I've encountered this before in many forums ... "I used to be an atheist but now I've seen the light or whatever". Reason tells me it is possible for the door to swing both ways; that not only can theists wise-up and realise their beliefs are bunkum but that atheists can find faith but in my experience education and an intelligent outlook lead to reduced faith and not the reverse (on one level I have to believe that, in a sense I put my faith in it). For now this is just my view, mere opinion, but I would very much like some evidence to support this view .. some kind of survey indicating educational level vs. faith perhaps?
To my mind the problem with the idea (mostly implied when theists brandish such claims as some kind of flag in support of their cause) is that virtually all the atheists I know are what I call rational atheists, atheists that support their lack of faith by way of relatively critical analysis of the world, the universe around them and I find it hard (though not impossible) to believe that someone can slide form a rational to an irrational POV based on the claims I have heard from the theists which are, to my mind, ALWAYS irrational.
Another problem is that theists often equate the word atheist to mean someone who is angry at or in some way disillusioned with a particular god ... an example from TV is "Firefly" where you'll find many people like or dislike Mal Reynold's character because he is an atheist however a careful look at the character in context reveals that he is not so much atheist as disillusioned theist who lost his faith in god (but not his belief) at a famous battle in the past. In that sense it seems many of the theist-supposedly-once-atheist types were actually angry at their god or perhaps seeking something that mortal life didn't offer and to my mind that isn't at all what atheism is.
How does one go about supporting this idea ... the answer is, I'm not sure but I think the next time someone claims they were once an atheist or (especially) that someone famous was an atheist I think I'll just say, "OK, show me the proof!" on the basis that I'm no great shakes as a writer and I write a fair bit so one might reasonably expect a famous ex-atheist to have written some seriously barbed diatribes during his or her life when they were supposedly one.
Kyu
To my mind the problem with the idea (mostly implied when theists brandish such claims as some kind of flag in support of their cause) is that virtually all the atheists I know are what I call rational atheists, atheists that support their lack of faith by way of relatively critical analysis of the world, the universe around them and I find it hard (though not impossible) to believe that someone can slide form a rational to an irrational POV based on the claims I have heard from the theists which are, to my mind, ALWAYS irrational.
Another problem is that theists often equate the word atheist to mean someone who is angry at or in some way disillusioned with a particular god ... an example from TV is "Firefly" where you'll find many people like or dislike Mal Reynold's character because he is an atheist however a careful look at the character in context reveals that he is not so much atheist as disillusioned theist who lost his faith in god (but not his belief) at a famous battle in the past. In that sense it seems many of the theist-supposedly-once-atheist types were actually angry at their god or perhaps seeking something that mortal life didn't offer and to my mind that isn't at all what atheism is.
How does one go about supporting this idea ... the answer is, I'm not sure but I think the next time someone claims they were once an atheist or (especially) that someone famous was an atheist I think I'll just say, "OK, show me the proof!" on the basis that I'm no great shakes as a writer and I write a fair bit so one might reasonably expect a famous ex-atheist to have written some seriously barbed diatribes during his or her life when they were supposedly one.
Kyu
