Indoctrination

[Mister Agenda]

Indoctrination

noun
the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.

You can't be indoctrinated without someone trying to indoctrinate you. No one tried to indoctrinate me into atheism. more the opposite, people tried to indcotrinate me into theistic religion, it just didn't take permanently, for a variety of reasons.

You were lucky.  It most definitely stuck with me.  I had to pry it loose over the course of years.  I don't think I even met another atheist until I was in my mid 20's.  I remember reading a book by one of my favorite authors, who has been openly atheist for decades.  I sent him a letter explaining why I thought he was really a believer in god and just channeling his anger through his books.  This is common thinking for theists for some reason, as demonstrated by Airhead Ahriman.  At the time I didn't want to accept that an author, who's books I loved, was an atheist, so I conjured up this explanation that made some kind of sense to me.

Oh, it took about 15 years between the time I first read the Bible through cover-to-cover and stopped being a Pentecostal to realizing I had become an atheist. I was in my early forties when I knowingly met my third atheist. In my youth I thought Ayn Rand was right about a lot of things but close-minded for not believing in God, now it's more like I think God was one of the few things she got right.