An Atheist's Journey to Faith

[Mutty]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Compry</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Mutty</div><div class="ubbcode-body">
Says your holy book, Compry.

Here's an interesting thing. In Edith Hamilton's book, Mythology in chapter one titled, The Gods, it opens with these words:


The Greeks did not believe that the gods created the universe. It was the other way about: the universe created the gods..." </div></div>

It was also yours once upon a time.

I agree with Jaith...people have created many many many gods...however God created people. </div></div>


Obviously yours is not one of the created ones. Got it!

[heretic]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: jaith</div><div class="ubbcode-body">i dunno about the universe, but i believe people have created many gods... </div></div>Except yours. Yours is special, but all those other gods are human fabrications.

[jaith]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: heretic</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: jaith</div><div class="ubbcode-body">i dunno about the universe, but i believe people have created many gods... </div></div>Except yours. Yours is special, but all those other gods are human fabrications. </div></div>

i think you're reading a little more into my words than was said.... [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70400-talktohand.gif[/img]

[heretic]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: jaith</div><div class="ubbcode-body">i think you're reading a little more into my words than was said.... [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70400-talktohand.gif[/img] </div></div>Of course, because you surely wouldn't believe anything like that.

[Compry]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

Testimony of Former Atheist, A.S.A. Jones

I was a devout atheist for over twenty years. In July of 1998, I finally managed to see the biblical truths that had managed to elude me. The following is an account of how I went from hardcore skepticism to hardcore worship of the Savior, Jesus Christ.

Rational thought replaces the God of my youth

I was raised a Roman Catholic in a home where the name of Jesus Christ and God was never mentioned. I was encouraged to attend catechism and church every weekend, but the concept of God was never made completely real to me. I entertained the notion as any child would, but I just wasn't into the imaginary friend scene and by the time I was thirteen, I had concluded that God was merely a vicious adult version of the Easter bunny. I abandoned the lie, informed my upset parents that I would no longer be attending church, and began seeking truth.

In the absence of a religious belief to answer life's questions, I turned my mental energy to science. Science had an awesome track record of solving many problems and its resulting technology had provided tangible benefits to all of mankind. Science was the answer! I reasoned that if we could educate our populations and continue to make advances in medicine, agriculture and energy production, we would one day have the mythical Eden as our reality.

I threw myself into my studies, determined to become a scientific messiah who would one day deliver people from the bondage of disease. At the age of sixteen, my IQ and my grades made me eligible for my high school's early release program and I began my studies in biology and chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh.

Rational thought replaces my compassion for others

I graduated from college with high honors and my prized science degree, but I had lost any motivation to apply that knowledge. I recalled staring at a swarming mass of termites one sunny day, thinking that, from a comparative distance, there was little difference between them and us. I smashed a few dozen with my shoe and ground them into the dirt. What did it matter if these died? What did it matter if they all died? People died every day. The end result would always be death for both the individuals and, eventually, the species.

Humanity had become nothing more to me than an organized network of molecules and enzymes. I viewed people as mere organisms going through their daily routines of metabolizing nutrients and expelling wastes, ovulating their eggs and ejaculating their semen. I knew the psychology of humans almost as well as their anatomies. The hidden things that pulled them this way and that were very evident to me. They were like guinea pigs, only more predictable, and my chief form of entertainment was to see how skillfully I could manipulate them. I knew that I was supposed to care about them, but I didn't. I couldn't. If mankind's goal was to alleviate its own suffering, a bullet to the head was more efficient and made more sense in my thinking than screwing around with medication or disease control.

What was the point of prolonging any one life? What difference did it make if a girl didn't live to marry or her mother live to see it? Of what value were temporary emotional experiences? They were simply the biochemistry of the brain reacting to sensory input and, upon that individual's death, any remaining memory of that experience would be thrown away along with the person who had experienced it. My extreme point of view had reduced people into throwaway metabolic units; I had become as cold and indifferent as the logic that I exalted.

If my education would benefit anyone, it would benefit me. I passed up an offer of a low paying research position for a secure and higher paying job in a chemistry lab. My brain rotted there for 40 hours a week for 10 years.

Rational thought turns from science to philosophy

Science had done nothing to answer the questions that raged in my head. Why should I care? How much should I care? Should I care at all? What is my purpose in life? Is there a purpose? How can I love people? Should I love people? Which people should I love? How can I forgive people? Should I forgive people? Have I done what is right? Have I done what is wrong? Is there a right or a wrong?

I turned to philosophy. I started with Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness". This man had won a Nobel Prize for basically taking white and logically demonstrating how it was really black. I tried several other atheist philosophers who tried to assign meaning to a life created by chance and I decided that they were all full of crap. If our life is the result of randomness and chance, it is meaningless, no matter how we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

That was fine with me. I was prepared to live my life by this truth and discovered that the prospect of a life without meaning can be a very freeing experience. I set out to take advantage of moral relativism and effectively destroyed any of my remaining conscience. Friends, let me tell you, I fell far, far away, but I didn't know it. I busied myself with one diversion after another, trying to fill my life with meaningless activity in order to forget how meaningless it was. In my desperation, I grew self-righteous and indignant. I was secretly envious of the morons who seemed blissfully unaware of their own meaninglessness. I wanted to shake them awake and get them to see how worthless their lives really were. [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/704555_dwl.gif[/img]

My philosophy turns anti-Christian

The worst idiots were the Christians. I hated them because, in their ignorance of naturalism, they failed to see that there was no reason for the rest of the world to believe in their god, live by their standards or give a damn about what they had to say, yet there they were, acting as if they had a copyright on truth. Their pretentiousness sickened me, despite my being equally pretentious toward them. After all, I was justified in my pretentiousness! At least I could give logical reasons for not believing in the supernatural. I would challenge them to give reasons for believing in something that couldn't be seen and they would reply, "You can't see the wind but it's there." I would then try to explain to them that wind was created by differences in pressure and that there was plenty of scientific proof for the existence of wind but none for their god. Even the most intelligent Christians I knew had a difficult time articulating their reason for faith.

Most of the explanations I heard rested on the Bible's authority. "The Bible says... the Bible says... the Bible says." Who cared what the Bible said? I certainly didn't. "It's all a bunch of made up, superstitious baloney. Can't you see?" and I would then go into pagan origins, etc., and try to demonstrate that Jesus was a manufactured myth. I ended up knowing the Bible inside and out just to be able to debate against it. <u>My Lord, this sounds so familiar. [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70402-thinking.gif[/img]</u>

My anti-Christian arguments became my ultimate diversion to a hopeless life. I learned that religious debate wasn't as much about truth as it was about language and presentation. I began seeing flaws in my own logic while trying to demonstrate certain instances of Biblical errancy, but that didn't keep me on the bench. To justify my desire to destroy Christianity, I had to find reasons to discredit it. I railed against its hypocrisy, the behavior of its followers, the wars fought in its name and I questioned the motives of its bloody god and the religion's effective outcome. In short, I began seeing it as the supreme evil, despite the fact that my own view of moral relativism did not permit a logical defense of the concept of evil.

The paradox of Biblical jabberwocky

One night, I was very tired and alone in my study. I didn't reach, as I usually did, for a book of religious argument. I grabbed Lewis Carroll's "Through The Looking Glass", plopped myself down in a comfy chair and sleepily began reading. I skimmed through the pages and stopped at Humpty Dumpty's explanation of 'Jabberwocky' to Alice. A thought occurred to me that if I were to read 'Jabberwocky' the same way I read the bible, it wouldn't make any sense at all. I put Carroll's book aside, folded my hands and stared at the wall, lost in thought.

The Bible didn't make sense to me. But why did it make sense to others? What were they seeing that I didn't? Did they so desperately want there to be a God that they had deluded themselves into thinking that there was one? It was New Year's Day, 1998. I made a resolution to read the entire Bible again, only this time I was going to read it as I would poetry or fiction, and not as a proposal of fact.

In the months that followed, I kept my resolution and I began noticing a change in my way of interpreting the Bible. Intellectually, I found that my mind could logically accept two very different interpretations of almost everything I was reading. One interpretation of any verse or passage would render the whole story as nonsensical. But the other interpretation allowed the whole story to make sense.

If my mind was capable of accepting interpretations that allowed the whole book to make sense, then what was it in me that wanted it not to make sense? This book was reading me as surely as I was reading it. Every time I found fault with its god, I ended up finding a fault of my own. What was I doing when I condemned this god for commanding Moses to kill? Was I arrogantly making my morality superior to that of the being who allegedly authored all of morality? Was I condemning the actions of an entire nation, which was trapped in a kill or be killed situation? What was it in me that wanted to express outrage at Jesus Christ for telling me that I had to give away everything to be considered worthy to follow him? Was it my own selfishness?

For weeks, I was on a high, the type of high that comes about by feeling that one is on the edge of making some sort of profound discovery. I wasn't sure what I was discovering but my perception of this world was changing. In July, I read these words of Jesus Christ, understanding them for the first time after having read them for years; "Who do you say I am?"

I see it!

What I had to say about who Christ was, said more about me than it did about Him.

At this moment, I saw it. I saw what the truth of the Bible was! And I was humbled. More than humbled, I was broken. The truth wasn't about cud chewing bunnies or how much precipitation fell during Noah's flood. It was the truth about human nature and our efforts to rise above it! It was the truth about human spirit being led by divine spirit! It was the truth about each of us, imperfect in our love for one another, needing to be made complete by the perfect love of God! The truth was about how one man, without sin, had died for us so that we could live! The truth of the Bible was and is JESUS CHRIST!

The moment I was made aware of my despicable nature, I realized that Jesus had died for me. I never had recognized sin and, therefore, thought that Christ had died for nothing. But this man was able to see the horrible nature present in all of humanity and yet he had sacrificed himself to save us from ourselves. In a very real sense, my sinful nature had caused the death of an innocent man. I never believed in hell prior to this, but one of my first thoughts, after seeing how hellish a person that I was, was that I deserved to be in it.

A new creature

I had been a fool. I had paraded around, thinking myself to be the sophisticate, oblivious to the trail of toilet paper clinging to my shoe. For the first time in my life, I became aware of my soul and how dirty it was when the light of Christ fell upon it. My accusing finger turned around and pointed right back at me. I sucked! Christianity wasn't what was wrong with the world! A lack of education wasn't what was wrong with the world! I was what was wrong with the world. I began praying for forgiveness to a god whose existence I had thought was intellectually indefensible. But He was very, very real. Within days, almost every viewpoint I had once so loudly announced, changed. I could no longer justify my advocacy of abortion, homosexuality or pre-marital sex because I recognized these options for what they were, that being selfishness. I couldn't enjoy television because much of what it offered was an offense to the god I had discovered. But the most astounding change that took place in me was that I was freed from my cold indifference in matters of the heart. My atheistic philosophy had allowed me to lose my compassion for others. I no longer had the ability to love anyone, not even myself. I had become apathetic to life itself. For years, I had been dead, but because I continued to walk and talk, I didn't know it. But now, I was born again and the spirit that was in me, which had allowed me to understand spiritual things, connected with the glorious and perfect higher consciousness of Jesus Christ. He restored my heart and my conscience. Christians speak of this as a veil being lifted, but, for me, it was more like the iron curtain was being torn down. For the first time in my life, I was seeing the world as it really was. I no longer saw people as a sum of their components or this life as a meaningless exercise, but I now saw both as something more valid than my rational thought had allowed. I had spent most of my years examining life, crouched over and focused on the microscope of logic, incapable of seeing the Big Picture that was going on around me.

The more I emptied myself of myself, the clearer the truth became. It had been my own selfish sin that had kept me from seeing it before. Jesus Christ became my God and my grand obsession, and for many months, I spent hours with my mind locked in meditation, trying to connect with Him in a more tangible way. I wasn't disappointed. There is a point that one can reach in prayer where there is nothing at all left of oneself, and it is in that moment that God makes Himself known.

For me, Biblical truth wasn't verified through historical accuracy, inerrancy or reliability of the Gospels, because my initial assumptions didn't include these things. I saw divine inspiration in the actual content of the words attributed to Jesus Christ. The fact that I, or anyone, was capable of understanding spiritual matters became my evidence for the soul.

Learning the things of the spirit dramatically changed my attitude and my outlook on life. It wasn't that the information available to me had changed, but that my perception had changed and as a result, I was changed. I was dead, but Christ woke me up! He saved me from my selfish self and I have given myself to Him because I am thankful for that which He has given me and hopeful for that which He has promised.

Source

[Compry]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

Former Atheist Darwinian Philosopher Explains his ‘Conversion’ in a New Book

Antony Flew “followed the evidence”, "empirical evidence,” to belief in “a god”

By Hilary White

LONDON, November 2, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Former Darwinian atheist philosopher Antony Flew has published a new book, “There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” to explain his move from being one of the world’s leading exponents of the pure materialist Darwinian philosophy to belief in the existence of a personal deity who created the universe.

Flew, an Oxford educated philosopher described by some as “legendary”, first announced his discovery of “a god” in 2004. Flew had been one of the 20th century’s leading proponents of the pure atheistic Darwinian doctrines that categorically reject any possibility of a creative divine being. His ideas paved the way for thinkers such as Richard Dawkins, the UK’s most virulent opponent of religious belief.

The Darwinian view is embraced by most of the scientific and philosophical community and was recently declared the only acceptable viewpoint for Europeans by the European Council.

Flew has emphasized that his “discovery” of a god who created life was a result of relentlessly “following the evidence”. “It was empirical evidence,” he told an interviewer, “the evidence uncovered by the sciences. But it was a philosophical inference drawn from the evidence.”

Flew told Dr. Benjamin Wiker that two factors in particular “were decisive”. “One was my growing empathy,” he said, “with the insight of Einstein and other noted scientists that there had to be an Intelligence behind the integrated complexity of the physical Universe. The second was my own insight that the integrated complexity of life itself – which is far more complex than the physical Universe – can only be explained in terms of an Intelligent Source.”

More akin to the “watchmaker” god of the 18th century Deist philosophy, Flew’s god is not the God of Abraham, Isaac and St. Thomas Aquinas. Flew described the deity he believes exists as “the god of Aristotle.” He has inched further towards belief in the personal God of Christianity and Judaism, however, describing his god as “a person but not the sort of person with whom you can have a talk. It is the ultimate being, the Creator of the Universe.”

He told Wiker, “I believe that the origin of life and reproduction simply cannot be explained from a biological standpoint despite numerous efforts to do so. With every passing year, the more that was discovered about the richness and inherent intelligence of life, the less it seemed likely that a chemical soup could magically generate the genetic code.”

Flew answered Richard Dawkins’ argument that “the origin of life can be attributed to a ‘lucky chance.’” He said, “If that's the best argument you have, then the game is over.” Flew said, “I would add that Dawkins is selective to the point of dishonesty when he cites the views of scientists on the philosophical implications of the scientific data.”

Emphasizng that he remains a Deist, not a Christian, he told Wiker that he does not “accept any claim of divine revelation” but is continuing to study them, particularly those of Christianity.

Flew’s journey into belief from pure atheism, follows a pattern set by other prominent British intellectual former atheists, C.S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge whose relentless intellectual rigour also prompted them to follow the evidence.

Lewis, after having abandoned his childhood faith, used his considerable intellectual gifts and classical education to examine the rational proofs for the existence of God which he found inescapable. With the encouragement of his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, he converted at the age of 31, later describing himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

Lewis was later to use those gifts to become the most popular Christian apologist of modern times and his books, using logic and rational argument to defend Christian doctrines, have never been out of print and have sold millions of copies around the world.

Muggeridge took a longer route and came to Christian belief, and eventually Catholicism, equally reluctantly in later life. This was partly in response to his association with Mother Theresa, but even more through his years of consideration of the evidence which he was eventually to find irrefutable.

As a result of his conversion, the formerly dashing and sanguine journalist, the darling of Britain’s secular media establishment, found his former friends and admirers drawing away. Muggeridge later followed the evidence to become one of the world’s leading developers and proponents of a comprehensive pro-life philosophy.

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:

Prominent Atheist "Discovers" Aquinas' Proof for the Existence of "a god"

http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2004/dec/04121308.html

Read the full interview:
http://www.tothesource.org/10_30_2007/10_30_2007.htm ;

[Mutty]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Compry</div><div class="ubbcode-body">
I was raised a Roman Catholic in a home where the name of Jesus Christ and God was never mentioned. I was encouraged to attend catechism and church every weekend, but the concept of God was never made completely real to me. I entertained the notion as any child would, but I just wasn't into the imaginary friend scene and by the time I was thirteen, I had concluded that God was merely a vicious adult version of the Easter bunny. I abandoned the lie, informed my upset parents that I would no longer be attending church, and began seeking truth.</div></div>


Nuff said.

[Compry]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Mutty</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Compry</div><div class="ubbcode-body">
I was raised a Roman Catholic in a home where the name of Jesus Christ and God was never mentioned. I was encouraged to attend catechism and church every weekend, but the concept of God was never made completely real to me. I entertained the notion as any child would, but I just wasn't into the imaginary friend scene and by the time I was thirteen, I had concluded that God was merely a vicious adult version of the Easter bunny. I abandoned the lie, informed my upset parents that I would no longer be attending church, and began seeking truth.</div></div>


Nuff said.

</div></div>

I don't get it...especially since:

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I was encouraged to attend catechism and church every weekend, </div></div>

[Diplomat]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Mutty</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Compry</div><div class="ubbcode-body">
I was raised a Roman Catholic in a home where the name of Jesus Christ and God was never mentioned. I was encouraged to attend catechism and church every weekend, but the concept of God was never made completely real to me. I entertained the notion as any child would, but I just wasn't into the imaginary friend scene and by the time I was thirteen, I had concluded that God was merely a vicious adult version of the Easter bunny. I abandoned the lie, informed my upset parents that I would no longer be attending church, and began seeking truth.</div></div>
Nuff said.
</div></div>
So he wasn't a "real" atheist? [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70402-thinking.gif[/img]

[Mutty]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: CEW</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Mutty</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Compry</div><div class="ubbcode-body">
I was raised a Roman Catholic in a home where the name of Jesus Christ and God was never mentioned. I was encouraged to attend catechism and church every weekend, but the concept of God was never made completely real to me. I entertained the notion as any child would, but I just wasn't into the imaginary friend scene and by the time I was thirteen, I had concluded that God was merely a vicious adult version of the Easter bunny. I abandoned the lie, informed my upset parents that I would no longer be attending church, and began seeking truth.</div></div>
Nuff said.
</div></div>
So he wasn't a "real" atheist? [img]/forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/70402-thinking.gif[/img] </div></div>


Let him spend about a good 10-20 years in the faith, taking it extremely serious, reading and studying the Bible only to find the whole thing based on a big farce and then I will show you an atheist who probably will never sniff another church again while he or she is alive.

[Mutty]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

A perfect candidate and example would be you CEW. If all you now know bout the Christian faith someday strikes you as completely ludicrous and you walked away from it, it will not all make sense again 14 years down the road.

[Diplomat]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

^^^
Both statements in your previous posts are not necessarily true because the basis on which a person evaluates his/her position on a particular issue is not necessarily static. It's amazing what one is capable of seeing when one looks at certain things with a fresh pair of eyes and an open mind.

I'm really amused at how the atheists in these stories are view as not "real" atheists. Of course, that position only minimizes what God is capable of doing in the life of the genuine seeker, but it in no way changes the experiences of these individuals. If you read the first five chapters of "Mere Christianity", C.S. Lewis explains why he found atheism too simple in its denial of the existence of God. Any atheist/agnostic can have that experience. It is as stated many times in this forum - people looking at the same "evidence" and coming away with different conclusions. The genuine seeker will always find the way to God; we were created that way.

[Compry]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

I had this section copied and ready to paste prior to the above post but got distracted. I'll paste it anyway.

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">The Bible didn't make sense to me. But why did it make sense to others? What were they seeing that I didn't? Did they so desperately want there to be a God that they had deluded themselves into thinking that there was one? It was New Year's Day, 1998. I made a resolution to read the entire Bible again, only this time I was going to read it as I would poetry or fiction, and not as a proposal of fact.

In the months that followed, I kept my resolution and I began noticing a change in my way of interpreting the Bible. Intellectually, I found that my mind could logically accept two very different interpretations of almost everything I was reading. One interpretation of any verse or passage would render the whole story as nonsensical. But the other interpretation allowed the whole story to make sense.
</div></div>

[Nylah]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> One interpretation of any verse or passage would render the whole story as nonsensical. But the other interpretation allowed the whole story to make sense</div></div>

and what does this mean exactly?

[Compry]

Re: An Atheist's Journey to Faith

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Empress_Nylah</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> <div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> One interpretation of any verse or passage would render the whole story as nonsensical. But the other interpretation allowed the whole story to make sense</div></div>

and what does this mean exactly? </div></div>

Depends what you're looking for when you read it.

The story of Job is an excellent example. For the believer, it's a story of us not giving up no matter what the circumstances are. For the non-believer...well, you know.