It took me twenty years of intense research and other disciplines to reach my decision. When I did a very very heavy suffocating weight lifted. I love the freedom it has given and the peace.

I used to make up all sorts of excuses to reconcile religion and science and most times I could bullshit my way through an argument but after learning how the king James Bible was written, that was the nail in the coffin for me. The last shred of spirituality/ religion left me

You have found a home.

Yup.
Waking up from the Matrix dream can be..traumatic in some cases.

"All scientists are not atheists", is a false statement. You may have meant, "Not all scientists are atheists", which is obviously true.

I wonder why people feel they need to do the mental gymnastics to rationalize faith with science. Yes, all of it is bullshit and they are deluding themselves. It is possible to hold contradictory positions at the same time. I understand that science is true and my faith is important to me as a link with my family, community, or whatever. Trying to combine them together is like mixing oil and water.

Whenever this subject is broached, I find myself thinking of Jason Lisle. There we have a true mental contortionist who has taken his PhD to the Answers in Genesis crew and is selling cosmological snake oil for them. An example of this is his stating that the sun is uniquely designed to support life on Earth. He says that Sol is unusual in the galaxy because of its stability. There are manifold problems in just the two comments. First, Sol is a main sequence star and its mass will allow it to continue the fusion process for about 10 billion years. A star with 10 times that sun's mass will last perhaps 20 million years -- substantially shorter life. Red dwarf stars at about half the mass of Sol can hang around for upwards of 80 to 100 billion years. That's a mighty long time.

Roughly 90% of the stars in the Universe are on the main sequence. Main sequence stars are not all as stable as Sol, but a lot of them are, and that is common knowledge to any beginning student of astronomy. Did Lisle study the same material as everyone else? In more extreme mental gymnastics, Lisle proposes that c was different at the time of creation and that it slowed to its current speed over the intervening 6000 years. I'm still waiting for him to publish that little paper somewhere besides AIG house organs.

I honestly believe they cannot be helped. If they choose to help themselves, I'll be here, but you won't find me holding my breath. People believe what they choose to believe. And when they are determined to justify those beliefs, they will. It's in our nature.