That's what I don't understand about prayer in school or people who think we should bring that back. Did prayer in school accomplish anything? In itself it is magical thinking. There is some mythical period of American history people want to revert to and also link it to the time when there was prayer in school, and that we "declined" when prayer was declared unconstitutional. Although I went through school after the fact, I think it might be one of the first issues I was aware of, regarding the sanctity, er, well, of my secular rights.

I don't know if my mother was/is an atheist, but her father was, and financially supporting us, so she pretended to be one over issues like this, which I kept hearing about and always thought it was fishy. How will that make us good to tell us when to pray? How does prayer in school make everything ok again in America?

My moment came through prayer in schools. In public school there was some silent head bowing over linked fingers after the Pledge. I had moved in 2nd grade to this scene. I went with the flow but began using the time to think. Do I feel anything special? No. Does anyone else look different? No. Do I think anything is going on here? No.

I figured that I respected honesty more than pretending, so I began making a point of being honest with myself about it. I wasn't one to act out, though, so I've been looking around at people with reverently closed eyes ever since.

@Mark the Pilgrim:

Your childhood questions and thinking processes sound eerily like mine. I was especially mystified by people acknowledging Greek and Roman mythology as myth but presenting the Bible as fact.

Not to hijack your thread, but it sounds similar to my epiphany:

I had that "aha" moment when I was four. I had just come home from Sunday School and I lay on my mother's bed thinking about what I was taught. And at that tender age I could already realise the problem with evil. I started shouting at the walls (not because I was angry, it's just that when I used to have internal arguments with myself I would talk aloud) and attempted to speak to God. I asked him "Why is there evil?", "why can't you just beat the Devil?", "why send people to hell?", "how did Adam and Eve's children find wives if they were the only people on earth?" and so on. And I suppose it just all seemed like nonsense to me. I remember putting it on par with the things that I saw on the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers - interesting to listen to, but it isn't actually real. Of course I wasn't an atheist yet, but I definitely decided that I wasn't going to be a Christian. When I went back to Church I remember looking around and thinking "people actually believe this stuff? No, they can't". So for quite a while until the topic came up again, I was convinced that no one actually seriously believed in it. Man was I shocked to find out they did.

So I suppose that was my "this is all bullshit" epiphany. But what was also more important was that later on I started reading world myths and could not see anything that made believing in God more special than believing in Mabuay or Hurucane. My family were mostly on par with me though.

Very similar to how I feel now that I've been deconverted. I never had an "Aha!" moment like you did, but it does feel great to know that there's no cosmic being watching me wherever I go.

HALLELULIAH!!! Praised be thinking!

It's also nice when what makes sense to a person coincides with what is measurably true about the universe. It's a nice bonus.

I am happy for you. That you are living in a world that makes sense to you and have escaped the religious oppression and abuse you experienced.

It sounds quite familiar.

My parents were divorced when I was three, after which time I lived with my mother even though she had serious mental issues (this was the 70s, at a time when the courts always deferred to the mother in custody situations). My mother and sister and I attended the church on the corner, which I'm sure was selected by my (non-driving) mother for its convenience rather than ideology. It was (is) part of a small midwestern sect known as "missionary" which, to the best of my later research, is closely akin to 7th Day Adventism. In any case, Bible literalism was a mainstay of the church and I was taught that everything in the Bible was beyond questioning.

My first crisis of faith occurred when I was repeatedly badgered (there's no better way to put it) to "accept Jesus into (my) heart." That's all I heard, variations on that commandment/question. I had no idea what people were talking about. I tried praying, but the whole "God speaking" thing alluded me, too. I was convinced for sometime that I was unworthy of God because He didn't speak to me. I even imagined that He was shunning me for some or another minor childhood infraction. Finally, I told the congregation that I had, indeed, accepted Jesus into my heart - I did it partially because I thought saying it would make it so (it didn't) and partly because I didn't want to stand out among the more worthy in the congregation.

That was about the time my father, through lengthy court battles, won custody of my sister and I and my mother was removed to what use to be called very harshly a "psycho ward". I was 10 at the time. I didn't know it at the time, but my father was a lifelong nonbeliever. I knew he did not attend church, but I wasn't really aware that he was an atheist - which I had been taught was worse even than a murderer and far worse than the voodoo practicing infidels in places like Haiti (the church had taken on Haiti as a major target of its evangelical missionary work).

Anyway, time went on. I attended church less often (I sometimes went with my sister, who insisted on continuing to attend).

My second and final crisis was when I decided to transcribe Noah's Ark on a piece of graph paper, using the commonly accepted conversions for Biblical cubits. As I stared at it, it became clear even to a 12-year-old that something was seriously wrong with the story. The more I thought about the story of Noah's Ark, the more ridiculous it sounded to me. I showed the piece of paper to my father (who, coincidentally, had designed and built several boats - a lifelong hobby). He smirked and agreed with me - we talked, for the first time, about his own beliefs. Even at that stage, he was cagey and the word 'atheist' never came up in the conversation - though I understood the implication.

Anyway, it was clear to me that at least one part of the Bible was, well, patently made up. That led me to re-examine the Genesis account, which even as a much younger child made absolutely no sense to me. It was clear then that at least two key stories in the Bible - stories that I had been taught, nay admonished on pain of eternal damnation, to believe was the literal truth - were in fact not true.

I distinctly remember laying in bed one morning and running this all through my head. I thought about the obvious untruths in the Bible. I thought of my father, a non-believer who was not only a moral and upstanding individual, but obviously not suffering from anything resembling divine retribution for his lack of faith.

Then it hit me. It was, I must say, the closest thing to what I have heard others describe as a religious epiphany or awakening. It's all bull-s*it, I thought (and yes, I did think of that word). Suddenly that morning, a great weight was lifted off my shoulders. I suddenly had the freedom to live my own life, control my own destiny. No one was watching my every move from the cosmic panopticon. I could BREATHE. Years later, I read Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage and Maugham's account of this same moment for his protagonist, Philip Carey, was so accurate that it brought tears to my eyes. It was nothing short of a liberation.

So, that's the story of my religious awakening.