fwiw I wouldn't say I'm entirely non-religious today, although that's still a complicated subject for me. The quick summary would be to say that I became very serious about religion due to loneliness (a way of coping, both in the positive reinforcement sense of "Who needs friends when I have God?" and negative in the sense of "Most kids my age are disgusting hedonists anyways") and due to a couple phobias that I could manage through rituals (frequent prayer, sacrifice of things that brought me pleasure, etc). Believing in a hardcore, micromanaging deity made it easier to imagine divine involvement in my own life, but my religious fervor was always inversely correlated to how happy I was. Probably the first major turning point was when I was 16 and passed out from drinking for the first time, and I made the mistake of having a large glass of milk the following morning, as an emetophobe. I spent hours pacing around the side of the house, crying, praying, and telling myself everything was alright while fighting the nausea, and at some point I found myself passed out a second time on a pile of dirt, a few hours having passed. I continued to think happy thoughts and chant "I am healthy, God is great" a thousand times for that day, but afterwards I realized how absurd it was for a whiny hypocritical masturbating drunk to earn personal protection and not many thousands of poor Christians in Africa or elsewhere dying.
