Like most atheists, I wasn't always an atheist. In fact, I consider myself as having been quite religious up until my mid teens. My main motivation for this was a profound fear of ghosts, which itself was something I don't remember having in my early childhood until a mischievous uncle subjected me to an evening of ghost stories in Calcutta. But religion and the idea of God had always seemed very natural to me. I remember the first time I encountered the idea that there were people who did not believe in God was when my grandfather told me that his father had been an atheist. He said it as if he were revealing a family scandal.
I think I was a fairly inquisitive child, though not unduly so, so that I don't expect that a biography of me would spend too much time poring over evidence of my inquisitive nature. Starting from when I was four or five, I had always felt uncomfortable contemplating infinities. God being infinite and without beginning or end, and what could possibly lie outside the Universe? (I knew all about the Solar System and outer space and the Big Bang by then.) My questioning nature was kept down by matter-of-fact reassurances from grown-ups that that the whole point of God was that you couldn't comprehend these things.
The perceived apotropaic properties of prayer and a higher benevolence that watched over me perhaps kept my theistic flame burning a lot longer than it might otherwise have lasted. It's fair to say that my theism burned out slowly and naturally rather than being suddenly put out by some great intellectual epiphany. Over time, as I learnt more about the world, I realized that I did not need God. Indeed, God was not necessary. As I outgrew religion, I began calling myself an "agnostic", and I remained an "agnostic" until one fine day I went, "Oh, wait. I think I'm actually an atheist." And then I became an atheist.
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