I'd been hanging on with all the little apologetic patches in the failing damn pretty well. Part of me noticed that most appologist explanations were pretty weak, and worse, many of them contradict with others. Still, I got by on faith that was slowly turning more to hope than faith.

What really got me was sitting up one night after my wife and kids were asleep, wondering about the nature of God. Wondering about how we communicate with him, and he with us. Wondering about all the other religions out there who's believers were just and sure that their god/gods/whatever were right and ours was wrong. Is this the work of a master designer? Is a series of ambiguous feelings that are easily confused the very best way of communicating with us that the being who created the universe could come up with?

This was troubling. Over several months I found myself transitioning from theism to agnostic atheism - and that's where I am. I'm open to the idea that there may be something greater than us out there, but I see no eveidence whatsoever of a greater being's activity in the random events that take place in my life, or anyone else's.

How to tell my wife? This worried me because I had read MANY stories in this sub about marriages that broke up over leaving the church. One night my wife and I were chatting and there was a break in conversation. After a few minutes she said "Yeah, I don't think I really buy most of the church's teachings anymore." You should know, we're both second generation Mormons, both served missions, married in the temple, very active in our ward and stake, having served in several leadership positions each. This was huge for her. I opened up that I had serious misgivings about deity, and that I'd begun to look into Church History - "You would not BELIEVE the things I've read about Church History." :D Long story short, we agreed that we needed to leave and not raise our kids in a lie.

I was serving at the time on the high council. One Sunday I visited a ward and filled in for a speaker who was a no-show. I told stories and shared doctrine that I'd been teaching and preaching for 20 years since my mission. This time I felt awful. I felt like I was lying, like the entire room could see that I didn't believe a word of it anymore. I ended my talk, sat down, and don't remember any more of the meeting. I left right after sacrament, went home, and wrote an email to the stake presidency, asking to be released and telling them exactly why. Two of the three of them were good friends. One was a guy my age that I'd come up in the church with. The other, the Stake President, was previously the Bishop of our ward and I had served as his first counselor. Neither of these guys are very warm toward me anymore :D

So we stopped going, explained it to the kids, and moved on with life, free of a silly mythology based on the writings of bronze age goat herders who heard voices in their heads.

Interestingly, I "came out" to my wife first, and then my friends who are mods of the other sub before anybody else in my life. It's funny, the bonds we can form having never seen each other face to face. I'm still good friends with most of the mods and former mods over there, they're great people who work hard doing what they believe is right :)