It was weirdly quick. Most people talk about how they spend months or years slowly moving from one position to the other. For me, it was a single work day. I just had a good ten hours by myself with nobody else able to talk to me and I let my thoughts flow. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to believe what is true, even if it makes me uncomfortable. I left my house a Southern Baptist and came home an atheist.

There's a million things that drove me to come to the conclusion. One was that I was born and raised in a young-Earth family that believed that the entire universe was 6000 years old. I listened to an astronomer explain parallax triangulation and how we can work out that stars are much farther away than 6000 lightyears and it kept bouncing around in my head. Of course there are apologetics, but they're always just excuse-making when you look at them objectively.

The last little thing that I held on to was duality. I don't know how you can build a machine complicated enough that it produces subjective experiences, but those subjective experiences can be altered by changing the structure that generates them anyway. There isn't room for a soul anywhere in the process. My uncle had a brain tumor and I watched him transform from a quiet, loving man to a wife-beating slobbering mess that was incoherent and hallucinating when he died. For years, I kept telling myself that his soul had already left his body, but again, it's just excuse making.