Is it easier to be an atheist in your 20's compared to your 70's or 80's?

Yes. People in their 20's still believe death for them is eons away.

It's probably difficult to be atheist in both the 20s and the 80s.

In the 20s, your brain is still developing....ever notice how fanatical 20-somethings are about whatever they happen to believe?

In the 80s, the brain is deteriorating, and the odds of damage from injury or disease have greatly increased.

All I can tell you as this.

1) I was born and raised without God.

2) As a kid, I didn't even care about the question of God.

3) In my 20s I went around searching for God (read lots of scripture, attended lots of worship services)...I believed He probably did exist; I just had to find some evidence to convince myself.

4) The older I get...the more convinced I become that He doesn't exist.

Hope that helps you.

That depends on where they live. In the UK it's easy (although uncommon) for a 70-80 year old to be an atheist. For a 20 year old it's almost expected.

In Saudi Arabia it's going to be hard for a 20 year old to be an atheist (and for the 70-80 year old or anyone else for that matter).

If you think gods exist, it is pretty hard to be n atheist at any age. If you think they don't, it is pretty easy at any time of life.

I'd say I was about 10 or 12 when I sort of assumed God was a poetic reference, meant to make the moral parables in the Bible more coherent. I'm now pushing 60 and I have much the same opinion, but I am slightly better educated now, so in addition, I have a little better understanding of physics and biology.

"Then again you could get in a car accident tomorrow and die, so iyou should turn to Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior today and start obeying God. "

==My guess is that you have some wishful thinking going on there.

The reality is that there are thousands of cultures and even more religions and cults.

Sorry dude, you arr worshiping a dead jew guy who never had magical powers.

Most people currently in their 70's and 80's have been indoctrinated in religion for too long to be useful examples. While there are many intelligent, thinking 70 and 80 year old people who are atheists, there are not enough for a sizeable control group. A better question might be " do 20 year old atheists convert to religion as they get older and begin to fear death ? " At heart, fear of death is what religion is all about, besides money.

I don't see how there could be any real difference.

EDIT: It's not true that people are atheists when they're young and go back to religion when they're older. That's a misinterpretation of the statistics. The truth is that belief levels drop with each younger age cohort. The believers in their 70s now were believers when they were young, too. If that poll had been taken fifty years ago it would have found a similar proportion of believers in their twenties. Unbelievers who are in their twenties now will still be unbelievers in fifty years. There is a certain amount of change in both directions, but overall, the trend is that each age cohort contains fewer believers.

Sometimes you see people going back to church when their kids are young, but usually those parents believed all along but didn't bother with church until they had kids.

Plenty of the atheists here were believers when they were in their twenties. Don't mindlessly believe the religious stereotype that people suddenly start believing when faced with death. That's simply not true.

Definitely; people in their 70's and 80's would have a much more narrow minded peer group.

EDIT: There are currently fewer atheists in their 70's and 80's because people in their 70's and 80's come from a generation with significantly less education, but who needs that when you've got comforting beliefs, right?

It's easier to be an atheist if you have the benefit of an education and critical reasoning skills. You don't lose those just by getting older.

No.

Can you imagine to pray to Odin in case you feel your death near?

Cause if you don't you will not enter valhalla and you will sit outside in the cold forever.

The thought that I might one day believe that any god could be real is about as far fetched as you actually praying to Odin.

Is it easier to believe in dragons when you are old? To me fire breathing dragons and gods have about the same level of importance in my life and about the same probability to really exist.

There is nothing that makes your religion special among all other religions. There are stories about 3000 different gods. There is nothing that indicates that your god is any more real than all the other gods.

It's not difficult to realize that the idea of invisible people is ridiculous, whether you are seven or seventy. In response to the idea that atheists become religious when they get older because they realize that they are going to die, that is simply false. I'm almost seventy, and I have inoperable thyroid cancer and leukemia... invisible monsters don't scare me, and Pascal's Wager is still an absurdity.