Just a little thank you to everyone that shared their own stories about being and becoming atheist. I'm saddened to learn that is challenging thing to be in the States, or at least part of the states.
I was wasn't raised religiously at all. I've never asked my parents why. I had friends that went to Sunday School but had no idea what it was.
At what you'd call elementary school we had an hour or so of religious education called 'scripture' every Thursday morning. When they asked what denomination we were, to divvy us up, I picked Presbyterian because I thought it sounded funny. Learnt lots of Jesus on the road stories but somehow missed the point of them other than as stories.
Two early childhood 'philosophical' epiphanies were:
At age four seeing a war movie on day time TV at my grandparents place (we didn't have a TV) and a seeing a pilot in a plane going down, struggling with his ejector seat and failing to get it to work. It was less than graphic (1960s, on daytime TV) but I ran screaming from the room because I knew exactly what death meant. The end. And clearly I'd developed empathy.
Age 8, I'd gotten really into science, particuarly astronomy, even won a model hovercraft from Continental chicken soup for knowledge of the planets, when I'm wondering through school, just after hours, pondering the physical limits of the universe. So I'm thinking 'right at the edge there's a brick wall - but what's over the brick wall? Another brick wall? And then....' and my brain did flip flops trying to comprehend infinity - bit of do it yourself
Total Perspective Vortex
I hadn't all dismissed the idea of a christian god, or any other gods, really. It was nice to think there was a heaven, where my cat went and ate all the mice she wanted, and then they went to heaven too. In my mid teens I committed myself to reading the bible. That was an eye opener. I'd read too much science fiction to see that far from being the 'word of god' (Hey, God, take writing lessons) it was clearly part family history, part garbled myth/memory, fused from many sources, deliberately avoiding clarity when it was most needed.
I'd always been a voracious reader (I could read before I went to school thanks to my mother) and loved non-fiction. None of those books were anti-religious; religion just wasn't a factor in explaining things.
In my late teens my best friend became 'born again', I could see the social attractions of being with nice people who did fun stuff together on 'retreats' but it meant believing a big lie that I couldn't bring myself to believing.
Fortunately, religion isn't a big delineating factor on social acceptability/mobility in Australia - I never felt under any pressure for being an unbeliever, in fact I used to feel sorry for kids who lost their Sunday mornings, and the poor Jehova's witness kids that didn't get christmas or birthday presents.
Until my mid 20s I was probably agnostic. Until I came to believe the universe without God was a frickin' amazing place. The only thing a God brought to the picture was cruelty. If an intelligent hand was guiding this it needed it's knuckles rapped. But if this is arbitrary cause and effect than it makes sense and can parsed emotionally - and gave you a real reason to be thankful you were alive, because nature and humanity provide plenty of opportunity not to be.
In my early 30s I got over my fear of death, philosophically - I still get an adrenalin rush when a ute is 360ing toward me on the highway.
I'm a lot more tolerant of believers than I used to be, but can't help the feeling they've taken the easy way out by just accepting someone else's version of the way things are, and not really contemplating why and how you should live. Accept your insignificance on the macro level and work on your performance at the micro level.
I like some of Dawkins' points. I agree that it makes no sense to accept religious arguments without question, when we do that with no other sphere of human knowledge. I also like his quote from some historical figure who's name escapes me 'Why should I fear death? I was dead since the dawn of time until just recently, and wasn't affected the least by it.'