No, don't worry, I haven't suddenly taken leave of my senses, abandoned logic, reason and rational thinking and 'found God'.Several time a week you'll see some fundamentalist Christian or Muslim come on to Twitter and claim to have been "an Atheist just like you", or to be "a former Atheist who's found the peace of Jesus/Allah... blah!... blah!... blah!".
And of course, blogs making that claim are ten a penny.
I say they are either lying or have not bothered to understand what Atheism is.
I say that for this reason:
Atheism is NOT just not going to church/mosque or not praying or not reading the local holy book.
Atheism is NOT behaving badly, getting drunk, messing with drugs, having pre-marital or extra-marital sex, masturbating, robbing a liquor store or swearing at your mother.
None of those things make you an Atheist. Some of those things make you an immoral person but that's not the same things as being an Atheist.
To be an Atheist you have accepted that there is no credible evidence for ANY god, not just one particular, locally popular, god. To be an Atheist you have accepted that there can be no belief without evidence and that when the evidence changes, the honest thing to do is to change your mind. To be an Atheist is to accept that your beliefs are subordinate to the evidence of the physical world, that without evidence there is no such thing as valid belief.
Now, as a real Atheist, there is no way back to 'faith' from that position. Faith is belief without evidence. With evidence, the correct term is 'knowledge' not faith.
Suppose an Atheist DID find some evidence for a phenomenon which can ONLY be explained with a supernatural explanation. What would that say other than that there is maybe a supernature of some sort? It would NOT; COULD NOT be taken as evidence of any one particular god, or even of ANY god.
If it were to be truly supernatural there is no way it could be investigated beyond that, so there is no way to arrive at any one particular supernatural explanation. If it COULD be so investigated it would not be supernatural; merely some imperfectly understood natural phenomenon.
Yet we see time after time that these self-proclaimed "former Atheists" not only can never tell you what evidence convinced them, but they almost invariably claim to have found the locally popular god, almost always the god they were told about as children, if not the actual cult version they were brought up with.
The day I see a former Muslim from Riyadh who became an Atheist then "discovered Jesus as his personal saviour", or a New York former Jewish Atheist who suddenly realised the teachings of Guru Nanak were the true way to salvation, is the day I MIGHT just be tempted to take the claim seriously.
Taken with the rest of their seemingly inevitable sophistry, rehearsed evasions and over-use of tactics over substance in their 'debates', we can usually be fairly sure that the claim of former Atheism is just another ploy intended to deceive.
Always check the bios and web-pages of people who make this claim. You will usually find the give-away 'donate' tab or button which will tell you all you need to know about their motives.
A population of poorly educated, credulous, superstitious people is a lucrative market place for snake-oil salesmen and a fertile breeding ground for parasites.
So, whenever you see, 'As a former Atheist...', say, "don't give me that crap!"
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