My story is simpler than most. And not as filled with family strife.
My family was nominally Protestant, mainly from my mother's side, Scottish. Actually, my father's side, Irish (County Mayo) and southwest German (Baden), was Catholic until his normally non-religious father "got religion" in one town and the entire family converted to Protestant and remained so after his father lost his new-found religion after having gotten cheated by the church leaders in a business deal. My grandmother was very religious --Protestant -- for the rest of her long life, but my father had quickly become disillusioned with religion because of the rampant hypocrisy he saw continuously, though for his mother's sake he continued to attend church regularly until his 21st birthday. But in our family he never expressed his religious views; I did not learn of them until more than a decade after the events of my own deconversion, thus he had made no contribution to that deconversion.
As I said, we were nominally Protestant. In elementary school in the second half of the 1950's, my mother had signed me up for Released Time Religious Education. I attended church with our neighbors, members of a mainstream Protestant church -- I do not remember what denomination it was except "Protestant". Then when I was about 11 years old, I accompanied church members to a Billy Graham revival in L.A., which motivated me to be baptized in our church.
Within a year, I began to strongly feel that I needed to get serious about religion, which first required me to learn just what it was I was supposed to believe. Obviously, I was supposed to believe what was in the Bible, so I started to read the Bible, just as I would any other book (at the time), from beginning to end. Even though it was very likely not required by my church, I took a naïvely literalistic approach to my reading. It was totally incredible! Really! I could not believe what I was reading. I don't remember exactly how far I got, though I'm pretty sure that I had not made it to Lot's incestuous rape by his daughters (Genesis 19:30+), since I did not learn about that one until a couple-few decades later. So, since I could not believe what I was supposed to believe, I could not be a Christian. My only choice was to leave, which I did.
Basically, that was my deconversion. It was a personal choice that I really didn't discuss with anyone, except to let my neighbor know so that she would not expect me to accompany them to church anymore. I didn't really have any family members to worry about. Nobody else in my immediate family attended church, though my older sister and her husband are now fundamentalists. I never brought up the matter with my grandmother and one of my great-aunts, who had converted to Catholocism when she married my great-uncle, never bothered the kids but rather would continually rag on my mother that we non-Catholic kids were going to Hell and it was her fault.
Then in extra-curricular reading in high school (I have always been an avid reader, though for the past couple decades it's mainly been technical) I learned more about Christianity's bloody history. As I entered into college, the "Jesus Freak" movement hit, 60's hippies now getting "turned on to Jesus" -- back then, a "freak" was a hippie, usually identified by his/her drugs of choice (as related on History Channel's show on Woodstock, a normal introductory line was "What you got?", meaning what drugs would they share) and a "straight" was a non-freak. A number of friends got "hooked on Jesus" and I became a kind of fundamentalist "fellow traveller" (borrowed from the McCarthy red scare which sought to indict non-communists who had communist friends or acquaintences), in that I learned a lot about Christian fundamentalism while never accepting it. The more I learned, the more skepical I became. It just did not make any sense at all, especially not biblical literalism and their obsession with demonology.
It was during that time that I first encountered "creation science", mainly through two claims: 1) living mollusks had been carbon-dated to be millions of years old, and 2) a NASA computer calculating the moon's position back to the distant past stopped at roughly 6000 BC stating that nothing existed before that time and when brought back to the present had a one-day discrepancy which was accounted for by Joshua's Lost Day. That first claim just didn't seem right, plus considering all the other non-creationist BS that I'd been getting from them, it seemed prudent to distrust this one too; in my researching in the mid-80's, I found the source of that claim and found that the mollusks in question were fresh-water living in streams fed from limestone sources such that the vast majority of the carbon they were getting was very "old" carbon from the limestone, not from the atmosphere as carbon-dating depends on, and as the source article itself pointed out and warned about. Now, try to remember back to 1970. Computers were near-mythical machines that virtually nobody was able to anywhere close to, and most of those who did could get no closer than the windows encasing the computer room. But even before I had come to know anything about computers (1977, computer technician training, 1980, computer science degree), I knew full well that what that claim was saying about what a computer could do was complete and total bullshit; even many Christian writers denounce it.
Then a decade later, around 1980, an ICR debate was staged at the university near where I was stationed. Amazed that creationists were still around, I started studying "creation science" to learn what evidence they really did have. Instead, I learned that all they had was lies and deception. Three decades later, that story has not changed one single iota.
During the time I've been trying to have discussions with creationists (from mid-1980's on), I've found that they must continually guard against certain thoughts. This agrees with what I had learned as a fellow-traveller and with the testimonials of former fundamentalists, such as Gary * , a friend at church (UU). As an atheist, I feel free to pursue any line of investigation and to question anything, as I have done.
{* FOOTNOTE:
One day Gary picked up some furniture we were donating and we went for a Korean BBQ lunch. He told me how for many years he had been a fervent fundamentalist. During that time, he would encounter every day things that contradicted his beliefs, things that he had been taught did not exist and could not exist for Scripture to be true. He would just cast a blind eye on such troublesome things, but as each day passed he would have more and more such things to avoid noticing. Finally, all that self-delusion and denial just proved too much for him to maintain. So he applied the Matthew 7:20 test to Christianity and found that it failed miserably. BTW, you should start reading from Matthew 7:15. Now he's self-described "an atheist and a thorough humanist" and he finds that he is so much happier and spiritually fulfilled than he was as a Christian. The only thing he misses is being able to express gratitude to God. But isn't that a small price to pay for freedom and ability to see Truth?
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