Good question, hope you don’t mind me jumping in. For me as a teenager or even younger, reading about various faiths and mythologies, I was thinking about which faith was the right one. Obviously I could simply choose the one of my parents and the adults around me followed, but I went to a school with Muslims, Hindu and Buddhist children too. Was I really supposed to try and convert them? None of the Christian teachers did.

It all made no sense. Everybody was just doing and saying what their parents told them to, and actually thinking or talking about it and taking it actually seriously just seemed absurd. Nobody was actually following through on what the scriptures said they aught to be doing, if it really was all true, and if they had that would be even worse.

So it wasn’t so much deciding god doesn’t exist, it was that if god does exist, which version is it and how would I know? From there concluding that religion is an entirely artificial social construct was a pretty small step.

Having said that, I also concluded that spirituality is clearly a ubiquitous human experience. Religion seems to be a response to a universal, or near universal impulse that it’s worth taking seriously.