Atheist is Hiding,

There are many people roughly in your situation. I have never been a religious individual but rarely mentioned it to anyone for the first twenty years or so of my life.

My thought at the time was that there was no point in making religious people uncomfortable and most people were probably some kind of atheist anyway and were more or less going along with the drill for social reasons.

I have modified my views on this a bit, but still I don't see much advantage to being an in your face atheist either.

One of the things that I have enjoyed since the rise of the internet has been the opportunity to find like minded people. You might try finding an internet forum where you could interact with fellow skeptics. One such forum is the James Randi forum (http://forums.randi.org/). There are many people who have lived roughly through what you are going through now and you might enjoy getting their reaction to your situation.

Good Luck,

Dave

I took some issue with commandment VIII, resolving the Palestinian/Israeli crisis. I'm not opposed to one more try at this, particularly if it was done with some sense of fairness about the conflict (something that seems like it is just about impossible politically for an American administration to do). But the key element of any real attempt needs to be an American willingness to walk away if the peace effort is unsuccessful. The US has done everything within its power to exacerbate the conflict for most of the last 40 years and at this point there is no real reason to suspect that continued US meddling is going to do any more than to keep the conflict going.

Israelis don't need American handouts to survive, but they do need American handouts to subsidize their land grabbing. Any plan that doesn't start with the US guarantee that it won't do that anymore is doomed to failure.