I was raised pentecostal but gradually my family and I went more conservative till we finally settled on one of the worst denominations: Reformed. I have been baptised three times, was heavily into relationship over religion, messianic jew doctrine and hermeneutics. I often would turn agnostic but would always return to jesus after a while. At one point my devotion got so bad that I rejected all my non-believing friends so that I could be more holy. Three precipitating factors contributed to my turn to atheism, one of them was that I never felt like I was able to truly live up to gods standard esp when everyone else seemed to have it easy, the second was that i never felt that peace and joy christians preached or connected to God at all because I never succumbed to the mass hysteria and emotional manipulation cos i was able to see through it, the third was that I was living life just fine and getting the same "blessings" as i would from praying even when forgot to. Finally I came across my amazing boyfriend who planted little seeds of doubt in my mind by showing me various bits of evolutionary fact that debunked my creationist beliefs and then one day i saw a post on fb that showed that the time it takes for the light of stars to reach the earth is a lot longer than 6000 years and from there my beliefs disentegrated rapidly. And now I'm an atheist who is discovering all the time how different beliefs i once held dear are really quite idiotic.