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Former atheist Kim Endraske believed in science and her own morality instead of God, yet she lived with a constant fear of moral failure and death. After her views were challenged by an intelligent Christian, she found belief and grace in God. Kim’s Resources: Book: God is Real: The Eyewitness Testimony of a Former Atheist www.amazon.com/dp/1975916328 YouTube Channel: www.YouTube.com/c/FormerAtheist58 Blog: www.TeachWhatIsGood.com Ministry to Families Continuing their Pregnancy to Term: www.AChildOfPromise.org Resources recommended by Kim: More Than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello, 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, sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page. It has been said that there are two things in life that we can be certain of: Death and taxes. As much as we try to avoid one or both of those things, they are inescapable. For the atheist, death is the end of our physical existence. There is no soul or spirit that exists beyond the grave, beyond death, only memories that live on in the lives of those whom they’ve left behind. If that is true, there should be nothing to fear in death, for we will all experience that. And, for many, that becomes a mandate to make the best of our time here now, to live life to its fullest, to accomplish, to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Or perhaps we just mindlessly pursue distractions and pleasures to avoid the inevitable. Yet for others, the fear of death can become overwhelming, even for those who don’t believe in God, immortality, and the afterlife. The fear of eternal nothingness, of blackness, can cause a fear in life of the unknown, of what will happen next, of when and whether death is coming sooner or later. In today’s story, former atheist Kim seriously wrestled with this existential reality. Fear of death was her constant companion. But that fear wasn’t enough for her to change her mind about God just to soothe a personal discomfort. After all, atheists are the adults in the room, called to soberly and courageously live with realities such as death and dying that may be personally unsettling. They are not to succumb to the childish notions of happily ever after in the afterlife. What was it then that changed Kim’s mind about the reality of God, and through that, lose her fear of death? I hope you’ll come along to find out. Welcome to Side B Stories, Kim. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thanks. It’s good to be here. Wonderful! As we’re getting started, so that the listeners can know a little bit about you before we get into your story, tell me something about you, perhaps your family, where you live, what you do. Yeah. My name is Kim Endraske. I am a home schooling mom for 21 years, but in addition to that, I have a YouTube channel at FormerAtheist58 and love to kind of share with people on my YouTube channel. I have a blog at Teach What Is Good, and I’ve always liked to write ever since I was a little girl. Actually, when I was little, I would make little newsletters and sell them to my neighbors, like a quarter apiece or something. And God has just continued that in my life, where now I’ve written several books, and I like to blog, and I’m just a teacher at heart. That’s wonderful! The world is desperate for good teachers. And good writers for that matter. And so for all of our listeners, we’ll include all of these, her YouTube channel, her blog, and all of these connections to you. We’ll put those in the episode notes, so that they can access some of your writing as well and be taught, hopefully, in some way. Thanks. So let’s get into your story, Kim. Why don’t you talk with me about your upbringing? Tell me a little bit about how and where you were raised and whether religion was any part of your family life at all. Yeah. So I was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. I’m the younger of two girls. I have an older sister who is three years older than me. My dad and my grandfather are both attorneys, lawyers, and my mom was actually my dad’s legal assistant. So I grew up in a very academic home. Our dinner table conversations usually consisted of whatever case that my parents were working on. And so that was always—we just had a very academically rigorous upbringing. My parents had very high expectations for my sister and I. We were both identified talented and gifted, like, from the earliest age. My sister actually skipped a grade in kindergarten, and I skipped a grade when I was in fourth grade, actually. I took the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and scored all 99s on it, and they were like, “Okay, something is going on here,” and so I was actually promoted mid-year when I was in fourth grade, from fourth to fifth. But that’s just a little taste of the academic rigor, that there was just an expectation that I was supposed to be the best student in class. I was always reading books. I would prefer reading over playing outside or over watching TV. I’ve always just kind of been a book lover. And I think that that impacted all of my life, that I wanted to know, I wanted to learn. I wanted to be the smartest, the best, the brightest, be looked up to for my academic excellence. So as far as where religion fits in all of that, well, I don’t remember too much when I was five, but my mom tells me that I told my grandmother when I was five that there was no God. So to me, that means that must have been in there from very early childhood, that I had made up in my own mind that God did not exist. And I don’t think my parents told me God doesn’t exist. I think it’s more just God was absent. You know, there was no faith in my home. We didn’t go to church together. We didn’t pray. We didn’t read the Bible. We didn’t follow any other religions, either. It was just we did things our own way. We made up our own rules, and I think that I liked making up rules. Jana, I’ve always been somebody who likes making up rules. I’ve always been a rule follower, and I liked making up rules, and I liked making up rules for myself. And so I think that’s an interesting little piece of me. I think sometimes people have false conceptions about atheists, that they’re all, like, immoral, into drugs and alcohol and just off the charts. And that was not at all who I was. I was a very good, law-abiding citizen, and I was trying to be good. There was no end goal. I didn’t believe in any kind of afterlife or any kind of spiritual anything. And so it was just about me. And so I wanted to be a good person just for me. And I wanted to help other people because it made me feel good. It made my life mean something to help other people. Right, right, and I can imagine growing up in a home like that, where you’re probably having pretty meaningful discussions around the table. With an attorney and a paralegal as parents, you’re learning about what’s according to the law, what’s breaking the law, so I would imagine you would have this sense, real sense, of right and wrong. Like, some things are law abiding, some things are just what you do, and some things are just what you don’t do, whether God’s in the picture or not. That was probably just the flavor of your home, to grow up with a framework like that. And I’m so glad, too, that you pointed out that there are so many misconceptions and stereotypes, whether it’s Christian or atheist, that they’re all just a certain way. And I think it’s important that you brought that up, that we don’t broad brush anyone. I think everyone is an individual, and some of the atheists who are friends of mine are some of the most moral people that I know. So it’s not that someone cannot be moral or not based upon their religion. It’s the grounding of that morality. But that’s a story for another day, perhaps. But back to, again, who you are, growing up. So you you’re rule oriented, you’re moral. But I’m so surprised, even at age five, that you had this very stark, kind of pragmatic view that God did not exist. And of course, you were academically minded. You’re telling me that you were growing up in rigorous kind of intellectual study. I’m curious. Did you consider if God did not exist, did you take on any kind of identity? Or what that looked like if God did not exist? What that meant for you in any way? Yes. So it’s really kind of a harder question than you might think, actually, because for me, it was just a very humanist—is that a good way to put it? It was just humanist, that my life was just centered on human wisdom, human intellect, human science. Like, I wanted to be a scientist. I was going to be a veterinarian, actually. So I was always very science oriented, into evolution. I wanted to be a veterinarian, so I was always studying animals and especially horses. I thought horses were fascinating. And so the evolutionary theory really grounded me that there was no need for God, because the world just kind of evolved. And so this is where I hooked into, “Okay, yeah, so who needs a God?” But there were two specific things where I really thought, “Okay, I don’t know what to do with this.” I didn’t know how to mesh the beauty that I saw in creation and death. These are two things I really wrestled with as an atheist. So when I saw really beautiful, the created—and now I can say created—but the way that the world was and how beautiful it was, I thought, “Wow, how is this possible?” So I can remember two specific times, I just have this memory, and it’s like a vision burned into my mind. I was in high school. I was at a debate camp. So my sport of choice is I was a debater. So I won speech awards as a debater. I went to Harvard to compete as a debater. When I was in high school, I was a debater. Okay, team policy debate. That was my sword of choice. So I was at debate camp in the state of Vermont, and in between these debate classes that we had, we had a little time, time off, a little break. And I was sitting out in this grassy field, and this blue sky and these trees, and I’m sitting there and I’m watching all of this, and in my head I’m like, “God, if you are real, will you please show yourself to me?” Because I just thought, “How is this possible?” But then Nothing happened. Like there wasn’t lightning or like a Bible fell on me or like somebody walked… Right? Like, no one walked up to me at that moment and said, “Jesus is God!” And so I was like, “Okay, well, I guess God’s not real,” but I actually think that in the creation of what God had made, He was saying to me, “I am real.” He had put into my heart a desire to search for Him, even in that moment. The other thing that I struggled with was death. So I had an ongoing, constant fear of death. I think un-normal. I have four children of my own. None of my children are living in fear of death. So like I said, I was a very moral person, and I think one big reason why I was very moral is I lived in constant fear that I would die. So I wanted to wear a seatbelt, I didn’t want to speed, I didn’t want to use drugs, I didn’t want to drink alcohol, because I lived always thinking, “Oh, I might die! I might die!” And when you died, then that was it. There was nothing after that, and so I didn’t want to die, so I didn’t want to do any of these things. And that also made me think, “Okay, is this really all that life is?” Like, “Is this really it?” Death was also a struggle for me. Okay. Yeah. And those are very real issues of beauty and death, and of course, you as the atheist humanist have to look at life through a stark lens. Like you say, death is all there is. When you look at the diversity and beauty in the world, it really is a little bit hard to explain. I know that there are atheists who look at the cosmos and call it magical because it’s awe inspiring and it’s hard to dismiss that. But at this point you had intellectually dismissed God. Now, you had a moment there where you were wavering, but I’m curious just…. Before we go there, what did you think of Christians or Christianity or belief in God at this point? That it was just subpar intellectually? That it’s just some wishful thinking or fairy tale? Give us what you were thinking around that time and why it wasn’t an intellectually viable option for you. Okay, so that’s a great question, Jana. I had some Christian friends, friends that referred to themselves as Christians, in middle school, high school, college, people calling themselves Christians. I remember having friends invite me to youth group, and I said, “What is youth group?” because this is like Christian-speak. I didn’t know what youth group was. So they were like, “Oh, it’s when people from our church get together, and we talk about God and stuff.” And I was like, “Well, no, I don’t want to do that.” I wasn’t interested in that. But a lot of it was because the morality that I was keeping was actually superior to the morality that my friends were keeping, right? And so I remember having this friend who was involved with her boyfriend in an immoral way, and she was a Christian and she would say, “Well, God will forgive me,” and that was like what she would say. And I just thought, “Well, if that’s Christianity, I don’t like that.” Now, keep in mind, to me…. Okay, so one is the Christians that I knew, unfortunately, they just did not really… they were not holding to their convictions. So they would say, “I believe this,” but they weren’t really doing it. But there was the occasional Christian that wasn’t like that and that was really appealing to me. So as an atheist, there were these couple Christians that I knew, and now looking back, I wish that I could get in touch with them again and be like, “You were a good example for me!” But people who cared about me and who wanted me to know God. But the other piece of it was I was largely ignorant, okay? So I think sometimes Christians think that atheists know more than they do. And I understand that some atheists have really researched, and they know all about Christianity, and they’ve read the whole Bible, and they have chosen to reject the actual tenets of Christianity that they have read and studied and read the Bible, and they have chosen to reject it. But I think that a lot of atheists, including myself, were like straw man argument, okay? So we have this illusion of what Christians are, and we are rejecting that. So I was rejecting Christians, okay? I was rejecting a faith in an unknown God because I couldn’t see Him, touch Him, feel Him. But I really didn’t know Christianity as far as the gospel, and we’ll get to that in a little bit. But the things that I knew: When I was in college, we took kind of a comparative religion class, and I thought, “Okay, I’m going to choose a religion. So Jews have the law, right? And they like….” Okay, so what I knew, what I understood was: There’s the Ten Commandments. You keep these laws and that kind of stuff. I thought, “Oh, well, that sounds kind of good. A religion where you keep laws, that sounded good to me.” Or other kinds of religions where they were very…. Rule-based faiths sounded more appealing to me than what I knew about Christianity. But, once again, a lot of it was ignorance. And if there is one thing that I really hope that some people will understand, it’s that sometimes you’re rejecting something that you have not really studied and learned about and that you really know what it is that the person actually believes. And not just, “Oh, well, I met this Muslim guy this one time, and I didn’t like him, so I don’t want to be a Muslim.” I met Christians, and I didn’t like some of them. Therefore, I didn’t w…
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