I was Catholic as a child. Some people say they were a religion just because their family dragged them to church, but they never believed. No. I was Catholic. Confirmation meant something to me. God meant something to me. I went through a faith crisis in college through the age of 23, because I learned religion is actually not real. It was a proto-state building tool.

Before the internet, before most people could read, there was no central body of human knowledge that you could cross-reference and analyze. People only knew what the people around them told them. People could make up stories about faraway krakens, dragons, giants, and nobody could say that it was or wasn’t true. The only person who saw it says it’s true. Religion gave people a reason for the unfairness of human society, for order, for structure and rules, for that particular person being in power. Religion is people making up stories to establish the social order, to justify the social order, or to challenge the social order. That’s it. It was a necessary tool of control before we were organized enough to establish an independent, cross-referenced body of knowledge.

Now that we have that, we know that sirens aren’t real, giants aren’t real, dragons aren’t real, magic isn’t real, ghosts aren’t real, and no god is real.

I would also recommend looking up more of the formal writings on atheism over the past 200 years, particularly explaining how the Christian god is a logical fallacy.