The Soul Of An Atheist - The Chimera Of Doubt That Became Faith

(Cross-posted at God is for Suckers!)

In my ongoing efforts to find the wild, the weird, the diverse (I rather enjoy pissing on the shoes of the Young Earth creationists as much as the next infidel, but let's face it: fish in a barrel is the adage that comes to mind), I present unto you that most unique of perspectives, the atheist that changes her mind.

How I stumbled across this, I cannot say or recall. One hundred clicks later, one wonders to himself, "How did I arrive here? What onramp on the information highway did I take?"

I dug into this website, hoping perhaps there was some new, unusual content, perhaps actual evidence, perhaps a new methodology to explore, perchance an angle I'd missed over.

It's...strange, I'll give you that. Some of it old hat (I'll demonstrate that in a touch), some of it just...perplexing.

One A.S.A Jones at Ex-Atheist.com (I wonder what the initials stand for? 'A Satanic Asshat', perhaps?) goes on at length about her 're-conversion'.

First, the personal account:

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.

So far, so good.

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 ejaculating 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.

My first response was, "Oh, wow." Second was, "Oh my." A bullet to the head? I see the gibbering monkeys of madness gnawing away at the fringes of this person's psyche.

I'm skipping a few paragraphs here (not trying to strawman this, just an overview), so forgive me.

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 jaw dropped. WTF?!? So you missed that personal touch of the supernatural (that vast, unprovable 'what if?), and elevated yourself above the hoi polloi via your imagined intellect?

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 a damn 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.

Interesting.

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.

Here's the thing: not all atheists are moral relativists. I know I'm not - it's morally bankrupt. I rail against religion on a personal level, because humanity has been lied to. Well, that and the fact that most Christians are a tad overly anxious to share, whether any of us like it or not. Oh, and the efforts made to infiltrate our lives on multiple levels. Otherwise, you want to live a lie? That's your business, none of mine. Until you make it my business.

Snip:

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.

I confess, dear readers: the bible actually does make a lot of sense to me. I fancy I do understand the major themes, the cultural environment it was written in, the undertones, the allegory and parables.

Comprehension is NOT the equivalent of agreement.

Snip:

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.

(Note to self: moral relativism is a BAD thing.)

Continued:

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?

The book was reading you? Bad news: if a fictional book is reading you while you're reading it, then I suggest therapy. It's not a living being - personification is the word that springs to mind.

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.

Talk about issues. A secret envy of mentally challenged people? Why are they happy, and you not? The rest of the testimonial descends into predictable drivel from there.

And the debate methodologies are contemptibly skewed - see here.

And get this:

In trying to find quick answers, I turned from the library to the Internet and ran smack into J.P. Holding’s Tekton Apologetics Ministries. In my opinion, this guy is the most thorough researcher and honest apologist I have ever read. His website is a treasure to any Christian who is bothered or entertained by debate. The anti-Christian crowd is fond of dismissing Christian apologists for telling 'what could have been or the way things may have been', but there is no denying that Mr. Holding's research illustrates what actually was and the way things actually were.

Holding? You're...kidding me, right? The guy in the glass house who throws stones? If I were a Christian, you bet your bottom dollar, I'd most strenuously object to him on multiple levels. Yeah, I'd pull a Scotsman on him on a moment's notice.

I found this to be especially repugnant:

When a Christian did the impossible or the outrageous or lived out the extreme philosophy of Jesus Christ, these were the things that caused me to take notice and offense. No amount of talk about God's Law could have made any difference with me. The only time that caught my attention was when a Christian acted extraordinarily in the Spirit of the Law.

Hey, ya know what? When someone does behave in the manner most pay lip service, I can respect that. I may disagree with their epistemology, but I've managed to make a Christian friend or two via the internet. One of them actually throws me some web work on occasion, despite our obvious differences.

I get hot and lathered when the concern becomes some sort of coercion. I get 'rabid' when some wackjob like Cho goes postal and blithers about Jay-sus. I get bent out of shape when some woman excuses her husband for microwaving their baby by blaming it on Satan. I get pissed off when some drooling imbecile decides that his gawd is going to call the shots for the rest of us. The laundry list is long, and stomach-wrenching.

These, then, are the wages of original sin. That some imagined flaw fashioned into our clay by a cosmic babysitter is our fault (Tsk, tsk, let's not blame the parent for how fucked up the child is, shall we?), that must be washed away by baptismal blood sacrifice (the bloodlust of this phantasmal being is beyond anything that could be termed 'loving').

It beggars the imagination that anyone could even remotely consider this acceptable.

Final analysis: my eyes were somewhat crossed, and glad this person isn't batting for our team.

(Note: I will email her, so have any notes ready.)