Nothing, just a sense of relieve, but it wasn't overnight...

That no one has the answers. I finally realized that one has to find ones own answers.

Born and bred atheist here

The hardest thing for me to accept was that everything will be gone forever eventually and that life is ultimately meaningless, however it may not be meaningless in a human sense.

Probably realizing how long it took for my brain to mature, develop acceptance that it was all nonsense. Yes, some great parables and lessons were there in the Bible, but the majority can be easily summed up by Ricky Gervais, "God is the best unpaid babysitter"
[or should we say paid, due to all the money given to the church].

absolutely nothing. it wasn't traumatic for me at all. i wasn't religious anyway and neither was my family, though we had (and i still have) a strong jewish cultural identity. i didn't have to accept anything except oops, that god i vaguely believed in and thought of as a personal friend of sorts didn't exist. no biggie.

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DO You mean when you realized there wasn't any EVIDENCE of the existence of God, and in fact it was unlikely there IS such an entity or entities, NOT, it was when you realized there WAS no God, because that has never been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt?. S, were they actually LYING, or did they really BELIEVE what they were saying to you? I don't know the name of the cult, but WERE they charlatans and liars, or were they caught up in the same delusion as yourself?

I don't recall anything hard to accept. It actually felt like I was more at ease because I always felt trapped under surveillance and it had been lifted.

My biggest problem is that almost everyone I know or talk to takes theology serious. But knows little about science! And quickly becomes defensive and dismissive...

Nothing at all. It was just the right thing to do.

That a lot of atheists simply exchanged one kind of dogma for another.

I don’t really know. I don’t recall when I became an atheist.