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A question for the atheists here: since many of us come from religious families and were raised in the faith, how did you explain your atheism to your parents? I'm sure this analogy isn't entirely accurate, but for me it felt like what I imagine a homosexual goes through when he or she "comes out" when I told my parents that I no longer believed in God and would not be attending church services with them anymore. Needless to say, it took them awhile to get over it. My father is more understanding, but it's been over a decade and my mother still hasn't fully come to terms with it.
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Interestingly, my mother probably figures it's her own fault. She grew up in a strongly religious family, but her mom died after a protracted illness when my mom was sixteen. That really shook my mother's own faith. My sister was born just before my mom turned eighteen and I was born just after she turned twenty, a year and sixteen days apart. For our sakes, my mother decided to try and raise us in the Catholic church, but my dad has always been pretty non-religious. They ended up splitting up by the time I was five and my mom seemed to kind of lapse again. At the same time, I was a pretty smart kid and avid reader and my mom encouraged me strongly to question everything, and she didn't chide me for asking hard questions about religion to her, our priest, or anyone else. By the time I was about eight or nine I had pretty much decided that the church didn't have any satisfying answers. After dabbling in high school with other philosophies and even another Christian sects I came away convinced that there is no good reason to believe in any supernatural agency in our lives. With a critical eye, I have observed the back and forth arguments over the years, which have literally exploded on the internet, and no religious argument has ever satisfied, while the secular/agnostic/atheist arguments have a fundamentally coherent sense about them.
My mom has gone back and forth on her own religion, but she has never bothered me about my atheism because she knows that it comes from a place of personal reflection and understanding of myself. I think my dad is probably agnostic/atheist anyway and certainly doesn't challenge me on it but our discussions in the area tend to be abstract rather than personal.
It goes back to some of photon's much earlier posts about not wanting to derail the thread by getting into a discussion of belief versus knowledge, but in many ways he is absolutely correct that the distinction is critical to what we are talking about.
In epistemological circles, the question is often discussed as being a distinction between coherentism and foundationalism. Foundationalism requires that you find some base piece of incontrovertible knowledge and develop a logical framework from there to justify making a claim that something is knowledge rather than belief. Its major weakness is that soemone can always challenge the truth claim for the original foundational knowledge leading to an unavoidable infinite regress. On the other hand coherentism says that if we have a bunch of different pieces of evidence, all of which hangs together in a consistent framework to support a truth claim, that should suffice to designate that claim as knowledge rather than just belief. However, the challenge to coherentists is the question, 'If something about how the evidence goes together makes the truth claim stronger, then shouldn't that be a foundational claim itself because it could be applied to different types of evidence or situations." That then leads to the infinite regress of asking what characteristics of a group of coherent evidence makes it worthy of converting a truth claim from belief to knowledge.
In an argument/discussion about religion, we all draw our own lines. I tend to lean towards a coherentist view, in that evidence from various sources that are reliable in other contexts such as physics, math, biology, geology, history, psychology and others paint a coherent picture in which the supernatural element of a god is not necessary. It doesn't mean everything is explained, but to maintain consistency and coherence of my knowledge claims, God is not a useful concept.
A foundationalist might think differently in some respects and focus on one specific idea, such as complexity and decide that that one issue, for which there is no satisfactory explanation in their mind, supports the belief in a supernatural agency.
Neither is necessarily wrong nor right, nor, despite appearances, are they necessarily mutually exclusive. Like atheism, one would be a strong foundationalist and weak coherentist at the same time to some degree for example.
It's a truly fascinating area of philospohy, but definitely steers away from the topic at hand if you get into it.