Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers posted an email that he got from a reader. As opposed to all of the death threats and hate mail, Myers was happy with this email. It was from a guy who looked at all the evidence and left evangelical Christianity for atheism.
“Monitoring” deconverts is probably the wrong wording. It’s more or less that he can watch a deconversion unfold and the proof of them might be in the form of a thank you email.
Myers says he gets six deconvert emails a week. If that’s true, that’s amazing.
The deconvert said in the email:
Over the last several years I have been “converting” from a once very strong evangelical faith to atheism. It was a long road and involved many different facets, one of which was a steady tide of atheist reason and thought I received online. And my main source, well none other then you, Dr. Myers. My first movement towards rationality came when I started researching evolution and what do you know, it was true. While I was still an evangelical, I started tracking the creation and evolution controversy, which often through a link landed me on you blog as you are very prominent in the discussion.
Read the rest here.
This email reflects the question I asked Hemant Mehta last night at the SSA talk. I think that perhaps more of this might be going on over at the Friendly Atheist blog, but perhaps Mehta isn’t looking for it.
Evangelism isn’t something PZ Myers is actively doing either. It’s just something that happens. It’s part of the Christian culture to convert nonbelievers. It’s not atheist culture to (de)convert anyone. Should you decide you’d like to cease being a Christian, that’s great, but that’s your prerogative. You’re not going to get some form of counseling to deconvert. You’re pretty much on your own.
I’m not looking for evangelical atheism as a part of our culture, but I am curious about conversion stories, only because conversion stories tend to help fence sitters take a step in the same direction.
Le Café Wittypoots 