Any Atheists here who at one time denied evolution?

[Cecelia]

How can you have higher than a perfect grade?

Extra credit.

That was one of my triggers, Cecelia.  One of the first ones.
I was raised fundie Protestant.  I remember assemblies in the Church school I attended, that proclaimed why Evolution was a lie.  My parents believed (even my Father, a very intelligent, college-educated man) that all of the "fossil evidence" was either deliberately faked or misinterpreted.
Then I changed schools.  I went to a public high school and made friends with a girl whose parents were biologists.  When I told them what I had been taught about evolution, one night over dinner . . . they were kind, but I will never forget their faces.  They clearly were looking at me with a mixture of horror and pity.  That - - was significant.  These intelligent scientists were looking at me like I was somehow mentally deficient.
It took a few more years, science classes, and reading, for me to be SURE that my Parents and those Preachers had been very wrong.  That, of course, paved the way to more questions about science and religion.  First stop . . . fundamentalism was wrong.  But even more mainstream liberal Christianity gradually lost its hold.  The idea of Deism and Polytheism and Spirituality and all of that . . . tried, studied, and abandoned.  But I was in my mid-40's before I finally proclaimed that I was an atheist.

Yeah, I can imagine it's hard.  I mean you are supposed to be able to trust your parents.  Why would they lie to you?  It's hard to start to think "Well, they wouldn't lie to me, but someone would lie to them, and someone might have lied to them, setting forth a chain of lies leading back to someone nobody knows, and who probably had reason to lie"