I don't know, deep down I feel like making them let go of it is the right thing, that's all.
But they feel the same way about you. I assume you're an American. Freedom of religion is one of the Constitutional rights that every American has, no matter how much you don't like it. (And you'd better like it because if it were overturned you know it wouldn't be done in such a way as to benefit atheists!) Yes, I know that only applies to government coercion, but it's a good model for all of us. You don't like being cornered by religious evangelists, so unless you simply look down on religious people, have no respect for them, and think they're just dog turds on your lawn, you should treat them with the same minimal civility that you expect to be treated with: live and let live. That is, after all the basis of civilization!
And I stress once again:
Even if it's the right thing, you will not be able to "make them let go of it." Choose your battles wisely because you only have a finite amount of energy. If you dissipate it on unachievable goals, your tombstone will read, "Here lies Chris. On the cusp of a Paradigm Shift when people around him were changing the world, he tried real hard but he never achieved anything."
I was raised very religious and couldn't tolerate it, it never made sense to me. Even as a 5 year old I remember making excuses and attempting to find logical reasoning to justify my beliefs, at around 15 I just gave up and quit it. Like Lounatic when I first quit being religious I became very agressive with my new beliefs, eventually I just stopped caring.
So please bear your own experience in mind. Nobody converted you to atheism. It almost never happens that way; it comes from within. Life is full of hard lessons and this is one of yours.
but sometimes I can't help but feel like those same religious people around me are more rational than me in plenty of other situations, I can't help but not understand why they cannot be rational about religion.
The human brain is an amazing organ, isn't it. People have the ability to be rational in some areas and irrational in others. Surely you've observed this phenomenon in arenas other than religion. Politics, morality, drugs, war, race relations...
It's similar to
cognitive dissonance, the ability to believe two things that are mutually exclusive and be perfectly serene with it.
After all, I got out of it myself just by thinking about it, it took a while but it worked.
As I said, you need to let other people do it that way because it seems to be the only way that works. Be a good citizen and a good friend and share your ideas, but stop short of becoming an evangelist. Nobody listens to a pain in the ass and there's no quicker way to become a pain in the ass than to rag on people about their religion.
Very few of the tens of millions of Americans who got caught up in the Religious Redneck Retard Revival in the late 1970s and early 1980s were converted by evangelists. They had epiphanies just like you did. Their epiphanies just happened to take them in the wrong direction.
The percentage of the American population who identify themselves as atheists is growing slowly but steadily, and it's stronger in Europe. Be patient.
The percentage who are not atheists but do not affiliate themselves with any organized religion is even larger; it's up into the double digits in the USA. This is cause for celebration, since it's the organized, Abrahamic, religions that are responsible for virtually all of the religiously-inspired violence and stupidity on this planet. (The Hindu-Buddhist conflict on Sri Lanka is the only exception that comes to mine and my Indian friends are adamant in the admonition that religion actually plays a very small role in that one, if at all.)
You may object to belief in gods and the supernatural on philosophical grounds, but it's specific belief in the god of Abraham and his various looney prophets that leads people into periodic frenzies of war and genocide. It's monotheism, the pathetic one-dimensional model of the rich human spirit, that suppresses a huge portion of their identity into what Jung calls their Shadow, so it festers and explodes at depressingly regular intervals.
