You know when you're really little, and you just accept the things your parents tell you? You go to school and learn the things those adults tell you. A lot of those things stick with you for a very long time.

Eventually you grow up and start considering things for yourself, generally around the time adults begin to ask you questions that you actually have to think about rather than just remembering a combination of things. You learn to decide the difference between right and wrong for yourself, generally when you see adults start to make mistakes. You get to make objective assessments of the world around you, generally when you see how adults could have done something better. You eventually start reconsidering everything that adults ever taught you about the world, generally around the time people start telling you new things that you know aren't right.

Eventually, you look at your opinions and the way you think and wonder who made those thoughts and opinions for you. Religion, no matter which one, is something that someone else decided for you initially. You start to consider whether that was right or not.

You initially stay with it. There are a lot of reasons, but those eventually break down over time. As much as you want it to be true, you know it isn't. For some people, losing your religion is like death by a thousand cuts, hanging on to every facet as long as they can. For others, it's one loose brick that breaks open the floodgates, and suddenly it's all gone. For a lot of others it's simply a weight removed from their shoulders, no longer weighing them down. For me, there was no single event that caused it, rather it was a gradual, peaceful realization.

I don't fault anyone for their beliefs. I consider it to be a part of who they are, much in the same way I think of people who enjoy baseball or dislike the handlebar moustache. It's just simply there. I think it's more damaging and polarizing to be a radical atheist, attacking and belittling something so central to who someone is about something which they wholeheartedly feel is real. I completely understand the anger and frustration of those who angrily denounce it, but I just don't think it's the best way to go about it.