxi God'. This ties in neatly with the saying somewhat doubtfully attributed to D. G. Rossetti that "The worst time for an atheist is when he feels thankful and has no one to thank" ─ in other words, a common human feeling that certain kinds of luck are "sent".)
I had no resistance at all to getting married in a church, and when my wife's clan wanted our first child baptized, that didn't worry me either. If they hold my funeral in a church, fine, whatever the living would like ─ it's probably as convenient as anything else. When I was in politics, someone once raised the question of dropping the opening prayer, and I voted in favor, but only two or three of us did so and it was voted down. And that was no real concern either.
But we never otherwise went to, belonged to, any church, we raised our kids without church, and I can have no argument with the results.
I didn't get back to religion until the big fundie surge in the 90s, trying to get fundie nonsense taught in state schools, and somewhere around 2000 I found the old Beliefnet, and actually got to argue with some of them (some sentences deleted here, though did any of you ever come across that archdingbat Carl Crawford, under one or other of his many netnames?). I also found it was an interesting way to occupy the times in my SOHO where I wasn't busy. The importance of the Kitzmiller v Dover case (2005) in taking a great deal of the impetus out of the fundie movement is hard to overstate. It was in the course of those discussions that it dawned on me that none of us actually knew what we were talking about when we referred to "God", and later still I found the word for this was 'igtheist' or 'ignostic'. And when Beliefnet stopped being a discussion board, I let it all go for some years. But here I am, at RF ─ bad habits ....
