Recovering from Religion

My parents divorced when I was five. Neither had been particularly religious before hand, but my father turned to it after my mother had an affair. He told me once that it was because he had broken God’s law and allowed her to work, instead of making her stay home and raise my sister and me. He had brought sin into their life, thus leading to the divorce.
I was six, when my father remarried. My stepmom was a music teacher at a Christian school, but after their marriage she quit her job and stayed home to raise me and my sister. We moved to a new home near my eighth birthday, and with the move came a new sister and the decision that my stepmom would be homeschooling us from this point on. I didn’t handle all of this change well. It was eight years before I escaped the abuse and indoctrination my parents put on me. I was told my rebellious nature brought demons in the house that attacked my baby brother, and that was why he cried at night. I was told that I was beyond saving, that it didn’t matter if I repented or prayed to God, I would go to Hell regardless, because my repentance wasn’t genuine. I watched as my sister got baptized, took communion and her purity vows, all of which I was forbidden from because I wasn’t worthy. On top of this, my stepmom insisted that I had a mental illness. I learned much later in life that she thought I had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Not because I had been diagnosed by a doctor, or because my mom was a heavy drinker, but because she had looked it up online as the only explanation for my bad behavior.
Throughout my homeschool education, I had really familiarized myself with the Bible. Near the end of it, I was taught a bit of Apologetics. I had been raised as a Young Earth creationist, with influences from Quiverfull and Calvary Chapel Churches. Ironically, or maybe unironically, depending on your perspective, it was the Young Earth creationist science curriculum and the worldview curriculum that started my deconversion process. Both taught me the importance of thinking critically and to be careful about what assumptions were made. They, of course, emphasized that God was no assumption, a given, but I think that the critical thinking I learned was helpful.
I moved in with my mother at age 16, and she enrolled me in a public school. It was overwhelming how different people were there. My expectations were that high school was going to be something like The Breakfast Club, but people weren’t really like that at all. I was being taught a lot of different things that I had been told all my life were evil, such as Evolution and sexuality. I began to question what was right, and so I decided to start from a blank state. This didn’t last very long, though. I wanted there to be something more to life. I spent the next few years dipping into Neo-Paganism and mysticism. My mom was (and still is) into Astrology, so I borrowed her books. I spent a good amount of time convincing myself that there were spirits all around us, and my beliefs were validated by the friends I had made at school.
These beliefs actually ended up reeling me back into Christianity, actually. There was a pastor I found on YouTube who claimed to fight literal demons, which you could see only with your mind’s eye. It really spoke to me. I desperately wanted to believe that I was special, that I had some great ability and that I would save lives. So, I signed up to attend a private Christian university. One of the required courses was an Old Testament survey, where we learned the origin of the Old Testament and how it was written and adapted. When I learned that the Bible was a myth and borrowed from other ancient civilizations, I looked up more. I came across atheists on YouTube debunking creationist claims, like Aaron Ra. I discovered Christopher Hitchens, George Carlin and others criticizing Christianity and Theism in general. These videos, coupled with the lessons my stepmom taught me about the importance of being careful about the assumptions we make when forming a worldview, broke my faith. I’ve been an atheist since 2010.
But I think that simply losing your faith is only half of the deconversion process. I’m still deconverting today. The biggest thing I’m still working to overcome is my ego. Making a mistake doesn’t mean I’m the worst person in the world, and life often requires help from other people. For me at least, deconversion is similar to recovering from addiction. The desires are still there, the itch to fall back into the same behaviors comes back with varying intensity, but it gets easier to deal with, as time goes on.