A number of years ago, toward the end of the 1990s, I had still not come to grips with being an atheist. I called myself an agnostic. One reason for avoiding the label of "atheist" was that I had somewhat bought into the view of atheists as a rather grim, uncharitable lot who militated against any form of religious belief, something like the White Witch in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, who made it always winter and never Christmas. Another reason for my avoiding the atheist label was, of course, the stigma attached to the word "atheist."
Meeting decent people who were atheists certainly dispelled both of these illusions, and most atheists I met were conditional atheists, not the hard-nosed, close-minded stereotypes usually presented. Once I came to grips with these facts and accepted the fact that I really didn't believe in any god or that I had an immortal soul, I found that accepting the atheist label was quite natural. As for the stigma, I didn't really want to elected dog-catcher anyway.
Two things I've encountered since I accepted that I was a conditional atheist are people who, once they found I wasn't so terrible, decide I really wasn't an atheist and those who asserted that, while it was fine for me to be an atheist, it wouldn't do for others who weren't strong enough to handle living without a god. This latter reaction is part of what Daniel Dennet calls "the belief in the belief in God," the view that the public in general needs religion to keep them civilized.
As for those decide I'm not really one of those awful atheists, a number of years ago I was able to speak with Julia Sweeney, who went from being a Roman Catholic to an atheist. She shared with me some reactions she had encountered from friends and priests when she told them she was now an unbeliever. It paralleled what I had experienced. They said to her, once they found she still had high ideals, "Oh, you're not really that way. You're really one of us. You just don't know it." Last year, at the annual conference the Mythopoeic Society, I was on a panel on religious belief with a Wiccan priestess, an evangelical Christian minister and a Jesuit. When I delineated my position as a conditional atheist, the Jesuit said, "Oh, you're not really an atheist. You're an agnostic." He seemed a bit relieved to be able to say that.
I'm curious as to what experiences other atheists on this forum had when they first came out to themselves and others. I'm also interested as to whether any of you have noticed a shift in people's perception of atheists and atheism.
