I learned logic and stopped accepting cognitive dissonance.

My parents didn’t think I was religious enough so I was forced to go to Catholic school. Thus became even more atheist. Also, religious people are the most hateful and dishonest people on the planet based on my experience.

I was in 5th grade, and I had filled a notebook with questions about the bible and how passages in it contradicted modern science, as well as a bunch of passages from the bible that directly contradicted eachother. My parents took me to a bunch of different christian “scholars” and pastors and none could answer a single question in my notebook, other than “have faith.” It was then that I realized there was probably no god and the bible was a bunch of bullshit. And maybe there is a god, I am not against the idea, but I have still not to this day ever seen or heard empirical evidence that would lead me to believe there is one. Telling your kids they will burn in hell for eternity if they don’t believe in a mystical being is pretty fucked up. I had serious nightmares growing up about what would happen to me in hell. Talk about brainwashing.

There were just too many contradictions and the more I learned about science, especially physics, astronomy, and psychology, and the way the world works, I discovered that there is always a rational explanation for things, even if sometimes the knowledge necessary to comprehend something is not something I possess personally at the moment. People who would preach in my church would confidently claim things I knew to be fallacies, misleading, or straight up incorrect, not out of malice but their own ignorance as well, and I stopped trusting the words of religious leaders as I discovered they were as human as myself- their faith didn’t protect them from error or make them better people, and eventually I just couldn’t fall back on faith or ideology to be the bedrock of my moral or philosophical compass because it just wasn’t trustworthy.

Learned about science. Primarily astronomy and evolution, and the evidence supporting it.

That killed Genesis, and everything else went with it