I was raised as a Christian, but I was never really that into it.
In addition to the creation story, Noah's Ark, and Jesus, I heard all of the 'feel good' stories (David & Goliath, Daniel in the lion's den, the 3 guys in the furnace, etc) by age 5 and fully accepted all the claims. I realized at a young age that people believe ridiculous things like Santa, so that helped with critical thinking. I stopped going to Kingdom Hall (JW Church) meetings when I was about 7 because talking for hours about how great God is got repetitive and boring. From about that point up to about 16, I took most of it as 'be good' guidelines, while accepting most of the claims as literal with some exaggeration. Then I found this section of the site where criticism of beliefs was common. Since I had to defend my beliefs, I decided to seek reasons to (other than 'just in case', which didn't hold up for long). I happened to actually read the parts of the bible that they don't tell kids (polygamy, prostitution, incest, killing a baby in contradiction of Ezekiel 18:20, burning cities while killing every inhabitant and stealing as much as you can, human sacrifice, slavery, etc), as well as basic contradictions and how the bible itself was compiled. The 'answers' from apologetics always seemed to ignore or gloss over the issues and were unsatisfactory. Accordingly, I dropped the beliefs that were baseless, which was pretty much all of them.
I didn't first hear the word atheist until I was 13-14
Me either.
this always happens. not because we are stubborn, but because when baseless claims get challenged, the person who made said claims plays the offense card, and ragequits.
