Near death experience of Howard Storm

[Mister Agenda]

For me the most interesting point of this story is that he considered himself an atheist and took pride in that ideology, yet somehow ended up moving away from that and turning towards something he never believed to be truth. That's what's makes this story so interesting. I'm sure some would say he's just a fool. The only guarantee in life is death. You can even get away without paying taxes, but we are all mortal, and death will come. For me I think it's interesting to know about death to learn the lessons, before it comes to me, so I can grow in knowledge.

If someone said they used to consider themselves a Christian, and cited their frequent drunkenness, promiscuous homosexuality, and practice of stealing from the homeless as what they were like when they were a Christian, wouldn't it leave you scratching your head? Not that they couldn't have been a Christian and done all those things, but that they think it supports their claim of having been a Christian. It would make me think that they are so unfamiliar with Christian teaching that they aren't qualified to evaluate whether they were a Christian or not.

That's the feeling I get from Storm. A lot of people think they're atheists because they've been told (usually by preachers) that atheism is something that it's not. Atheism is not being a backslidden Christian, or being mad at God. It isn't trying to control people with your rage (not sure how that is supposed to work) or being contemptuous of people who don't agree with you. Atheists are as prone to that kind of behavior as anyone else, but they aren't features of atheism. Atheism has only one feature: not believing in God. It's not an ideology. Someone can have an atheistic ideology, but they can't have atheism as their ideology. The same is true of mere theism. They are both just differing opinions on one specific topic.

Storm may have been an atheist, but he sounds like someone trying to make his story more impressive by increasing the before and after contrast, but didn't know two atheists in real life and based his 'before pic' on the stereotypes he was familiar with.

Not saying he wasn't an atheist, just explaining why he's not a very convincing ex-atheist.

Just so you know, a lot of the atheists here are rational skeptics who think that a person's belief in something should be proportionate to the evidence for it. Not all rational skeptics are atheists, but atheism is much higher among rational skeptics than among the general population. A lot of the replies you're getting are coming from a place of rational skepticism, not atheism.