Mine was probably when I relapsed towards religion at age 15-16 and joined my mom’s conservative megachurch, naïvely thinking I can convince them to be less bigoted and more “christ-like” as well as accept science

        • Robust Mirror
          21·
          23 days ago

          Honestly sometimes I wish I could brainwash myself that effectively.

      • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        25 days ago

        Not OP, but also an annoying adolescent atheist. After actually giving it some thought, I realized I was contextualizing the concept all wrong. Just because most people seem to contextualize God as a Santa Claus figure (bearded man who lives above us and judges our conduct, with fitting consequences) didn’t mean I had to accept that context.

        There have been many very intelligent people across history who had many interesting things to say about deity. Few of them were using the Santa Claus model.

    • gerryflap@feddit.nl
      13·
      24 days ago

      Same. At some point I became friends with pretty religious people who were also some of the most intelligent and nice people I had met. My beliefs that religious people are just dumb people who cannot understand the complexity of the real world kinda fell apart then.

      I returned back to my pre-teen opinion, still an atheist but with compassion for other people’s beliefs. No need to constantly force my opinion into it or needlessly be a dick because we disagree. I’ve had many interesting discussions since then with very religious people. I still don’t fully get it, and to me it still reeks of indoctrination, but I’ve accepted that it’s fine to disagree.

    • gi1242@lemmy.world
      6·
      25 days ago

      oh lol. been there done that. finally learnt it’s never worth your time to try and change someone’s beliefs.