Though raised catholic, most of my role models are atheist.

For the past, oh, let's call it a year, my faith has been waning to a near non-existence for reasons I'm sure you all know and have experienced, but through this (what I may call) "transitional" period, I've realized that the great minds that I look to for inspiration never needed a god for their comfort/spiritual needs/what-have-you. Men I have respected for many years through my schooling were mostly atheist. Now, I never sought out explicitly Christian or atheist scholars for role models, as I considered religion an unnecessary category for judging another's character and contribution to humanity. It's curious nevertheless that even when I didn't quite realize it, I was already primed to question my faith based purely on my interests in literature and the life sciences. Now, I'm not simple, and I encountered many examples of religious skepticism, but I simply glossed over these examples/arguments, never paying attention to them until very recently.

I see now what wisdom and insight I've missed.

Here's some excerpts from those I've looked up to:

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith. I consider the capacity for it terrifying."

-Kurt Vonnegut

"In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."

-Samuel Clemens

"[I]f history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure."

-Edward Osborne Wilson

"Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?"

-Carl Sagan

Sorry this turned into such a long post, but I needed to get some of this off my chest. Refuting one's upbringing and indoctrination is not an easy process.

tl;dr: People I've looked up to for years were atheist and I didn't even process this fact until I myself questioned religion.