Atheist people of reddit who were once religious, what changed your mind?

My dad has always been a hardline conservative Catholic. He followed the traditional, pre-Vatican 2 stuff. I bought into the whole religion thing until maybe 7th or 8th grade, obviously a very hormonal time for everyone... I remember learning in school (I went to Catholic school) that masturbation was a mortal sin according to the Catechism (i.e. it sends you to hell if you don't confess it to a priest before you die). I thought, "Wow, I must be defective, because I have this urge literally every day." As funny as it is to me now, that actually really messed with my head - I'd be filled with immense guilt immediately after beating the bishop. (Literally beating a bishop is a sin, but it probably wouldn't be a mortal sin unless you killed/seriously injured him. However, metaphorically doing the deed IS a mortal sin, interestingly enough.)

I honestly thought I was destined to go to hell, and I thought something was wrong with me. Sexual repression is a weird, dangerous, unhealthy thing for anyone, especially a boy in the midst of puberty. One day it just sort of dawned on me how ridiculous it was to think that way, since EVERYONE masturbates. I thought, "there's no way God would punish everyone like that for no reason," but I couldn't logically reconcile the absurdity of masturbation being a mortal sin in Catholic theology with what I actually believed. That started a chain reaction of me questioning everything about the Church, leaving me an atheist.

I thought in the back of my head for a few years that maybe I'd return to catholicism after moving away from the repressive religious environment created by my father and older brother. That went out the window when I totaled my car in a really bad car crash my junior year of high school. The only thing I remember thinking was, "Oh shit, this is it, I'm going to die," before blacking out and waking up behind the steering wheel a few minutes later. A couple weeks after the accident, someone said something like "Thank God He spared you, I bet you have faith now," and I realized that I never once thought about God or Jesus or the Church when I truly believed it was my last moment alive, so that sort of sealed the deal on being an atheist for me.

/r/AskReddit Thread