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The Bible, of course, was the one that sent me spiraling away for good when I was young. That will always be first and foremost for most people, I think.
After that, though, there was a certain author that kept me company during the time I felt I needed to keep my atheism quiet, and he made me feel that people had been having doubts and living good lives for ages before me, so I shouldn't feel so lonely. This might sound odd to some people, but Mark Twain is a fabulous writer for anyone who questions religion. In 6th grade Twain love hit me hard, and I gathered about me everything I possibly could by him. He always struck me as a bit of a misanthrope with an extraordinary ability to poke fun at the ridiculousness around him, and he certainly didn't spare religion. There are several short stories by him that essentially rip religion to shreds, but you never really notice how scathing he is because you're too busy laughing. I wouldn't say his writings helped me on my way out of religion, but I would say they helped me keep from getting bitter about religion during a time I was still forced to go to church. I could see the humor in it because of him.
Another author that really helped me was Caryl Rivers. I was raised Catholic, and Rivers wrote about growing up Catholic in the fifties. That experience, the way she writes it, was alien to my experience growing up Catholic, but it made me realize her Catholic Church was the one my parents grew up with, and my parents seemed to have deviated widely from that church, though they still remained Catholic. I felt closer to my parents reading Rivers' work, because, even though they couldn't see the connection, I could . . . we all had looked at the religion we were being raised with, found it wanting, and adjusted accordingly. That really, really helped me deal with everything, because I hated disappointing my parents, it was the worst part of not believing.
Learning about ancient mythologies in school, and reading those stories helped. The Norse God, Odin, struck me in particular, how he sacrificed his eye in a quest for knowledge, while the god I'd been raised with seemed so bent on suppressing knowledge. Actually, I liked the Norse Gods better in general, because unlike the Roman and Greek gods, they didn't seem bent on raping people all the time. Anyway, learning about those gods and realizing that, at some point, those were religions just as real and powerful to people as our modern religions . . . it just makes you sit back and smile at the thought of some future children in a classroom reading about the myths of today that we take so seriously now.
