Tell your story of conversion from atheism to theism

Great Debates
1

You can tell your story of theism to atheism, too, if you like, but I’d like to hear some atheism to theism stories, since those seem to be rather less common.

Please try to refrain from the following:

  1. Discussing which belief system (or lack thereof) is correct
  2. Insulting believers in a certain system (or none)

If this has been done to death, then please leave a link to other threads on the same topic when saying so. (I am unable to search since membership has not been paid at this time)

Thank you, I look forward to reading all of your stories (in both directions).

2

Not wishing to interupt your thread. I wondered if you might wish to hear from people who have always thought atheism and theism were equaully untenable?

3

Hate to interrupt, too, but religious threads belong in Great Debates, not MPSIMS.

4

I thought witnessing belonged in Great Debates, not all religious discussion. I’ve seen plenty of threads about religion spread all over this board…

5

askeptic: It’s okay if you tell the story of how you got there. One could even tell a story of going from one religion to another. It doesn’t matter.

Eve: I have put this thread in MPSIMS because I don’t want it to turn into a religious debate. I just want people to share their stories.

6

Ah, so sweet, so young, so innocent . . .

7

My experience is not what you were initially asking for, but I’ll add something. I went from close to fundamentalist christian, I didn’t believe evolution was real, to what I thought of as a more mystic religious person. I did the whole Life And Teachings Of The Masters Of The Far East book and tape stuff, thought I had spiritual guides instead of a guardian angel (and had someone channel/draw one of my guides for me). I used crystals and tried to open my chakras. Tried meditation and Tarot, the Ouija Board, etc. Read all of the Shirley MacLaine books, and believed all of it.

I got to a point, where none of it seemed to be doing much for my life, and I still didn’t feel like I’d found the answers I was looking for. I felt like I had answered questions I had previously had, by compounding them with more questions. I decided I didn’t know the answers, and was never going to know a lot of them. Though it even felt sacriligeous at the time, I remember making the switch in thinking that Jesus was my saviour, to Jesus was a teacher like Buddha or Mohammed. The switch from looking at evolution as a possiblity, as opposed to something evil. Lot’s of things, that began changing slowly over time, heh.

I think the day it started picking up speed for me, was a chance reading of the Marquis de Sade’s, Dialogue Between A Priest And A Dying Man. I didn’t agree with a lot of what was written (and still don’t), but there were a lot of things that made sense, without me needing to make extra explanations. I had never bothered to read about atheism before, and when I finally decided to do a search, I hit upon Adrian Barnett’s site, Wasteland Of Wonders. Things that hadn’t made sense to me, it turns out, didn’t make sense to a lot of other people. To keep this reasonably short, I will say things just went on from there, until I got to a point where, even if I wanted to still believe, I don’t think I could. YMMV and probably does.

8

I was an agnostic when I married my husband. He grew up in the Catholic faith and has never doubted the existence of God. I was envious of that. In 1992, I had a dream that Jesus came to me and said, “Why don’t you believe in me?” I fell to my knees, cried, and said, “I do believe in you!”

That’s all it took.

Hasn’t stopped me from doing some pretty dumb, selfish, and abhorrent things, though.

9

This thread is better suited for Great Debates. I’ll move it for you.

Cajun Man
for the SDMB

10

My story is a bit meandering.

On Easter Sunday in 1987, I was confirmed into the Presbyterian Church as an adult member, at the age of thirteen. Later that day some bug bites I’d been scratching at started breaking open, and when I mentioned it to my physician father, he diagnosed the chicken pox immediately. I spent the ensuing Spring Break miserable and bedridden. It seemed to me a sign from God that He didn’t want me ;).

One of the privileges of being a confirmed member of the church was that it became my decision whether to attend church. I don’t remember exactly when I decided that I didn’t believe in God, but I do remember my older sister trying to get me to fill in for her at some church function (babysitting or something); I refused by saying, “I don’t even believe in God!” and she told my parents and we had a big old confrontation, family-meeting-style, about my burgeoning atheism. From then on, I categorically refused to go to church, despite my father’s weekly exortations. (To be fair, my dad is now a Calibuddhist, and my mother is some sort of apostatic Mother Earth Femiyahweh Christian, and neither of my siblings attend church; score one for the Dorkmeister!)

Two years later, I was stalking downtown around midnight, and suddenly like a bolt of lightning it hit me: “I should become a druid!” I thought. Yes, yes, I was a total dork even then, and most of what I knew about druids was from second edition. Wanna make something of it?

I did some research, getting my hands on Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today and somehow managing to track down Ar nDraiocht Fein, or A Druid Fellowship, the US’s biggest organization of folks who fancied themselves druids. I paid my $20 membership fees and was rewarded with a directory of other group members. One of them was in a neighboring city, so I wrote him a letter and described my situation to him, a sixteen-year-old guy interested in ancient Celtic religions. He agreed to meet with me.

He was a wonderful guy at a difficult point in his life: his lover was dying of AIDS, and he was trying to find meaningful rituals to help him through his death. Despite that tremendous difficulty, he took the time to talk to me about religion, and even to talk with my then-girlfriend about paganism (although when he found out her parents were fundamentalists, he backed way the hell off from talking to her).

Through him, I met local pagans, and spent about eight years of my life as a pagan, sporadically attending rituals, performing magic, and talking to nature spirits. I described myself not as a believer, but rather as someone who pocketed his disbelief when it came to spirits and gods: somehow, whether or not these beings were objectively real seemed like the wrong question to ask, almost like asking whether chocolate pudding was in the key of E Minor. It gave meaning and beauty and sense to my life to do these rituals, to speak these words; thus I did them, spoke them.

But after about eight years or so, paganism was meaning less and less to me, and when friends asked me to participate in rituals, rather than feeling moved, I felt vaguely embarrassed and silly. I’m no longer very good at pocketing my disbelief, and the rituals no long give beauty or sense or meaning to my life; I therefore don’t do them.

I don’t know exactly when I started considering myself an atheist again, but these days it’s the best description for me. I’m a soft atheist–I think there’s no good proof that many specific deities don’t exist–but acknowledging deities does nothing for me intellectually, emotionally, or aesthetically.

Daniel

11

Hoo boy. OK.

A little background, to start. My father, being Mexican, was raised Catholic. He never really agreed with it, but suffered through being made an altar boy and the whole jazz. When he turned 17, he snuck into the Navy and left his family pretty much behind him, for a variety of reasons, but that included his religion. My mother was never really religious, though she does believe in God and Jesus. They raised my sister and I not as a religious family, but not as an atheist family, either. I suppose “agnostic” is the best term, though we celebrated Christmas as it was a religious holiday, learning about Jesus and all that, though we never went to church.

As I grew up, I started to become more interested in religion. In 6th grade, I had two teachers who were fundamentalist Christians, and I allowed myself to be inducted into their newly founded Christian club. Mostly, it was fun and social, but by 8th grade, I was asking a lot of questions about the nature of God - I had one science teacher who was a devout Christian and a great guy, so I went to him. He explained to me how there is room in life for both science and religion, that the two don’t have to contradict, and that religion is largely metaphorical. After some careful consideration, I realized that he was largely right - science is of God. This type of thinking set me up for the next several years, until my senior year in high school, where I again revised my Christianity to include the belief that everyone really worships the same God, and God truly loves every person, whether they worship him or not. This schism, while not necessarily exclusive to Christian belief, set up the downfall of my Christianity.

One thing you have to understand before moving on to the next part - I have always had two loves. One of them is nature. The other is spirituality. I spent a great deal of time in the Boy Scouts and in family trips backpacking, hiking, and doing all the other fun stuff. I was also a member of the Order of the Arrow, a kind of super-Scout organization that has strong rituals based on Native American cultures. This comes into play later, you’ll see. I never felt closer to God than when I was with nature. I could feel his love and the lushness of life all around. There was a small stone outdoor chapel overlooking a beautiful ravine up near a place we used to go camping a lot, and I loved sitting there and reading the Christian bible. It may have been one of my favorite places.

Skip ahead a few years to college, around 2000. I hadn’t been in touch with religion for some time, being busy with college and all, though I still tried to practice the basic religious principles of love and respect. I used to go hiking up in the hills above Berkeley frequently, and one day on such a hike, I was sitting against a tree, and I had what you could call a spiritual encounter. I had always felt that plants had as much spirit as animals did, but I had never realized how vividly you could connect with that spirit.

I went to the library on campus and started digging up texts on every pagan religion I could find, from Native American practices that I knew about from my OA days, to central Asian shamanism, to Daoism, to druidic and Wicca, etc. I absorbed all of the knowledge I could from the texts, and experimented with the various ritual and theology. I found that certain things worked for me, certain things didn’t, so I literally cherrypicked from the rituals. Some things, like ritual dances, are just not possible for someone living in a tiny apartment. I still would like to spend some more time at a Native American reservation practicing some of it. In any event, I took out of it a general theology, ethical code, and several ritual processes for meditation and attaining a spiritual level. I combined this with my previous Christian experience, and came up with a concept of a god-force being made up of everything physical, expressing itself through emotions, and represented by various symbology and personification.

In practice, I usually use Wiccan tradition, since Wicca is pretty much the only neopagan religion that is popular in the US, and practicing with other people is a cornerstone to religion - but I certainly don’t consider myself a Wiccan, as loosely defined a religion as that is. They tend to concentrate strongly on god/goddess forms - whereas I may look at Luna or Sol and feel the presence of god, they can sometimes look at it as god. They also tend to harp a bit too much on the names of gods, like Aphrodite. Also, there is room in Wicca, and this is fairly common, for people to cast spells to bring them money or love. I think that is bunk, and the most you can do with magic/prayer/ritual is affect emotion, such as giving yourself more confidence to do well on a job interview.

I do look at plants as living creatures, though, so maybe you can consider me nuts. :slight_smile: I think one of the more important parts of my religion is knowing that “god” can laugh at and with you… like a good friend, not a patriarch. Oops, I think I’m getting into the preachy area. I just wanted to define how my beliefs have solidified, so sorry if that went beyond the question. I’ll stop now.

See? I stopped.

12

Hi! My name is Ahunter3 and I make serious use of the G word.

I had previously been a “soft atheist” (i.e., one who does not explicity deny the possibility of anything named “God” existing, but one who sees no reason to think anything similar to the oft-alleged “God” does in fact exist). To explain how the heck this conversion happened, it’s sort of necessary to paint a conceptual fresco of sort. I mean, I didn’t suddenly feel a need to posit a semi-translucent bearded male a la Leonardo da Vinci, or a timelessly eternal majesty to say “Let there be light” like the Elohim of the Torah… just as I challenge both atheists and theists to define their terms first, I find it necessary to do a bit of that if I’m to make sense myself.

In 1980, in some of the western states of the US, some of the last little ripples of “the times they are a-changin’” / idealistic visions of a world without war and antagonistic competition, an alternative to corporations sitting atop the global money system and authoritarian bureaucrats deploying The Man to keep us down, etc., ran up against the hard shoreline of the New Materialism. God that’s bad writing. But you probably know what I mean even if you think I was a damn fool kid to attribute any vestige of societal goodness to the often-immature antics of the babyboomer flower children hippie social activist contingent – whether they deserved it or not, they symbolized that there was a direction and that there was a possibility that we could move in that direction, decisively, leaving behind ugly old ways. And I was just 21 and didn’t want to believe that none of this was true, that those ideas were all nonworkable and/or that the entrenchment of the Powers that Be was deep enough to defeat any attempts to make those kinds of changes.

From the top floors of the Tower of Atheism, up amongst the poststructuralists and the existentialists and the behaviorists, the perspective is this: there is no reason to think that the world can be kinder and more geared towards cooperation between free people rather than competition between people trying to control each other; more to the point, there is no reason to think that whatever I was feeling, this wish for such a change, was in any founded on anything useful – I was just exposed to some ideas and sucked them up like a blank slate, and the mouths speaking those ideas when I heard them were just parroting as well, and there’s nothing intrinsically “good” about any of this, or anthing else for that matter. Nor is there any “force” or any “rule” or “tendency” or “nature” within us that is telling us, through these feelings, that we are “supposed to” (whatever that might mean) be nicer to each other, or our societies based on warmer more communal-sharing dynamics instead of all this adversarial power-centric stuff.

Now, you may interject with a perfectly valid atheist vantage point from which to rescue the legitimacy of those feelings – I’m not claiming there is none, or that adopting the concept of “God” is necessary in order to raise a counterperspective. It’s just that I was unable to do so at that specific time in my life.

I wanted there to “be a God”. Not a rule-shouting belligerent old patriarch, but something that in some sense meant that the feelings I had, the passionate idealistic sentiments about people being good to each other and remaking human life together into something much nicer than the cold and alienating world I saw, were legitimate and somehow tied into something…strong, I guess you’d say, i.e., not something eviscerated like “yeah, those feelings are legitimate in the sense that yes it would be nice if that kind of stuff could happen, but it can’t” but rather charged with the potential for actually making all that wanted-for stuff real. And I had to see it, I had to comprehend this horrible incongruity between the world as I thought and felt it ought to be and the world as it actually appeared to be. All that had enough overlap with stuff I grew up aware of w/regards to religion to drive me to think in terms of “I need there to be a God” even if I was not conceptualizing “God” necessarily in quite the way “God” had been described to me growing up.

I had no interest in “experiencing a rebirth” or whatever and going back inside smiling my damnfool head off if all I was going to get out of it was “Yes, my disturbed head, you may ‘believe in God’ if that’s what it takes to keep you from collapsing on the sidewalk crying about the meaninglessness of modern life”, and I identified that kind of thing happening as a significant risk here, but I prayed.

What in hell is prayer? Not reciting recipes. GodIsGreat, GodIsGood, NowWeThankHimForOurFood, Ah-men. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want, he makes me lie down beside the abbatoir. Our fodder which art in heaven hollow be my brain. Hail Mary full of grass, God is peeking at your ass. Nope… Yo, ‘God’, yeah, you, are you out there? … ::well if you’re not you ought to be:: … I need some answers here, I need some understanding here.

Intensity. Focus, fueled by the strongest of emotion. And content, in reply: understanding. Concepts. Things making sense. One thing I understood was what prayer was, having accomlished it.

I understood lots of things, the overall constellation of which did not mesh with Judaism, Christianity, or precisely any other organized body of theological thought and perspective I’ve ever encountered. But I’m convinced by the general parallels that that which I experienced, both the subject matter in question (the “search for good and what ‘the Good’ means, including its relevance”) and the process (prayer), is that which was seen and tasted and known since the dawn of time and given, among others, the name of “God”.

So it is real. For all that I consider most institutions of religions to be to this process what taxidermy is to wild animals, the process and tradition around which they are wrapped is not a sham. Others have done what I did. (And, I should hasten to mention, some have done so and, either because of or in spite of it, participate in organized religion in some fashion, whether to re-invade traditional religion’s dead halls or to be part of the tiny scattered glowing dots amidst the ashes and phony fairydust glitter).

And so I use the word “God”.

13

I was raised Catholic in a medium-strict household. I really got into it when I started at a Catholic junior high, but I became disappointed when I didn’t get results–I wanted to experience all the great mystical things the saints had experienced.

I went to a special camp in 1984 for two weeks. It was my first time away from home as a quasi-adult. I was surrounded by smart people, and we basically had free run of the college campus. I decided spontaneously to become a Buddhist.

This didn’t last long. I became an atheist. I convinced my friend to become an atheist. I read the books atheists had written, and I agreed with their arguments. I still agree with most of them (insofar as they prove that the Judeo-Christian “God” does not exist).

During high school, however, I gradually began to develop my current perspective. I started studying life after death, ghosts, and psi. I was convinced. I still am.

In college this path continued. I became interested in Tarot and New Age thinking. Nowadays I label myself a pantheist. I don’t believe in a monotheistic God, but that the original singularity of sat-chit-ananda produced the Big Bang (and many other worlds), and we are all products of this. I find value in the teachings of many different religions and myths, but I think that homo sapiens will gradually merge myth-based religion and science into one body of thought.

14

I’ve told my story several times, so I won’t bore people with the reruns. Nutshell: I was stoned, and was translating the book of John. When I reached the 58th verse of the 8th chapter — Jesus answered, “In all truth I tell you, before Abraham was, I am” — I exhaled as an atheist, and inhaled as a theist. It was instantaneous. One moment, I saw the world one way, and the next moment, I saw everything a new way.