From atheism to Christianity? How so?

[Angrboda]

Say someone... pfffff, any random atheist, not calling out anyone... converted to Christianity. How did this happen? Anybody else... er, I mean anybody here been there, done that?

I confess I'm skeptical to this. First thing to pop into my head is that this is just another fundie trying to save souls by fitting in then sticking the hook down the throat.
Granted I could be wrong. Show me.

I've been meaning to respond to this, but I haven't had time to read the entire thread, so I'm just going to respond directly, ignoring any later replies. Apologies if I duplicate or seem to ignore some previously made point.

I think my experience as a Taoist and Hindu convert may be relevant to the question. When I was young, before the age of 10, I lost my belief in the god of Christianity and became an atheist. I don't remember why or how, but as a teen, I knew I didn't believe in God like my mother did. When I was 17 years old, studying Asia in school, the teacher read us a few chapters of the Tao Te Ching. He loaned me his copy, and I read it cover to cover that night. I converted instantly because everything that Lao Tzu had written resonated with my own experience. A few years later in college, I encountered Kali in the words of a poem, an ode to Kali, by May Sarton. Again, the images and ideas resonated with my personal experience and beliefs. Over the next 20 years, the goddess and Hinduism just sort of gradually seeped into my bones. However, only in the last 5-10 years have I been actively cultivating my understanding of Shakta Hindu traditions specifically, and the various orthodox and heterodox traditions of India.

That is basically my conversion story, and I think it speaks directly to your question in a number of ways.

First, it's worth pointing out that only in the last 3-5 years have I become knowledgeable about the arguments against various religions, so while I was an atheist in my teens, I wasn't equipped with reasons for being an atheist. So I was a naive atheist, and as such, didn't have the knowledge which many atheists here possess which is critical of religion. Perhaps you're assuming that atheists generally have an array of reasons for being non-religious. I only had one: I simply didn't believe. Furthermore, it's worth pointing out that knowledge and reason often play second fiddle to other forces in our minds in determining our choices and beliefs. Cognitive bias, emotion, intuition, and quirks of behavioral learning can all have a more powerful influence on what we end up believing than reason applied to knowledge. In my case, in both instances, my intuition indicated that what I was finding was correct and worth pursuing. As noted elsewhere, my reasoning abilities are the poor stepchild to the power of my intuition, so something appealing to my intuition is bound to have a significant effect on me, even in the face of reasons and knowledge otherwise. (And we all know similar examples; women continue to become involved with "bad boys" or entering dysfunctional relationships in spite of having a lot of head knowledge and being otherwise very intelligent.)

I think there are a number of myths prevalent in the atheist community which contribute to such questions. The first and foremost being that we, as humans, are primarily guided by reason, assuming all other things being equal. This is bollocks, and it doesn't take much looking around to discover counter-examples. Another myth is that the typical atheist is knowledgeably and self-consciously atheist. Having participated in a lot of discussions both online and offline, it's apparent that there are many atheists who are simply going on instinct and what they picked up along the way, and are essentially traveling the road with a kit bag that was assembled in a thoroughly ad hoc fashion. This kit bag tends to include a lot of gems, in my opinion, because the quality of scholarship and intellectualism in the culture associated with atheism is very high; but it also contains many useless, counter-productive, and even plain wrong items as well. So the typical atheist, even if they've picked up a sizable "anti-theist kit bag" from their travels, may still be quite vulnerable to conversion in spite of the so to speak "gems" amid the dross in their kit bag. (A potent example of this is that there are roughly a half dozen popular theories about religion in general, from it being used to control the masses to social cohesion theory. Most atheists have a very informal acquaintance with one or two of these, and have latched onto one of them as "the answer" which explains religion, to the neglect (and often complete ignorance of) competing hypotheses. Most such people are unaware that their chosen explanation has competitors, and that it is just a hypothesis, nothing more; many I talk to seem aghast when I suggest their hypothesis might be wrong. To many I talk to, their chosen hypothesis is just "a self-evident truth." The appeal makes sense, because any one of these hypotheses do offer great explanatory power; however, so do the competing hypotheses. What happens if an atheist who is sold on one explanation of religion encounters a religion or religious experience which falls outside his chosen explanation for it? I'd say the odds of conversion increase immensely in such a situation.)

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.