deconversion(obviously this doesn’t apply to anyone who has never believed in a deity)
I grew up in a passive religious environment - everyone believed in God but nobody went to churches etc. But when something fortunate happened people genuinely attributed it to God, and in tough times people genuinely hoped that God could help.
Of course these ideas got deeply imprinted into my mind, and although I had always believed in things like evolution and always thought Bible was inconsistent to say the least, I still found that when things were bad I was secretly asking God to help, in my mind, and when things were good I was secretly thankful to God. (“secretly” only in that I never spoke about it to anyone, for no particular reason).
At one point I decided that this was totally inconsistent with my fundamental beliefs and decided to try to eradicate this last bit of religiosity out of my mind. But, it was HARD! It took about two years of conscious effort to not be thankful to God, and to not ask God’s help. It was initially a little scary, even :)
Anyway, as I say, I think it took me about two years before it stopped even occurring to me to be thankful to God or ask God’s help, without forcing myself and without feeling uncomfortable about it.
How long did it take you?
My upbringing included both passive and active religion. It was the active religious periods that led me to question my beliefs. Around the age of 9 I started regular church attendance which continued for more than 2 years. That was a period of perfect attendance including Xmas and Easter special services. Around the age of 10 I began to question many of the things I was being taught. In particular I questioned the belief in an afterlife when I knew living things ceased to exist. I lived on a farm and I knew the chickens we killed for dinner were not coming back to any kind of heaven. I saw no reason to believe humans would come back either. My older brother died around that time and I couldn’t understand why everyone was crying if he was going to heaven. By the age of 12 I had rejected christianity and after studying other religions in school I rejected all of them by the age of 15. I would have moments of doubt but the final blow came when I was watching the movie ‘Inherit The Wind’ and saw how easy it was to refute religious beliefs.
My path to deconversion was an idealistic search for “the Good.” I was told it all existed within the confines of the “One true, holy Catholic and Apostolic church.” But the more I pursued this worthy end, the more I realized that “the Good” was not the sole province of the Church… and in fact, not much of “The Good” existed there.
Only after I willingly reconsidered my indoctrinated belief about the “perfection” of the Catholic Church was I able to start addressing the underlying theology. Start to finish… from first doubts as a devout zealot seminarian to freethinking non-believer: 4 years.
I just had to read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the first time, at age 11, in order to stop believing in anything resembling the God of the Abrahamic faiths.
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