“Half of atheist kids wind up believing”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/13/half-of-atheist-kids-wind-up-believing.html

If true, it wouldn’t surprise me a great deal.

I’ve seen a number of cases where this has happened.

And here are three notable instances:

William Murray, son of the famous atheist agitator Madalyn Murray O’Hair, converted to Christianity in 1980 and became a Baptist minister.  When she learned of this, his mother — a charming sort who would eventually be brutally murdered by the former typesetter for her American Atheists organization — commented that “One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times.”

Svetlana Alliluyeva, the last surviving daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church in 1963.  She then turned to the Greek Orthodox Church, and, it’s said, considered becoming a nun.  In 1982, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Bertrand Russell’s only daughter, Lady Katharine Tait, married a Christian minister.  Part of the money that the vocally atheistic Russell received from his Nobel Prize in Literature paid, somewhat against his will, for his son-in-law’s seminary education.  In her memoir of her father, Lady Katharine described a visit to Cyprus (I believe; perhaps it was Crete) with her father and her husband.  She said that Lord Russell spent quite a bit of time during that visit (not long before his death) sitting, meditatively, alone, in small rural Greek Orthodox churches.  She believed that he was experiencing doubts about his notorious unbelief.

Anyway, shifts between atheism and theism don’t occur in only one direction, whatever triumphalist unbelievers say.