I only believed in God as a child because I was indoctrinated. The scales fell from my eyes in Social Studies class when I discovered that I was merely aligned to a demographic; had I been born in another place, to a different family, from a different culture, then my alignment to some other demographic would have cast all ideas about Ultimate Reality in an entirely different light.
I did not yet know the word "indoctrination" but at that moment I understood its meaning. I made an immediate break with religion, and resisted all attempts to drag me back into the fold.
At the same time I began to sense that if something so deeply insinuated into the mind could be forcibly imposed through a system that pretends to be founded in truth, honesty and justice, then the system must be fundamentally corrupt. With that new outlook, I drew lines in the sand, determined to free myself of all such influences. I joined millions of young people similarly situated in my opposition to The Establishment, even to the point of ending up in jail (naively believing that the police could not legally deprive me of my civil rights). At an elite school where I had been given a 4 year scholarship, I quit in the middle of my senior year, in protest over the use of a course (studying Plato no less) as a stump for the teacher to vent his Establishmentarian apologetics.
Indoctrination is a terrible thing. People die, or are tortured and maimed either as a direct consequence of indoctrination, or as a consequence of their subsequent awakening and rebellion against it.
Charles Dickens once came to the US to see for himself the conditions of our prisons. He wrote
I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain, to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body: and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.
Indoctrination shares this aspect of adjudication of a crime. It is the slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the human mind, perpetrated against vulnerable victims, which ought to shock the conscience of those who have either been spared the manacles, or who managed to throw them off as I did.
Unfortunately, under the pretense of Freedom of Speech ( freedom of religion) the practice so far remains legitimized.
But I believe the day will come, that as long as a person is too young to die in combat, to consume alcohol, or to consent to sex, the world will wake up to the urgent need to establish protections, ensuring that such a person is to too young to consent to indoctrination.
I don't believe in God because the entire concept has "the mark of fraud stamped upon it" as Thomas Paine eloquently described it. In the first place every conception of God originates from superstition, myth legend and fable. It is the highest most fatal fallacy to set this fact aside in preference to the illusions of indoctrination. Worst of all is the illusion of an immortal soul. The belief that one can cheat death is insane. It is nothing more than the self preservation instinct run amok.
And this is the bridge the indoctrinaires have for sale: buy this plan, do these tasks, and you will cheat death.
I believe that future generations will look back to the present age as one marked by naive, foolish and deliberately ignorant people, in denial that the Information Age has long since obsoleted their insane attachment to this, the oldest Establishment.