How I went from atheist to Christian

[sdegutis]

Thank you for your conversion story.

I’d love to hear about you going from atheist to Christian.

I second this post.

My conversion from atheism much less interesting, but since every matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses and there’s two of you, I’ll write it anyway. Also the title is misleading since I was all sorts of things, not just atheist, before becoming a Christian.

I’ve always had a curiosity about things of God. My dad brought me to Mass a few times as a kid, but I found it boring and he probably did too, so we stopped going and he never went back. I was baptized at age 4 and given a statue of Mary which I kept for a few years. One day that statue broke at the head and I felt really sad about it, but I felt I was being too superstitious and that God wouldn’t really care if it was broken or not. I tried to glue it on but eventually it was un-fixable and I didn’t really care anymore, since video games and other things were more interesting.

Anyway, nobody really taught me about anything religious except I knew that God made everything and that we have souls and that if we were really good, we would go to Heaven when we died, and if we misbehaved we might go to Hell. I remember that my mom explained Judaism to me as that God existed as this big “bubble”, and when humans are born, a part of this “God-bubble” comes off and is infused into the body of the baby, and that when we die, it returns back whence it came. I’m pretty certain that’s not correct at all, but I believed it for a while.

But over the years I started to wonder. Like, if our brains really contain knowledge, then how does our soul contain knowledge once we die? And what about people in other religions who are good, why don’t they get to go to Heaven too? Eventually I concluded, probably around 10 years old or so, that anyone who acts the best they can according to their conscience will go to whatever Heaven they had in mind. I’m sure certain popular films mixed with a false sense of compassion had inspired this idea in me, and it wasn’t my own idea.

As a young teenager I began to hear stories about Christianity’s past, probably in school, and concluded that the Church were hypocrites and that all religions were probably equally full of hypocrites. My experience in school led more credence to this theory, so I held fast to it. Eventually I met some people who befriended me, and I bought into their whole mentality of calling religious people “sheeple” and saying they don’t think for themselves, because otherwise they would come to the same conclusions we did.

Not that we had anything figured out, but we had at least “proven” how wrong all religions were, and that true peace could only come from not having religion and letting people do whatever they wanted. My family’s and school’s idea of “tolerance” probably fueled a lot of this. We were very pro-choice and pro-sexual-tolerance and everything like that. Pretty much I grew up in a world of “do whatever you want and never judge anyone, and everyone will be happy.”

I remember once a Jehovah’s Witness came up to me when I was at a bus stop during high school, and I mocked her saying that the Bible is easily explained away by the fact that the apostles were drunk on wine, so of course Jesus didn’t really walked on water, they were just drunk and hallucinating! The sentence “Jesus walked on water” was probably the extent of my knowledge of the Bible.

Anyway, in college I took classes in religion out of curiosity. I guess I still had some hope there was a way to find the truth. I fell in love with buddhism for some long-forgotten reason, and for a month or so I called myself a buddhist. Then I realized I was by no means buddhist, since having a religion was intrinsically tied to doing things in relation to that religion, which I was not. I tried meditating but it was really boring so I gave it up after one day or so.

It was during college that I met a very nice Catholic girl and her friends. Despite being homeschooled she was the smartest in the class. We would sit in the cafeteria for hours and I would try to prove to her that her religion is wrong in this way or that. I explained to her all my theories of God, creation, the universe, the afterlife, and such. I guess I held her in some kind of high esteem or respect, because I kept presenting her all my theories asking her what she thought of them. I told her of my theory of pantheism, and the infinite succession of Big Bangs and collapses of the universe.

I realized deep-down that it was highly unlikely that a single individual such as myself could ever happen upon the right answer to these questions by just thinking about it, and it would be more effective for me to read and research about it than to come up with it on my own. But the goal wasn’t really so much to figure it out as to just talk with friendly people, and also to kill time by thinking about it during dull moments of life. Plus I believed it was too unlikely to ever find the right answer, so I didn’t want to invest a whole lot into finding the matter just to be let down at the end of a wasted life. So these conversations were a good compromise, I figured.

(continued below)

 

[sdegutis]

(continued from above)

The last time I talked to her in college was when I tried to prove to her that homosexuality was not a problem and was just fine. She told me she honestly believed people would be happier of they did not act on homosexual urges. Despite being outraged, I couldn’t prove her wrong, knowing that the only true scientific test of this would require an alternate universe to test the same person in both ways, since any other way would only give inconclusive results. But I still maintained that even though I couldn’t prove her wrong, I was probably right. Maybe.

Later, after becoming a Catholic and befriending her, my long lost Catholic friend, I talked to her about these past days in college. She gently informed me that by these debates she was just honing her debating skills. Of course, as a Catholic, she must have seen very clearly that all my nonsensical theorizing was just me being lost in a sea of darkness, being thrown about by the waves, and that I had nothing really to offer her intellectually, who was securely on the solid ground of the Catholic Faith.

Anyway, at one point I believed the world was going to end by some natural disaster, like an over-due supervolcano or asteroid or something. I was terrified. I sat my parents and siblings down and asked them very solemnly what they would do if it was the end of the world. They sort of laughed and brushed it off as nonsense and walked away, advising me that I should be more mindful of this world instead of worrying about the next, since according to their principles both then and now, it is impossible to know about anything outside of this life with assurance.

At one point in college, my wife was taking an ethics class and we were unfuriated because her teacher kept arguing (ineffectively) that there is such a thing as objective morality. But we believed firmly that morality was strictly relative and that it was dangerous to society to teach such a thing as objective morality.

After college I became indifferent to the matter of religion again, being too busy with work. But every once in a while, probably every few months, I was overcome with an extremely horrible feeling of nothingness and emptiness that was so terrifying. I know now that these were graces of God intended to turn my attention Heavenward. But at the time all I could think was to find meaning to my life in one way or another, so I looked left and right. I looked to philosophy or to family as the ultimate goal of life. I looked to physical happiness or to industry. Nothing satisfied this complete feeling of emptiness I would still occasionally feel. It was horrifying.

In those times, I could only find consolation in the idea that, in a thousand years, I would be long-dead and non-existent and would not be able to feel that same feeling. I only took comfort in the futility of my existence and the complete lack of ultimate consequence of any of my actions. I should mention that guilt over being a horrible person constantly haunted me all my life, and it was too difficult to quell permanently, although I could supress it often for short periods.

At this point, my theological beliefs were that God was a phychological coping mechanism for the weak. I decided that the power of influence over our own mind or the minds of others was enough to explain away any “miracle” or supernatural event, in varying degrees, as being self-deception.

Now, the job I had at that time was going so terribly that my wife, three children, and I were in danger of being homeless and jobless and moneyless a thousand miles from home. At that time, we were going to a non-denominational church at that time because my wife was so lonely away from everyone she knew because my job required we move.

Then, I was convinced by some terrible website online that the world was about to end in a natural disaster. As a funny aside, I went in tears to the pastor of that non-denominational church and asked him why God would allow my children to die so young without having experienced life yet (because of the imminent end of the world). This ironically indicates that the concept of “eternal life” was nowhere on my radar yet despite going to this church for several months by this point.

So in panic mode, I ended up finally deciding that I was weak and needed this psychological coping mechanism called “God” and “Jesus” that I heard about at that church. Finally, I often prayed to God and Jesus and thanked them that everything would be alright, although I had no idea how, because I trusted in the omnipotence and goodness of God and Jesus, whoever they were.

When the situation was resolved and I got a new job, everything was back to being normal again and we were okay, so I had no motivation to keep “God” and “Jesus” around anymore. So I went about my life, being wicked again as usual. But I kept having that sinking haunting feeling of complete nothingness. The question came to my mind “why does existence exist, and what happens if it immediately ceases to exist, and what’s stopping it from doing so at any given moment?” And I could not find an answer. But I knew it had something to do with God.

So I emailed the pastor of that church we used to go to since we had moved back to our “hometown”, and begged him to prove to me that God exists. I told him, I desperately wanted to believe in God but I didn’t think it was possible to reconcile belief in God with belief in science. So he mailed me a copy of a book I don’t recommend anymore, called The Reason for God, which specifically had chapters that successfully refuted all of my objections to Christianity and taught me a lot about it too. It successfully convinced me that I can maintain integrity and intelligence while becoming a Christian permanently. It also convinced me that it’s reasonable to believe in the more conservative interpretation of the Bible, such as that the New Testament literally happened in real history, and that the morality of it should be upheld before that of any given culture that happened to disagree with it, and more directly that there was such as thing as objective truth.

Finally I was sold on a specific religion, and decided to my first Bible! And the rest of the story is in that other thread

 

[Faith1960]

So I emailed the pastor of that church we used to go to since we had moved back to our “hometown”, and begged him to prove to me that God exists. I told him, I desperately wanted to believe in God but I didn’t think it was possible to reconcile belief in God with belief in science. So he mailed me a copy of a book I don’t recommend anymore, called The Reason for God, which specifically had chapters that successfully refuted all of my objections to Christianity and taught me a lot about it too. It successfully convinced me that I can maintain integrity and intelligence while becoming a Christian permanently. It also convinced me that it’s reasonable to believe in the more conservative interpretation of the Bible, such as that the New Testament literally happened in real history, and that the morality of it should be upheld before that of any given culture that happened to disagree with it, and more directly that there was such as thing as objective truth.

Finally I was sold on a specific religion, and decided to my first Bible! And the rest of the story is in that other thread

I’ve never heard of the book The Reason for God, but why don’t you recommend it anymore?

 

[sdegutis]

I’ve never heard of the book The Reason for God, but why don’t you recommend it anymore?

Much of it is a Protestant book.

 

[Trebor135]

Much of it is a Protestant book.

There go C.S. Lewis and William Lane Craig out the window…

 

[sdegutis]

There go C.S. Lewis and William Lane Craig out the window…

Don’t get me wrong, I would recommend many whole chapters of The Reason for God to someone considering Catholicism. But there are entirely good Catholic books that serve the same purpose, viz., to explain that miracles and science are compatible, that the Resurrection really occurred in history, that objective truth and objective morality are true, etc. So why should I recommend something that’s only somewhat pure when I can recommend other sources that are wholly pure? But in The Reason for God he presents an erroneous take on the reason Christ’s Passion and Death are efficacious, and he expounds upon other Protestant doctrines which we hold to be false.

 

[Mathblue]

Don’t get me wrong, I would recommend many whole chapters of The Reason for God to someone considering Catholicism. But there are entirely good Catholic books that serve the same purpose, viz., to explain that miracles and science are compatible, that the Resurrection really occurred in history, that objective truth and objective morality are true, etc. So why should I recommend something that’s only somewhat pure when I can recommend other sources that are wholly pure? But in The Reason for God he presents an erroneous take on the reason Christ’s Passion and Death are efficacious, and he expounds upon other Protestant doctrines which we hold to be false.

In finding reasons for faith I tend to be carefull, because it says in the bible that you need to accept God as a child,and not as a scholar, however '‘confessions’'by saint- Augustin is a truly pure and humble work, and one by a scholar at that.

 

[Contra_Mundum_1]

Thank you!

I am always fascinated by atheist conversions. It sounds like a journey from being half dead to fully alive.

 

[sdegutis]

In finding reasons for faith I tend to be carefull, because it says in the bible that you need to accept God as a child,and not as a scholar, however '‘confessions’'by saint- Augustin is a truly pure and humble work, and one by a scholar at that.

Well St. Paul says we need to be infants in terms of evil, but mature in terms of thinking. I think this is a valid approach as long as we maintain this careful balance, which includes making sure we always research it with a clear conscience and full integrity and honesty with ourselves.