Any other Ex-Atheists?

[HabemusFrancis]

Hello all. It is with great sadness that I confess that I one time, I was an atheist, or at least a strong agnostic.

I suppose I became one because God didn’t really make sense to me at the time, partly because of all the evil in the world (including the sex abuse stuff) and at the time much of Catholic doctrine did not really make sense to me either.

I never really renounced the faith, but at my worst I barely thought of God at all and thought though while the Catholic faith was nice and all, it should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

This period of mine was mostly through my college years. Since then (until recently) I have been hopping back and forth between faith in the Church and agnostocism and unbelief.

However, I am very glad to say that my faith has increased very strongly in the past two months or so. You could say I have finally “made up my mind” about God and the Church, and I think I made the right choice .

Even before I “made up my mind” I found it fascinating how much happier I was and felt, and how much better I functioned as a person when I had an active prayer life. Whenever I “fell off the wagon” it was much easier to feel sad, despairing, slothful and selfish. Without a faith life, it felt much easier to get caught up in petty grievance, dwell over wrongs, and have desires for things that really weren’t good or healthy.

Again I have noticed that the latter things I feel, vanish with startling speed when I start to have an active prayer life. God may not answer all prayers, but it always seems he gives us wisdom to sort out our problems.

Before my “reconversion” I thought being a “True believing Catholic” meant becoming a self-righteous killjoy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of “having fun” and “having God” being mutually exclusive, I found they are very intricately linked indeed, and much of what the world views as “fun” leads to sadness and discouragement.

I could go on about the differences Ive felt in my life since embracing Catholocism more. Has anyone else been in my situation, sort of “lapsing in faith” for a good long while, before coming back?

 

[CHRISTINE77]

Hello all. It is with great sadness that I confess that I one time, I was an atheist, or at least a strong agnostic.

I suppose I became one because God didn’t really make sense to me at the time, partly because of all the evil in the world (including the sex abuse stuff) and at the time much of Catholic doctrine did not really make sense to me either.

I never really renounced the faith, but at my worst I barely thought of God at all and thought though while the Catholic faith was nice and all, it should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

This period of mine was mostly through my college years. Since then (until recently) I have been hopping back and forth between faith in the Church and agnostocism and unbelief.

However, I am very glad to say that my faith has increased very strongly in the past two months or so. You could say I have finally “made up my mind” about God and the Church, and I think I made the right choice .

Even before I “made up my mind” I found it fascinating how much happier I was and felt, and how much better I functioned as a person when I had an active prayer life. Whenever I “fell off the wagon” it was much easier to feel sad, despairing, slothful and selfish. Without a faith life, it felt much easier to get caught up in petty grievance, dwell over wrongs, and have desires for things that really weren’t good or healthy.

Again I have noticed that the latter things I feel, vanish with startling speed when I start to have an active prayer life. God may not answer all prayers, but it always seems he gives us wisdom to sort out our problems.

Before my “reconversion” I thought being a “True believing Catholic” meant becoming a self-righteous killjoy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of “having fun” and “having God” being mutually exclusive, I found they are very intricately linked indeed, and much of what the world views as “fun” leads to sadness and discouragement.

I could go on about the differences Ive felt in my life since embracing Catholocism more. Has anyone else been in my situation, sort of “lapsing in faith” for a good long while, before coming back?

I definitely had a lapse of faith for many years. Finally life got so meaningless for me that I turned to God. I have never looked back. Everything is 100 times better. I feel much happier, secure and life is full of meaning again. God is number one in my life.

 

[1neophyte]

I definitely had a lapse of faith for many years. Finally life got so meaningless for me that I turned to God. I have never looked back. Everything is 100 times better. I feel much happier, secure and life is full of meaning again. God is number one in my life.

May I ask what turning to God exactly entailed for you? I assume an active prayer life and reception of the sacraments, of course. But I’m curious what else would indicate God being number one in a person’s life.

 

[CHRISTINE77]

May I ask what turning to God exactly entailed for you? I assume an active prayer life and reception of the sacraments, of course. But I’m curious what else would indicate God being number one in a person’s life.

Putting my whole trust in Him.

 

[HungerNThirst4R]

Putting my whole trust in Him.

Amen!

 

[drac16]

I was an atheist for four years. I suppose most of it was inspired by a documentary featuring Richard Dawkins, known as “The Root Of All Evil”. In it, it is mentioned over and over again that faith in supernatural things is not only silly, but also detrimental. The alternative that’s presented is to only believe in something that can be proven by the five senses; preferably by scientific inquiry.

Looking back on it, Atheism was not as intellectually stimulating as I wanted it to be. All you’re going to discover with naturalistic tools is the natural world. I figured that, if there is another dimension to life, like spirituality, it would be harmless to research it. After all, I considered myself to be a hot shot, so I may as well learn about spirituality so as to refute it .

To make a long story short, I came to the conclusion that Atheism couldn’t hold water anymore. There’s a necessity for a first cause because matter is not eternal. There had to have been something that created it and put everything into order. You have to shelter yourself from evident signs [of God] as well as suppress your conscience in order to be an atheist.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

I was an atheist for a while, although I was never as doctrinaire about it as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens et al.

I suppose it was a mixture of things - the theory of evolution we were taught at school and the apparent conflict with Genesis, a somewhat difficult home life with a father who hated me and who deliberately destroyed my confidence, parents who never went to church themselves while expecting me to go to Sunday School (hypocritical on their part); the way I didn’t seem to fit in with the Sunday School crowd (and the lack of support from the Presbyterian Church at that time), the religionless nature of Australian society and the education system, and the obvious evil in the world. I was about 23 or 24 when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge were decimating the Cambodians. What had they done to deserve all that?

But at the age of about 28 (same age as CS Lewis by coincidence), I’d just gone through the worst period of my life - a divorce, no job, house on sale, shattered confidence, caused problems for a few other people, and what seemed to be a bleak future.

What happened was that in this rut, I started getting this sort of push to go back to the same church where I’d gone to Sunday School half a lifetime ago (at that time). So I went, met the new Presbyterian pastor, an outstanding man, and went on from there.

A similar sort of push years later led me to the Catholic Church. I didn’t go into it due to a diligent search of doctrines a la Scott Hahn and others - it was mainly a spiritual push and a general sense of dissatisfaction with the Protestant situation at the time.

I’ve now had far too many spiritual experiences to think God’s not there -

1. My father turned up in my room the night he died (when I was still an atheist).
2. Three “double whammies” (like a breath going through you in waves from head to foot, and used each time to highlight what someone else was saying.
3. Heavy gripping pressures at night (demonic).
4. One less than edifying occasion when I thought I’d get “pally” with God, and this sense of anger descended on me. I thought I was going to literally disintegrate, and had to pull over to the side of the road, till He relented. I don’t fancy facing His unadulterated wrath for eternity after death, as Paul wrote -

Romans 1:18-32 (NIV) -

God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity

18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

1. “Coincidences” which weren’t coincidences.
2. Other things, usually more subtle that the above.

I’ve done a fair bit of reading on the Catholic Church since becoming Catholic (not before) and for my money, the Catholic Church is “closest” to the truth. That’s not particularly original - the same old Presbyterian pastor I mentioned above turned up one night in a vision some time after he died, and after I’d joined the Church, and said “The Catholic Church is closest to the truth.” Then he just disappeared again, and that was that.

So I’m really just quoting him. But then i think God wanted me to meet him, so in the end it was God’s plan anyway - not mine.

 

[HabemusFrancis]

One thing I really has convinced me is just how different I feel with God in my life, or around Godly subjects.

I feel so much happier and more hopeful. It is truly a night and day experience.

I am in my third year of law school, and without a prayer life Im not sure where I’d be.

I have read the Hitchens/Dawkins arguments about atheism, and while at times I have thought they have sort of made sense and been somewhat amusing, I realize that their world view is mostly hollow and leads to the opposite of happiness and contentment.

 

[CHRISTINE77]

One thing I really has convinced me is just how different I feel with God in my life, or around Godly subjects.

I feel so much happier and more hopeful. It is truly a night and day experience.

I am in my third year of law school, and without a prayer life Im not sure where I’d be.

I have read the Hitchens/Dawkins arguments about atheism, and while at times I have thought they have sort of made sense and been somewhat amusing, I realize that their world view is mostly hollow and leads to the opposite of happiness and contentment.

 

[Viki63]

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.” C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy. He talks about how atheism is much like a religion, in that you have to hold on to it by faith and may often be assailed by doubts of its truth.
I too was an agnostic for awhile. Never an atheist, because how can you prove the non-existence of something? But God led me back to the faith that I hadnt really learned much about.

.

 

[NilDesperandum]

Yup, one here. Although I do have to make a clarification:

I did not believe that there was God, but felt that there may be something more to life than what our empirical findings tell us. I’ve seen in other threads atheists labeled as “anti-theists,” which is, in my opinion, disingenuous. My friends are atheist (or for semantics’ sake, agnostic, as none of them would be foolish enough to state that there is no God) in the sense that they haven’t found compelling enough evidence to believe in one. Neither my friends or I were “anti-theist” in that we didn’t/don’t believe that religion is some ill that needs to be removed from the world. I was searching, but didn’t yet have the answer. For that, I can’t say I feel any sense of shame, as I was trying to find more than just what we “know,” but I wasn’t at a point where I could declare myself religious in any sense, because you can’t fake your way into believing, as far as I’m concerned.

I think that there needs to be a clear distinction made between people who don’t believe because they haven’t had an experience yet or calling, from those who outright deny God’s existence an use religion as a source of ridicule. That was the difference between my atheistic beliefs and those of the “new atheists.” I didn’t follow a doctrine of atheism. I was just a person trying to lead a good, moral life who was not ready or able to hear the call.

It all boils down to faith for me. As a man who works in medicine, I can only make judgments on what I can see or measure. I NEED (for my job) to make decisions based on that type of thinking. So, it is difficult at times to abandon that thought process and go with a faith-based one. If we had proof of God’s existence, everyone would worship unless they were completely insane or ignorant.

People tried to convert me using various arguments, but none of them “worked” in the sense that they all started from the premise “God exists, here are some examples why.” In medicine and testing, we start with the “null hypothesis” meaning you start with the assumption that cure/treatment/procedure doesn’t work and then it is up to you to prove that it does. That reasoning was backwards to me. It would be akin to saying “Islam is the correct religion, and here’s why,” while providing me with reasons to back that up. Starting from that premise makes anyone’s case stronger.

Perhaps I’m in a bit of a Pascal’s Wager situation, but there are enough things that we can’t explain, as well as some personal issues I seem to have with morals and society that lead me to believe that there is a God. I’m not 100%, for sure, but I’m trying to keep my mind and heart open and try to hear.

I’ve never had any “religious experiences” that opened my eyes in an impactful way, more so, it was the culmination of small things that led me to have a more open mind.

I’m in RCIA, for full disclosure.

 

[zyzz]

I realize that their world view is mostly hollow and leads to the opposite of happiness and contentment.

What a sweeping statement about atheism. Atheists cannot be happy and content? Their view is “hollow”?

 

[Charlemagne_III]

What a sweeping statement about atheism. Atheists cannot be happy and content? Their view is “hollow”?

Yes, at the core it is hollow, meaning empty.

Atheism argues one thing and one thing only, that there is no God. This is a negative that implies a hundred other negatives that go nowhere. That is what I experienced as an atheist in my youth. The negative effects of atheism on my life were profound. It was only when I began to see the negative effects of atheism on others (and on society at large) that I was able to look in the mirror and see them in myself as well.

What is positive about atheism? Nothing.

What is positive about religion? Everything, so long as you have the right religion. Some radical religions are also negative, but none of them are so hollow as atheism.

This is not to say that atheists cannot be upstanding citizens in society or have virtues that commend them. But it is to say that atheism cannot spring from fundamental roots that grow happiness in our lives.

I do not say that religion is a guarantee of happiness, since too many people by the lip service they give to their faith show in their lives that their faith is not authentic.

The true desire to see God, however, inspires hope and virtue in a way that atheism can never do.

 

[zyzz]

Atheism argues one thing and one thing only, that there is no God. This is a negative that implies a hundred other negatives that go nowhere.

And it also implies thousands of positive things, which do lead to meaningful existence.

That is what I experienced as an atheist in my youth.

Sorry, you are not qualified to speak for ALL the atheists. You certainly do not practice “humility”, if you think that you are the spokesperson for ALL the atheists in the world.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

And it also implies thousands of positive things, which do lead to meaningful existence.

Sorry, you are not qualified to speak for ALL the atheists. You certainly do not practice “humility”, if you think that you are the spokesperson for ALL the atheists in the world.

Name a few thousand of those positive things that atheism implies?

I don’t speak for all atheists. It’s arrogant of you to assume that I do.

I speak only for myself as a former atheist.