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Former atheist Mason Jones thought Christian belief was an overly simplistic view of life and reality until he began to recognize its depth and complexity, its ability to better explain reality. Mason’s Campus Outreach Page: https://cocentralil.org/mason-jones Atheists Finding God book promo code LXFANDF30 valid at https://Rowman.com/Lexington TranscriptHello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page or through emailing us directly at info@sidebstories.com.As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, at the end of each episode, these former atheists give advice to curious skeptics as to how they too can pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians on how they can best engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening in to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been on both sides. We have so much to learn from them.Also, please know that many of these former atheists have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If you’d like to connect, please email us at info@sidebstories.com, and we’ll get you connected.Christianity is often associated with a cross and with Jesus, who died on a cross outside the city in first century Jerusalem. Christians believe that Jesus not only died but rose from the dead and appeared to hundreds of people over 40 days, until He returned to heaven. They believe that these events, among others, confirmed Jesus’ claims to be God, to be truth, to be the way to heaven. Christians believe that these were not merely historical events in history but that they take on spiritual significance for those who believe, that it is good news for themselves and for the world.For those who don’t believe, this story can seem like childish superstition, just another myth, wishful thinking, a psychological crutch to give comfort or hope for something better than this world alone can offer. It seems completely out of touch and disconnected with anyone or anything reasonable or rational. It is an overly simplistic understanding of reality, they think. Skeptics believe it is severely out of step with scientific and sober-minded reality. It makes no sense intellectually or morally, until it does.Former atheist Mason Jones once found himself rejecting the Christian belief he now embraces, and more than that, advocates. For him, the cross of Christ held the key to him making sense of himself, of his own values, and of reality itself. I hope you’ll come along to hear his story of moving from disbelief to belief.Welcome to Side B Stories, Mason. It’s so great to have you with me today.Thanks. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me.Wonderful. As we’re getting started, so the listeners know a little bit about you, Mason. Tell them perhaps what you’re doing now in terms of your ministry and your recent history.Yeah, so I graduated from Eastern Illinois University back in May 2022, and right now I’m working with a campus ministry called Campus Outreach to plant a new region in Michigan. So right now I’m living in Illinois, learning how all of our financial systems and everything works, so I can then go and build everything basically from the ground up in Michigan, and I’ll be moving this summer to go do that, and I’m really pumped about that.You’re in ministry, and that’s a long way from being or calling yourself a former atheist, so I’m curious how that happened. Let’s get back into your story. Let’s start at the very beginning, Mason. Why don’t you talk with us a little bit about where you grew up. Tell us about your family life. Was there religion there? Any references of God in your world?Yeah, so I grew up…. When I was really little, my family probably would have said they were Christians, all of us, just, I think because that was the default assumption. But the God we believed in was pretty superficial, at least for myself. I think I viewed God as kind of a fairy godparent who just existed to basically take care of me, watch out for me, and make sure everything went smoothly. And yeah. I grew up, and my parents, especially my mom, really tried to shelter me from just the messed up stuff in the world, I think like most mothers do. So at least for the first few years of my life, I didn’t really have anything to challenge that view of God, and I think my family didn’t have a whole lot of that, either.But when I was about eight years old, some stuff happened in my family that my mom just couldn’t shelter me from, just a lot of hard stuff. Family deaths, sickness, broken relationships, just yeah, some hard stuff. Over the span of just two years, one of my grandmothers got breast cancer, my grandpa got lung cancer, one of my uncles died in a motorcycle accident. Actually, a year before that, another grandparent died of a brain aneurysm. Then, like, two weeks or something after my uncle died in a motorcycle accident, my other uncle took his life in our driveway. And really, that event was kind of where it really hit me hard. Like, the questions, “How can a just and loving God be reconciled with a world that seems so devoid of justice and love?” And yeah, I questioned that for a while, just to myself. Oh, sorry.No, I was just trying to consider, as an eight year old boy, what that must have felt like. Experiencing that kind of loss in such a short period of time and especially so graphically in your own yard. I suppose, like you say, any semblance of faith in a God who exists to protect you would have…. It’s like the rug would have been pulled out from underneath you, I would imagine, sending you reeling in a sense, of where was this good and protective and powerful God? I can’t imagine, as a child, really, what you must have undergone, and I’m so sorry.Thank you. Yeah. It was definitely hard, and I definitely didn’t have the resources to understand what was going on.Did your parents try to help you talk through that, or was that something you were observing and processing on your own?As far as I remember, I don’t remember really talking about it very much. I think we tried to avoid the reality of it as much as possible. And to this day, I don’t know if my mom knows how much I actually saw, because my parents are divorced, and I was visiting my dad when my uncle took his life and yeah, I just never really talked about it with my mom and didn’t really talk about it with my dad, either. That was his brother, and so he was going through his own process of grieving and a whole lot of pain there. So I think our solution a lot of the time was just not to talk about it, but I definitely asked a lot of questions to myself and just didn’t verbalize them very much. Just questions like, yeah, how could a loving God let this stuff happen?At one point, I’d gotten to the point where I think I was asking, “All right, maybe God is good. Maybe I’m just not on His good side. Just the question of, like, “How good do you have to be to be good enough for God?” kind of was replacing the question of, “Is God really good?” And so I was wrestling with that. And that was when I finally did ask my parents. I asked my mom as we were… I still remember it. We were pulling out of a grocery store parking lot, and as we were pulling up to the stop sign, I think I asked my mom, “How good do you have to be to get to heaven?” And she, I guess, at some point herself had become an atheist. I don’t think she was before all this stuff happened, but she just turned around and said to me, “Oh. You know none of that stuff’s real, right?” And that was first time I had realized my mom didn’t believe in God. But at that age, it was still, I think, anything especially my mom said was, “Oh, my mom is where I look to for truth.” And so it was, “Oh!” From that point on, I think I was an atheist and just was like, “Oh, I guess God isn’t real.” It was devastating, but it was just kind of, “This is the authority figure in my life. That’s I guess the way things are.”Wow. And again, that’s a pretty sobered view for a young child, really. As you were processing through all of that and walking through all that. I’m also presuming, by your story…. You were surprised at her revelation. I guess that means that you weren’t actively going to church or involved in any kind of Christian community at all during any of this period of time.No. Like I said, all growing up, my understanding of God was really superficial. I didn’t even have really a category for what function church could serve, other than, “Oh, man, you must be really devoted if you go there.” I don’t know if we even owned a Bible in our house. So I just really had a truncated, simplistic view of God that was pretty easy to take apart. So it wasn’t like…. When my mom told me God didn’t exist, it wasn’t super hard to reconcile with just the information that I had, because the understanding of God that I had seemed like a contradiction, and it was. Yeah. It was really superficial, which—I was nine years old.Right. In your world, too, did you have any friends who were Christians or believed in God at all? Or was it a fairly nominal faith or at all in any of your friends that you had association with?Yeah. I don’t know. It’s hard, looking back then, because I wasn’t even asking questions that would have gotten at the genuineness of someone’s faith. But as far as, at least, I can remember, as far as conversations I’ve had with friends growing up, none of them ever said anything that would indicate a deep, rich understanding of Christianity and the gospel. I think there was a lot of nominal Christianity, which again, we were eight, nine years old. So some of that’s just we weren’t old enough to really have rich, deep understanding of the gospel. But also, I think, even just growing up after becoming an atheist, that was a common trend, was the religious friends I had seemed to have that truncated view of God that, at that point, had left a bad taste in my mouth. I think I thought little of them for it.Christianity or God or belief in God left a bad taste in your mouth. There are some people who experience pain and dismiss God and say, “Okay, I guess He’s just not there. He’s not real.” And then there are some who feel it, I guess, a little bit more palpably and can even develop almost a bitterness or a distaste or a contempt for religion, for religious things, for, in an ironic way, the nonexistence of God. Did you feel that sense of contempt in yourself? Or was it just, “Okay, I guess He just doesn’t exist. I really don’t care. Let’s just move on.”Yeah, I think I definitely wouldn’t have said I had a contempt for Christianity as such. I think I just had a contempt for the simplicity which I did attribute to Christianity. I didn’t realize there was a more comprehensive nuanced worldview out there under the banner of Christianity. But I had, again, friends that were professing Christians that… I wouldn’t have said that I was hostile to God, that I was angry at God. Although of course, examining myself in the lens of the Bible, of course I was hostile to God. I was alienated from him. But at that time, I wouldn’t have presented myself as such. I think I would have at least framed myself as objecting on purely rational grounds and rejecting the idea of God as a contradiction, not as an emotional hostility.So it was a rational decision, in a sense, that God didn’t exist, and I presume that you’re saying that it contradicted the idea that He was there, that He was present, that He was protective, those kinds of things. You’ve couched or used the word simplistic a few times with regard to your understanding of Christianity at that time. Can you flesh that out a little bit more? Because you’re contrasting it between a simplistic understanding, but yet you’re saying there was a deeper complexity to it that you didn’t understand. But just, at that time, what did you think Christianity or belief in God was?Yeah. I thought the essence of Christianity was, “Believe in God and do enough good things, and you get to heaven,” and that way of ordering the universe and understanding how objective morality and God’s goodness and sovereignty, how all that fit together, it seemed like, and I still think today, it is a contradiction. If you come in with the assumption that people are basically good, like I did, and with the right notion that God is both perfectly loving and sovereign over all of the universe, then there is no rational explanation for what goes wrong in the world.So that’s what I mean by simplistic. I had kind of a one plus one equals two understanding of Christianity.Okay. Okay. I think that that is fair, a fair analysis, I think, in terms of your own, and many, I think, think in those terms. So I appreciate you kind of spelling that out for us. So you’re eight, nine years old, and you’ve decided that God cannot exist rationally with what you’re observing and experiencing in the world. So then what happens from there?Yeah, for the next few years, honestly, I didn’t think about it very much. It was just kind of, “Oh, this is the way it is.” At least, I didn’t think about God as such that much. I thought about the implications of my atheism pretty often. I remember, as early as fourth or fifth grade, just sitting in the classroom and just having like, existential dread, realizing, “Man, if something happens and if I die today, then that’s just it. There’s nothing!” And being terrified as a grade schooler, and yeah, that wasn’t a normal thought for people in my classes.No! Right, right. That’s, again, a fairly mature perspective or understanding as a boy, really, that you understood what you were rejecting, but you also understood what you were embracing, in terms of what it means for there to be no God is that there is no life after death, as it were. That can be pretty frightening for a child, I would imagine.Yeah. It was definitely a hard time, just because there was, I think, an instinctive fear of death. I think as I got older, it got easier for me to make the—or at least convince myself that, “Oh, it’s okay. It’s just like a really long nap, or a forever nap.” But at that age, I think, just instinctively I knew better, that death really is a tragic thing, that it is sad, it’s hard, it’s devastating. And, yeah, I understood it better than I did, I think, when I got older.Well, you had been very close to several deaths to people close in your life. So I would imagine it would be a much more palpable reality for you, to consider that you would just watch people that you love die. So of course, there are other implications to a naturalistic or a worldview where God doesn’t exist. You had spoken of objective moral values and duties and things, and just knowing things that are absolutely right or wrong. Were those things that you wrestled with as you were trying to come to terms with this godless world?Yeah. I think I realized pretty quickly, just on an intuitive level, that if—I was a physicalist atheist, so I was the most common, but also the strictest form of atheism there is. It’s there’s no phenomena that can’t be explained apart from what’s physically observable and just the principles of physics that you would learn in science class. So I think pretty early on I realized the implications of that, that if physical phenomena and physical properties are the only properties and phenomena that exist, then there really isn’t a place for objective and transcendent moral values, because a physicalist worldview traps you within the immanent. You can…
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