I have personally heard this claim from several Christian Fundamentalists. It usually doesn’t survive examination. They were raised to the church, had a normal adolescent rebellion and denied everything to do with the authority structure they knew. Then as they matured they experienced the guided hallucination (revelation, dream, epiphany, psychotic break) that returned them to the church with the burning fervor of any new convert. Proverbs 22-6 [1] pretty well promises this return to type.
What was their “atheism” like? Let’s quote one [2] who has recently been visiting us:
“I have lived life apart from God (thinking that I was the center of the universe, not wanting to admit that I was a follower, I was convinced of my uniqueness).”
I don’t know any atheists like that.
[3]“Center of the Universe“? Rational atheists know that the universe is big, and the Earth is tiny. We are as unlikely to be the center of the universe as we are certainly living on a minor planet near a smallish star near the edge of our own little galaxy of 200,000,000,000 or more [4] stars. This is a minor galaxy in our local galactic cluster, that is itself nothing significant in the vast foam of galaxies [5]. All created for “me”? Uh. Huh.
“Convinced of my Uniqueness“? Aside from the statistical uniqueness of any macroscopic assembly of fermions [6] compared to any other, atheists usually know that we are basically interchangeable parts of any social unit larger than their close circle of family and friends. Every individual is unique unto himself. But not to the social matrix in which we live. Any of us might have written this post, allowing for stylistic differences, pleasing or offending the same readers.
[7]“Not wanting to admit I was a follower” is typical adolescence. Sociologically and anthropologically, humans are pack or tribe animals, somewhat like wolves but more like bonobos, who form fractal group hierarchies naturally. Teens are especially prone to forming cliques with leaders and followers within and between. But the followers don’t want to think of themselves as such, so they claim to be individualists, as they carefully mimic the behaviors and accouterments of the current peer leaders while carefully disassociating themselves from the societies of their progenitors and predecessors.
“Life apart from God“? I was never a theist. The faiths in which my parents were raised canceled out before I was born, and they quietly raised atheist kids in a rural Christian neighborhood. We never did drugs, we never were promiscuous. We respected our elders as well as did our peers, and lived by the Golden Rule. Excluding Santa Claus, we never believed in invisible father figures. We never believed in eternal posthumous punishment for our own actions, much less for the actions of our very distant ancestors.
Yes, I was raised apart from God. Never missed him.
Another charge raised (but not in this particular quote) is that Atheists think the world was always as it now is. Nope. Rational atheists know (and most Eastern philosophies have always held) that the world is ever changing. Mountain ranges come and go. Oceans relatively rise and recede. Glaciers come and go, and continents drift gracefully like the slag on ladle of steel. Societies, languages, civilizations, and species are always evolving, even faster than the landscape. The Sahara wetlands (a true Garden of Eden) became a desert in the time that man has lived there. All of this is measurable.
Was I raised with any beliefs? Sure. I always believed in discernible causes for any given effect. I probably believed in Evolution until I had enough education to understand it. Now I know it. Like gravity, electromagnetism [8], or quantum parity [9].
Just like Me? I don’t think so.
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