Hi, Hal.
I've shared some of your experiences, though in different decades and at different stages of life. In particular, I can identify with religious belief dissipating in the face of honest questions and clear perceptions.
Raised in a Southern Baptist community in the Bible Belt, of course I attended Sunday School as well as Sunday services regularly. I was a precocious reader, and by the age of 9 or 10 I had read the entire Bible twice, and many sections over and over. Some of the Bible matched my own awakening spirituality, but much of it seemed...off.
My first distancing from Christianity began with my questions: How could Adam have been sin-free before the apple if he was capable of disobeying? Why would he disobey unless he was likely to--he must have been made that way--wouldn't making him that way be the truly Original Sin? Why would God send she-bears to kill 40 children because they teased a prophet about being bald? Was that the prophet's decision, or God's? And how could that be fair and right? Why would a righteous man turn his daughters over to a mob? Hindu kids in India believe in Krishna; if they'd been born here, they'd believe in Christ: just because they've heard a Christian missionary speak, they are doomed to Hell? And, speaking of Hell, what act by a flawed creature, one of God's children, merits an eternity in torment? We imprison parents who act that way.
Etc.
In my experience, believers encourage questions as long as you don't ask hard questions, and as long as their answers satisfy you. Once you persist with questions, you move rapidly on the tally sheet from the Us to the Them column.
At age 10, I was banned from Sunday School for continuing to ask skeptical questions and to reject inadequate answers.
But the background of all this, I believe now, was the lack of evidence in the efficacy of Christianity. I saw no signs of betterment in the devout; in fact, the lot of them were the same racist, tax-cheating, wife-beating, child-abusing, hypocritical adulterers as those Satan Spawn Catholics, Jews, and Unbelievers.
Their hearts may have been filled with love, but it was mostly self-love, and it mostly fueled self-righteousness. The doctrine of salvation by grace rather than works seemed mostly useful in explaining why they did no good works, since there was no grace about them that I could detect.
At the same time, I was experiencing states of consciousness I'd now call transcendent or mystical, moments of oceanic consciousness, a communing rapture with nature from leaves of grass to stars, that so took me out of myself that I could later think, "So that's what it's like just to Be, without a name or body or neighborhood," because the experiences were profound enough to remove all awareness of self, name, place, body...
Trees can still make me weep with joy. My preacher thought my "daydreams" were Snares of Satan.
I don't know what they were, or are, but I believe they are good, and good for me. They launched me into decades of spiritual and philosophical reading, thinking, exploring, meditating, traveling, seeking. Those experiences turned me into a poet, because I had to invent a language with which to talk to myself about them. They have given me a perspective that is, at least in some ways, outside of time and self.
At present, I call myself an agnostic or atheist, depending on how irritated I am with doctrine-spew.
But
there is something about the world.... God? Creator? I don't know. I do know that the universe is vast and old beyond our powers to comprehend: learning notations for those incredible dimensions is not the same as understanding them.
If there is a God, and if, from our tiny morsels of vision and understanding, any of us have said something true about God, it was likely by chance. The Gods that humans have proposed so far are all Big Daddies or Big Mommies, good and bad, which I believe says more about us than gods. Whatever God may exist would, I think, be more strange and mysterious than we have imagined or could imagine. In the face of that mystery, to hear any believer insist their much translated, emended, amended, adumbrated pastiche of human writings is the perfect word of God (and only properly interpreted in their culture, too, of course) makes my eyes widen and glaze. So proud and so sure!
I, too, have found paganism attractive at times. While some would term it primitive religion, I prefer to think of it as primeval--the expression of spirituality by humans before the State looked upon the ecclesiastical control knobs and found them good.
I'd say keep thinking and feeling. If you feel moved to do so, seek, but don't just read a few books about other beliefs and kid yourself that you've exhausted them--I recall "seekers" in the 60s who would read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, burn some incense, and chant a few mantras before declaring they had "done that." Years later they boast about their time of spiritual quest when they never left the cocoon of their own time and place.
Read primary texts of the world's great religions, mystics, and philosophies, and if one of them sings out to you, go deeper: read more, find a community for discussion, visit that culture's home, etc.
Or, like me, just get a bit more comfortable with feeling but not knowing.
Walk in beauty, Hal.
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