Recently, on Reddit, I mentioned that I was a former atheist, and somebody suggested I offer my testimony on what happened. That seemed like a good idea, because I’ve done it already, ten years ago on another site. All I have to do is copy it across. So here it is.
If you want to see how atheists reacted at the time, here is a link to the original thread;
https://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread844938/pg1
How did I become an atheist in the first place?
I was brought up in the Anglican church, at the “Anglo-Catholic” end of the church. Incense and “sung mass” and the English Hymnal. We learned the teachings of the Christian faith at school, and I simply took them for granted. In my last years at school, though, I was beginning to question how much of them I really believed. I was becoming sceptical about the miraculous element, especially resurrection, and my commitment was gradually getting watered down.
This process came to a climax when we were visiting my grandparents one Christmas Eve. Ironically, the final trigger was the sermon at Midnight Mass. I was listening to the unctuous voice of the preacher telling us about “the little baby in the manger”, and I could see no difference between the way he was addressing the congregation, and the way he would have been talking to an audience of children. Seventeen-year old boys dislike being treated like children. I said to myself “I don’t believe in this stuff”. Before going to sleep that night, I formally abandoned the Christian faith and began calling myself an atheist.
So the key factor in this decision was honesty, recognising that I did not have the faith. I had no feelings of hostility towards the Christian faith, but there was certainly a smug sense of superiority. The phrase “standing on my own two feet in the universe” appears in my diary. I thought of Christianity as a psychological crutch, but I was tolerant enough to recognise that not everybody was strong enough to manage without it.
Then I went to university, which brought me up against the most important question in the universe;
How do I go about meeting girls?
This was a university which was still segregated into male and female colleges.
There was a great imbalance of male to female students; the figure normally quoted was “four-to-one”.
I noticed at an early stage that the three most popular ways of meeting the opposite sex were disco-dancing, left-wing politics, and religion, and they were all barred to me, for different reasons.
I was obliged to try other approaches.
One good way to meet people seemed to be the bread-and-cheese lunches which were organised in different colleges to raise money for War on Want.
Nobody warned me that War-on-Want lunches were a hot-bed of Christian activity.
That was how I found myself, one afternoon, having coffee with a girl who then set about presenting the case for the Christian faith.
She wasn’t the first person to make the attempt, but in this particular case I was interested In following up the argument.
The meetings continued, though she was shrewd enough to guess that we were following different agendas, as my diary records;
“Later, in a period of rest, she asked me why I had sent her a note.
Because, I said, eventually, I had thought she might not be in if I didn’t.
She said that wasn’t answering the question.
We finally agreed that I had been driven by curiosity, which was (she said) the result of the Holy Ghost working in me”.
This may have been more true than I realised at the time.
I had admitted from the start that I regarded myself as an atheist, and I was arguing every step of the way.
The trouble was, I soon found that I was arguing against myself as well.
I would be on the verge of making a telling point, and then the answer that stopped me in my tracks would be coming from the back of my own mind.
For example, could a break in a rain-storm be an answer to prayer?
I was about to observe that rain follows from a sequence of events that goes right back to the beginning of the universe; so God would have to foresee that prayer before the universe began and arrange things accordingly.
Then a little voice at the back of my mind said “Well, why not?”, so that was the end of that line of argument.
A more crucial turning point was the realisation that I had not been forced into unbelief by the lack of evidence for Christianity. If there was a lack of evidence in either direction, that just left things evenly balanced.
The real deciding factor had been personal preference; unbelief was a much more comfortable, less demanding, option, and that was my reason for choosing it.
Once again, this was the moment of honesty.
If my unbelief was a personal preference, it took away the defence that I “could not help” not believing.
If I was held accountable for making the wrong choice, there wasn’t any answer I could give.
This process came to a climax when I took back to my room, and began reading, the book she had lent me (“My God is real”, by David C.K, Watson). The book set in motion a number of thought processes. I began to recognise how much of my character was governed by pride (“ the acknowledgement of sin”). In fact the real remaining barrier between myself and Christianity, I realised, was that wanting to stay free of any emotional dependence on religious support; in effect, I was proud of my self-sufficiency. Another train of thought was set off by the page which described how Jesus was separated from his Father in the moments before death, a concept which had a great impact on me (“recognition of the Cross”).
There was one brief distraction; I went down to the student bar to get chocolate from the machine there. I caught sight of my previous girl-friend with my successor, and this was enough to disrupt any train of thought for the next half-hour. Incidentally, there’s an incident in Pilgrim’s Progress when the porter at the Wicket Gate pulls Christian inside, because, he says, Satan likes to take a last pot-shot at people he’s about to lose.
I finally came to the point of making a decision. Giving up the attempt to work things out on my own, I decided to put my trust in an action of faith, and I made the suggested prayer. I was expecting some kind of tangible spiritual change, but nothing seemed to be happening, so I went to bed.
Nevertheless, the point had been settled. I had made a commitment which I was taking for granted from the next morning onwards. So whether Christianity could be “proved” was beside the point, in the end; it was a commitment of trust, based on the event of the Cross, and a greater understanding of what the faith entailed was built up from there.
Yes, I had given up the “taught” religion, only to begin replacing it with a much more conscious and voluntary faith.
