(December 29, 2013 at 5:11 pm)rasetsu Wrote: Anyway, this is getting tl;dr, but I think people have a tendency to view deconversion as a rational process, and conversion as an irrational one. The fact is both kinds occur going both directions, and the amount of rationality involved in these processes is, to my mind, enormously exaggerated. We, as a species, don't use the bulk of our brains to reason; the bulk of our brains has other ideas.
Definitely some good points. In my experience, atheists who are de-converted by rational arguments (or who learn arguments against the existence of God at some point) rarely convert to any religious system based on apologetics arguments. Whenever they do, it's almost always a conversion to a strand of religion with non-traditional views of God or of faith, and there's still usually a relatively high degree of agnosticism. Rational conversions straight to conservatism or fundamentalism almost never happen, so my assumption when someone says that they went from atheism to evangelical Christianity is that their original atheism wasn't based mostly on rationality.