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SilasBarta comments on Great post on Reddit about accepting atheism - Less Wrong
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Again, I'll reiterate that religion, in practice, isn't generally about scientific claims or facts or beliefs (in the sense of internal predictive models) either. It's usually about identification with a group.
That doesn't make it okay, but it does mean that you're not necessarily abandoning a particular internal predictive model when you abandon a religion.
Sometimes it's also about fear of divine punishment if you stop believing. I'm not the only one who was terrified of this every time I started doubting God's existence. This notion of thought crimes certainly helps keep people from thinking too hard about ideas which don't fit into their religious worldview.
(Maybe I'm a special case since I was never very good at identifying with groups, but the stories of other former Christians suggest that many of them had the same worries whenever they were about to commit a thought crime.)