in real life. I graduated from a fundamentalist christian high school in 1981 and left home 3 months later and have been sure in my heart that I was an atheist from that time but it wasn't until about 4 or 5 years ago that I actually met another person who was an out and proud atheist.
My wife of 25 years is (nominally) a southern baptist and she and my kids know I'm an atheist (I say nominally because she identifies herself as that but I have only seen her go to church twice in my life - once was with her mom and once was with mine) but I never officially "came out" to my mother and didn't post it on my Facebook until the day after she died.
I imagine it was cowardly of me to not tell her but I think she knew anyway and saying it out loud would have been very upsetting to her - she was a children's evangelist and ran vacation bible schools for years. My stepfather is still alive and I don't care if that prick never speaks to me again so I don't care that he knows but I just never wanted to openly hurt my mom like that would have done.
Nowadays I work with that previously mentioned out atheist in a large company so we can talk amongst ourselves but we try to mind who else we talk about it. We just aren't quite as careful as I would have been 10 or 15 years ago.
But I have been online since the late 80s starting with a Commodore64 and a 300 baud modem and I have anonymously been an atheist on many forums and I am glad for it too as now I personally feel more comfortable talking about it in real life (whether or not I actually do talk about it.) I even argue with my little brothers all the time about it, lol, but we were gonna fight about one thing or another anyway.
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