I’m Jewish, and did the Hebrew School thing. Never very devout, but I did believe.
My senior year of high school I worked the English book room. Lots of books, not much to do. I picked up one of the Bibles (for Bible as literature) and read the introduction which explained the current thinking on who really wrote the Bible - not Moses. The scales fell from my eyes. The real story - that the history that I read in Hebrew School about Abraham and Moses and the like was all made up much later - became clear to me.
Christianity always seemed like nonsense, which I suppose made it easier.
Fascinating stories, all y’all.
I came from a Catholic background, we dressed up and went to Church every Sunday, but my parents had us attend public school and not Catholic schools (they said it was due to the class size; in retrospect, I think it was probably the cost).
I think I began to doubt about 8-9 years old at the CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) classes I had to attend, when they started talking about the Trinity. I mean, there is only ONE God, but he shows up in three different aspects? To my kid brain, this just didn’t make sense.
Still, I kept going to Mass every Sunday (the 60’s and 70’s were happy-clappy times for some Masses, and it did feel good to belong to something). Can’t really say I prayed much outside of Church or even thought much about it.
Around the age of 30, I was going to mass at the Chapel at Ft. Ben Harrison, Indiana, it being the closest place. The chapel was used for several services, and there were copies of the Bible in the pews. Since by now I knew the mass procedures as well as the Priest did, I started reading it.
And that pretty well put paid to that. There was so much that didn’t fit with what I had been taught and all those pre-fed passages the Church had us read each Sunday. And I still want to know what drugs the guy what wrote Revelations was on.
So…I stopped. And except for some Christmas kids programs when my niece/nephew were young, I haven’t been back in 34 years. I consider myself an agnostic/areligionist (I accept that there may be a higher…call it purpose…to the universe, but no human religion past/present/future has any clue about it if there is).
4th Grade.
Somebody asked me if I believed in god. I thought about it and told them that I believed in nature.
That said I never remember a time when I had religious faith. So I was probably an atheist before that. I had just never though about it before.
I was born in 1968 in a rural part of Germany that was still predominantly devout Catholic to Catholic parents and in my childhood I went through all the usual sacraments, went to church (almost) each Sunday, was an altar boy from age 8-17, said table prayers etc. etc. A typical religious upbringing for the time and place, the faith wasn’t really pressed, but always present. For all my extended family and acquaintances, believing was the default. Thing is, I really can’t remember when I lost faith in god or if I ever had faith at all. Saying prayers for me was always going through the motions, and I never expected, and surely never got, an answer. So maybe with ten to twelve years, I realized that I was an atheist and that was that. All the good arguments why I SHOULD be I learned later in life, many of them here at the boards ;).
The Jesuits themselves don’t believe in that shit either, do they? 
I don’t really recall when it happened. My parents are both atheists however when I was a child they used to take me and my brothers to Sunday School at a nearby church for, I guess, religious education. They never said anything to dissuade us from going but at some point we lost interest and stopped. Early in my teens, in the 70s, I started reading a lot about Eastern philosophy and started to think the whole God thing was pretty silly.
I recall, at maybe 15, going a couple of times to a church with the whole full immersion baptism, speaking in tongues thing going on. They were nice folks, who lured teenagers with free coffee and cookies and conversation at night, and their services were great fun but I know that service was the last place I ever bothered to go looking for God.
I was raised in the fundamentalist Church of Christ. I read rather widely from an early age, though, and never took the Bible literally. (The majority of people in my denomination did, though.) A lot of the doctrine just seemed silly, and there was no way I would place it above the findings of science.
Still went to church regularly, though, until just a few years ago. I’m 55 now, and I stopped attending in 2013, when I was 52. Should have stopped a long time before!
For me it was when I was 12 years old and learned in science class the earth was 4.5 billion years old, which I couldn’t reconcile with what the Bible said. I knew they couldn’t both be true, so I had to make a choice of which to believe. It was a fairly simple decision for me.
Around 3:30.
Born a Jew, but never believed. When I was in my teens I heard the song ‘Dear God’ by XTC, and was surprised to learn people actually talked about religion that way in the open. Somehow it made it OK for me to expand my thoughts and realize I was always an Atheist. Learning about nature and science in school only added to my confidence.
Truth be told, only after reading views and learning about Atheism on this very message board, was I able to, as an adult, be able to tell people verbally, as I had always just kept it to myself until about 4 years ago.
I grew up in a fairly tame southern evangelical church. Church always seemed like a boring pain in the ass, so I wanted to know why I had to go, and I was never quite satisfied with the answer. Nonetheless my family and friends were believers. I convinced myself that I was as well. But over time, I just continued not being satisfied with the answer. I started seeing that religion was many things, but mainly a way to manipulate people into behaving a certain way. This isn’t all bad - I can see making a case for scaring my kids into behaving when they’re not in my sight, or for enforcing basic morality. But I find the dishonesty off-putting, and it’s hard to ignore the effects of division and strife that inevitably come with it.
Probably not, but they got me started using critical thinking about religion, something which I hadn’t done before. The end result, of course, was that I dropped the faith.
What clinched the deal for me is mind-altering substances. When I’m drunk, I think “there’s no way that I can be thinking so differently from a substance and still be a soul.”
I know there are handwaving answers to this, but this is the strongest argument that I feel deep inside instead of simply weigh in my mind from the evidence. It just doesn’t make sense that our actions should depend so heavily on outside influences (of all sorts) if we have some eternal thing that is the essence of us.
Always? I grew up in a completely non-religious household surrounded by religious ones and was constantly amazed that anyone could believe in that. It’s kind of like believing in Santa Claus after age 4.
I’ve never believed.
My immediate family had no religion.
My family weren’t religious but I was sent to Sunday School anyway. Good people, I learned a lot about religion but the older I got the more my logical mind could see through the “faith” element and see the stories as just that.
By the time I was 11 or 12 I didn’t believe that the stories were true, even though I did sort of like the key messages which they delivered about being good to others.
So while I’m grateful for the moral framework they helped set in my head, I haven’t actually believed in a god or gods since my teens.
Agnostic here.
I was raised Episcopal and when I was younger, I believed. But there were things that confused me and when I started asking questions, I quickly realized that people either wouldn’t or couldn’t answer them.
So about age 11 or so, I started looking for the answers for myself. This was pre-Internet, so there was a lot of library and dead-tree book time involved. By the time I graduated high school, I had learned that religion is a massive scam, and is quite likely the single most harmful thing that humans have ever dreamed up to inflict upon themselves.
I think I was most religious at age 14-15 because I belonged to a church youth group at the time and had a lot of fun. I kept up appearances among my southern Appalachian family members until I went off to college, then all that book learnin’ done drove God out of my system. I still close my eyes and bow my head when the family prays before dinner, but that’s it.
I’ve battled depression for the last 10 years or so, and a year ago I came to wonder if it was because I experienced a spiritual void from not engaging in worship. I reconciled by deciding the universe is God. The universe created me, as well as everything else, and I can actually SEE it. I don’t have to resort to faith to accept its existence. The universe doesn’t make demands of me and try to manipulate me into loving it. The universe is vastly beyond any desires to govern my life with petty laws. The universe doesn’t mean different things to different people. It is a universally accepted notion.
That seemed to take a lot of pressure off my shoulders, so I’m going to say deciding the universe is God fills my spiritual void. Maybe that’s a matter of faith, but it’s the only kind of faith that works for me.
Around 10 or 11. I was brought up Catholic and went to a Catholic grade school, so the indoctrination was pretty heavy, but so were the examples of nuns and priests not acting very Christian. And the fear-mongering about non-Catholics was ridiculous.
I came out to my parents as an atheist at age 12 and got the only serious beating I ever got from my dad because of it.
I attended Sunday school and took the option of Religious Knowledge at School.
When I was about 15 (having read the Gospels thoroughly), I asked my Sunday School teacher why there were contradictions in the Bible about the Resurrection (e.g. entering the Tomb and meeting the Risen Christ.)
He replied that there was no proof, but that you had to take Christianity purely on faith.
I didn’t have any faith, so realised I was an atheist.