[quote=“BigJohn”]The bottom line is, people believe in a deity or deities because they are told to at a young, impressionable age. That is, anyway, the main overall reason.[/quote] You make cartoons out of us.
My father had some sort of spiritual beliefs, maybe strong ones but they were hard to pin down (he could talk about Jesus, Khalil Gibran, Omar Khayyam (as far as I can tell, Omar was an atheist), and probably other stuff I don’t remember), and I think by the time I was in about the fourth or fifth grade, he had stopped going to church.
My mother was a Baptist and wanted to take me to church and Sunday school on Sunday. I remember asking when I should get baptized, and someone, I think my Sunday school teacher, told me that I would know it by some kind of feeling. I never did really get that feeling, but I sort of faked it so I could just get the baptism thing over with.
At some point during elementary school, maybe sixth grade, I guess, it became a hassle to get me to go to Sunday school or church. My dad said that I didn’t have to go, but I had to read whatever the Sunday school lesson was, and he would come in and quiz me about it. That’s when he surprised me by showing how knowledgeable he was about the Bible.
There were illustrations in those little books–you know, illustrations of Biblical figures, dressed in the way people imagined they dressed. There were also pictures of the kinds of houses they lived in, and other acoutrements of their lives. After my father would quiz me, I would go outside to play with my friends, wander around, whatever. I remember that when I went outside and saw the TV antennas, and the bungalow-type houses, and the cars zipping by, and the jet planes overhead, that they came into conflict with the pictures in the Sunday school book. In fact, they, and many other things in the life I was leading moment by moment, seemed to overwhelm those pictures.
Again, I guess it was in elementary school (maybe nine, ten, eleven, not sure exactly when it was, but thereabouts), I went to my parents crying, and told them I was having trouble believing in God. One or both of my parents showed me some photographs from a book. I think the photographs were of archeological excavations of what was purported to be an ancient Israelite/Jewish temple from before the birth of Christ. I think one or both of my parents referred to it as Solomon’s Temple.
That gave me some relief, but I bet that relief didn’t last more than about a day, maybe a lot less than that, because it wasn’t long before I reasoned, “Just because there was a Solomon and he had a temple, that doesn’t mean that there’s a God.”
But I didn’t exactly stop believing; it just got mixed in with and diluted by a bunch of other things (that mixed in and diluted thing really has always been the case with me; I’m no poster boy for spirituality).
I remember getting crude ideas about evolution from somewhere. I don’t recall them being in serious conflict with my religious beliefs. Those TV antennas on Sunday probably had more anti-religious influence on me than Darwin.
Oh, yeah, at about age thirteen I read the story “Letters from the Earth,” by Mark Twain. That actually caused me to tinker around with atheism briefly, but not more than about a month.
I’ll go ahead and cut to age fifteen. I was somewhat rebellious, so my parents sent me to live with my oldest brother and his wife for one school semester. About that time, I stopped believing in God. I remember talking to my dad on the phone from my brother’s house and telling him, “I don’t believe in anything anymore.” And I remember him answering, “Well, that’s a start.”
My two best friends throughout most of my childhood were brought up in an atheist household. Their mother was an atheist. The older of the two brothers struggled with spiritual ideas for a while, but I don’t recall what finally happened as a result. The younger brother eventually became a Christian.
Oh, this may be the way I found out that my childhood best friend was not joking about having become a Christian: He had gotten advanced degrees and a wife and kids, and gotten a good job way up north. By that time, we didn’t communicate regularly. I called him up one day, just to see how he was doing. It happened to be Easter Sunday. I believed in God again by then, but I didn’t pay too much attention to Easter, or religious holidays, for that matter. But right after I said hello to my friend and let him know who was calling him, he said, “He is risen.” 
Just thought I’d add that, in keeping with the thread’s theme.
Like I said, man, you make cartoons out of us. We’re actually three-dimensional human beings. We’ve, you know, got a lot more detail than you assign to us.
