I was born into a Catholic family. It was very much a great part of my life for a while. It felt nice to have my family be proud of me for taking part in mass and for being a "nice catholic girl". One day I went to church, and the time came to take the eucharist, I was one of the last ones up. So as I approach the priest, he turns and walks away. He was finished. This may seem silly, but I felt very betrayed. I stood in the middle of the aisles feeling like an idiot. I was in grade school at the time, really little. From then on I slowly began to not like church. I still believed in god, but wasn't too happy with the religion. All this time I had a friend who was an evangelical christian, and she wasn't allowed to do anything. She didn't watch any of the Harry Potter movies, and anytime my friends would tell ghost stories, she would excuse herself saying ghosts were from the devil. She also didn't watch Buffy because that "had to do with witches". She was no fun, and I realized religion was the reason why.

  During junior high I got my first crush on a girl, my best friend. Before then I'd been raised to hold homosexuality in contempt, and I did. But since I already didn't care for religion much I didn't have any conflicting feelings. Although I still considered myself catholic, but not practicing. It was a mixture of science and being gay that brought me to shed the last remaining vestiges of religion and theism. I didn't want to be controlled by clergymen, I didn't want my scientific inquiry to be impeded by zealotry. Thankfully I wasn't alone in this. My brother and I had both loved science from a young age, and we both gained skepticism and shed religious thoughts together. He was the only other person in my family I could talk science and atheism to. To this day, none of our family know.