BGH's thread made me think of a question that I've had for some time now. This is a question to everyone that was once religious but has since become an atheist.

 I/we know that religion resolves a lot of problems that it creates, which serves to keep people believing. The biggest one that I noticed in other people growing up was guilt over natural feelings. The christian boys would see some attractive girl, start talking like sailors, and then practically break down in tears over the guilt that they feel and start praying. Heck, I've even seen some doing this after simply thinking something. It seemed clear to me that there were patterns of repression, compulsion, and guilt, obviously a mechanism to keep the person praying for forgiveness. That's just one example, but the result of this has been most religious people going on about how religion provides "so much" that "athiems can't", completely unaware that these things simply aren't problems in the athiest perspective. What I've been wondering is to what extent? What issues did you consider to be of the utmost importance when you were religious that simply became non-issues when you became atheist?

I know that I saw an article about a book that covered things like this. Although the book itself was about political corruption, it went into how corrupt leaders on the right use these mechanisms to control people, saying that religious people are the easiest to manipulate because of their religion. If anyone knows what this book is, I would love to know so that I can get a copy.

Anyway, what was your experience? What "issues" that religion addressed simply ceased to be issues once the religion was dropped?