At what point do you say, “Everything I have been taught is a lie, and the framework I have been given to make sense of my life, the world, and my place in it, is wrong?” And what does it take for that to happen?

For me it happened when I was 15. And it took a lot.

I grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist family in a SC town where anyone who did not exude evil was assumed to be a Christian. I was taught to fear atheists, which was easy to do, since I had never met any. But from the stories I was told, I gathered that they were cruel unhappy people with contempt for morality and a hatred of life.

To me they were villains on par with “The Joker” on Batman, or worse. It was hard for me to believe such people existed.

Examples of atheists I was given were murderous villains like Stalin, and Christian literature was full of saintly heroes who stood up to the kinds of tyrants who tortured Christians for their beliefs. I was always inspired by those heroes, who were always clear victims and responded to ill treatment with forgiveness, love, and courage.

In the seventh grade, I enrolled in a strict fundamentalist Christian school where the first words in my physical science textbook were: “The Bible is the infallible word of God.” I learned a lot of other interesting things that year such as: it is a sin for girls to wear jeans; rock music is evil; and Care Bears are Satanic.”

At first I accepted most of what I was told, entranced by the novelty. The church I went to as a child let you wear jeans to church at night and had never preached against rock music. Apparently, it had been unaware of the threats to Christianity and common decency that besieged the devout on every side.

I immersed myself in religion that year; prayed often; read the Bible all the way through; filled my head with Bible verses which I memorized. I dreamed of one day becoming one of the brave saints in the books I read, like Corrie Ten Boom, who risked her life to hide oppressed Jews during the Holocaust.

It was my full-scale immersion in my faith ultimately led to its downfall; that and a severe depression that struck as soon as I turned 13. Having bipolar disorder, I have experienced many depressions throughout my life. Nothing has ever come close to the three year nightmare that began when I was 13.

My teachers did not help matters. They taught that in heaven all Christians would have their lives reviewed by God on a giant celestial screen, and that Christians who lived ungodly lives or had forbidden thoughts would weep with remorse, even though they would be spared from hell.

I was a self-conscious 13 year old girl who was terrified to even present a book report to the class. The idea of my thoughts being on display before the world was horrifying.

I became paranoid about having “wrong” thoughts, which led to a kind of mental Turrets syndrome in which my mind furiously conjured the most depraved thoughts it was capable of having. I imagined God staring down at me in stern disapproval. I prayed for the offending thoughts to go away and got no results.

I thought God was ignoring my prayers because he hated me for having “wrong” thoughts or that he was shocked by them. My shame was unbearable. For the first and only time in my life, I considered suicide.

I had nightmares and woke up in cold sweats, gasping. I lost my appetite and had to go to a psychiatrist because my dad was worried I had anorexia. As I fell asleep at night I envisioned how it would feel to be engulfed by the flames. I thought about how excruciating it was to touch a hot stove, even for a second.

I did not necessarily think I was going to hell. But the horror that most of humanity was going there had worked itself inside me. I could almost feel the burn working its way beneath my skin. No hope, no escape, forever. And a God unwilling to reconsider, deaf to all screams and pleas for mercy.

Desperate for understanding, I was reading the Bible through and instead of finding the comfort many promised, I became more and more disturbed. The picture of God that materialized from my reading was not the loving God I had been taught to envision.

I was particularly disturbed by a passage that said God pre-selects which people will become saved, removing free will from the picture entirely.

My beliefs ruptured. The ground buckled. The face of God warped. And no one else seemed to be having my problem.

Lost, unbalanced, desperate, I turned to the only thing that seemed stable: reason. For the first time, I began to question what I had been taught. The parts of the Bible that contradicted each other, which I had tried not to think about, now came into light.

This finally led to my questioning the cornerstone of my belief system: faith. Why was it a virtue? Why did God care about it so much? Why did he not like reason, if he had created brains capable of using it?

What remained of the believer in me was stunned by the thoughts I was having. The stories I was fed always portrayed atheists as people who secretly suspected God existed but who had nefarious ulterior motives for doubting him: foolish arrogance; a dislike for following rules; addiction to cruelty; or a disdain for all things good.

The word “atheist” had a hard edge, and I did not want to become cruel, arrogant, or hostile. In the end, the summer after I completed the ninth grade, I became an agnostic, even though I had never heard the word.

I reasoned that if there was a God, there was no way to know it, since belief rested on faith. I was convinced that faith was not knowledge. If it was, why did the faith-based revelations of all religions not agree?

Considering that, how could a fair God, if he existed, expect baseless belief and damn someone to eternal torture for not having it? Especially when reason was the best tool people had to discern truth from non-truth. Within a week after asking this question, I encountered the word “agnostic” and made it my own.

My depression had been deeply intermeshed with my religious confusion. Now it lifted. The world became new and frightening and full of mystery. The biggest questions no longer had easy answers. The world had become too fascinating for me to be depressed. I felt like I had been dropped on an alien planet with no knowledge of how I had gotten there. I liked the feeling.

I transferred to a public school in the tenth grade. Taking a biology class, I became excited about science, which celebrated reason and gave me a way to rebuild my understanding of the world.

I kept my doubts a secret. I went to church, wrapping myself in layers of isolation. The idea of telling anyone was unthinkable.

I was cursed with a kind of double vision. I could see myself from within, and I knew that I had done what I had to do to preserve my mind and sanity. But I also remembered how nonbelievers like me had looked through my Christian lens.

There would be no point in trying to explain my new insights to my family, because it would be like trying to trying to argue with my old self. Years later, after I revealed my doubts, I learned that this was true.

When I had my manic episode my senior year of high school, I admitted my skepticism to my parents. After it was all over, I confirmed to them that my doubts, confessed in a state of lowered inhibitions, were real.

My parents were baffled; saddened; disappointed. And now, decades later, they still are.

As long as I avoid the topic of religion, I get along with them. On some level I think they understand that I am the person they have always known, yet they still worry that I am playing a dangerous game with my eternal fate.

I love my family and appreciate their many admirable qualities, their kindness; their humor; and their nonreligious insights.

But there will always be an unspoken tension and distance between me and them. There is no way to reverse what I understand, and I would not want to if I could. And there is no way for them to seriously consider my point of view without putting their own faith in jeopardy.

Since agreement seems to be impossible, I can still reach across the barrier against understanding by loving them, and I do love them, as much as I always have.

But I sometimes have trouble understanding how so many people can continue to hold onto beliefs that are based on a text full of inconsistencies; or how they cannot see that faith is a way that religion protects itself from scrutiny. I wonder how all of my friends I grew up with continue to hold onto their beliefs, while mine did not survive my adolescence.

But then I ask: At what point does anyone drop a framework for viewing the world that has been built over a lifetime; or ask questions that could ultimately lead to alienation from family and friends? At what point does anyone decide to give up the promise of an afterlife in exchange for uncertainty? What does it take for that to happen? And then I remember:

For me, it took a lot.