I’m coming rather late to the party, but here’s what happened to me. As a kid, I was brought up to believe in Jebus and all that. I started reading the bible (can’t remember at which age), and started at the beginning, as you do with any other book. Genesis 1, creation story. Cool. Genesis 2, another creation story that did not match up with, and even contradicted, the first one. WTF? Flipping pages back and forth and comparing the stories, this was hard to digest. Since I was being told by my parents that only a fool does not believe, I accepted that, and wrote the discrepancy/contradiction off as a result of me just being a kid and not understanding it. Later in life, after some prolonged exposure to non-believers in diverse configurations, and (most importantly) learning about Science, I finally thought the better of it, and wrote the whole bible thing off as myth. In retrospect, I was probably always a skeptic and an atheist at heart, and that I was too non-confrontational as a kid to air my questions about the validity of the bible. So I ended up believing that I believed what I was told (meta-belief?)
If I, as a kid, was able to identify a contradiction in the very opening pages of the bible and thinking “WTF?!?!” then how come adults are not able to?