Question: How many of my fellow atheists had a religious upbringing? If one had one, when did it wash out?

[eppur_se_muova]

29. It started with something my Mother said when I was 5 or 6 yo ... we attended a Southern Baptist church ...

both parents were Baptists, not extremists like you might think of them today, just raised to believe what their parents believed (repeat back N generations). We went to Sunday School and services every Sunday, and I listened to all the nice fairy tales, but didn't much get the point of all the actual religion ("saved" ? saved from what ?) and the bizarre metaphors ("washed in the blood of the lamb" ?? WHO thought that sounded like a good thing ?), but I took it all to be true, because why would all these nice people, including my parents, be telling me all this stuff if it wasn't true ? Then one day the preacher gave a sermon about missionaries who had traveled overseas to some "primitive" country to spread the Gospel to these "heathens" (I think that was the actual word used). Of course they triumphed over hardship and hostility, but the thing which impressed me was that the heathens insisted on hanging on to their old, wicked beliefs ! (Hey, I was 5 !) I couldn't understand that (after all, Christianity was right and true, so how could they believe anything else ?), so I asked Mother about it and to my surprise -- I was expecting some tale of evil run amuck -- she just said something like, "well, I guess that's just what their parents raised them to believe". I was dumbstruck ! I don't remember saying anything to her in response to that, but I was thinking Is that all there is to it ? Everyone believes whatever their parents teach them ? Not because there's anything right or true or even holy about it, it's just whatever you're taught from birth ? But .... THAT WOULD INCLUDE US !! So there was nothing particularly right or true or holy about our beliefs, they were just inherited without much challenge. Somehow, I never talked about that with my family -- after all, they seemed happy to continue with the pleasingly theatrical mythology -- but I never thought the same way about religion after that.

About the same time, I read my first books on dinosaurs (one from the Baptist Church library !) and began looking for more. I read anything about science that came my way*, started collecting Golden Nature Guides (Rocks and Minerals, Trees, Birds, Insects, Reptiles and Amphibians), and developed particular interests in chemistry and electronics (the latter ran in the family). So I was headed for true science gnurddom, and considered evolution and relativity to be non-controversial topics, despite so many authors emphasizing the reactionary responses when they were first introduced; quantum mechanics would come later. At one point, the richness of the story of evolution on Earth so thoroughly outclassed Genesis that I rejected everything else in the Bible as similarly unsupported by evidence. It wasn't something I felt comfortable mentioning to friends or family, but by 4th grade (8-9 yo) I was thinking of myself as an atheist, and not having any thought of that ever changing. But I'm still not "out" to my family, since they keep saying things which indicate they wouldn't welcome any such thing.

*Ironically, a relative I didn't particularly like bought me not one, but two books, on science themes, and they weren't necessarily dumbed-down children's books, which seemed to indicate I was expected to handle heavier reading material than other kids. One was my first dino-related book, and the other didn't really affect me -- I read only far enough to decide I wasn't that interested in Earth Science, but not before I learned to pronounce Mohorovičić discontinuity. Yeah, I was a pretty bookish kid.