Also, anyone else have their atheist phase at 15 , buy Hitchens and Dawkins books, but never actually finish them?

I read Dawkins because I was very excited to ingest the antidote to a childhood's worth of Catholic orthodoxy. What I got out of "The God Delusion" was little more than 400 pages of self-aggrandizing bullshit. That pretty much killed my interest in "New Atheism". I got PZ Myers-pilled and just went all in on modern academics - math and physics mostly - holding to the belief that these rhetorical fights were for dorks and losers, while scientific inquiry and logical proof offered much firmer ground to build on.

Then I got deep into that and discovered how gutted and hollow academia was... Even then, you could hold up a piece of technology and know how it works if you dove deep enough into the manuals. That offered so much more value than anything religious institutions (or the jerk-offs doing anti-religion) had to offer.