Well I guess it depends on how much lying about this bothers you — and whether or not you need to have financial support from your parents. If it is possible you should get out of the religiouly-affiliated school...transfer out. If that is not possible you just have to hold your nose and shut up until you get out of there. Religious people are frequently very threatened by atheists..but I know some who are not. My mother believes she will meet me again in heaven and she is distressed that I don't believe as she does because she wants to see me again. I tell her that if she is right and I am wrong, I will be delighted to meet her again in the hereafter. That seems to calm her. She sometimes sputters that to get into heaven one has to believe. Than I ask her if she thinks all the little children killed in concentration camps are not going to heaven and she seems to think that maybe you don't have to believe to get into heaven.

has clearly been in a coma for the past seven years.

Private piety seems to be very out-of-vogue lately. The religious are organized and active - but atheists are just supposed to lie low and keep to ourselves.

As soon as we raise our heads, we are shouted down as being arrogant and presumptious simply because we don't believe all the far-fetched, undisprovable lore in a bunch of ancient books!

Meanwhile, religious people get to proclaim whatever pernicious nonsense they want - no matter how absurd, contrary to observable fact, or morally repugnant - because to oppose their sincerely held religious beliefs would be mean-spirited and intolerant.

Oh well, count me among the meanspirited and intolerant then.

The world needs more closets. Everyone needs their own personal, well-lit, walk-in closet, to contain one's personal stuff. It's theirs and they can see its contents. The rest of the world is dealing with their own personal stuff, in their own personal closet and doesn't need to see what's in everybody else's closet. Mind your own business and stay out of mine.

Amen, heartsafire, and I mean that almost religiously. It certainly has been most useful to me that people like to tell all their business.

I suppose I am stuffy and old-fashioned. I was brought to understand that there are few social occasions when it acceptable to discuss politics, sex, and religion. Thank Goddess for Salon where we can discuss anything and insult others at will. I cannot imagine what outlet I would possibly have for my sarcasm and aggression if I could not come here. Sometimes my shadow side just needs indulging.

Oh sure people can have their intellectual discussions in their personal lives if others are like-minded, but why foist this on other people in our daily lives. Ultimately, other things become more important: what one dreamed last night, whether it is going to rain just when you wanted to wear your new suede shoes, and what on earth shall we have for dinner. Anyone who cannot make a conversation out of mundane things is likely to be rather socially inept or else really lives at a lofty level indeed and feeds on air.

Personally, I want to know who everyone sleeps with and what they do in bed. No not those porn movies. I mean real people. I want to imagine beer-bellied Uncle Henry moving with elaborate patience over Aunt Jane who has dispensed with thinking of England and is about to have an orgasm so loud and lusty that it will wake the neighborhood. I want to know that Gary down the street looks at gay porn on the internet and gets off before he kneels at his his beside to say his evening prayers and that he believes fervently in both his body and his spirit and teeters on a spider line mitigating the tension between the two. I want to know all the juicy details of my father's courtship of my mother and how I managed to get born almost nine months to the day after their wedding, which may have been bigamous. I want people to tell me all these things. However, I certainly respect their admirable restraint when they do not.

The crap people will eagerly reveal to you, is never the crap that really counts. A little discretion oils the social gears. Go lie in a hammock on your back porch on some lovely Indian Summer's Day folks and feel a gentle wind and watch the gleam of sunlight on golden leaves. Doing that, do you want to be distracted by the next argument you are construcing in your head about how to defeat your believer brother-in-law into understanding that you are right and he is wrong about the existence of God? If so, what a little life you must have!

At the close of day -- I mean the last day of your life and not today -- will you be remembering how you fought the good fight on behalf of atheism or Christianity, or will you be remembering how your child's face looked when she first observed a dragonfly close up and marvelled at the intricacy of its wings and the hugeness of its eyes. For all we know, God IS the dragonfly.

Whoever it was downthread that said (and I've heard this many times before) that religious fanatics have caused most of the misery in the world was obviously not paying attention during the last century. The body counts racked up by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot are going to be hard to beat, even by the Taliban.

Atheist? So long as you're a student or in the work world, keep it to yourself. You need not lie. Just say things like, "I'm not very religious" and side step discussions on your faith or lack of it.

I "left" the Catholic church at about age 13. I just thought the nuns and priests who catecized us were crazy.

When asked over the years about my religion I'd say things like, "I was born Catholic, but I'm not a deeply religious person." That was sufficient most of the time.

Nothing to be gained by telling morons that you're an atheist.