How did you end up atheist?
Will pass along this belief to your kids?
Do you have an authority?
Do you fear death? What are your fears?
What do you believe happens after you die?
Do believe in life beyond earth?
Do you believe in any forces in action beyond human control?
You don't end up being an atheist ....it's the default position, you start out as atheist, you either stay that way or become influenced via indoctrination.
If you were to change the question to "why am I still an atheist?" the answer would be that by pure chance I was just fortunate enough to be born into a modern Western society with access to good scientific education and that generally speaking, my influences just happened to be more secular than religious.
Don't and won't have any kids so kind of a moot point for me personally. Hypothetically speaking though, if I were to have children they would be raised in modern Western society and be privy to all of man's current thoughts/philosophies on religion, both for and against (see above) I certainly wouldn't stop them from finding their own path though. (I'd just be more likely to read them excerpts from "The selfish gene" as a bedtime story rather than "Noah's Arc"
)
I answer to authority in the sense that I obey the laws of the land and generally abide by the moral compass of the society I live in, the difference is that I think of those morals as innate ...not God given.
I do not fear death itself, it's an unavoidable part of the circle of life.
It's the thought "
how I will die" that holds fear (this applies to everyone) No-one wants to die a painful/gruesome death ...that's what worries ALL of us, religious or not.
The same as before I was born -nothing. I don't have any recollection of consciousness before I was born and I don't believe there will be any once I die. However, the thought of my atoms being once again distributed among the universe (Stardust) is far more comforting to me than being stuck in eternal limbo.
Where we are in our current understanding of the Universe, the mathematics alone (which is basically what our real understanding of the Universe comes down to anyway) suggest that there's a very real possibility of life beyond our own small rock.
However, I would say that in the grand scheme of my own life here on Earth, it's probably not worth worrying about too much, as it's unlikely that anything significant will be found in my lifetime (little green men etc.) Any life discovered by humans will almost certainly be "simple" ...but of course the thought of it being more than that is what is so wonderfully fascinating, the search and the drive to discover the new.
No, although I would never rule it out ...there is just no reason for me to. At this stage in our understanding of the Universe, there is ZERO evidence for anything beyond our own consciousness.