Former Atheists Who Are Now Theists: What Changed You?

Great Debates
21

That’d be me.

I was brought up a Christian. English Protestant. We weren’t very observant, just going to major events, but it was there. I decided that there wasn’t a god in my early 20s. About a decade ago I had a quiet epiphany and decided that there was a god after all. I don’t follow any one religion, but more-or-less follow Christian morality. I don’t believe in an afterlife. I just believe that there is a god, a benevolent Creator, and that that god wants us to do our best and has communicated this to us over the ages, giving rise to pretty much most religions. How we do our best is mere detail, decided upon by humans.

I suppose you could rework that as aliens working as guides - sufficiently advanced technology and all that - but it wouldn’t square with my own epiphany.

22

Those of you who have shared your stories, thanks. It kind of makes me want to go back and read CS Lewis’ autobiography again since his story is somewhat similar.

23

I went from a pretty staunch agnostic to a moderately strong deist.

I became “convinced” through arguments that I largely find axiomatic. Eg, that all things with a beginning must have a cause. To me, that proposition makes enough basic sense to the point that counter arguments of “but how do you know that all things with a beginning must have a cause?” aren’t strong enough to instill doubts in me.

I think that space, time and matter possess fundamentally finite properties, which implies that space, time and matter could not have existed forever. Given that I reject things can begin without a cause, the direct implication is that a spaceless, timeless and immaterial entity “caused” the universe (or at the very least, caused space, time and matter to exist).

When I study elementary things like atoms and single cell organisms, the apparent design feels intuitive to me, or to use my earlier word, axiomatic.

Two authors who have been particularly influential in forming my beliefs are Frank Turek and Dinesh D’souza.

24

Non-Christian former atheist checking in.

I was raised by an atheist father and a former-Lutheran mother (who said *nothing *about religion as I was growing up except that when I was older, I could choose my own.) As a small child, I was fascinated with religion, but also an atheist. I guess the best way to explain it is that I saw religion as a club, but one that we weren’t members of. I’d hound my Catholic friends to teach me everything they learned in CCD. I’d hug trees and whisper the Hail Mary into their bark. I devoured books about Orthodox Jews, Amish and other “strange” religious families.

Still, I didn’t believe in God any more than I believed in Santa. I saw them both the same way, as stories people pretended to believe in because it was fun. I think I got all the way to high school before I realized that people actually believed that God was real!

Then, when I realized people really did believe, and belief was all you needed to be in their “club”, I tried sooooo hard to believe. I went to half a dozen churches - Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist - and tried to feel God. I became part of an entirely unofficial choir that rehearsed at our school and sang at various churches in our areas that didn’t have choirs. I joined Young Life, a Christian youth group. Once in a great while, I’d feel a glimmer of faith, and I’d try to stoke the ember into flame, but it inevitably fizzled within minutes. That was such a frustrating time!

Eventually, I decided it was a problem of people, not God. That I couldn’t join any of these churches because their view of God was so limited, and reflected in their views on women and gay people and other things I couldn’t, in good conscience, believe in. Unlike BrotherCadfael, I viewed Catholics who were gay or had abortions as hypocrites and liars, and could not myself join a church whose teachings I found abhorrent.

So I gave it up for a while. Then one night several years later, with my first tarot deck in hand, I went to meet a friend at a local coffee shop. We got into a discussion about religion, and I said something to the effect of, “You know, I sort of intellectually believe that there’s Something Divine, but I can’t believe it’s just an old man with a beard sitting on a cloud. I think maybe It has a whole bunch of faces that It’s shown to different people at different times in history, as they were ready to see It. And I don’t think it’s out there waving hands I think it’s all over, inside you and me and this table and that tree…”

The guy at the next table leaned over and said, “I’m sorry to eavesdrop, but I just have to tell you…I think you’re right.” Turns out he had just left the seminary for similar doubts. He told me that he thought of the Christian God as one God-face, and he can respect and worship YHVH as one facet of God, but there were an infinite number of other faces and facets. Then he spoke the word that changed my freakin’ life: Paganism.

I suddenly found that other people believed what I did. That there already was a “club” that I belonged to, even though I didn’t know it. And with that knowledge, I had a truly transcendent experience. Walking home that night, I felt the presence of The Goddess. She spoke to me, in words I could hear, and welcomed me into her presence. I literally felt her arms around me, and She held me as I sobbed in relief. That ember burst into flame, and I had faith.

Now…I often describe myself as agnostic, and most of the time, I am. I’m such an analytical, pragmatic person that, in everyday events, that faith is back to an ember, and I’m filled with doubts. Is it all in my head? Are we all playacting still? Maybe. But then, every so often She or He (I’ve worked to feel and understand the male aspect of Divinity, although it was much harder for me to connect with) shows up again, and the flame rises.

25

That’s fine - I just felt that you left us hanging a bit. :wink:

26

Uh… what the hell does that have to do with your religious conversion?

27

Who is Kerri Dunn? How did some no-name professor who vandalized her own property to provide some false emotional support to an overwrought polemic become a famous incident?

28

Also, what about people who’ve never really thought about philosophy or theology but just think religion sounds dumb? Such people might be technically atheist, depending on the definition, but many are predisposed to religion and will embrace it the first time it is presented to them in a tempting package.

Might seem a nitpick but here in britain I think many people are like this.

29

As Martin Gardner (a “philosophical theist”) has written, “No one is ever convinced by reason of anything important.”

30

Interesting. George Orwell wrote in 1941:

So, there are a lot of Brits raised with that attitude who experience mid-life religious conversions?

31

No, I think mid-life conversions are relatively rare, it’s that type of person that’s common.

I’ve seen the complete scenario play out in a friend.
If it ever (rarely) came up in conversation, he’d scoff at religion. But in the same breath, he’d say things like “well atheism is a belief too”.
This is a typical POV here. It’s very much the culture to be dismissive of all philosophical ideas without ever actually considering them.

He would probably have stayed that way except he dated a hot girl who happened to be very religious. Before you know it, he’s talking about the lack of evidence for “macroevolution” (yes, it’s a literalist group :smack:).
If he was doing it just to get laid fair enough, but I think he’s really turned to the dark side…

32

As I see it, almost everybody has a system for making moral judgments, whether they are religious or not. Some people have refined their system through learning and careful consideration while others have not and a very few have ignored morality entirely. However, to me it is equally obvious that the systems of morality out there are vastly different. Throughout my life I’ve heard many people argue that all moral systems are the same, or basically the same, or the same in the major issues. (Often accompanied by pseudo-scientific claims about morality being encoded in our genes.) Even when I was an atheist I could never truly accept this because it seemed so obviously false.

For instance, while I was in college there was heated debate about affirmative action and related topics, such as racial preferences in scholarships, funding for separate offices for “Black Student Affairs”, “Hispanic Student Affairs”, and so forth. Some people were morally certain that these things should exist because racial minorities were “underprivileged”. Others were equally morally certain that these shouldn’t exist because they were discriminatory. But the point was that there was no common ground because there was no agreed-upon morality. At my college the first group always won and the second were left to simmer bitterly–not a very satisfactory resolution.

The other thing that I realized was that while secular groups had morality it tended to be limited in scope. The idea that morality applied to eating, to shopping, to sex (as long as between consenting adults of course), to conversation, to movies and music and TV, and to many areas, simply was not on the table.

When I first learned serious about Christian morality I was rapidly convinced of its correctness not just because its positions on certain issues (like sex and violence on TV) seemed correct but because it had a solid basis. Firstly, its scope covered those things which I found missing in secular moralities. Second, it had a solid basis in the belief that the motivations which a person chooses are either sinful (pride, anger, gluttony, lust, jealousy, laziness, and greed) or virtuous (modesty, generosity, temperance, chastity, kindness, love, and diligence). If I and another person can agree on what is sinful and what virtuous, then we have a basis for morality which we can build upon to bridge disagreements. The secualr morality that I grew up with is much more limited and hence, in my judgment, inferior.

33

If. But, you must realize it is always easier to bridge disagreements within the framework of secular morality, than to bridge disagreements as to what is sinful and what is virtuous. And such disagreements are by no means rare or unimportant, even within churches.

34

I can’t answer for ITR Champion, but we went to the same school, and were part of the same graduating class, and that incident had a fairly profound effect on me, too.

A brief account: Some students at a college had set fire to a cross (among other items. They claimed a lapse in judgment and no racist intent). This led to a variety of campus events on the theme of tolerance. Ms. Dunn was an outspoken advocate that something should be done. After attending one of those events, Ms Dunn returned to her car and found it vandalized. The community responded with overwhelming support. There were marches and chants and a general upswell of the collegiate and academic spirit.

Several students came forward and said they’d seen her vandalizing her own car. She was later convicted of insurance fraud.

It’s difficult for me to capture the emotional response I felt back then, but it was the first time I remember being directly connected to the exposure of a a supposed community and cultural leader as a base fraud. I felt very angry at having been manipulated. I didn’t have a change in religious faith (I was and remain an atheist), but I can see how someone who idolized an intellectual ivory tower might have been seriously shaken by the event.

And, another note. I’m embarrassed by the way some atheists are acting in this thread. Please don’t come into a thread started for the purpose of people sharing their personal reasons for their faith and snipe at them for doing so. Take another look at the two responses I quoted. You really couldn’t have found a more polite way to ask those questions?

35

Hmm, I agree those questions were asked a bit sharply, but on the whole I was just wondering at how respectful the atheists in this thread have been toward ITR C and the others. Given the topic this has been a remarkably civil thread. I hope it stays that way!

36

I have to say that I’m a bit puzzled by this. I’ve seen atheists frequently apply morality to all of those topics. For example:

-Healthy food is ‘better’ than unhealthy, organic ‘better’ than non-organic, smaller ‘better’ than bigger, home-cooked food ‘better’ than restaurant food.
-Shoplifting and shopping sprees are immoral, but shopping around and window shopping are neutral, and being frugal is virtuous.
-The more non-consensual sex is, the more evil it is (Sex with an SO is better than casual sex is better than an affair is better than prostitue sex is better than PUA sex is better than shame-based sex is better than alcohol-based sex is better than rape).
-While no topic is always immoral in any conversation, a topic offensive to the parties involved in the conversation is immoral.
-Movies that are internally consistent are more moral than movies that have plot holes or switch genres.
-“Friday” is a deeply sinful song. :wink: No, but seriously, a song is virtuous if it has a deeper meaning, and is immoral if it has a catchy tune without meaning anything.
-Daytime television and the like (e.g. Judge Judy, soap operas, infomercials, Lifetime movies, etc.) is immoral, while educational television is moral.

37

This is a sidetrack that may need its own debate, but I think you are confusing two concepts: What a moral is, and how to achieve it. In this case I think both groups are actually advocating the same moral: Justness. They disagree on how to achieve it.

Secular morality is no more limited than religious. A secular humanist can think torture porn and gangster rap are immoral just while a religious person can find environmental destruction morally neutral and the maiming or small girls moral. I don’t want to tell you what your experiences really meant and I didn’t live through it, but from how you describe it, it sounds more like you found a specific religious moral code that fell more in line with how you felt morality should be then the specific secular morality you grew up with.

38

I’m sure that for any broad statement anybody made comparing religious and secular morality, somebody could come up with a counterexample. Nonetheless, as I see it, the differences exist and are clear enough that we can talk about them. If I were to attend a mainstream church for a year and listen to the sermon each week, and also attend a public lecture at a major university once a week, I would expect to hear a lot more about personal introspection and self-criticism at church and a lot more about passing laws and activism elsewhere. It is a categorical difference that the basis of Christian morality is about the difference between sins and virtues. If I here someone talking about sin and virtue, I find it’s much more likely that they’re religious than not. Are there exceptions? Sure. I don’t doubt there are many, but nonetheless the association is there.

39

That would take quite a while. The best short answer I can give is to point you towards G. K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy,which is still the best work of Christian apologetics that I’ve ever read. (And since it’s the story of Chesterton’s own intellectual journey to Christianity it’s very relevant to this thread.)

The biggest thing, as far as changing my mind was concerned, was changing what I viewed as reliable authority. In my early days, if I ever heard someone claiming that they had witnessed a miracle, or experienced the Holy Spirit, or heard the voice of God, I immediately dismissed such claims because they couldn’t be verified by the authorities that I trusted. I assumed that either such claims were made up or there was some explanation of the experience as hallucination, insanity, mental illness, group social dynamics, or so on. Once I began to question that assumption and think about whether there really was any legitimate reason for rejecting all claims about personal religious experience, I started realizing that I didn’t have such a reason.

40

There isn’t a single good reason to question that assumption, but even you do question the assumption you will still come up empty on evidence for miracles.