Interesting topic! I think that how atheists see their position and/or their progress to their position depends a lot on whether or not they were ever believers.
I have friends who were raised without religion; they are atheists, but it's more of the "non-stampcollector" variety. It's not a spirtual or even (often) philosophic issue with them, it's a simple absense of facts to persuade them to take on a commonly held belief. Sort of a-fearing-spiders-ism.
On the other hand, those of us who were once quite religious, who went to church, prayed, and believed--in my case actually converted to one of the more intellectually rigorous faiths (Catholicism)--had a very different journey. The same search for truth, for integration of my approach to living, that led me to the church in the first place, ultimately led me away from it.
I went down the (I suspect) fairly common path of: This church is bunk; Organized religion is bunk, but they just misunderstand God, the road to God is personal; Okay, it's not God like various creeds say, but there's something out there...Okay, maybe the pagans are right, the spirits of everything amount to...Okay, really? There isn't a god. There's no room for a deity in how the world works, and there's need for a religion to provide moral or philosophic underpinnings to my life.
I am not as anti-religion as some atheists are, because I know that a good, thoughtful, smart person--like ME, for many years--can honestly and sincerely believe. It's a journey and a process and attacking people for searching for truth is not warranted, until and unless they start harming others. So, what you believe: Good for you! Learn and be happy! -- but don't try to enforce it on anyone else, using the Law. Don't use it as a method of keeping your women in purdah or a whole group of people as an untouchable 'caste'. Don't deny your kids medical care or my kids the protection of (your kids' )vaccinations because of it.
It seems to me that asking someone who has had personal religious experiences to deny the reality of that experience under threat of ostracism and taunting is unreasonable. Just because YOU haven't ever had a religious experience does NOT mean they don't exist, or that they're unimportant. (I have migraine; if do not, you have no idea what I, and other migraineurs, go through. This is also a subject that those who have never been there think they can know about.) Better by far--and more productive, in the long term, for creating a rational, nontheistic society--to offer civil, well-reasoned debate and alternative explanations for what happened.
"I miraculously survived a bus crash where 17 people died." "I'm so glad you're okay...[later in conversation].. But don't you think some of those who died may have been praying just as hard as you were?"
I saw a hellhound in my back yard once. (This was in my pagan phase.) It scared me more than I knew it was possible to be scared, and I had to put the whole experience into a file in my head labelled "Unexplained" for many years...until I discovered what hypnopompic and hypnogogic hallucinations were. This finally gave me an explanation that mapped what I had experienced to both the nature of reality AND the way human brains work. My "vision" did happen; but the explanation of it was not what I had initially thought. I didn't make it up; I just didn't have all the information available to make a correct assessment of what happened.
I think about that when I see someone getting shelled--especially in skeptic groups--for their beliefs. Denying the reality of one's own experience under peer pressure is exactly what a good skeptic should NOT do! Truth is not a popularity contest.
Some days I think that the shift of organized skepticism to being a de facto standard-bearer for 'hard' atheism -- focussing on a given position instead of a mode of assessing, testing, and learning--will destroy the credibility of skeptics groups. There are already atheist groups out there; let them focus their energies there.
As the saying goes, "Everybody has a gris-gris." We all hold unreasoned beliefs; some of them are not questioned because they're not covered by the History Channel's woo series, and some of them are accidentally correct. But anyone who thinks he/she doesn't have any is engaging in a bit of self-delusion, I suspect. Human brains put together conclusions on scant evidence all the time: We evolved to do so. Over time, we also developed methods to test those beliefs against reason and reality.
Atheism for the one-time believer results from a long testing of many intertwined beliefs and experiences against Reason and against Reality. Those who never had the God explanation for things didn't usually accumulate a bunch of god-related ideas in their head that had to be tested. So I think the way they see their atheism would naturally be very different.
Just my thoughts, MK
