Former Atheists

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6 months after the death of my dear husband a couple of Baptist missionaries came to my home. My then 9 year old son was interested in them, I think more because they told of how great their youth was (still the best I have ever seen). It was summer vacation and I was so emotionally distraught that I put aside my atheist objections to this and allowed him to go. Anyway, to fast forward this story, 6 months into my son attending this church he came home saying he wanted to be baptized. No biggie I though till he told me he wanted me their that day.:eek: He is my son and I will always support him, so I went. I have to admit, the service was quite nice and the homily was very good. Then at the end of the service, the preacher got up and said a few words about how my son had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Saviour and that he was going to make a public pronouncement of that. They took my son to the baptismal font and dunked him 3 times, I have to admit, I actually thought they were going to drown him:mad: . After, I asked the preacher Why they baptized my son and he said that it was a public symbol showing the church ( only this particular) that he has now accepted Jesus.

In comes the Holy Spirit. That explanation did not sit well with me for some then unknown reason so I returned home and did research on baptism. I must have spent 4 solid days researching every site I could find, and they were all Protestant sites mind you. So many different explanations on the One baptism confused me. I thought to myself…These Christians have faith in only One God, then why all the different teachings and doctrine. Then I just plain got curious so I researched other teachings of these Christians and found the same thing. Not all of them taught or believed the same thing exactly as if there truly was only One God. Then I happened onto a site written just for us Atheists, asking the ONE question I could never answer. “Assuming the Big Bang Theory is correct, where did the gases come from to cause it?” I sat back on this one and just soaked in what the question was saying in a more full sense. Where did it all start from?. Talk about a St. Paul type of conversion. It hit me like a 2x4 (God knows thats sometimes the only to get my attention:rolleyes: ). There IS a God!

The next logical question for me was, now that I believe He exists, where do I find Him. Back to searching the net again. So many different faiths/beliefs just further confused me. I remember becoming very frustrated and yelled at God, “OK God, I believe You are real, now help me find You”. I then started to do a Side by Side of the different faiths, most agreed on the major points, but other doctrines concerning Christianity they did not, baptism being one of them. The one thing they all agreed on though, was the time in which Jesus Ascended into heaven. So, based on this timeline, I wanted to find out which church was probably the one that He would have started. In comes the history. I checked the dates of all the faiths and none, not one single one dated to the time of Jesus nor were they started by Him.

The last (God works that way sometimes) faith I looked at was the Catholic Church. The date they were established was 33AD. That was pretty convincing to me, but I didn’t rest on that fact alone, still was not sure. Thank You Holy Spirit for directing me to Authentic Catholic sites in my search, because the next site I went to was the one with the complete Catachism on it. I started reading, dry and boring to a Now former atheist who has never read the bible, but I kept reading. It was when I got to the part of our Lady, The Blessed Virgin Mary that it all came together for me. I just started crying, I was completely taken by this woman and felt an intense and overwhelming love for her. I had to know more about this woman. The more I researched Mary, the more I learned about her Son.

Almost one year to that date, I was received into the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church at the Easter Vigil.

Thank You Mary for leading me to your Son, my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and for bringing me home.👍
 
Love4Mary,

I found your testimony very interesting. I had never before heard of churches dunking three times - except in the Patristic Period.

I was baptized in a Catholic Church and the priest poured water over my head three times as he said in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, but I have never seen a protestant baptism of dunking 3X. It must have seemed terribly strange. I think I would have jumped up and dunked the pastor if I’d seen him doing that to my kid!!! 😃 (Maybe that’s something only a mom can understand)

I was also intrigued by your finding different explanations on the internet. I did a Lenten article for a news paper last Spring and interviewed a priest and several protestant pastors. They all seemed to agree on the meaning of baptism with the exception of whether or not it should be done as an infant or at the age of understanding.

But what I am most interested in is where did you come up with the idea that Jesus started a specific church? It seems such an odd thing for an atheist to think about.

I think it is wonderful that God has brought you out of your unbelief.
 
I was an atheist for about 2 weeks in college. Afterwards, I went back to being a Christo-Buddho-Hindo-Sufi.😃
 
Boy! I hope we have a chance to speak in the future. I think it would be very interesting. But this thread is about atheists who converted to Christianity, so I won’t take us off topic. 🙂

Have a great week!
 
Ginger2,To me it was kind of a logical question to ask, “which church did Jesus start”. From all the reading I did, it was Jesus whom the first Christians followed and it was Jesus who was the great teacher and master. In my simple mind, it just made sense that it was also Him who started a church.

As for the dunking, I live in the Baptist Bible Belt south, Tennessee to be exact. It was in a Southern Baptist church that dunked my son three times.

The differences in baptism was not so much as to what age a person is to be baptised but the reason Why a person is baptised. It was there that the differences in denominations sent up red flags. At my son’s former church, it had nothing at all to do with the washing away of sin, but only as a symbol that my son had accepted Jesus into his heart. It was the Altar Call and reciting the Sinners Prayer that my son became “saved”🤷

There is so much to my conversion story left unsaid, mostly because I do NOT have the gift of writting (talking yes:rotfl: ).
it all happened so fast for me, like I stated in my original post, I likened it to a St. Paul type of conversion. My RCIA director wanted me to write my conversion in a story for others to read, but I would have to have a ghost writter to help me.:rolleyes:
 
Your story is unique - especially since the perceived differences in denominations sent up red flags.

You didn’t blow it off as proof that Christianity is superstition, but instead went searching for the church Jesus started. To me this is especially amazing because there were differences between the first churches the Apostles visited from town to town, also.

How did you determine which Catholic church actually was the true church?

You don’t need a ghost writer to write your story.

You need to follow a few basic writing rules.

When you have written the whole story down, go thru and organize the paragraphs so the sequence makes sense and it has a natural flow As you organize, delete irrelevant info.

Save your original file and save the changes under a new name.

Then find someone to edit it.

The secret to being a good writer is having a great editor.
 
Hi there,
I’m just kind of in the middle. Not really an atheist, maybe an agnostic. I feel myself leaning toward Catholicism a bit. I don’t know what is making me change. A comment my mother made, that she was sorry she didn’t raise me with a faith. The knowledge that I’m not happy with the kind of people I’m with these days. My friends, who are negative about religion, are also negative about other things I believe in. Laughing at the fools who choose to have faith has lost its appeal. The Catholics I know seem to be much happier than the atheists. And when my boyfriend pulled a rosary out of his pocket a few weeks ago, I felt a sense of calm. It felt right.

I haven’t made any move to join a church, start RCIA (or whatever it’s called), or even ask my boyfriend to tell me about Catholicism. I’m just reading this forum, and looking within myself. I need to reconcile what I feel in my heart with what the Church teaches, and make sure that I am doing this right.

I may not join the church. I may. But six months ago, I didn’t believe there was a God at all. And now, I am thinking about it more and more. What has made a difference? A friend’s bracelet of twelve saints, given to him by his daughter. My boyfriend asking me to go with him and light a candle at his church. The rosary I saw. The anger and hatred from the people who I thought were my friends, directed at my Catholic friends. The way my open-minded friends say my Catholic boyfriend is good for me, and the way my atheist friends say he’s making me selfish and unfriendly. The way I feel when I’m with my Catholic friends - encouraged to have fun and be good. The way I feel when I’m with my atheist friends - encouraged to have fun at the expense of others.
 
Just Wondering,

You probably don’t realize this, but your story is moving. God is speaking to your heart. He is giving you new friends to draw you closer to Him and show you what you have been missing.

I think it is beautiful.

God is already talking to you. It’s time for you to start talking to Him.

Don’t know how to pray? Just say “Dear God,” and tell Him what’s on your mind and your heart. If you don’t know what to say, tell Him that. He knows, even when we don’t.

Then just be patient and wait to see what God does for you over time,

Remember, God took 400 years to free the Israelites from Egypt - I promise He won’t take that long with you.

Bless you for sharing. I am very happy that God is moving in your life.
 
Ginger2, Thanks for the writing tips, I really need to do this and just so I don’t forget the how too’s, I am going to print out what you instructed.👍

Now on to your observation of my rather strange conversion. In my town here in Tennessee, there are only two parishes, so I simply went to the one closest to my home.😉

Before I started looking for a church, I had the epiphany that God Does exist. What was lacking in my original post was the time line from believing in God to trying to “find” Him (silly me, He was with me all along:p ) I sat back in my chair in total amazement and then incredible guilt that I had denied Him all my life. This went on for a couple of days. It was then that I went on a full scale Search and Find mission.

I fell back on my college days of doing research papers and took that approach in finding the answers. As an aside, I first looked at Eastern religions and although I found some of the meditations quite beautiful, everything else about them lacked any spiritual calm for me.

I started with the hypothesis that there WAS a church started by Jesus Himself then went searching for it. The Red Flags that went up did not scare me off from Christianity as much as just confuse me as to how so many Christians could believe so many different truths or variations of the same truth. Also the shear number of different kinds of Christian churches didn’t make a lick of sense to me. One God should equal One Church.

I know that is was the Holy Spirit who finally led me to the Catholic Church. I was blessed that every site I went to in order to learn what the Catholics believed (as apposed to the Protestants) authentic and not a Jack Chick type of site.

When reading these sites and comparing Catholic teaching to Protestant(s) teaching, and then going back into history as to what the earliest Christians believed, I knew that it was the Catholic Church I was looking for as the Original Chruch established by Jesus.

Then the bible became my “text book”. I had my compiled list of teachings, both Catholic and Protestant (both so soooo similar just using different verbage) and read the bible in light of that. In fact, still doing that to this day. I was not nearly ready for the Assumption of Mary doctrine yet, remember, milk before meat, but everything about the Catholic faith I found in the bible. Even Purgatory made sense inlight of what I was reading in scripture.

The more I read scripture (praying to the Holy Spirit for understanding first), the stronger I grow in my Catholic Faith. Everything about the Holy Mass just for starters can be found in scripture, from beginning to end.

I cannot go forward with my conversion story though without giving a huge thanks to the Southern Baptist Preacher from my son’s old church. He encouraged me in the beginning to go on a Jesus “hunt”, he was kind and supportive of me and I will always be thankful for that. His support and kindness changed though when he found out where I DID find Jesus, but I will leave that to the past and just be greatful that God put him in my path when I needed him. So, Thank You Brother Scott for pushing me on my journey to the truth and may God continue to bless you and hopefully soften your heart towards the Catholic Faith.

PS…this is fun, I so enjoy talking about my conversion story, and I apologize for leaving so much of it out. Now time to take Gingers advice and start putting my story down in a more organized story.👍
 
Ginger2: do I seem pretty dumb or what? It truly hasn’t occurred to me to pray. :o Well, we can’t all be geniuses! I’m on my way to bed now (it’s midnight in Korea) and I think I’m going to try it. Thanks. What you said really means a lot to me. As I said, Catholics are such nice people!

This is a really interesting thread. Keep the thoughts coming, everyone.
 
love4mary said:
Ginger2, Thanks for the writing tips, I really need to do this and just so I don’t forget the how too’s, I am going to print out what you instructed.👍

I write professionally and one little trick I use, if I’m not satisfied with the flow of the article, is to read the first sentence of each paragraph. If the story still makes sense, I know I’ve got it right!

You need the main events and connecting events to ensure people will get a clear picture.
Click to expand...
 
Just_wondering said:
Ginger2: do I seem pretty dumb or what? It truly hasn’t occurred to me to pray. :o Well, we can’t all be geniuses! I’m on my way to bed now (it’s midnight in Korea) and I think I’m going to try it. Thanks. What you said really means a lot to me. As I said, Catholics are such nice people!

This is a really interesting thread. Keep the thoughts coming, everyone.
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Prayer has been by far one of the hardest things for me to do. It feels so foreign and strange.

It took me many months to not feel like I was talking to air. I felt ridiculous every time. Praying in small groups…like at RCIA, is still one of the strangest things to me.

I hope it’s easier for you, but if it isn’t, don’t give up…I just pray and feel strange while doing it and somehow it all works out.

Rebecca
 
So true RebeccaJ,

This to was and sometimes still is difficult for me. I am used to having people respond or at least make eye contact with me when i am talking. While in prayer though, these two things do not happen (i would probably need a change of clothes if it did:o )

To help me through this, I like to pray in the presence of a statue or some other form of art work, no my protestant friends, not as in worship, just as a tool to help me better focus my prayers on and to God.👍
 
Ahimsa said:
I was an atheist for about 2 weeks in college. Afterwards, I went back to being a Christo-Buddho-Hindo-Sufi.😃
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Woof…!

What about those paleo-shamano-shinto-amerindo-austro-poly-melanesian’s…!

Why aren’t you “affiliated” with THEM…!?

What kind of a non-inclusive narrowminded chauvanist ARE you…!!?

🙂

(( If you translation of this “satire” as to what it means in relation to your chosen “faith”, just ask, and I’ll wing as good an explanation as my overly creative and somewhat warped little mind can formulate. ))

Mahalo ke Akua…!
E pili mau na pomaikai ia oe. Aloha nui.
 
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