At what age did you stop praying to Father Christmas

[Mudhammam]

Some people call him Jesus, or Yahweh, or Marduk, or Asshur, or Allah, but for the sake of simplicity, I've settled on a more universal "deity" that everyone can understand, and possibly even believed in as children: Father Christmas. Whatever you choose to call him (Jesus/Father/Holy Spirit in my parents' tradition), at what age did you grow up (if you did) and realize that Father Christmas was an incredibly dull imaginary figure created to satisfy/stimulate primitive human ingenuity?

I remember when I was around 12, I was a really diehard Christian and would debate atheists online, often finding myself unable to answer their criticisms. I read many apologetic works until I eventually realized that I could better pre-empt their attacks if I read their own material; I picked up Atheism: The Case Against God. It planted the seeds of doubt that grew and grew over time, despite my parents' repressive attempts to see to it otherwise, eventually sprouting full blown into the proud and confident atheism I espouse today. Along the way, I have experienced a few brief relapses into faith or mystical fascination, particularly during times of emotional duress, but whenever I come back to rational thought, I find the case for atheism far too overwhelming to deny. How old were you when you realized that religion was nothing but a series of lies and myths built on fear?

[Minimalist]

Gradual process. Started when I was 11 or so. Gave up church shit at 13. Decided the NT was horseshit around 20.

Ignored the whole scene for 30 years and when I 50 read The Bible Unearthed and realized that the OT was a pile of shit, also.

Haven't stopped examining the flaws in religion since.

[Laserdude]

I can't even remember the last time I prayed. I remember a few points in high school when I would pray in vain attempts to find some comfort, but I haven't actually prayed and believed myself at the same time in quite a while. I guess that the minister's words didn't have a big enough impact on me to take them literally while I was still a Christian.

[Crossless2.0]

I haven't prayed since childhood -- about 35-38 years if I'm not mistaken.

[truthBtold]

Hmmm. The last time I prayed? I can tell u when I stopped praying.. when I saw a pic of a football player praying to win a game.. a person praying for a job.. and a poor kid dieing of starvation. I guess he didnt pray hard enough!! Or he must of not know jesus? Cause god can see this....

[Sword of Christ]

I suppose Father Christmas is based on Saint Nicholas so it's just about about conceivable for a Christian or a Catholic at least to pray to him. He's also based on Odin and a Coke a Cola advert from the 1920s though.

[Darkstar]

Pray? I'm not sure. I didn't really pray much even as a Christian; it didn't really do anything for me. As for when I gave up belief, that would be sometime in the eleventh grade. I probably would have deconverted sooner if I had realized non-belief was an option. It wasn't that I didn't know atheists existed, I just...never really thought about it.

[Angrboda]

This is all rather biased toward former believers in the Semitic god, which makes it hard for someone unlike you to answer. I was psychotic by the age of four, so my view of reality has always been, and likely will always be, radically different from yours. By adolescence, I had taken to acknowledging that I didn't believe in God, but I don't know when that change occurred from my Christian upbringing, or even if that was my core personality. (I did, as a child, and still today, believe that people were trying to find me to kill me. So I constantly dissembled, and had multiple life "tracks" with different beliefs and aims and personalities, all kept in mind simultaneously so as to make them consistent with my actions, yet each account would be told different depending on who the audience was. I had a private narrative that I shared with no one, and a public narrative meant to fool those looking for me. After all this time, it's hard to tell, in remembering things, which deck I was dealing from at the time.) But I was firmly a non-believer by adolescence, but when that change occurred, I do not know. I became a Taoist at 17, and converted to Hinduism in my 20s. I do not 'pray' to my god, though I sometimes thank her for blessing me by teaching me the lesson that I needed to learn at the time, or for being such an instrumental part of my development as a woman and a person.

So, the answer to your question is, A) I don't know, and, B) You need to ask better questions, with less bias and assumptions; even if I were an atheist, I would find the wording of your question presumptuous and loaded. I suspect you didn't so much want to know what others thought as to disguise a statement of your personal opinion as an inquiry by cloaking it in the form of a question.

[Mr Greene]

Lets see, I was sent to a catholic school at the age of 5, I became aware that people were lying about the age of 7/8 so there's a period of about 2 or 3 years when I may have been a believer, though I suspect I wasn't..
At the time my view was that the Jews had lied somewhere along the line.
I had a christian house-mate at Uni who made an attempt to convert me about the age of 23. This failed though it annoyed me to the point where I researched the archaeology of the middle east, refining my views and ultimately pin-pointing the liar that started the whole monotheistic ball rolling.

[BrokenQuill92]

I haven't prayed since I was 8-9 but I did make a halfhearted plea at 15 when I realized slowly diminishing sight was permanent and there's no fixing it