I'm in my mid 30s and can remember very clearly back to when I was like 7 or 8 my mom would make me go to church and I hated that shit so much. I would just sit there and reread genesis over and over every Sunday just to "do something" other than just sitting there, bored as hell.

Anyway, I told my mom at some point I hated church and didn't wanna go and she basically said "fine, don't love Jesus if you don't want to." And didn't make me go anymore. By total coincidence, I'm sure, my little brother and she both quit going as well not long after.

So by my teens I already had a resentment towards my quasi-religious family; Christian by label, but never in action. I was too young to understand what else religion could be beyond fear-porn bullshit that I absolutely never bought into for a second. I actually posted a bunch of what kids now days would call "cringe" around 2003-04 somewhere in there. Age like 14-17. Just paragraphs and paragraphs ranting about how dumb someone has to be to believe in God.

Fast forward another 5-10 years, so like 2008-2010ish, I started noticing everyone who identified as atheist was 1) extremely vocal (I hadn't really spoken about it since like 16 because I realized no one gave a shit) 2) had an odd hyper focus on Islam.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't fall for that trap for a while myself. I think I caught on fairly quickly though when I figured out like you're interacting with probably almost all white, middle income, western guys who have never met a Muslim person and yet all these people post 90% of the time about... whatever. Shit about Muhammad as a warlord is popular. Amongst other topics. I just remember thinking like "ok, yeah, that sounds bad. But the Christians...? They live right next to me and they're kinda crazy." It was just a weird outlet for "acceptable" Islamophobia which often was just anti-Arab racism under the thinnest possible veil. I also didn't know any people from any Middle Eastern countries at the time, but didn't feel much hatred towards them.

I was (self jerking off) genuinely of the mindset like "all religions are equally dumb" and that is why I eventually stopped calling myself an atheist. It was just too cringe and associated with "I'm an atheist and I'm about to say the most anti-Arab talking points bullshit you've ever heard" and many others ran straight the fuck away from that immediately. Everyone who's like mid-30s and calls themselves an agnostic now days is probably one who ditched the online atheist stuff sometime in that era.

As I got older I met a bunch of people from a ton of faiths. Mostly Christians of course, but I met an orthodox Jewish guy and some Arab Muslims and some white American Muslims. I met most of them in an academic setting, and so I saw they were definitely not dumb. Nor were they much different than me. They didn't give a shit that I didn't believe in what they do, I also didn't really care, and it was just like "why did I ever care so much about this?" I suppose a lot was a childhood resentment for Christianity being forced upon me. I think it's natural some people will resent that forever. But coming to kinda learn about Judaism and Islam in a second hand way showed me a lot. I think I finally realized that for some people religion can be more than just a label, like it had been for most of my family. It can be like a path in life. Or an anchor. Something like that. I still can't say I fully understand really, but I could see that despite what the internet would have you believe these people held no special resentment towards me. I guess it was a classic case of just finally being exposed to different cultures and people and immediately going "oh, anything bad I ever imagined was just bullshit someone put in my brain" and it kinda washes away.

Also, perhaps ironically, my field of study was biology. You'd think such a field almost by definition would be packed full of atheists. How could someone believe in evolution AND creationism? Well, you can, long story short.

I've actually been on the defensive side of theists multiple times over the years when some (usually ignorant, but some are highly educated) dingus tries to insist on the impossibility of god. I just have to explain to them over and over that we simply don't know a lot of stuff, may never know it, and yeah, sure, I agree there's in all likelihood no god. But if someone chooses to believe that god sparked the first life or caused the Big Bang, who cares?

I actually wrote a paper in college, I think in my third year, about how I had begun college as a "devout atheist" and several years into my biology undergrad program was questioning if there was a god after all because so much stuff is... just crazy. I felt like I was having daily existential crises with some shit trying to fathom it. Maybe I'm just a dumbass, I dunno, but I think the resolution to my contradictions was found in writing that paper (the prof was doing that kind gesture of "you're all fucking up, so I will let you write a paper on basically anything and average it in with your finals so I don't get 50 whining emails over my break" type thing) and putting into words for the first time then, but also since then, how far my opinion of science and religion had changed from my teens. Accepting that maybe I was wrong, and that I didn't somehow just magically come to the right conclusion because I'm just so smart. Or accepting that none of us know and insisting I knew basically by definition was against my own beliefs.

I'm kinda like Mulder from the X files or something. I just want to believe. Or maybe that was his partner, whatever, point is I'm the forever-skeptic because I want to believe, but I also want to justify that belief. I want to understand why people believe, but I probably never will. Maybe not until the final season when I see those sweet, sweet aliens for myself.