Why become an Atheist?

[Dragon_Of_Heavon]

My story is similar to Whitney's, I was born a Roman Catholic, worse as a child I was a bit extreme as I have a tendency to go all the way with what ever I do. My mother was one of the CCD teachers as well as the leader of the chorus. At this time I was about ten I started reading alot. starting with Moby Dick and I read up to War and Peace by the time I was twelve. I turned to reading to get some answers but it only gave me more questions. I would read the Catechism of the Catholic Church and find inconsistency after inconsistency however more and more reading just kept entrenching the fact that things did not add up. However I did not loose my religion until freshman year of high school. I was riding home on the bus and I was thinking about God and how perfect the idea was. I wanted to push closer to the idea and really understand it. So i started examining why I believe in God expecting to find some glorious bastion of truth. Instead I found a large gaping hole. I had never asked my self why I believe I had always just accepted it as common place for me. Some people like apples or the color green, I believed in God. It really was that ingrained belief or the old "You are Catholic from birth to earth" as my mother used to say, and still does. My not having an answer for this rather fundamental question made me hate my self. So my answer to this was to have my mother pull me out of high school and put me into a private Catholic school on the protest that there were Gangs and drugs in my old school (there really were so this was not hard). However upon reaching good old Bishop Mcguinness I met up with a group of individuals that actually helped me to question and when I found that I really had no reason for believing they helped me to come to terms that I was not evil for not believing in God. Upon graduating from Catholic high school I was agnostic, and I wanted more answers so when I got a chance to go to a brand spanking new Catholic College I jumped at the chance. However just like Whitney as I had my classes on philosophy I had more questions, and as I had my classes in theology I despised the church and its use of fear more and more. By Junior year I was a full blown Atheist (but with a Catholic Girlfriend). All in all I think that the reason I changed was that I asked my self why I believed. The problem though is that it cant be asked or taught it has to come as a natural questioning of self.