Excellent post Muadib. Thanks for sharing. To zero in a bit more now, and here is where the line gets fuzzy. Suppose the same exposure you had as a child had resulted in a voluntary belief to go by the way of faith for much longer? Would the absence of parental force mean that you weren't indoctrinated? Children tend to absorb a lot just from the behavior of the people around them, and it could be argued that simply being raised in a religious household serves to automatically indoctrinate children, and that you were simply fortunate enough ( or unfortunate enough depending on your perspective ) to go through a period of self-induced religious deprogramming. That process involved asking questions and seeking answers. At what point did you come to realize that you should ask questions and that the answers required evidence rather than faith? Was there a pivotal issue or moment for you that you can share?
Thank you and you're welcome. I don't agree that simply being raised in a religious household automatically indoctrinates someone. Don't get me wrong, it can, and the more rigid the belief system you're exposed to, religious or otherwise, the higher the danger level of indoctrination. Like I said in my last post, it's when we refuse to adapt or modify our beliefs with what the facts and evidence show that we become indoctrinated. Take the story of Noah's Ark, which is a story that even small children have trouble believing represents a 100% factual account of the events described in the bible. It's a nonsensical story of one man and his sons collecting two of every single animal on the Earth (physically impossible) and then building a boat larger than the largest wooden boats we can build today (also physically impossible) stocking it with enough food and water to feed however many thousands of animals (physically impossible) and then surviving a world wide flood for 40 days and 40 nights that left no evidence and disturbed nothing that it should have (coral formations, sediment deposits, etc) So, you have to, if you're not indoctrinated, attempt to reconcile the physical impossibility of the story plus the lack of evidence with your faith in the accuracy of the bible. Many Christians do this without issue, the story of Noah is a fable, not a literal retelling of events and the lesson is what's important, not the story itself, but there are some that want to hang onto their preconceived notion that the bible is 100% literal, factual truth. That requires that we deny so many different lines of evidence that it becomes even more ridiculous than the story itself.
As for my own journey, some of it was similar to what I describe above. Many Christians don't read the entire book that they base their faith on, they get the cherry picked passages from Sunday School or the holiday stories or whatever, and that's good enough for them. The more I read the bible, the more I had to question the stories and whether or not I wanted to worship a being that was so bloody, petty and vengeful. Dawkins has said that the god of the Old Testament is one of the most unpleasant, tyrannical and frankly insane characters in all of literature and I have to agree with him. His values and mine were just so different, you can rationalize it all you want but the bottom line is that most of these so called values have no place in modern society and we see that in the way they're used to oppress people that are different historically and today. That feeling led me to question the origins of the actual bible itself, which lead to textual criticism, which lead to me realizing that the bible was nothing more than a product of it's times. It's been handed down from generation to generation and changed for political and social reasons at the whim of individual translators. We see the evidence of that in the text itself, contradictions, inconsistencies, and mistranslations abound. Once you realize all of that, it's not a large leap to the position I hold today, which is "I don't know, but if I had to guess, I'd say there's no such thing as a God and the bible is certainly nothing more than a very old book of various fables, stories and superstitions handed down over the years from early mankind."
As for voluntary or involuntary, I don't think it matters whether you indoctrinate yourself or you are indoctrinated by others, you're still indoctrinated. You can keep your faith and still not have to deny concrete evidence that's right in front of your face, many early scientists who were essentially Christians investigating the world around them did this, it just requires that you adapt your beliefs in light of the facts. If you can do that, whether you come out believer or skeptic, in my opinion, you're not indoctrinated.