Since most people are raised by parents who are believers to some extent or another, that makes it likely that most people who are now secular types were at once at least nominally religious. So let me ask you, if you were in such a situation, at what point did you know that you were no longer such and such religion but were agnostic/atheist? Was there a definitive moment? Was there a transition period? Was there a period of time you oscillated?
The psychology of this interests me. I find religion and the religious experience fascinating having been indulging and struggling with it, in terms of human experience and the quirks of the human brain. I want to understand my own immediate craziness this way.
Nonbeliever is not a term I'd normally use. It's phrased as a binary thing like believer/nonbeliever but in reality, gods are described in so many ways that belief is not really a binary thing.
Instead I view it more as being in reference to specific belief, such as "Christianity" or "Islam" or "Buddhism", etc. As in, a nonbeliever in Christianity does not identify that as being a good description of her worldview.
In that sense, I was always a nonbeliever to most metaphysics worldviews, especially before encountering them. Like before I learned what Islam was, I was a nonbeliever (and I still was afterward). Nonbelief is for the most part a default position because until you learn an idea exists, you can't exactly believe it. So for example, you don't see "Islam-genesis" occurring, or groups of people becoming Muslims in various places of the world that had never even heard of it before. It's an idea that requires propagation to be held. And it's not like European explorers sailed to any distant shore and found Christians already there. They had to propagate Christianity to those regions for people there to eventually be Christian, because prior to that they had never heard of this idea and were nonbelievers.
So, I was a passive nonbeliever in all the things I had never heard of. I was sort of an active nonbeliever from the beginning too, because my father raised me in Catholicism and my mother raised me with these new-age panentheistic transcendentalist beliefs, and the latter were the ones that took root. So I had to try to squeeze that theology into Catholic doctrine to try to make Catholicism relevant to me as I was raised in it, which never really took hold, and was a heretic I guess. So in some sense, I was raised as a believer in my mother's worldview and then for the most part active disbelief in my father's Catholic worldview, but not exactly entirely (more like, if I cherry-picked and interpreted almost everything as a metaphor, I could make it fit, kinda).
I became less and less of a believer in my mother's worldview over time, mostly in my teens.
