Glad to find this place. I'm a former Christian coming out of a 15-year period of reevaluating of all my beliefs from scratch, down to the very existence of God. In the process I've spent a fair amount of time reading and listening to atheists. I figured that atheists would be better acquainted with the reasons for not believing in gods than anyone else. I've been frustrated in that effort. I hope there are those here who can help me with that.

Just to clear the air, I'm not a covert theist operative, as some have taken me for elsewhere. I understand why they did: my thinking tends to be hard to categorize. I ask questions about things a lot of people take for granted. It's interesting how much suspicion gets aroused when you question the "obvious" or suspend belief for longer than others are comfortable with.

I went on the About.com Agnosticism / Atheism forum a couple of years ago trying to understand why atheists choose atheism. At the time, it seemed strange to me that an intellectual/theoretical position would label and define itself by reference to what it denied. If atheism doesn't depend on the existence of theism in order to define itself, what does it mean to be an "atheist?" How could LACK of something ("a" - without, "theism" - belief in god[s]) form the basis for collective identity and provide anything cohesive enough to maintain a sense of belonging and shared interest?

I got schooled. What I learned there is that atheism for the folks I conversed with was actually a kind of anti-theism, but not as an intellectual position. I was given to believe that apart from the influence--even pressure--of theists, atheists would simply think of themselves as  human beings. In other words, "atheism" = normal human thinking, "theism" = human thinking corrupted by the addition of belief in gods. In my residual theistic bias, I had made atheism = lack of theism, while atheists seem not to have any sense of lack (gee, go figure...) I guess I can be forgiven for my presumption, since I spent most of my life in Christian circles. To me the question of God's existence was a valid question. To the atheists on that forum, the question itself was symptomatic of a problem in thinking.

That brought me to an interesting and revealing insight. I experienced the same kind of reaction more than once in my life from theists when I brought their basic beliefs (foundational, self-evident, I-have-no-justification-for-them beliefs) into question, even though I was sympathetic to them. I realized that theists consider the question of atheism as an aberration of thought and atheists consider the question of theism as an aberration of thought. Given that, how could there ever be meaningful discussion between the two positions?

What I really hope to do here is understand why atheists choose to become atheists. I expect that the reasons are wide and varied, but they all have one thing in common: they all result in atheism. I already understand a great deal about why theists choose to become theists. My frustration with understanding atheists so far is that they exhibit the same reluctance to examine their foundational beliefs that theists do. Most of what I've read and heard atheists say boils down to reasons why it doesn't make sense to seriously entertain the possibility of the existence of gods. This seems like the flip side of the theistic refusal to seriously entertain the possibility that gods do not exist. Both seem like opposing sides of the same coin of denial.

What both theists and atheists have in common is that we all went through a process to arrive at our respective positions. One striking difference between theists and atheists is the way that they talk about their individual processes. The processes described by theists tend to focus on constructive elements (what did happen, what it did mean) while those of atheists seem to focus on deconstructive elements (realizing what didn't happen, realizing that it didn't mean what it seemed to mean.)

As an example of the latter, consider Sir Bertrand Russell's description of his own process. It is from a 1959 interview in which he is asked about his atheism. Here is Richard Dawkins' page with a link to the interview: http://richarddawkins.net/articles/4833. In response to the question, "…when did you first decide that you did not want to remain a believer in the Christian ethic?" Russell said:

"I never decided that I didn't want to remain a believer, I decided… Between the ages of 15 and 18, I spent almost all my spare time thinking about Christian dogmas and trying to find out whether there was any reason to believe them. And by the time I was 18, I had discarded the last of them. "

What has always struck me about this answer is not that he rejected Christian dogmas, but some more basic things that I have yet to read or hear him comment about. For example, what motivated him to spend so much time and energy evaluating Christian dogmas? I can't think of many Christians who have put that kind of effort into evaluating the very dogmas that they claim to believe. That was some serious motivation. And why did he focus on dogmas in the first place? In other words, why did he conceive of the question in terms of dogma? Did he consider alternative ways to frame the question? Why did he think that disposing of Christian dogmas would mean that he had disposed of Christianity?

If we don't understand the basic beliefs and motivations that prompted us to start our processes and drove us through them, we don't really understand why we ended up in our current positions, and to that degree we don't understand the positions themselves. I want to talk to people about their processes in order to understand them and to understand myself. That's why I'm here.

Am I in the right place?