I enjoyed the thread about believers who became atheists.
So I thought one about the opposite situation might be interesting.
I have no dog in this fight-I am merely interested in the issue.
Bumping this because I too am curious about this. From my admittedly anecdotal experience most people who “find God” either go from one religion to another or from weak generic theists to finding a specific religion.
In the few cases of going from atheist to religious, it is usually an event or feeling and not an argument that caused the shift.
I’ve heard that foxholes can have this effect. Never experienced it myself.
There’s also the “atheists” who are more disgruntled theists, who go around for a few years looking for an excuse to believe again.
To quote my signature, “There are no atheists in foxholes because all the atheists were smart enough to get into tactical command and the airforce.” 
I am one of those that the OP is curious about.
I was raised in a family with no religious practice. My mother says that we used to go to the Unitarian church, but quit long before I was born, “because she could never find enough white socks” to cover all eight of us. That gives you an idea of the priority we attached to church. (My sister, famous for her accidental epigrams, once said, “We don’t go to church, we go to the library”.)
I spent most of my school days, right through college, as a fairly hard atheist. I didn’t evangelize like some, and didn’t make a point of denigrating religion or the religious. But, yeah, I saw myself as more intelligent, more open-minded, etc., etc.
I married a cradle Catholic, twelve years of Catholic schools, etc. As is common for young Catholic women at the time, she was not particularly devout, and generally only went to church on Christmas and Easter. We were married in a Catholic non-mass wedding, which is what the church did at the time between a Catholics and a non-baptized person.
I remember going to Easter mass with her our first year (or perhaps the spring before our wedding) and watching all of the congregation lift their palms high and wave them at the appropriate part of the ceremony, and feeling like an anthropologist in Darkest Africa, watching the natives dance around the fire.
What changed?
Having children. Holding my newborn daughter was like nothing I had ever experienced. Here was something far more important than myself. It caused me to re-evaluate my priorities.
We had her baptised - there was never any question about that. I had no problem with raising the children in a religious tradition, although I probably thought that it would be mostly ceremonial and symbolic rather than actually meaningful.
But we started going to mass more often. I am a lifelong singer, and have sung many of the great works, including a variety of mass settings. Hearing the words of the mass spoken (in English) that I had sung (in Latin) for so many years gave the ceremony great resonance. I also came to appreciate the history and traditions of the church.
I found the community of churchgoers to be a warm and welcoming group, not at all as I had pictured believers to be. They were not exclusive, not rejecting people who didn’t believe, or who had failed to live up to the standards of the faith. There were people with gay children, or daughters who had had abortions, etc., and did not cast them out. There were many who had been divorced.
About the time that our second child was born, it was time for our daughter to start Sunday school classes, which happened to take place on Monday afternoons in that time and place. I had noted that the adult classes were scheduled to start on Monday evenings, so, when I picked my daughter up after school, I asked our priest (who was a cool guy) if the adult class started that evening. He replied, “Yes, are you interested in coming?” I was, and did.
Eventually, there came a time where each of us in the class had to meet privately with the priest, and discuss with him whether or not we wanted to officially go through the ceremonies to become officially Catholic. I told him that, as a longtime atheist, my belief would no doubt be different than that of a lifelong Catholic. He was fine with this, and I went ahead and was baptized, took first communion, and confirmed all in one evening. I have never regretted it.
So, what have my kids gotten from all this? They are both grown, or nearly so, and are well-adjusted, well-behaved, and tolerant. I think being raised in a religious tradition has given them a framework within which to develop their own morality. My daughter’s (gay) roommate has recently moved out, and the question of moving her boyfriend in came up, but she says that she isn’t comfortable with that yet, “probably because of her Catholic upbringing”. It will probably happen eventually (and I’m fine with that), but it isn’t a bad thing for her to think twice, to take her time and re-evaluate her situation and relationship before doing so.
She has more or less quit going to church except at Christmas and Easter, so we are pretty much at the point where we came in. I expect when she has kids the whole process will start up all over again.
But are you actually a theist now, or just atheist and Catholic? Do you believe in God? If so, what specifically caused you to begin to believe?
I was raised a Christian. Then I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel which really got me thinking about evolution and I came to strongly believe in evolution. This put me at odds with everything I had been taught in the Church. After giving the whole thing much thought I came to the conclusion that you can’t come up with a deductive argument for the existence of God. That sealed it and I became an atheist.
Fast forward about a year and a half and I was perfectly satisfied in my non-belief but out of nowhere I started thinking about the other side of that coin, namely that fact that you can’t come up with a deductive argument for the non-existence of God.
At that point I realized that it’s just a choice. Go with whichever you prefer. It makes me happier to believe that there is an afterlife than to believe that I will cease to exist. I may be wrong but I don’t really care.
So to some up I would say that I left atheism because it didn’t make me happy.
::sits back and awaits sharp criticism for wish fullfillment and/or someone bringing up the Problem of Evil argument::
And, if I may follow up, were you an atheist by default because of your parents, or did you have an argument for it?
Which God did you choose to believe in?
Why that God?
I’m just curious.
Nor leprechauns.
I was raised in an atheist household. My father was a militant non-believer, my mother less so and she later converted to Christianity when I was about fifteen. I grew up without any religion and in my preteen years I easily picked up all my father’s viewpoints. (We also subscribed to The Nation, and reading it was doubtlessly formative for me.) By the time I started college I was firmly established in the idea that I belonged to a small elite that was better than everyone else on account of being more rational, more intelligent, more intellectual, more open-minded, and so forth.
I spent four years at college and in the time all my professors came from that same eilte that I considered myself to be in, as did the administrators and the leaders of various student activist groups. After four years of watching and listening to these people, I was forced to the conclusion that these people were not quite as intellectually and morally superior as I had initally thought. The famous hate-crime hoax by professor Kerri Dunn is just one of many examples of bad behavior I witnessed. Yet despite rejecting some parts of the philosophy I was brought up with, I was still quite sure in my atheism. During my summers I often traveled to rural Wyoming, where I met some people from ‘the other side’: Christian, very conservative, poor, and generally everything I’d been raised to hate. I was forced to acknowledge that they were not bad people and indeed were extremely generous and kind-hearted.
Fast forward to graduate school. I started noticing more and more flaws in the worldview that I was brought up with. At the same time, at first via the internet, I came in touch with some Christian communities and began to read books and magazines from a perspective different from my own for the first time. The more I heard and read, the more I was forced to realize that I agreed with a great deal of it. To give one example, a big issue while I was growing up was sex and violence in the media and kids being overexposed to it. I was brought up to assume that there couldn’t really be anything harmful from watching TV or movies or listening to music. However, upon considering the issue it seemed almost impossible to not conclude that many TV shows, movies, and music acts were actually morally degenerate, vulgar, and flatly stupid. So by this time I was agreeing with the Christian perspective on more and more issues, but I was, of course, still too rational and intellectual to believe in god or anything else that was simply known to be non-existent.
Then, in my third year of grad school I began to read Christian apologetics and other serious works. It didn’t take long for them to turn all my intellectual certainties around, and when I looked back on all the reasons I supposedly had for rejecting Christianity they seemed entirely unconvincing. Then I began to pray and God answered my prayers, and I joined a church and met a minister who could answer the ‘big questions’ that I had better than anyone else I’d ever met, and the Holy Spirit began to speak to me once I was willing to listen. And, well, if I were to list everything that God has done in my life I’d never get around to finishing this post and actually posting it.
The Christian God. 'Cause it was all I knew.
I’m not saying I applied any rigorous intellectual discipline to the choice. It was an emotional choice, which was very hard for me because I hate that I couldn’t use logic.
I was definitely one of those “atheist by default” sort of people–my mom used to be Catholic, I guess, and my dad never bothered with religion. It was never something we discussed, except in a sociohistorical context. And, although I was (and still am) wary of the big religions as institutions, I was never particularly closed off to the beliefs themselves, both seeing why they were probably false, yet seeing why they were potentially valuable.
And then I found them becoming valuable to myself. I’ve–hang on, I’m just going to quote myself:
So, yeah, maybe not exactly what you’re looking for, since I still consider myself an atheist, and I never joined up with an official religion, but I’m still theistic.
Wow. It’s funny how your story is almost exactly opposite to the typical atheist’s story. You hit all the highlights–the militant believer parent, the meeting with decent folk from the other side, discovery of a small society of fellows, and the finding of the heavyweights. Not that I’m accusing you of making it up, mind–I believe you. But it goes to show, I think, that people in general are just a lot more similar than they like to think. That also explains why you think of atheism as a religion, I suppose. People can turn anything into a religion.
An interesting post. I know I am cutting out a lot of your story, but the part of the story above, especially the part I bolded, made me wonder. You seem to imply that only why to have moral judgment is through religion. In my experience atheists are just as moral or immoral as theists. They just apply (and frequently for both, misapply) different rational to get to their morals.
I would personally be more interested to hear which part of the apologetics most convinced you to accept the Christian God as truth.
Does this mean that your intellectual brethren didn’t think most TV was vulgar and stupid? (Morally degenerate might be a bit much.) I mean, if TV programs were targeted to atheists the networks would seen be out of business.
Could you share some of your intellectual/rational reasons for being an atheist?
A theist, but one who doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about His nature.
I solidified my atheist thinking in late grade school, and was pretty hard through college. I started to soften in my late 20s (we got married when I was 30). So it wasn’t as outrageous a transformation as it would have been ten years earlier.
I noted, above, that, with respect to my kids:
This is not to say that there are not other frameworks.
I guess I just can’t wrap my head around someone choosing something like this.
I just cannot choose to be Catholic just like I don’t believe the respondents so far could choose to be Buddhist.
I note you guys converted to religions similar to the ones you were exposed too (at least on some level) how do you guys think that effected your conversion?