Hmm …

… How Should Atheism Be Taught? - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Louis J. Appignani, an 84-year-old living in Florida, tells a compelling story about his conversion to atheism. Despite attending Catholic schools from a young age and through his teens, he didn’t really question belief in God growing up; people in his world, he said, sort of took faith for granted. Then he got to college and started reading the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who argued against traditional defenses of God’s existence and justified, as Appignani put it, “what I deep down believe.” Now, the proud atheist holds nothing back when it comes to his personal views on religion. The study of atheism, he said, “gave me strength to believe that faith is stupid … [that] mythology is not true.”

This story may be compelling to the author of this article, but it isn't for me, if only because Bertrand Russell had exactly the opposite effect on me.
When I was in high school, I started reading Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian, which had just come out. I didn't get very far into it. Understand, though: I knew that Russell was routinely referred to as a philosopher of note. But when all he could offer up against Aquinas's argument from cause was that he (Russell) could easily imagine an infinite series of causes, even I immediately thought, "No one asked you what you could imagine. I could imagine that you never wrote that sentence. And, as a matter of fact, you really couldn't imagine an infinite anything unless you had some experience of the infinite." Subsequent encounters with Russell served only to reinforce that initial impression.

As for atheism, it is every bit as faith-based as religion. In fact, it demands more faith than I can muster. I prefer to think that the point of being — presuming there is one —  has more to do with how we live it than with we how we think about it. So I am inclined to think of being as a drama, not a contraption. Everyone else is free to think of it however they choose.