I once heard the concept of religious faith compared to a glass of water. When one is young, the glass is small and so is easily filled with a small amount of water. As one grows older, the glass expands, and the same amount of water no longer fills the glass. I am not positive why this comparison has stayed with me.

It is a fairly simple explanation for a rather complicated idea: the loss of one’s religious faith. I suppose, though, that the reason this analogy has persistently remained with me is I can easily relate to it.

I have felt my faith evaporate as I have grown older.

Unlike some, I did not lose my faith in the Catholic religion suddenly—no colossal event caused me to question the religious teachings that had been part of my upbringing. Nor did I just wake up one morning and decide to stop attending church.

My faith in the Catholic Church had a gradual death with many factors leading to it, two in particular. Both my education and the precedent of non-conformism set by my older siblings contributed to my loss of faith in Catholicism.

When I was young, I unconditionally believed everything my mother, Mass, and religion classes told me about my religious faith. One of the things many people find endearing about small children is their complete, total faith in everything.

The three-year-old girl, squealing with delight, who is being tossed into the air by her father does not for even a moment lose her faith that he will catch her every time. As a child, this was true of my religious faith as well. I had better be good, because God was up in heaven watching me, noting all my sins. This was a fact to me; I did not even think twice about it. It was only when I began to be educated in other areas outside of religion that I began to question what I had been taught.

If I had to choose one thing that has driven my education, it would have to be my constant need to know how and why things are the way they are. I have never been content with “because that’s the way it is,” types of answers.

As I demanded more in-depth answers in my secular education, I also began demanding them in my religious one.

“Because it says so in the Bible” no longer was a sufficient response to my religious queries.

I wanted to know why babies who died in childbirth could never go to heaven and how exactly Jesus could be the son of God and yet be the same thing as God at the same time. As I began to ask more and more questions to which there were no concrete answers, my faith began to waver.

Later, education would deepen my doubt in the Catholic Church as I began to learn about other religions. Many religions I encountered included a story of a great flood in their mythologies. From the polytheistic Greeks and Sumerians to the monotheistic Christians and Muslims, there are stories of the gods or God becoming angry and destroying the human race save one chosen man.

Both the Babylonians and the Christians have within their theologies a Moses figure (the Babylonians called theirs Sargon), found floating in a basket on a river, who would grow up to overthrow his adopted father, a king.

These undeniable similarities between these other religions and my own caused me to view Catholicism’s insistence that it is the only true religion through which one can find salvation as ludicrous. This is the primary reason I ceased attending Mass in ninth grade.

Although education has had the most influence on my straying from the Roman Catholic faith, it is not the only factor.

Precedent has also played a role in my religious metamorphosis. Both of my older sisters stopped attending church on Sunday mornings long before I did.

It is not that I decided to stop going to church just because my sisters stopped. It was just that my sisters’ refusal to go to church just to conform with the expectations laid upon them opened my eyes to the fact that there were alternatives to sitting in church being bored for an hour on Sunday mornings. If my sisters had not stopped going to church before me, I probably would have continued going despite the fact that I no longer believed in the teachings. My older sisters beat out a path that allowed me to follow my true feelings.

There were both positive and negative effects to my breaking off from the religion of my childhood. One that was a major positive was that my freedom from religion allowed me to become so much more open-minded.

Many strict Christians are very closed-minded when it comes to tolerating people who differ from the Christian lifestyle or views. I truly think that religious views blind some people into justifying their hatred and intolerance.

I attribute my own unwillingness to superficially judge people based on race, creed, gender, or sexual orientation to my irreligion.

A negative effect of my break with my childhood religion was my lack of confidence in what happens in death and thereafter. Religious people are not overly worried about death or the afterlife. They know what is going to happen because their religion has told them what happens. I often envy this carefree certainty of the religiously inclined.

I sometimes wish I had the same level of comfort with my own mortality.

It would often be easier to sit back and believe in something just because one is expected to and because then one would not have to think for oneself. But that is not the path for some, me included. I am not necessarily proud of my lack of religious faith, but neither am I ashamed of it. I am at peace with my personal idea of God, and that is what is important to me. All the other teachings of the religion of my birth are just excess water.