Originally posted by divegeester
I can tell you with absolute certainty, that being identified with the name of Jesus Christ is not easy.
You clearly live in a country where atheism is not as minority a view as you paint it. Or is everyone else Muslim or Hindu where you live?
Where I come from, (Zambia) the vast majority of people are Christian and it is atheists who are made to feel uncomfortable. Oddly enough Christians will often readily accept other faiths, even if they are vastly different or even totally contradict their own, yet when it comes to atheists they can be very unaccepting. You often see on these forums people saying atheists are denying God, choose to be atheist, or are otherwise closet theists, yet you never see such sentiments about Muslims or Hindus being closet Christians or having chosen Islam over Christianity.
Here in Cape Town we have a wider mix of religion. At a guess, a quarter Muslim, a quarter Christian and the a few smaller groups and the rest nonreligious (though many would probably not say atheist). I certainly feel a lot less pressure to hide my beliefs - or more accurately, it rarely ever comes up in conversation.
But all of this is irrelevant to what you said earlier about the difficulty of maintaining your faith. If you believe something is true, then how hard it is to stand up and tell other people about it, should only affect how difficult it is to tell other people about it, and you should not describe that as a difficulty in maintaining your belief. If you choose to lie to other people or simply keep silent regarding your beliefs, that wont change your beliefs will it?
I don't always tell people I am atheist due to the social issues that might result, but that doesn't in any way make me doubt my lack of belief in the existence of God.
You said:
...that believing in God is a harder mental position to hold than not believing
Which certainly seems to imply difficulty in justifying your belief to yourself and nothing to do with social pressure.