Motivations for the non-belief in God

I grew up in a Catholic environment, but a really watered down version of it. That is, the generation of my parents was the last one over here (Belgium) that really got submerged in religion and the last one where you sorta isolated yourself if you didn't participate in the whole thing. We did go to church about once a week (I think about as long as my grandparents lived), I was baptized, we had religion lessons in school etc. But all in all, I can't remember a single second in my young life that religion was an issue one way or the other. It simply didn't "stick". I never consciously decided 'not to believe', I simply didn't. But I also wasn't vocal about this, and I always joined my parents to church as long as they went simply to avoid possible (unnecessary) conflict. My grandparents would have been disappointed, for example. It was a small price to pay.I always wondered how much it mattered in this, that I was allowed not to believe. That is: what would have happened if I grew up in a very devote community? What would have happened if I were born 50 years before? I'd like to think that I would have resisted it, but I'm realistic enough to accept the possibility that I would just have gone along with the mainstream, after all. I'm possibly not enough of the 'rebellious' type, lol.Like I said, I never had deep thoughts or a serious internal conflict about the whole issue. But (and now we get on topic), I do think I can, in retrospect, identify the 'background' reason why I never believed. What it all comes down to, I think, is an ability to recognize that people can deceive themselves. People fool themselves all the time. Because they lack self-critique, because they lack necessary information, because they are deceived by their limited senses, because they are misled by their prejudices, because they want something to be true so much, that they disregard any indications that it might not be true. Because they are submerged in a culture that has all these properties.Somehow (it may have been a case of reading the right books or whatever), I came to realise that skepticism and something along the lines of the scientific method were the only ways to seperate pseudo-knowledge from reliable knowledge. An honest attempt to work around our inherent limitations as humans. And pseudo-knowledge was just unsupported opinion and thus totally, completely and utterly uninteresting. As an aside: I feel a mixture of respect and disbelief when I see some of the people 'on my side' discuss religious matters (Trinity, salvation, the Ark...) in here. I'm always immediately reminded about the 'number of angels that fit on the tip of a needle' example. What a complete loss of time, lol. Just the observation that there are so many religions, and that place of birth seems to be the overwhelmingly most important factor which determines to which religion one belongs, was more than enough for me to catalogue religion under 'pseudo knowledge'. How do you decide between religions?Bottom line: while the fundies always claim that science is arrogant because it claims to explain so many things, I find that the scientific mindset is actually the humble one here. And when I realized this, there was no way back (although I never was 'there', to begin with )