Don - Yes, exactly! I was as unlucky in my atheist upbringing as you were in your religious one.

We were both, I think, oppressed by rigid-minded, dictatorial, arrogant people...people with a grandiose sense of their own "rightness"...who tried to shove their particular self-absorbed mindset down our young throats, while putting an example of hypocrisy and callous egotism in front of us that ended up driving us as far away from their damned mindset as we could possibly get. And we were driven in the complete opposite directions as a result.

People move away from what has hurt them!

Kind of sad, isn't it?

I wonder how many people in this world end up fighting the battles of their childhood and youth for the whole rest of their lives?

It's a little hard to determine what a "real atheist" is, because everyone seems to have their own definition for that. To one person a "real atheist" would be someone they approve of, while to another it would be someone they do not approve of, while to another it would be more sort of a neutral thing.

What's a "real Jew"? Ask 7 different people, and you may get 7 different answers. Ask Hitler, and he'd tell you a whole bunch of really bad stuff! Ask Ariel Sharon, and he'd tell you a whole bunch of really good stuff. Ask someone else, they'd tell you something else again. And just going to the dictionary will not end the debate.

My own opinion is...there are many types of atheists, just like there are many types of religious people.

To find out who a person is, you pretty much have to figure out what they like...and why.....what they dislike...and why....what they love...what they hate...what they fear...who they think their friends and enemies are....what they desire...what they wish to avoid...all that stuff....and most important: Why? How did those seeds get planted in their mind in the first place to make them think that way?

Figure all that out and you may begin to understand why they follow they path they have chosen. Hitler didn't become who he was in a single day. It took time. He had many experiences that he reacted to, some of them quite traumatic (during and after WWI), and he slowly became the dangerous, angry, unstable man who led Germany into WWII. He set out to battle what HE identified as the "evil" in the world, according to his own past and his unique interpretation of that past. The same is true of the rest of us. We react according to what we have suffered and/or enjoyed over the years of our lives.

We fight the old battles, seek out the old joys, replay the old tragedies time and again. And the other people around us wonder why...