A claim I have heard from some atheists that if you are not indoctrinated into religion as a child, you will not believe it later in your life? Is this true? I can’t think of any famous Christians that where born atheists. C.S. Lewis was raised a Christian, then became an atheist before he came back to Christianity.
PAX
It’s a good point. Atheism seems to be an process of deliberate reason, either intellectual or emotional or both. I had religiously apathetic parents who were neither hot nor cold about religion. It was just there, (or not there depending on perspective). This was common in baby boomer homes in the U.S. We didn’t go to Church. Discuss religion etc… Nor did we discuss or get taught atheism. Now, with this upbringing, you could go either way. I myself was a seeker. Odd for my family. They are all the “content” types who probably don’t think about it at all. While still a pre-teen I volunteered at the Church of Scientology in exchange for auditing. I moved on from that pretty quickly. Seemed to be about cash. I had older friends who of the intellectual stripe who got me into objectivism, and Ayn Rand. Very cold stuff. Didn’t do much for me, but to stay with a peer group, I read her books and discussed them. I then discovered dreaming and the way of seeing taught by Don Juan Matus through Carlos Castaneda, and almost simultaneously, the astral traveling escapades of T. Lobsang Rampa and the Third Eye series. My fascination with Castaneda waned. My interest in Rampa did too, but not before instilling a strong tug in me towards Buddhism. I searched and practiced Buddhism in one form or another until Intellectualism and Rand reared their ugly heads again for a couple of years while rekindling an old friendship. Since Buddhism had made the existence of a God optional, as had Castaneda, I was pretty willing to pull God out of the equation all together this time. My brush with atheism was thankfully short lived. I could see the attraction of ascribing so much power to man, but it didn’t feel genuine to me. I felt puffed up with the exclusivity of being with my “deep” freinds. But in the end, I went back to my meditations and chants, and disavowed greed and egoism again. I became full throttle Buddhist. I discovered the Pure Land forms, and was particularly enamored with Shin Buddhism, and even more precisely, Jodo Shinshu. Steady, peaceful comfort. The intellectualism that I loved in conversation, and spiritualism that I felt a natural craving for, all rolled into one. I took vows with an Abbott. This was the real deal.
10 years or more pass in Buddhist bliss, and I begin a close friendship at work with a Christian. He shares his bible class stuff he’s going through with me, and I relate it to Buddhism, and explain ever so gently how Buddhism is so much more open and peaceful than the Christian way, and how we shared so much in common with our views on the sanctity of life, etc… I have him some stuff to read. He asked me to read the gospels. Fair exchange. I took it a step further, and began meditating on Jesus and the Gospel accounts of his life. While still chanting my Nembutsu to the Buddha of Limitless light and life (Amitabah or Amida). I started wondering if the pure land and the kingdom of heaven weren’t perhaps the same thing. Then if Amida was the same soul or spirit who was Christ to the Jews and gentiles who had believed. That God was the summation of energy that the Buddha’s, Jesus etc. were all prophets or sharers of for their individual audiences in this culturally divided world.
I could go on forever, and have already gone on way to long. In need a few hundred pages to do my conversion story. It’s really a pretty good one, but by and by the Holy Spirit kept bumping me up against the door to the Catholic Church. I discovered Scott Hahn’s The Lambs Supper as an audio book at a truck stop when moving from Kansas to Nevada, and began attending the Holy Mass, and enrolling in RCIA with my atheist wife who had patiently suffered my religious dealings for 26 year or so by this time, and was convinced that whether or not there was anything to it, that I was sure head over heels, and it was worth a taste, anyway. We were brought into the Church on the Easter Vigil on April 15, 2006, and both of us are in love with Jesus, and His Church in a way that makes the rest of our complacent family wonder what the heck is going on with us. Nothing bad though. They just don’t know what to make of it.
The whole point was, my wife and I were both raised in the 60’s and 70’s by WW2 and Korea vets who had simply marginalized religion. We both had brushes with atheism for sure, but without childhood conditions one way or another, both ended up with Jesus by the grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. Neither conditioning, nor intellectualism and reasoning went into the final result. It’s become apparent to me that none of us are “born atheists”. It’s a choice of the intellect, and frankly, unless things have changed considerably in the circles out there, it’s kind of elitist, and of course humanocentric, and simply doesn’t account for metaphysics and the spirit. At it’s core, it’s just sad. Empty sadness. And nobody does a harder job on recruiting. Well…maybe Scientologists. When you’re sitting at an RCIA session with people from all over the map, deciding upon the Catholic Church as a possible answer, I guarantee you there’s a major story to be heard from everyone in the room. We never left RCIA between 2004 and 2009, because we love watching the process happen. It’s amazing. Non Catholics won’t even believe all I’ve seen in RCIA. There are no miracles? There’s a lot of former “atheists” who’d beg to disagree. They mostly just had to get over themselves, and give over to their Lord.
Peace,
Steven
