From Skepticism To Worship(great encouragement!)

Posted On: 10/30/2007

FROM SKEPTICISM TO WORSHIP
by
A.S.A. Jones
09/01/02

Note from poster: I starred(*) out a couple words on behalf of the

first bulletin guideline, but it wasn't originally like that.

MY PERSONAL TESTIMONY
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 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.

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 ***** 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.

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.

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lance Reply to this	Aug 9, 2009 10:08 am this is sooooo awesome !