Not very hard. I was never that observant in the first place, and I had been wrestling with God and the Holocaust for quite some time. In the army, it just hit me that I didn’t believe anymore. I didn’t look down on believers then, and I don’t now, but I just couldn’t get behind the idea of a kind and loving God anymore.
Come to think of it, that was far from the only change I underwent in the army. I left the service quite a bit more liberal than when I went in.
I grew up vaguely Presbyterian, but we never went to church or did any other religious things, so I had a clean slate. I married a catholic woman who was very observant and went to church with her on Sundays for 20 years. You’d think that it would rub off, but the longer it went on, the more ridiculous it seemed. She tried to convince me to convert (from what?), but she also wanted me to change in many respects, and it eventually led to divorce. Organized religion has always been a mystery to me, and the people practicing it seem deluded. I never gave up my religion: I never had it to begin with.
Raised in a conservative (but secular) Jewish household, sent to hebrew school and such. I had a religious period lasting until a while after my Bar Mitzvah, but looking back I’d call it more ritualistic than anything else.
I had a couple of issues, the first one being obvious: faith and logic. Why was the god of the bible omnipotent and all-seeing yet non-existent now? Why does an omnipotent god expect me to sing his praise twice a day and after every meal? My should I follow seemingly nonsensical commandments, for the simple reason of them being written in a book?
My second doubt was regarding god and man. For me it was patently obvious that there were several layers of man between anything God might have said and what I was expected to do. So why did I have to follow commandments to the letter (and in the Jewish tradition, beyond), when there was obviously fifteen generations of static between word and intent?
For a time I called myself a deist or an agnostic, until I happened upon Dawkins’ text on agnosticism where I realized that I was merely sitting on the fence. I realized that I have no belief, either through evidence or faith, that there there is any omnipotent being in the universe, and I readily accept the fact that I am a mortal speck on the face of the universe. So instead of singing praises, I prefer to go outside and enjoy the sunlight instead =)
Family accepted it without issue. I’m still culturally and ethnically Jewish, so I am (in my opinion) in now way an apostate from my culture or heritage. I still fast for Yom Kippur (for my own reasons), I light the candles on Chanukka and there will never be a christmas tree in my houe.
Wasn’t hard for me at all. It was more a gradual realization that the things I was supposed to care about and believe just didn’t really have any resonance with me. I was raised Christian (though not overly so–we went to church a few times when I was a kid and both parents believe in God) but I never attended church voluntarily.
It’s a little funny–over the past couple of years my spouse, who was raised in a very religious family but moved away from it throughout most of our relationship (he was still a believer, just didn’t go to church or otherwise participate much) has moved back in the direction of being more religious (going to church regularly, reconnecting with his religious family, etc)…and this was the catalyst that finally made me realize that it just didn’t speak to me, as much as I wanted it to for a long time.
Honestly, my feeling when I finally made this realization was…relief. Like I didn’t have to fake things to myself anymore.
I’m not an atheist–more an agnostic. I still think there’s something out there, I’m just not sure what.
I don’t think it was hard, what was difficult was that my mom wanted me to go more than i did, and by the time i was 14, I resented that i had to waste good weekend time at church where i didn’t like the people much, and also didn’t like the idea of going door to door pestering people to join the church.
I also felt that there was subtle pressure to be a stay-at-home-mom, to only go to Christian college, to give up my blue jeans, and i didn’t like either, and i wanted more to see the world and go to a secular college.
I used to go to a Baptist church and I don’t know if i would have enjoyed a more liberal doctrine, but i can’t change that. My parents sent me and my sisters to this church because there was a bus to pick us up.
I got older and I asked myself why is it that there are so few records of Jesus in history, and why was it that so many things in the bible were punishable by death, and that struck me as unreasonable.
I probably shouldn’t even answer this since I cannot ever recall believing in any gods. I was rasied as a secular Jew, went through Hebrew school and bar mitzvah like a good boy. But my parents never practiced religion in a serious way. At some point, there was a school assignment involving the bible and I realized we didn’t own one. After my bar mitzvah, I dropped out of Hebrew school and never went to Sunday school again. Later my parents joined a reform synagogue and went to services a lot, but it was clearly more a social club.
My wife’s experiences were a little different, sincw when she was 11 her mother married a religious man (whom I could not abide; what a miserable prick), and she learned a fair bit of ritual, but also has no religious belief. But we do fast on yom kipper and eat matzoh on passover, but to me these are gestures of solidarity with the Jewish community, I think that without Hitler, I wouldn’t do even that little.
All three of my kids married nomial Christians, only one of whom practices at all. She has trouble believing that my non-belief is real and thinks that I really must, deep down, believe in god. She is wrong.
About my deal. My dad was a minister. I finally realized that it didn’t feel any more real to me than the novels I read and mentally officially broke off. My parents were rather more upset and I hadn’t realized how much they believed. Actually I’m still not sure how upset my dad was; we just don’t talk about it. But my mom broke down and cried and occasionally teases / harasses me about it (not really meanly, but in a way that shows she really wishes I did believe.)
I think whatever part of the brain or whatever lets people believe doesn’t work that way in me. I can respect people who honestly believe and truly live by that faith, but I can’t be one of them.
I was raised as a fundamentalist Baptist and it was very, very difficult for me to leave when I did at age 28. I heard voices, fasted to find the truth, hid from almost everyone, and eventually realized that I was suffering from many of the same reactions of someone who had been brainwashed. I was haunted, traumatized, and damaged. Now, more than 20 years later, I am mostly fine with my decision, but I still occasionally suffer from the results of that damage. And yes, I went to therapy, and it helped.
Sometimes I wonder if some people have a brain region responsible for believing, and if so, mine must be different than believers. I never really was completely sure. I wanted to believe, I really, really did.
I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic schools, and I am surrounded by people with varying degrees of hostility towards Atheists, and even people of other religions. Mine was a silent, slow process that started when I was a child.
By the time I was 10, I had already decided that Jesus was just some cool guy, the Church was full of it, and I could only believe, at most, in some sort of Universal Force. 10 years ago very little of that was left, it wasn’t long till I realize that I couldn’t believe even if I tried.
I wonder if the word apostate is related to the word apostle.
Apostasy:
Apostle:
So, no.
Leaving the Catholic Church was done gradually enough that it wasn’t really a big deal for me. I don’t discuss religion with my mom so as to make our conversations more pleasant and my dad is a Protestant-raised vague theist, so there’s no pressure from him.
At one time, I seriously considered becoming a nun, but the more I studied, the more I realized that I really didn’t believe. I kind of gradually stopped attending, then went to a UU church for a while as a kind of place holder, but now I’m comfortable with being a godless heathen. 
The thing that I actually do miss is the ritual. I always took comfort in the order of the liturgy and the music. I perform church music and gospel occasionally and oddly, have few issues with that (I perform music about Santa and the Easter Bunny too, if that makes a difference 
).