Being incredibly new to these boards (and, might I add, loving them - the last board I wasted my hours on was full of people who thought “debates” were contests of who could insult the other’s mother the most efficiently in under 3 paragraphs) I’m not entirely sure on all of the definitions and terms y’all commonly use, so I’m not sure what “hard atheist” really means.
If it is the “actively disbelieves in deities” definition that pldennison is working with, then I think I qualify, in a way. My views are a little skewy. I think Gods exist because people believe in them, so others may have a God, but I don’t, because I don’t believe in them. shrugs I don’t know if that really puts me as an atheist or some sort of drugged agnostic …
… but at one point in time I was fairly close to a militant atheist so I suppose I have some qualification to speak here.
When I was eight it suddenly occured to me that, if God made everything, He had to have some sort of physical being at some point in time, to shape things or even to direct things. But if He was a physical being, and nothing existed before He did, then who made Him? If “all this stuff” - animals, people, planets, stars, digital watches, etc. - had to be made out of stuff, and couldn’t have “always existed”, then didn’t it follow that God was bound to this same law?
I asked this question of everyone I knew. My mother had me baptised as Lutheran (to this day I’m still not certain what that means) but we very rarely attended any form of church anymore, and she was unable to answer my questions. I asked friends of my mother’s who I knew were religious, and they never gave me a satisfactory answer, they just said, “He has always existed.”
(Nobody ever thought to say to me, “But if He doesn’t exist, then who made the earth? 'Cause if God can’t exist without someone to make Him, then the earth can’t exist without someone to make it, right?” If they had, my atheism may have taken much longer to develop - that sort of logic would have worked fantastically on me when I was eight.)
I started going to church with some of my friends, and asked their pastors/preachers/ministers the same question, and they always replied with the simplistic, “He has always existed.” I was not satisfied, and after a little bit of thought on the matter I decided that God did not exist.
My parents were devastated. My stepfather’s parents are very devout Catholic types (but they live in a different state which is why I couldn’t ask them these questions) and they constantly accused me of being a devil-worshipper because I had renounced God. That didn’t bother me too much because I didn’t see them very often, and I usually tune out people who yell and throw fits in my general direction.
When I was ten years old and in the fifth grade in elementary school, our school began shipping us off to a trailor located across the street from our building, conveniently off of school property, where we were given lectures and lessons about Jesus and God. It enraged me; at the age of ten I already knew about the “separation of Church and State”, and I felt that this was a perversion of that concept. However, we always got string cheese and wheat crackers at the end of the lesson so I wasn’t too vocal about it. I hated it, I found it very boring, but … cheese! Cheese is good. So I sat through it, but every moment of the class that wasn’t filled with cheese instead filled me with resentment and hatred toward these people who were trying to make me believe something I didn’t want to believe.
I didn’t really have a clear reason to hate Christians or any people who believed in any Gods; I just knew that they were inconveniencing me and it irritated me. Somewhere along the next several years this turned into aggression, as more and more I was told I was going to hell. I have the misfortune to live in a strip of the “bible belt” and in a rural area, where it seems that faith is more assertive, and I got confronted by a lot of people who didn’t want to mind their own business.
In middle school - I think it was grade 8 though I can’t rightly remember - we had a debate in my “Honours class” (it was just a class for smart people to sit around and be smart at one another, we didn’t really do much other than logic puzzles, debate, and write papers) about the existence of God. I was one of three atheists in twelve students, and the other two were the gothic/trenchcoat wearing/machine-gun loving all-out AntiGodWarriorhaXx0r types. Things got very heated during that debate, and in the middle of it all, I got caught up in their anger and started screaming at the theists, I don’t even remember what.
It took me until I was fifteen to come up with the “theory” on what religion was, that explained why I could be so derisive and feel superior to believers. I decided that religion was a left-over necessity from the primitive man, that it was nothing more than a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. I had taken basic psychology, you see
I knew that when the mind is confronted with a reality it can’t accept, or doesn’t want to accept, it sometimes reacts by “inventing” a solution that resolves the issue to make it more palatable and understandable. That’s how people get multiple personalities from extended childhood abuse (or so my very basic psych class said) … and that, I decided, was how the primitive man came upon the need for Gods and Goddesses.
They didn’t understand, because they didn’t have the evolution/knowledge/technology to understand, how life was created or what life was or why people had to die, or how the sun came up or why flowers bloomed in the morning and where rain came from … in fact they didn’t understand much more than (as I colloquially put it), the man puts his grunt in the woman’s unga and a long time later a little person comes out.
While their minds wished to resolve this rationally, they didn’t have the intellect to properly understand it, so they resolved their problems - all of them - by inventing Gods.
This was all fine and well to me, because they had little other choice but to accept that explination. My problem with religion now, though, was that we have scientific explanations for many of these things. I decided it was just pure, intentional obtuseness that kept the theists believing in their “fairy-tale” Gods, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s intentionally obtuse people.
So that’s how I used to treat Christians, and other theists; as if they were stupid, belligerantly so, and were purposely missing the point just so they could comfort themselves with letting God take the blame for all the bad things (“It was God’s will that I miscarried”) and still get into the paradisical “afterlife”. I felt they were too weak to accept the responsibilities of choosing their morals and actions on their own, with their own original thought, and instead turned to the Church to suck the elixir of hypocritical truth from its teats … I really didn’t like religions 
However, in the eight years since then I have mellowed out considerably, revamped my view on religion entirely, and I don’t have a problem with it anymore. In fact I envy people with strong faith - it’s a feeling, an emotion, that I simply am not capable of experiencing.
Something I have noticed about other atheists that I know - they seem to think that because they don’t believe in a God and a Judgement Day and an afterlife, they don’t have any goals to work for in this life, and that life is just meaningless and pointless, full of pain and suffering and little chance for happiness. I think that might be the cause of a lot of atheistic surliness that gets slung at theists. I can’t imagine anyone could be pleasant and smiling, going through life believing that it’s all a waste…