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Anti-theist Surprised by God – Jeff Dockman’s Story (Audio) Nov 26, 2021

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Former atheist Jeff Dockman wanted nothing to do with religion. Over time, his presumptions about the world, and his place in it, ceased to make sense and he began to consider the possibility of God. The CS Lewis Institute: www.cslewisinstitute.org Jeff’s recommended authors and books: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis, Miracles Alvin Plantinga Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side to see how someone flips the record of their life. Each podcast, we listen to someone’s who’s been an atheist and became a Christian. Through listening to their story, we can appreciate both sides from someone who’s been there. If you believe in God, you can see how someone might dismiss the ideas of God, religion, and Christianity. If you don’t believe in God, perhaps you can see how someone who once resisted God moves towards belief. But as for all of us, what we believe in affects our understanding of who we are, our identity. In fact, our identity can be shaped by many things. How we see ourselves, how others see us, what we do, the group we’re a part of, who we want to be, or how we feel. Our identity can be shaped by our friends, our family, our life experiences, our desires. For atheists, there is a sense of freedom in creating your own identity without restraint. Free thinkers who form their own identity, their sense of self. Sometimes our identity can also be shaped by knowing who you don’t want to be, a soft anti-identity. We don’t want to be a part of a group of people that seems culturally irrelevant, judgmental, unscientific, hypocritical, uneducated, weak, narrow minded. Pick your adjective. These are terms often used for the religious. We want our identity to be as far from that as possible. That is where our story begins today but not where it ends. The sense of rejection of the religious identity. Jeff moved from an atheist identity to take on the identity of the group he once despised, Christians. How in the world did that dramatic shift happen? I hope you’ll listen in today to see how this story plays out. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jeff. It’s wonderful to have you on today. Hi, Jana. It’s great to be here. You’re a familiar voice to me. We met several years ago. We both have a mutual affiliation with the C.S. Lewis Institute here in Atlanta, and so that’s where I got to know you a little bit and got to know a little bit about your story, so having you on the program today is truly exciting for me, because I know the dramatic changes that you have made in your life. In fact, you’re doing some pretty amazing things now in terms of even your current study of theology at the graduate level. Can you talk with me a little bit about just who you are now and what you do, so everyone gets a chance to know a little bit about who you are. Yeah, sure. So I work as a software manager at an engineering company here in the Atlanta area, I’m still in school, but I have switched my major from theology to Old Testament. I just had a lot of interest in looking deeper into the Old Testament, the history of the text transmission and things like that. So that’s my current focus in school, working on a Masters of Arts in Old Testament Studies right now. I know, in your story, you’ve come a long way from where you were, from your atheism. So why don’t we start at the beginning, in your childhood, and give me a sense of the home in which you grew up, your family, perhaps your friends and the culture. Was there God in that world at all before you had a sense of your atheism? Tell me about that. It’s a very interesting question because there was God in the sense that some members of my family would consider themselves Catholic from an upbringing perspective, but there was not God in the sense that we ever went to church or prayed or talked about God or anything like that. So we’d occasionally get together, and when my grandparents were in town, for example, my stepmother’s parents, they would pray, and they were pretty devout in their faith, so they would go to church. We would say grace for supper every night, even though that was about the only time we talked about God. Other than when my Dad would hit his hand with a hammer or something like that, and then I heard God’s name quite often. Okay, yeah. But growing up we didn’t really have much interaction with other Christian families. My friends, there were no Christians in my peer group, at least not that I knew of. If they were, they were closet Christians. Primarily I hung out with people that were pretty much humanists and a lot of interest in the occult and anti-Christian sentiment. So a lot of it was rooted in some of the punk rock culture and the New Wave/industrial music scene and things like that. So a lot of the people that I hung out with could consider themselves Wiccans or witches or humanists or even Satanists in many cases. Not a lot of Christians. So, Jeff, as you were growing up, you had some dots of religiosity with a dinner prayer, that kind of thing, but it’s obviously not something that your family took on with any serious nature. As a child, it sounds like it was just part of the routine but nothing more, but I would imagine that these humanist friends that you had, was that more towards like middle school, early teen? Or high school? Tell me about when you started hanging out with these friends. It was really late middle school and going into high school, I guess, is where that really started. And just one point from the earlier comment. I do remember one time clearly going to Mass with my stepmother’s parents, and my dad went with me, and I remember as we walked into the Mass, they had the holy water set to the side, so that you could genuflect, make the sign of the cross and all of that, and I remember watching my grandparents, step grandparents, go in and dip their fingers in the water and cross themselves, and as a young kid, I wanted to emulate that behavior, and I remember reaching over to touch the water and my dad pushing my hand away. So it was a very interesting dichotomy because, on the one hand, we’d do these supper prayers. On the other hand, when we are engaging these rituals in a Mass setting, it’s something he didn’t want me to participate in. And it’s funny because I’ve never talked to him about it. I never really thought much about it. But it’s just an interesting contrast. Yeah. It makes you wonder why he would almost endorse a ritual in one sense but not in another. Yeah. I’m sure that was a little bit confusing for you. It was. But as a nice young person I just put it aside and didn’t think about it for years. Yeah, yeah. I’m sure. So your impression of God or religion or Christianity at that time, growing up, particularly in your teenage years, as you were, it sounds like, part of a group that was rejecting all of that. Did you have any views towards religious people or institutions? Yeah. That’s a great question. And I think that actually gets at the root of what my religiosity was. Because it was really focused on people. And I’ve told a number of people over the years that, as an atheist, I actually wasn’t a very educated atheist. I was educated in my observation of people but not educated earlier on in the way atheists approached questions about who God is and the historicity of the Gospel accounts or things like that. So it was very much a focus on people, and even more so a focus on how I perceived Christian people to be, particularly with my peer group and my desires as a young man. It was primarily centered around hedonistic enjoyments, and so for me, Christians were those that were trying to take away any fun out of life, take away the joys of life. Yeah. And that’s interesting, especially related to even the… perhaps not only the activities that you were involved that were no doubt pleasurable on some level, but also you hinted that there was some kind of dark spirituality that you were even interested in. I’m curious about that aspect of your kind of pushing away from one form of spirituality but actually engaging in another. I think on some level there was a part of me that wanted to believe in something more, and I remember, at a younger age, maybe earlier middle school or sometime in middle school, reading The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart, which was talking about King Arthur legends and Merlin and things like that, and I remember at one point—part of the story line centers around Mithraism and the idea that perhaps Merlin was this Mithraist and that’s where his power came from, and I don’t remember the story that well, but I do remember the aspects of Mithraism, and so I recall walking to the bus stop one morning and tying this little spruce branch around a tree and sort of doing this little offering idea, and I think I was always enchanted by the idea that there’s something greater, but I didn’t really believe in it, particularly as I got older. So while I had friends that were involved in Wiccan religion and some paganism, I didn’t really have the sense that there was this devil that would listen to you if you decided to become a Satanist or that you could influence nature as a witch or anything like that. But I wanted it to be true on some level. And, in fact, I embraced the humanistic aspects of Satanism, to the point that I had a copy of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible and read through that and was really enamored with that sort of mindset. I know that the humanistic impetus in that movement is very strongly that you’re the captain of your own ship and a very strong sense of autonomy and control over your own destiny. Was that appealing to you? Oh, absolutely! A big part of that is, “If it feels good, do it,” and I think our modern culture even has quite a sense of that as well, which is, “If it feels good, it can’t be wrong unless it starts to encroach on somebody else’s boundaries.” And so, for me, that was a very appealing message, and again, as young man with a desire to have the sensual enjoyment in life, that was very compelling, to say, “Whatever feels good to you, go ahead and and do it.” So in a sense, then, you were involved with friends and your particular culture that was pushing away, I guess almost an anti-God sensibility, from religion and religious things, but at the same time, you said that you were focused on the people and that there was a negative hue or a negative perception of Christians and Christianity. What informed that? Was that informed by the actual experience with Christians? Or was it something that was informed more by what people were saying and what you perhaps wanted to hear? That’s a really good question. I think that some aspects of it were certainly informed by the media, and in particular, this was growing up as a teenager in the eighties and watching MTV and music videos. As an eighties kid, there was a lot of push back against the culture. I remember—I was speaking about it to somebody the other day—the Genesis video with Ronald Reagan and just this idea to push back against authority. And then Reagan and Nancy and the Moral Majority and all of those influences, where you’re looking at this media imagery of far right people wanting to put censorship labels on music. And you just sort of built this view of Christians as this vocal group of people that want to take away anything that you might enjoy. But again, I wasn’t really informed by a lot of direct personal experience with individuals. It was more of a collective thing. I see. Yeah. Because it sounds like there weren’t a lot of Christians, I suppose, in your world. No. Not at all. I would imagine, too, that it would be easy to develop a bit of an us/them kind of mentality and strengthen your understanding or perception of who you think someone is without direct engagement. That’s a very easy thing to do. Absolutely. So you were developing this sense of identity, this, I would imagine, anti-Christian identity, informed by your friends and the culture, your moral choices. Was there anything else involved in that? Perhaps education or your view of science or anything else that contributed to that push back against Christians and Christianity? As I said, I wasn’t a terribly educated atheist. In fact, I’m much more educated in atheist arguments at this point in life than I was at that age. But I did think that science was the answer to everything, so it was, in a sense, my religion. Although again—I was a smart kid. I had a good education. I understood basic scientific principles. But I did not really have a clear sense of all the different lines of argumentation that I’m aware of today. Nevertheless, I still felt like the earth began with the big bang and everything evolved, and where was the need for God in all of that? Science could explain all the questions that we have. And religion was just some holdover from a time where people didn’t have any understanding of the universe they lived in. So I absolutely held that prejudice, but again, it wasn’t a terribly well-informed prejudice. It was just something that I inherited by default. So Jeff, it sounds like, again, you were pretty well comfortable with your identity as an atheist. How old were you, by the way, when you really identified yourself with that label. I think the first time I applied that to myself was when I joined the Army. In fact, when I joined the Army and they were issuing my dog tags, they ask you for your religious preference. And I had never really thought much about it as a question, and so I put atheist on there as my religious preference, and it was, I think, the first time I had ever thought enough about it to say, “This is what I am.” Later, I remember having to get dog tags reissued, and they refused to put atheist on there for some reason. It was very strange. So I put agnostic, but I really still considered myself an atheist. And I think I did teeter back and forth a little bit, only because it seemed like atheist was such a firm position to take, and how much can we truly know? So while I was functionally an atheist, sometimes I would label myself as an agnostic. So then, Jeff, walk us along. Tell us what seemed to move you in a different direction. What seemed to cause you to perhaps question this identity or the way that you were thinking about God and Christians and Christianity? It’s a difficult question to answer on some levels because I don’t really know when the transformation of thinking began. When I look back at the influences that stuck with me, many of them were things that happened, but I didn’t recognize until later that they had some impact. So for example, as a 19-year-old person with an attitude, I had a Jehovah’s Witness come to my door, and he wanted to talk to me. And I was feeling particularly obstinate that day, so I invited him in, and he started talking to me about what he believed, and at some point in the discussion, he was talking about the Bible, and I said, “Well, what makes yours more valid than mine?” And he said, “Well, what do you mean?” And I walked back and I brought out LaVey’s Satanic Bible. And I fully expected this to have the guy kind of walk out on me, and he didn’t. He stayed and engaged. And I had asked a number of questions, and I remember, several days after he had visited, he came back, and he had a stack of papers that he had printed out that had answers to a number of the questions that I had asked. And I never even looked at them. I threw them away. And to this day, I’m not even completely sure he was Jehovah’s Witness because I don’t really remember, but he knocked on the door and wanted to talk about God. But looking back, I recognize the impact that that had on me, because this guy believed what he was selling enough to come back to an obstinate kid and want to give him the education, to give him the answers that the kid was asking for. So things like that, as I look bac…

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Conversion, Deconversion, Reconversion – Jim Thring’s Story (Audio) Nov 12, 2021

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A Christian for 15 years, Jim rejected his faith and identified as an humanist-atheist for nine years. Although he could not see a possible return to God, he found a more robust faith than he had once left. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we hear how someone flips the record of their life from atheism to Christianity. Each podcast, we typically listen to the story of someone who was an atheist and became a Christian. Today’s story is a little bit different. Jim was a Christian who became an atheist, who then found a more robust form of Christianity and reconverted. A commited Christian for 15 years, he left Christianity in his mid 30s and passionately identified as a humanist atheist for nine years. During that time, he genuinely could not see how he could possibly go back to believing in God again, and yet he did, with his faith even stronger for the experience. I hope you’ll come and listen and explore Jim’s extraordinary story with me. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jim. It’s so great to have you! It’s good to be talking with you. I love that English accent. Having gone to school there. I’m sure our listeners will really appreciate it, too. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, Jim? Well, as you know, my name is Jim and I’m from the UK. I live in Swindon currently, which is about 80 miles west of London, actually not that far from Oxford. But I was brought up in London, in the east side of London, a place called Rainham, and now I live in Swindon. I am an IT audit manager. I’ve worked in IT for about 15 to 20 years. I’m married to Liz, and I have two kids, one Hannah, who’s just recently gotten married despite the COVID-19 situation and the various lockdowns that we’ve had. And I have a son who’s just finished secondary school, and he’s started college now. So that’s us. Family of four. And I’m in my late 40s, and yeah. So that’s a brief introduction to me. That’s terrific. It certainly gives us an idea of who you are and where you are in the world, really. And congratulations on your daughter’s wedding. Thank you. That’s really wonderful. So let’s go back to your childhood, it sounds like in East London, where you grew up, to get your story started. Was God any part of the picture at all among your family and your friends and even around your local culture? Well, I wasn’t brought up a Christian, but I was fairly ambivalent towards faith and religion, I’d say, generally. I would probably describe my upbringing as a very typical British upbringing where, when it comes to faith, and in particular Christianity, my views about Christianity were formed mostly through the lens of popular cultural influences and references, like Christmas and I can remember Nativity plays. I think my idea of Jesus was formed mostly through a film called Jesus of Nazareth that starred an actor called Robert Powell, who is a classic blue eyed, dark haired European-looking man who kind of wandered the hills of Palestine sort of listfully floating around, making short sentence statements about different parables and perhaps not easily understood who was just a nice man who was mistreated by Roman soldiers, and I think that’s pretty much all I knew about Jesus. And my idea of religion was that it was just something that was there. I neither was against faith and religion or for it. You probably know that, in the UK, we have a long history when it comes to Christianity and the church. We have the Church of England, and we have a lot of pageantry and a lot of traditions, so I just saw Christianity as something that was very much tied to the Church of England, old churches, old parishes, and effectively just Christianity was a way of being nice and being good but wrapped up in religious ritual, I think is probably how I kind of saw it. And my parents, they didn’t go to church. And again, I think they had a similar view, that Christianity was something that was nice but not something that we particularly were invested in, and religion was okay, as long as it was on balance and that you kept your feet firmly on the ground, and I think probably that there was a sense of right and wrong that I had as a young person, but I didn’t really think about where that morality came from. I just kind of had that sense that, “Well, if there is a God, I haven’t robbed a supermarket, so I’ll probably be okay.” So that was kind of my view of Christianity. Didn’t really give it much thought and was quite happy to, as a young person, explore life and all of life’s opportunities. So it sounds like you had a pretty good childhood and a nice family, a nice life. You did good things. You were a moral person, just along with the culture. So did you explore what you did believe? If you didn’t believe in religious institutions or in religious tenets, that they were nice stories or cultural rituals but not much more than that, did you consider what you did believe at that point? Or was it just kind of going with the flow? I think it was going with the flow more than anything, and I think that… I was brought up in the eighties in my teenage years, and I don’t know about [UNKNOWN 07:54], but I think, for me, the term atheist tended to have negative connotations of some sort. I don’t know why, but I tended to think that. So I wouldn’t have described myself as an atheist. I just didn’t really have any passionate views on faith or religion, and I didn’t know much about religion. A lot of that changed, though, when I went to university, and it was… When I went to Dundee University in Scotland that was a story of coming to terms with the future that I was stepping into. I was doing a degree, but I was struggling with whether that degree was actually the degree that I wanted to do, asking questions about where it would lead to, and I think I did have periods of reflection as a young man at university who embraced all of the social benefits, as I saw them, of being at a university, going out to pubs and drinking and socializing and all of that kind of thing And I found myself faced with the kind of life questions I think that a lot of people do ask themselves about life’s meaning and life’s purpose and where I was going. And the turning point for me was when I realized that I wasn’t really taking care of myself, and I was struggling with motivation, particularly to kind of think, “Well, what is the point? I could get this degree. I could aim for success. But I don’t know what success looks like. I could aim for something in life, but I don’t know what that purpose is,” and I was missing out on a lot of lectures and not doing very well. And I realized, “If I don’t get my act together, my life is just going to take a bit of a tumble, and I need to do something about this.” And so I decided that what I would do is I’d hang around with those friends that I knew who seemed to kind of do life pretty well and were disciplined when it came to study and seemed to be a good influence, and I didn’t really realize this at the time, but it turned out that the group of people that I hung out with were all Christians, and so I found myself in the company of Christians, and the strange thing is that I found out months later that, in the corridor in [UNKNOWN 10:36], where I was staying, I think there were about three or four Christian guys who were all in this corridor, half of whom had actually moved into that corridor in the first term through various reasons, and in fact, I myself had come to be in that corridor because there was a mix-up with the room allocation, so there were all these coincidences that I found out afterwards that led me to being surrounded by Christians. I was tripping over them. Yeah. I would imagine that would’ve been quite unusual, really, in Britain, actually, in the eighties, like you said. It was a nominally Christian culture but really not much more than that. So that is an interesting coincidence of sorts. Yeah. That’s right. And I often put it this way: I accidentally became a Christian. And what I mean by that is I was talking to a visiting friend of the guy opposite me, a chap called Ian, and I was in his room, and this girl, Maggie, was visiting, And she kept talking about this place called Menzieshill, and I thought this was a park or a woodland or something, and eventually, she said, “Would you like to come to Menzieshill, because we’re going this afternoon, and I said, “Sure. Why not?” It was a nice sunny afternoon on a Sunday, so we’re in the back of her car, and I was talking to Ian, and I said, “What kind of park is this Menzieshill? Is it a park with swings and playgrounds and things like that? Is it like open kind of fields?” And he just looked at me incredulously and said, “Menzieshill is a church.” And I remember kind of thinking… I kind of felt two things, really. One, I thought, “Oh, my gosh! What have I done?” And then the other thing I thought was, “Oh, actually it might be quite nice to go to church.” And so I sat in this Church of Scotland Church, and I don’t remember what the sermon was, but I do remember that I had a strong sense of being like a child and a sense that there was something here where there was a second chance, a second opportunity for me to do life differently. And the long story short, I went through this journey of discovering the Bible. I read a Gospel that somebody gave me. I was asking questions. And another Sunday we went to the church, and they had communion, and as they were passing around the bread and the wine, I said to Ian, “Should I take this?” And he said, “Well, you ought to be a Christian if you’re taking Communion,” and I said to him, “Well, my mom and dad never christened me when I was a child because they thought faith needs to be your own decision. We won’t baptize you as a young infant,” And this is almost embarrassing, I thought the word Christian came from christened. It didn’t dawn on me that the word Christian came from Christ. So I assumed in my head that a Christian was someone who’d been baptized as an infant and had been through some kind of ceremony and declared by a vicar or a priest as a Christian and perhaps given some kind of scroll or certificate or something like that. And so I said to Ian, “I wasn’t christened,” and he said, “No, no, no. It doesn’t matter. That’s not that, but you should be a Christian,” and then afterwards, when we had a conversation about this, I realized that we were getting our wires crossed, and I said to Ian, “I’m getting confused here. What is a Christian?” And when he told me that a Christian is someone who believes in Jesus and has decided to follow Him and that this was a personal decision that you made, not something that you are granted by an official, I said him, “Well, I did that last Wednesday,” and he said, “Well, then you’re a Christian.” And this was news to me. And the reason why is because it suddenly dawned on me that faith and religion can be quite different things. It’s one thing to have faith in and to follow and be committed to the person of Jesus Christ. It’s another thing to just adopt a religious framework and all of the kind of things and trappings that come with that. And I was amazed by that. That was a real revelation to me because, again, having come from no Christian background at all, I was relieved and amazed and very grateful that actually I could call myself a Christian. Based not on meeting certain requirements of an institution. So that was how I first became a Christian. At the age of 19 at university in Scotland in Dundee. And remained a Christian for 15 years. So obviously something happened. But before we get to that, so your experience as a Christian for those… did you say 15 years? Yeah. How was your experience as a Christian? Before you decided that wasn’t for you? So I was very committed, and I was part of a very strong Christian union at the university, read my Bible, prayed, shared the gospel where I could on campus, and after university, I spent a year on mission in Kenya with an organization called Africa Inland Mission, teaching at a school and preaching in a church just southeast of Nairobi. And then I came back to Dundee, and by this stage, it was the mid nineties, and stayed in Scotland for a short while and then moved back to London and attended a church there, where I met my wife, Liz, and we had our daughter Hannah. And so my faith continued, and I was certainly very committed. If people ask, “Well, were you really a Christian? Did you really give your life to God? Were you really committed?” The answer to that is absolutely yes. I was a Christian. I understood the Gospel. I’d responded to it. And I had committed my life to Christ and chose to follow him. I think what happened, though, is you don’t just suddenly wake up one night and decide that you’re going to throw all that away. And it’s a long story. Lots of different things happened, but I think that probably the way I would summarize it, to begin with, is that I started, over years, to lose the simplicity of the Gospel. My faith, which was based on the Person I knew, became more about what I knew and whether I was right about things. And so the relationship with God kind of took the back stage, and what was front and center stage was more whether I was right about different things. It was the Gospel plus I have to have this doctrine right, and I have to be right on this nature of Christian walk and Christian living, and I think that, coupled with the kind of daily grind of life. Trying to cut out a career. Trying to cope with domestic life. And also I think when you go out into the outside world. I found that there were good people who were not Christians. I mean according them good in the sense of broadly speaking the way one might use that term. But they were people who were getting on with life who didn’t have faith, and I think that, if faith becomes ordinary and mundane, it just becomes less distinct. The Christian faith can become less distinct from any other religion or any other view, and I think that there are also areas of my life where perhaps there were compromises, not necessarily big compromises, but I think that what I found was that my life outside of church just looked very different from my life on a Sunday, and so I almost found myself living this dual life, really, where there was a kind of Christian side to me, and it was compartmentalized away from the rest of me, which was all about trying to get on with life, trying to achieve things, trying to do well in my job, trying to get on with the people who I worked with, all of those kind of things. And I think that’s what kind of happened over the years. And there was also this sense that your faith and Christianity becomes more complex in the sense of we all have to face into the fact that there are different denominations, there are different churches, that Christians don’t agree on everything, but I think that, for me, what I think happened was that truth mattered, certainly mattered to me, and continued to matter to me, but I found myself feeling that my Christian life was so far away from the lives of those who I worked with who weren’t Christians that it became very much an us and them kind of situation. And it felt like Christianity and church was just becoming a smaller and smaller island, if you like, of people who agree with you. And that was how I started to see it. From an emotional level I found myself struggling with trying to balance the kind of working life and the pressures of life with what faith meant to me on a daily basis. And I think intellectually I did have questions, but to begin with, I think those questions weren’t necessarily initially a challenge to my faith in the sense that they would necessarily lead me to reject my faith. I think what happened is a combination of all of these different things that kind of brought me to a point where, agai…

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Celebrating One Year of The Side B Podcast(Audio) Nov 01, 2021

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Please celebrate our One Year Anniversary with us! With 27 episodes, more than 100,000 listens from around the world, and so much more to come, we are very grateful for your continued support. Our hope and prayer is that these stories will continue to make a difference in the lives of many.

Questioning Life’s Questions – Jeremy Evans’ Story(Audio) Oct 29, 2021

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Former skeptic Jeremy Evans comfortably presumed his atheism was true until a sobering event caused him to ask life’s biggest questions. Dream Center Non-Profit: www.dreamcenterevansville.org Unbelievable Podcast Link Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has been an atheist and also been a Christian. Through listening to their story, we listen to both perspectives, from someone who has thought and lived on the other side. At different points in our lives, we all ask the big questions. Who am I? What am I doing with my life? What am I pursuing or not? What’s wrong with me? What, if anything, can make my life better? Where am I looking for answers? Am I looking in all the wrong places? Or am I on the right path? How can I know which way to go? Who’s telling the truth? Who can I trust? We ask the questions, but that doesn’t mean we really are looking for answers, but sometimes different circumstances force our hand and cause us to take a closer look. They prompt us to stop and ask the big questions, to actually search for answers. Suddenly, all the temporary noise and busyness and distractions are removed. We look more closely at ourselves and our lives to not only ask probing questions of ourselves, whether we’ve been pursuing the right path, but also to find answers in order to make sense of our lives. Life interruptions can also make us wonder whether or not there is a God. Is God the key that can help us answer our big questions? Is He real? Can He be found? Does He have anything to say that can help us make sense of our lives? Our podcast guest today, Jeremy Evans, had a devastating circumstance that caused him to take a closer look at his own life to see if atheism held the answers he needed or whether he should look for something else, something different, something more. Come along with me to listen to his story. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jeremy. It’s wonderful to have you with us today! Good morning. Thank you for having me. As we’re getting started, Jeremy, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? Yeah. So I am from Pekin, Illinois, which is a little town outside of Peoria, and currently reside in Evansville, Indiana, with my wife and three kids. My kids are nine, seven, and six, and I work for a Christian nonprofit organization here in Evansville that does neighborhood revitalization and work with kids and families to try to connect them to God’s will for their life and help them be successful and self sufficient. Sounds wonderful. I’d love to hear more about that, perhaps later as we’re talking about what you’re doing now. But let’s get started back at the beginning of your story, because I know that you weren’t always interested in Christian ministry, for sure. You were a long way from that. So I know that you were a former atheist, and I want to know how that really birthed in you, what your beginnings were, how you grew up with your family, and their view of God and how that informed you. Yeah, so I’m the eldest of three sons in my family, and I remember at an early age not going to church, and I remember my dad’s father, my grandfather, taking me to church at a very young age separate from the rest of my family. And I remember it was the kind of church experience where they would give the kids something to doodle on, and then eventually, they would bring the kids up to the front, and the pastor would talk just to the kids for a little while, and then they’d send the kids off to Sunday School. And I remember kind of being a ham, which is kind of how I grew up. Then the next real experience I remember of church was a Baptist church in our hometown in Pekin that we got involved with primarily because of sports. So I remember my brothers playing in basketball tournaments. I remember—it’s a funny story. My dad actually coached me and my brothers in baseball growing up, and I remember the only time my dad got thrown out of a baseball game was actually by the pastor of that church. He was the umpire, and he threw my dad out, and I remember thinking, “That’s a substantial moment, when your pastor throws you out of a baseball game.” Yes, yes. But I would say, in childhood, only real experience of church was connected to sports. And then I grew up, was in high school and then college. And in college it was a really interesting mix because I attended a Christian music festival called Cornerstone in Illinois, and I had friends who were connected to faith, and I remember that vividly, but then kind of moved away from those friend circles and ended up in a circle of people who I wouldn’t say were hostile to faith but just really didn’t care. It just really wasn’t a significant part of that group of friends’ lives. And so I remember being sort of swayed, not necessarily in the direction of atheism, but just kind of away from things of faith through that time in my life. Jeremy, as you were growing up, all the way through high school, because a lot of people, especially through their teenage years, start to question what is church? Or who is God? And what is all of this? Did you have any belief in God? I mean, you were going to church-related activities, but was there anything personal about God to you at all? Or was it just kind of in the periphery of what you were doing in sports? Yeah. So I would certainly say nothing like what I have now. Nothing even close. My parents, for better or worse, just didn’t. We just didn’t go there. We just didn’t talk about faith-related things. We didn’t get the opportunity to deal with big picture questions about life and death. But there was never any kind of—the Bible wasn’t part of our lives growing up. It just wasn’t a significant influence, if that makes sense, and so no, there was no personal connection to it at all. It was very much something that was just in the periphery, and I never really had an experience that I could draw on in my childhood and say that it was sort of a formative spiritual experience. Although you did have some Christian friends. Would you say that those Christian friends took their faith seriously? I think it was more of a social structure than anything else. Heavy focus on music, and I had several friends who were in Christian bands and walking through that particular cultural landscape. I would say it was more of a social focus than anything. It was more of a, “Let’s get together. Let’s hang out. And this is kind of a unifying bond between us.” But I don’t remember any significant Bible studies. I don’t remember any significant, again, formative experiences that drew all that together. It was more just something to do. So it was really more of a nonissue in your life, it seems, until you got to college, and then you started kind of leaving whatever that social construct was, Christianity or God, and started becoming acquainted with perhaps some other ways of thinking. That’s what you do at university, right? You meet new people, you encounter new ideas, and tell me about that time in your life. Yeah. So I would, unfortunately, given the current cultural landscape, I would draw some of this almost back to politics. I remember sort of the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case as having really impacted me towards a more liberal way of thinking and a more liberal way of processing the world. And I really tied those sort of political ideas to my personal beliefs about the world, and so I started to explore what more liberal voices were saying, and I’ll go back to, again, got married during this process, and the individual—my first wife, so we’re now divorced. But my first wife had no real connection to religion in her life, her family. No real connection to religion in our family. And so that was a formative experience in terms of getting married to that person and almost affirming that idea, that you can live sort of independent from these things. And as I continued to explore those more liberal ideas, I sort of found myself drawn to the idea that Christians could be sort of lazy in terms of their intellectual thinking and processing, and I was heavily turned off by the idea that a Christian would say that something was a mystery or that God was mysterious. It felt very much like a cop-out to me. And so I started reading Dawkins, started reading Harris. Letter to a Christian Nation was an important book for me during that time, and I would say it was more accidental than anything but eventually started to call myself an atheist. Accidentally. Yeah. It’s funny because the end of the story kind of goes the same way for me. I wasn’t part of Facebook groups. I wasn’t out bragging about it or trying to convert people or anything. It was more just that, on analysis and on reviewing the available information, I had sold myself that bill of goods and said, “This is how it’s going to be.” And so I think almost because faith was not an important factor, it almost felt like atheism was just as not an important factor in my life. Because the whole idea of faith was just so foreign. So as you were embracing somewhat I guess intellectually but perhaps not in a truly embodied way this atheism that you had intellectually assented to, obviously there are some very strong ideas in those books in terms of what God is, what religious faith is. Were you being informed about God and Christianity in those negative terms? Was that something that became a part of your way of thinking and vocabulary about faith? Or was it just kind of a nonissue? You didn’t really care one way or another about faith and religion. No. I think, because of the political component of it, I became really convinced that I could justify my beliefs about faith based on Christian misbehavior, as it were. So when I saw Christians doing and saying hypocritical things, when I saw Christians—it felt like at the time, and we know this to be true, that you don’t have to go very far without seeing a Christian leader sort of fail or fall or struggle with their own personal demons and individual issues, and I let all of those things sort of justify my belief. I kind of let the people do the talking as it related to whether I thought Christianity was something worth exploring, rather than letting the Gospel do the talking. So that was sort of a slippery slope, and I would say, if you set aside the Gospel and set aside what the Bible says and just base your belief about Christianity on just what you see coming out of the lives of Christians, unfortunately, I think you can justify pretty much any worldview that you really want to, based on what you see Christians doing. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. It does. I mean, like you say, you can look at any worldview and look at the warts and all, as you would see them, and then justify yourself or your own worldview. That would be an easy thing to do because we’re all fallen people, right? Yeah. Ideas aren’t pure, in a sense, but like you say sometimes it’s easy to look at the people who call themselves Christians and accuse God, rather than, like you say, looking at the Gospel or the Bible. So in your mind, I guess, Christianity and religion itself was really nothing but a social construct, as you mentioned earlier. So it wasn’t really much worth thinking about at that time. So, as you’re moving along and you’re seeing that atheism… You’ve kind of taken on that identity. You put on that hat. How was that working for you in a sense? I know you read Harris and Dawkins, but did you really look into the grounding for atheistic ideas or the implications of where those ideas go? No. And it’s funny, because when I was reading those, what I recognize as like the American pop cultural atheism books, I was feeding myself a line that, “Well, I’m going to be more intellectual than Christians, and I’m actually going to seek out the answers for myself, and I’m going to actually do the work intellectually to figure out the answers to these questions, and the reality was that I was just sort of taking a very surface level dive into those issues, finding what justified me, and then moving on down the road. And so I recognize that now, but at the time—and probably largely because it just wasn’t a very important part of my life, as I said. It wasn’t something that factored in in a deep way, and so I didn’t feel a need or a connection to try to study that in a deep way. The other thing I would say is that, again sort of driven by social constructions, I had surrounded myself at that point in my life with people who had similar beliefs and thought processes to what we’re describing here, and so it was very easy to justify sort of just going about my business, and I was never really challenged by the people around me to think about things any differently. Yeah. It is easy to do, isn’t it? Unfortunately. And that exists in the world today. We tend to surround ourselves with that echo chamber of people who we know are going to speak and think and feel the same way we speak and think and feel because that helps justify us, right? It helps us feel good about how we feel. And even today I struggle with that. Yeah. I think we’re all tempted towards that. So what was it, then, that perhaps breached your life or caused you to stop and think a little bit more closely about your atheistic identity or worldview and perhaps become open to another perspective? Yeah. So Andy Stanley says that you can—this is a terrible paraphrase—but you can do the intellectual thing with someone who’s not a Christian until you’re blue in the face, but the reality is that it takes more than an intellectual approach to get somebody over the line of faith. It almost takes some sort of emotional catalyst to get them thinking differently about their life and about the world around them, and that was certainly true for me. My wife at the time left me and was unfaithful, and that was sort of a shock to the system, right? That was sort of a seminal moment for me personally because I just was lost. I was completely shocked by that, completely blown away, and really didn’t know what to do. And it really turned my whole life upside down in a good way, looking back now. At the time, it didn’t feel like a good way, but it got me really thinking about everything in my life and about whether I was making good choices and whether I was spending time with the right people and those sorts of things. I can’t imagine what that would feel like. I know that your life probably was turned upside down, inside out, and it caused you to really, I guess, stop and reconsider your life choices, your life perspectives, and really look more at yourself, I presume? Did that lead you towards thinking, “Well, maybe there’s more to life. Maybe there’s a God who exists. Maybe there’s a better way to make sense of my life.” Was it causing you to ask those kinds of questions? Yeah. It was everything. I try to think about life then, and it’s just really difficult to put in perspective, even, because it was just so wildly different, but really I think there was this foundation underneath me that I had built my life upon that these things are true, these things are not true, and this is how we’re going to live. And it really all got blown up by this experience, and so I really had to step back and sort of live on my own, or live with my own perspective, rather than sort of cheating and taking some of those things for granted, if that makes sense. So it was this, I guess, time in the wilderness, as it were. When your life is, like you say, kind of blown up and you’re in this new place and you’re trying to figure things out. Did it cause you to just want to meet new or different people or reconsider or atheism? Did you see a problem with the way that you were living or thinking? Or that caused you to reconsider your life choices? Perhaps you wanted to go a different direction. Wha…

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Ivy league Atheist Finds Christ – Rachel Gilson’s Story(Audio) Oct 15, 2021

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Former skeptic Rachel embraced atheism until her intellectual curiosity regarding God’s existence led her to Jesus. Learn more about Rachel and her book at www.rachelgilson.com Recommended Resources: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis Confronting Christianity by Rebecca McLaughlin Reason for God by Tim Keller Episode Transcript Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Rachel. It’s so great to have you with me today. It’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks. Wonderful. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me, and tell the listeners, a little bit about yourself before we get into your story? Yeah. Well, I’m a California sojourner in New England. I currently work for Cru, formerly Campus Crusade for Christ, on the national theological development and culture team. I write a little bit. I speak a little bit. I parent a 7-year-old a little bit, so that’s a little bit of where I am right now in life. And you’re pursuing a PhD at the moment as well? Yes. I’m working on my PhD in public theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Okay. Wonderful, wonderful. Well, maybe we’ll hear a little bit more about those bits and pieces as we go. As we’re starting with your story, as you know, this podcast is talking with former atheists who found their way from atheism to Christianity, and sometimes that’s quite a long journey, from one ideology to the other and one life to another, but it all starts somewhere, and I’d like to start with your childhood and your culture, your family, your community, just kind of how you grew up. Shape that for us. Tell us how your journey or your story started. Was God in that story at all as a child? Yeah. I love context. I was a history major in college, so these are my favorite. Yes, context means a lot. Context is a big one. Yeah. So the bigger context is my mother had grown up in a practicing Catholic household but not really serious. She ditched it at a young age, so by the time she was raising me, nothing of that was in her life. She had really gone far away from Catholic doctrinal teaching, moral teaching, all of that. My dad similarly didn’t have religion in his life when he was raising me. He had grown up not church going at all, like poor in the hills of Appalachia. He had met some Jesus people along the way, he says, but there was just no faith in his life, even as a young boy, so by the time my parents were bringing up my brother and I, we were just never in the church, not even Christmas or Easter. It just wasn’t a thing that was talked about. It wasn’t a part of our fabric. Now, the community I grew up in is north of Santa Barbara, California, and sometimes people here California and think really, really liberal, and obviously that’s true, but actually where I grew up was very rural, in a lot of ways conservative. My high school had a working farm on it and a place where you could tie up your horse, like that kind of rural. The town it was in literally had one stop light. And so I knew that a lot of people around me were churchgoers, but as a child, I didn’t really know what that meant. It was just sort of a fact in people’s lives, and I never really thought about it as a kid. So there was no childhood belief in God, no prayer, I mean- Nothing. … there was nothing in there to give you a context for that kind of belief at all. No. I did have some babysitters when I was a young girl who were Mormons, and I have a distinct memory of… they had a picture on their wall, you know, of that feather-haired 1970s white Jesus who’s staring softly into the middle distance? Yes, yes. And I remember sort of making fun of that picture and getting a timeout for making fun of Jesus. So that was my first real encounter with Jesus as a concept. Wow. All right. So that was your childhood, and so, as you were getting older and going to school, still no cultural or contextual references, even for Christmas or things like that? Well, Christmas I loved, but it was definitely that weird porridge of Santa and Rudolph and Baby Jesus and Frosty the Snowman. It’s a little unclear what Baby Jesus had to do with any of it. Right! It was just the full-on tree, presents, commercialism type of thing. And Easter, like I got an Easter basket, but to me, Easter was entirely a rabbit who laid eggs or a rabbit who carried eggs. It’s entirely unclear what exactly is going on there. Chocolate is heavily involved. The resurrection? Not even mentioned. So no religious references at all to those holidays? No, no. Okay. Take us forward a little bit. So you’re growing up in elementary school, and you know, middle school is a time where you start really looking around, questioning, and I imagine you would be a thoughtful, introspective kind of person, or you read that way. Why don’t you tell us about who you were and if you were asking big questions or thinking about those things. I have a distinct memory of being in, like, the fourth grade and sitting up on top of a play structure, kind of looking down on the playground during a recess, and trying to work out whether fate existed or not. Like, “Are my actions all determined beforehand? And if so, does that limit my freedom? Or do I actually have real freedom?” Looking back on that, I think, “Well, that’s sort of a weird thing to be thinking about on the playground as a 9-year-old, but I do know that I’ve always been interested in big ideas. Actually, the summer after my eighth grade year, my grandfather, my mom’s dad, so a very not-practicing Catholic, gave me a bunch of books to read to earn money, and I was really into this. And one of the books was—I think it was popular in the 1950s. It was called The Robe. It was a historical fiction about one of the centurions who was at the crucifixion of Jesus, and so I read this book just because Grandpa assigned it. I remember reading it and thinking, “This is a really interesting story,” and at that point, right on the hinge towards high school, I did start asking a couple of my friends who I knew were churchgoers vaguely religious questions. I don’t remember now what they were, but I was sort of like, “Oh, well they must know some sort of things about this,” and I remember the answers I got just being utterly disappointing, shallow, like not really knowing what I was talking about, and so fairly quickly, I had an association of, like, “Well, maybe Christians aren’t people who think for themselves? Maybe they aren’t people who know what they’re talking about. Maybe it’s just a thing that’s sort of a crutch when you need something happy.” But at that point, my freshman year in high school, I wasn’t necessarily thinking of that in a cruel way or a dismissive way, but it was just where my interviews led me. And I remember even being invited to… The Presbyterian church had a youth group on one of the weeknights, and there was pizza and basketball, and so I would go because that’s where other kids were, but I remember often sitting in the back of the room during presentation time, thinking, “I don’t understand why you need Jesus and God,” so there was a little bit of exposure, but my early exposures really only hardened me against it. I could put it that way. It seemed rather nonsensical, and there was no one there to provide any kind of substantive answer or explanation for what it was or anything like that. So you lost respect for it, essentially. Yeah. I did lose respect for it, and over time in high school, I also lost respect for the Christians my age, so on the one hand, I started to think more and more, “I think the big ideas deserve real answers, and I’m not seeing those in Christianity.” The other thing that I was discovering about myself in high school, which was interesting that’s based on a cultural change we’ve had, but I realized, “Gosh, the way that my peers feel about other young men really is how I feel about other young women.” This was in 2001 when I first realized this and started having romantic and sexual relationships with other young women. This is right before Texas struck down its sodomy law in 2003, right before Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004, so it was just a weird little hinge period as we were moving, but I was also like, “Well, I’m pretty sure that Christians hate gay people, and I want to marry a woman someday, so not only is this intellectually dis-respectable,” is that the way to put it? Intellectually silly. “But it’s hateful for no reason,” and I saw the kids who identified as Christians also at some of the parties that I went to, doing some of the same stupid [UNKNOWN 9:21] things as me. I was like, “Well, at the end of the day, what really is this? It seems to be nothing.” So it was a combination of a lot of things, it sounds like, that really pushed you away from Christianity. It wasn’t intellectually respectable, morally respectable, I presume- Right. … and also those who believed were hypocritical. And what was it pushing you towards? That’s a great question. I really wanted to know what was true. It’s sort of cliché, I guess, but sort of like the true, the good, and the beautiful. I wanted to know what those things were. I took a lot of cues from culture. The kind of things that you read and watch and listen to. There were two high school teachers I had who both identified as atheists, which was kind of cool in my little small cow town, and they were warm, nurturing, wonderful people. And people who took interest in me, who invested in me, who listened to me. I really adored both of them. And so I think that having those type of role models who were so appealing also really helped me think about the fact that a humanistic life, an atheistic life, could be a life of virtue and goodness and of true living. And obviously you respected them. They invested in you. Did they provide, did you think, the answers? Those intellectual answers that you thought were true with regard to atheism? Were you reading? I don’t think they were interested in providing me any types of answers. I think they were interested in just providing me a scaffolding for how to become a thinking person. Which I think is ultimately probably why I respected them. I wasn’t necessarily even asking them the questions. I was looking to them as models for a way to live. So it was during high school, I presume, that you took their role model and you embraced it as your own. Yeah, absolutely. And you would consider yourself an atheist in high school? Oh, definitely. By the time I was a senior in high school, my senior year English teacher, who was one of these teachers, I started affectionately turning in my English papers to her with, instead of my name at the top, I just wrote the word Satan. Kind of antagonistic. Condescending, perhaps? Condescending, yeah. Maybe a little contentious? Arrogant for sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was a jerk, basically. And what do you think informed that sense of condescension or arrogance towards Christians? Part of it’s a personality defect. I think I’m arrogant by disposition. And so if I don’t have any moral check on it, that’s the direction I’m going to go. I’ve heard my whole life that I’m very funny, and one of the things I can absolutely do quickly is decide to use that against people. And the obvious targets in my context were sort of this picture I had of dumb Christians. People who weren’t thinking. That kind of thing. So you embraced the identity of not only same-sex attraction but also atheist. Yeah. Definitely. And so that identity moved you into college? Yeah. So tell me about that. And I was really excited. Again, I grew up in sort of an unimpressive place, but I got into Yale, which was really exciting for me. I thought, “Finally, I’m going to be at a place where I can explore big ideas with like-minded people. Finally, I’m going to be in a place where I can give some elbow room to my sexuality a little more.” I had never actually faced any persecution or anything like that related to my same-sex relationships, but it just—it wasn’t a lot. There wasn’t a big market exactly. I was just like, “I want to get to the broader world.” So I was excited. I showed up in New Haven kind of ready and raring to go, for sure. And what did you find there? Did you find those people who were willing to explore those big ideas? Did you find like-minded atheists? I found everybody who was smarter than me. I imagine there are a lot of smart people at Yale. Everyone who had received better training or was just naturally kind of further ahead than I was. But I did. I found people who were interesting and exciting and wanted to talk about this stuff and also just wanted to have fun. You get assigned in groups each to your freshman counselor, and they make you go to all these meetings at the beginning of the year, so you can talk about things, and we all just liked to complain about it, really. But I remember being in one of these freshman counselor meetings very early in my freshman year, and my counselor was leading us through a conversation. He must have asked something like, “What’s your experience here been like so far?” I’m not exactly sure what the question he asked was, but there was a classmate of mine, a young man, who responded, “You know, I get the sense that a lot of people think that faith or religion is only for stupid people, and I don’t think that’s true at all.” He was clearly speaking from some sort of faith perspective, and he offered that up, and my first response was like, “Yeah, we’ll you’re wrong,” and my freshman counselor was like, “Yeah, can’t you believe how silly and ignorant that is?” So I remember being like, “Wait a minute. Oh, is that not a thing we’re supposed to think?” So that was a weird first little entry point into having my assumption that religion was for idiots questioned. Now, over the course of my time in Yale, I absolutely encountered anti-Christian, anti-religious, sort of condescension or bias or these types of things, so I’m not trying to say that it was a beautiful and only open and affirming type of environment for people with faith, but that moment was really important for me, and there was more toleration and more encouragement of free exchange of thoughts than I think is sometimes portrayed of campus life in places like that. So this was an intellectual place, but obviously everyone did not have the same worldview or ideology. Yeah. Because these are thinking people and were willing to explore ideas, did they really explore—those who were naturalistic or atheistic or materialistic in their understanding of the world—did they explore those, do you think, in depth? Looked at the implications of their worldview? That’s a great question. I fell in quickly with people who were similar to me, and usually, when you’re in groups of people who are similar to you, you don’t spend a lot of time talking about your presuppositions necessarily. You end up more having a lot of stupid, fun conversations, but a lot of conversations more about implications sometimes, you know? Like what does it mean to live well? I’m not sure we phrased it that way. But like who are we supposed to be? What are we supposed to choose? What are the right kinds of things? And mostly refracted through politics. Or maybe not mostly, but politics was definitely a piece of it. Kind of Democrat/Republican types of things. Or policy types of things. Sometimes ethical types of things. I was in a program for freshman. You had to apply into it. That was sort of an intensive course through the humanities of the Western world. So you did philosophy and literature and politics. So a lot of really fun conversations over the classic texts of the Western tradition. So that was fun, too. It was a little more detached from everyday life but still interesting. I remember trying to read John Locke and just, like, throwing it across the room, because I was like, “What is he even saying?” It was pressing the edges. It was what I needed. What I’d encountered in hi…

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Dismantling Caricatures, Building Informed Faith – Mike Bird’s Story(Audio) Oct 01, 2021

Show notes

Former atheist Dr. Mike Bird tells his story of moving from a culturally-informed skepticism and caricatured Christianity to finding that perhaps his presumptions were mistaken. You can find out more about Mike here: Twitter: @mbird12 Blog: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/ Books: The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians (2019) How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature – A Response to Bart D. Ehrman (2014) Evangelical Theology: A Biblical and Systematic Introduction (2013) Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining me today. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Whether or not an atheist or a Christian or something else, you have a view of reality. For most of us, we’ve typically caught our view of the world, rather than taught it. Just like the coronavirus, we’re constantly exposed to different ideas, even when we don’t or even can’t recognize or escape them. We hear and see messages from movies and music and news media and social media. Sometimes obvious, sometimes much more subtle. We tend to absorb messages without questioning, without really thinking about it. Messages slip in the back door and tell us how to think, what is true, and we believe it. Unfortunately, in our polarized culture, we often believe the negative stereotypes of the other side without really listening to what that side really is or what that other person really thinks. Guarding our own position will do. Sitting down with another person is, well, too personal, too demanding, and perhaps too vulnerable. It’s easier to build a straw man and knock it down than to really engage with the ideas and the people who believe them. It’s easier to construct stereotypes and caricatures and dismiss without consideration. But what if we are dismissing something before we even give it a chance? What if we are missing something, something that actually answers life’s biggest questions in a way that is good and true and life giving? What if, just what if we actually listen without shutting down and turning off? We might be amazed at what we find. That’s why I love the story that we’ll be listening to today. It’s the story of someone who had listened to the messages of culture, readily stereotyped and dismissed Christians as totally irrelevant, and yet today finds himself on the other side, because he took the time to figure out what Christianity really was and who Jesus really is. Michael Bird was a former atheist that is now a Christian. He is a brilliant academic who writes and speaks in the areas of theology and apologetics. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mike. Well, thank you for having me. So, as we’re getting started, Mike, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, your academic background, and what you do right now, and then we’ll start at the beginning of your story. Okay. Well, I am Michael Bird. I am the academic dean and lecturer in theology at Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve lived pretty much most of my life in Australia, growing up mostly in Brisbane, although I’ve done a few stints in different places around Australia, and I also lived in Scotland for a number of years. I am also married to my wonderful wife, Naomi, and together, we have four children. I graduated from Malyon College in Brisbane and the University of Queensland, where I did my doctorate on Jesus and the Origins of the Gentile Mission. I’ve written and edited around about 30 or so books on the early church, Jesus, the New Testament, theology, Christian thought, probably am most well known for a book, The New Testament in its World, which I co-wrote with Tom Wright, and a textbook called Evangelical Theology. So that, in a nutshell, is where I am and who I am. That’s quite impressive, I must say. Set the context for us in terms of the world you grew up in and the way that they looked at religion and Christianity. Yeah. Australia is a very peculiar country on the religious front. We were founded, or settled—this is obviously after or beside the local indigenous population. We were settled largely as a penal colony for the British, largely after another colony decided they no longer wanted to be in league with Britain, which I think would be your own America. So for roughly 200 years, Australia’s been settled, and it’s never really been known for having strong or very big religious commitment. And when Australia became federated as its own country in 1900, it was created to be deliberately secular, but secular in the sense it wasn’t going to be sectarian. We did not want to import the debates and divisions from United Kingdom largely between Protestant and Catholic and the fragmentation of Protestantism, so the Australian political setup could be described as something of a half way house between the British system and the American system, so our constitution is almost like a British appropriation of the American constitution when it comes to religion. We have kind of like a free exercise clause and sort of a non-establishment cause as well. We have had a few moments of religious revival in Australia, mostly associated with the 1959 Billy Graham Crusade, which did have a big impact on the demographics and the religious contours of Australia. So Australia itself is sort of, in some sense culturally secular. It does have a Christian background. It’s generally had relative high rates of religious identification but not necessarily high rates of religious participation. And since the Second World War and the immigration that we’ve had, we’ve become religiously far more diverse, with people coming to Australia from all around the world, especially from Asia, since we’re closer to Asia than we are to the rest of the world. So Australia is a multicultural secular country. And it’s interesting. It’s different to America in many regards. We have more Buddhists than we have Baptists, for an interesting statistic. The largest denominations are, first of all Catholic, then Pentecostal, and then third Anglican. I can also say, of our twenty largest churches in Australia, all but one are Pentecostal in terms of their size. Only about I think maybe 10% to 15% of Australians would be involved with a church on a regular basis, and if you’re going for a real sort of core religious devotion, who attend church regularly, you’re looking at maybe 5% of the population. Someone once said that religion in Australia is something of a private affair. Australians like the idea of other people being religious. They like the idea of other people being religious, but they don’t like the idea of having to do it themselves. But things, I think, have turned fairly more negative since the 1990s, where religion is now associated largely with terrorism in the case of Islam and clergy sexual abuse in regards to the Catholic Church, and I think Christians can generally be regarded almost as like a right-wing pressure group in some sense. So we do have a somewhat adversarial context. In fact, on some global indices, Australia doesn’t have large amounts of government coercion in religion, but we do have a high rate of social hostility towards religion, and that can express itself in Islamophobia, antisemitism, and in attacks on churches. I’m an Anglican priest, and I’ve worn my clerical attire in downtown Melbourne only twice, and both times I’ve been attacked, once verbally, once physically. So it can be a somewhat adversarial context, someone once described religion in Australia for most people—most Australians kind of float on a sea of apathy with a thin veneer of hostility, which is probably the best way to describe what religion is like in Australia. So talk with me, then, about the context of religion in your home and in your community growing up. Yeah. I grew in a fairly secular household in suburban Brisbane, where religion was pretty much a nonentity. We didn’t go to church. No one was particularly devout. There was no real religion. I think my stepfather had some sort of connection with his mother, who I think was Catholic or perhaps Orthodox. I don’t know for certain. My mother would really verbally abuse Jehovah’s Witnesses if they ever came to the door. She was not particularly interested in any sort of religious conversation. She also could be quite adversarial. Growing up, I had a little bit of religious education at school. My mother just sent me off to Church of England because that’s vaguely what she felt connected with since we were from the United Kingdom. There was the odd TV show. But pretty much growing up the only sort of religious influence I had was from watching Ned Flanders on the TV sitcom The Simpsons. That was pretty much the amount of education in Christianity, which meant most of what I understood and saw of it was based more on caricature or reputation than actual substance or actually knowing any Christians. I didn’t really know any Christians. And everything I thought and believed of them was largely based on this cultural caricature that I would see in various places. So the stereotype is what you saw, and that wasn’t a very positive image of Christianity. No, no. Yeah, that’s right. It was definitely sort of negative. People had a very determinist… God said so, so I believe it. That settles it. And a kind of blind faith. And willing to do things that were irrational and immoral in the Name of God. So there really wasn’t much in your world that gave any kind of a positive image of Christianity at all. You didn’t know anyone personally. There was very little in the culture of lived or embodied Christianity, so the only thing that you were getting is from, I guess, a little bit of religious education at school and the negative messaging from culture. So it painted a fairly negative portrait for you. Nothing appealing about it, I presume. Nothing worth consideration. Yeah? There was no sort of initial enticement. I didn’t really read the Bible. I may have seen the odd, I mean, like at 5 AM if I got up early enough, there may have been some sort of Christian Broadcasting Network cartoon, the odd maybe Easter Day Parade, something like that, maybe some vague suggestion of Christianity, but for the most part, it was simply a nonentity in the world that I grew up in and inhabited. So it was totally just irrelevant. It was off the radar in a sense. Or if it came across the radar, it wasn’t pretty. Yep. That’s correct, that’s correct. So I presume the same for your friends and anyone around you, that it was just off the radar, just not a consideration. Yeah. That’s right. I mean, out of all of my friends, none of them were religious. None of them went to church. We never discussed things about the nature of reality or God or the hereafter or who was Jesus. It was definitely the case where religion was simply a nonentity. So you grew up that way, through school and despite whatever religious education you had. In religious education, did they talk about Christianity at all? They did, they did. You would normally have the equivalent of a local school’s Sunday school teacher would come and teach us, and we’d sing a few songs, things like “Rock My Soul on the Bosom of Abraham,” which was fun. I didn’t mind that when you’re six, seven, or eight and you have this one hour of singing some funky songs. A little bit of a Bible story, which was mostly, I think, more moralisms than anything else. It’s not like we were being taken through the Nicene Creed or anything. It was not terribly theological. Mike, as you were graduating and finishing high school, was there anything at that point, that pivotal point in your life where you were thinking about what was ahead, were there any religious touch points there? Yeah, you know what? In hindsight, there was one. There was one. Now I have to say, for me, high school was a miserable experience. I had a very difficult home life. I had parents who were going through addiction issues and mental health issues, and it was a really miserable time. I didn’t have too many friends. I was okay academically. I got bullied a lot. Girls didn’t really like me in any sense. And it was a difficult time, so I was very eager to leave. And I’ve never been back to a high school reunion, but the last day of high school was weird. And it was weird because we had this like graduation speech. It wasn’t like a big American graduation. It was just a little bit more low key. But it was a weird day. They brought out three different speakers, and one was a local businessman who was explaining how he got his restaurant up and going, and we also had a wonderful doctor come in, and then the local Baptist pastor got up, and I thought, “Oh, man! Could this be any worse?” And he went up and gave a few things you can’t do and you shouldn’t do with your life. But he did say something which did lodge in my mind, and years later, I would recall it. And again, I don’t know why it stuck because at the time it was just water off a duck’s back at the time. He said, “The most important decision you’ll ever make is whether you choose to accept or reject Jesus Christ.” And he said it with such pathos. He said it with real conviction. Now, at the time, I just said, “Okay, fine, whatever.” It didn’t mean anything. But I remembered his words, and I remember that day vividly, and it wasn’t until I went back, actually, as I would do later on down the track of visiting a church. Eventually, those words were recalled to me. I don’t remember a lot what happened to me in high school. I don’t remember anything about trigonometry or algebra. I got some basic typing skills, but that is literally… Besides typing, I got nothing good out of high school. Just that and a lot of bad memories. But I remember that Baptist pastor’s words, that the greatest decision you’ll ever make is whether you choose to accept or reject Jesus Christ. And years later, a few years later, that did resonate with me, and I have to say the man was right. So religion to you at that time, it was a class in school, perhaps a few moral precepts, but what was religion? Was it just something that people needed or that people made up? What did you think religion was? Religion was something that other people did that I didn’t need. And I didn’t really understand what it was about. It was something I haven’t given, to be honest, a lot of thought about. It was like some people like ice hockey. It was kind of like at that level. That’s what other people do, and I’m not other people. It was of no interest and concern to me, and I’d only had very limited exposures to certain aspects of it or its messaging. So it was just something curious, a hobby that people did, but that was about it. So you’re going through high school and you graduate from high school, and what’s next on your journey? Well, number one was to get away from my parents. My mother and stepfather were quite dysfunctional in their relationships. They both had some addiction issues. Home was not a terribly pleasant place for me. Living with them was spasmodically abusive in several different ways. The problem was I couldn’t go off to college or university because my grades weren’t that good. I was basically like a B student. I got good marks but for fairly easy subjects, which doesn’t work out well when you’re calculating your score to go into university, and that was difficult, so I couldn’t go off and do a course on psychology or criminology like I was hoping to do. I could maybe have done something like meat works inspection or horticulture at a regional university for farming or something. But that had no real interest to me. So the next option was to go and join the Australian Army, which was an odd decision, since I was certainly not built to be a soldier. When I was 17, I weighed about 47 kg, which is I think about 140 or 150 pounds, so joining the Army,…

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Disproving Christianity, Finding Belief – Robert Kunda’s Story(Audio) Sep 17, 2021

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We presume we are right and correct in our beliefs. But, sometimes we are challenged to consider why we believe what we do. In today’s podcast, former atheist Robert Kunda takes a closer look at his atheistic presumptions, opening him to new possibilities. Robert mentioned the influence of these Christian thinkers: Hugh Ross (on science): https://reasons.org/about/hugh-ross C.S. Lewis (argument from desire): Mere Christianity William Lane Craig (debates): www.reasonablefaith.org James White (debates): https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/bio/jwhite.html The Side B Podcast was recently listed as #16 on Top 35 Christian Women Podcasts. Check out the full list now! Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Life is busy. Who has time to think about God when there’s so much else to do? To think about and consider? We simply presume we’re right no matter which side we’re on. Many atheists presume that science has made religion passe. We no longer need the God hypothesis to explain anything. Christianity is not plausible but rather mere superstition. Thinking people have no time or desire to deal with it. It’s simply off the radar. In my research with over 50 former atheists, nearly two-thirds, 63%, thought that atheism was true and no evidence could convince them otherwise. But in light of the fact that I was interviewing former atheists who had become Christians, it begged the question: What made someone so closed off to God open up and become willing to change. That’s the million dollar question. I hasten to add that, as a group, these were highly educated people. Nearly half held advanced degrees. These are thoughtful people who, for some reason, decided to take another look at the God question and found themselves strongly believing and advocating what they had once thought was not important or just plain nonsense. Sometimes looking more closely, beyond mere presumptions of belief, causes someone to become open to another perspective, especially if their own worldview doesn’t seem to be providing adequate answers to the questions they’re asking, whether it be science or other questions of life or even death. That’s the case for the former atheist in our podcast today. Robert Kunda tells his journey from disbelief in God to belief. He was challenged to take a closer look at his atheistic presumptions, and that closer look made all the difference. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Robert. It’s so great to have you on today. Awesome. Thank you for having me. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about who you are, perhaps where you live. My name’s Robert Kunda. I live in southern Oregon, Grant’s Pass specifically, with my wife and our three dot dot dot kids. We have two girls and a boy, eleven, nine, and five, but we also have a fluctuating number of kids, as we are currently foster parents. We have one 1-1/2-year-old baby who, I guess she’s almost a toddler now, but we’re hoping to adopt. So hopefully she’ll be staying around. And then just the number of foster kids we have varies at any given moment. We just had a placement. A girl that was with us for four or five months left this last Friday, and so now we technically have only the baby as a foster kid. We do have a boy and a girl that we’re watching just for a week for someone else, but they’re not living with us permanently. So you have six children in your home right now, eleven and younger? Yes. That’s a full house. A busy life, it sounds like. Amazing! It’s busy. It’s nice. My wife stays home. She homeschools our kids, which is something that she always wanted to do, which is something that we’d never have been able to afford when we were in southern California, so the lower cost of living up in Oregon is helpful. It’s nice. I want to know about the kind of place you grew up that helped to inform and shape your views. I wonder about your childhood experience. Your family, your community. Were there references to God at all? Or Christianity? Or religion? And what did that look like? Kind of. In my house, not so much. For maybe three or four years, when we were really young, when we lived out near Pomona area, it was just my mom, my sister, and I, and we were in a private Christian school for some time, because, It was a rough area. So we had weekly chapel and references to God in that school, but other than that, we didn’t go to church. My mom wasn’t a believer. We moved a lot when I was younger, basically all through high school. And after that, there was no going to church. There was no other sort of Christian exposure, except for having friends that were believers. So when you were a child growing up and you went to this Christian school, was it anything that you believed? Or was it just something that they talked about the school but it really had no personal impact on you in terms of… Did you pray to God or anything like that? Probably not. At the time, if I could go back and ask myself, I would say at least for a period of time I probably believed it. What that really actually meant… Now I wouldn’t know. Kids can often just kind of repeat things by memorization and hold multiple conflicting ideas in their heads together, but I didn’t pray. I didn’t have any sort of experience with any of it. It was just almost like another class. You moved from English to science to chapel, and it’s just information that you can kind of repeat, but I didn’t have any sort of ownership of it. And whatever was there died off in my later elementary through high school age, anyway. So you said you had some Christian friends. Would you say that they took their faith very seriously? Were they the type that were very active and intentional in their Christianity? Or was it just something that they, too, were perhaps… called themselves Christians, but it wasn’t much more than that. It was kind of a mixed bag. And when I said Christian friends, I was mostly thinking of a few of the circles of friends that I had when I was in high school. Most of them, especially the closest ones, were not Christians, but I had another circle of friends that I used to hang out with. They were all part of the same church, and I used to go with them to Christian concerts because it was fun. One of those actually ended up being my wife who I’m married to now. Oh, okay. Well, that worked out well for you. But the whole group was kind of a mixed bag. You have some that didn’t stay in any sort of Christian community after high school. You had some that, later on, fell away. And you have a couple that are still there, my wife included. So it was kind of all over the board. So as you were growing up and you saw this kind of social reference to God and Christianity and you had a few friends who called themselves that, but it’s just not something that evidently was attractive to you or meant anything to you or… How would you describe religion growing up? That’s a good question. I probably would’ve thought of it as something… almost like a preference. Like, “Certain families do this. Some families watch football on Sundays, and some like to go to church,” and it’s just… almost like a relativistic approach. Different flavors for different people. I wouldn’t have the vocabulary, but it would’ve basically been like, “Well, that’s true for you, and what’s true for me is something different. It’s all just preference.” So what was becoming true to you at that time? How old were you when you were moving towards atheism or identifying with that kind of thinking or way of looking at the world? I want to say probably early middle school age. I don’t really remember thinking anything about it at all. I don’t think I really had much of an opinion. Through high school, I would say I strongly ventured towards the atheism side. I’m trying to think what the best way to describe it would be. Was it school or education? Were you influenced by your science classes? What was it, do you think, that was influencing you towards atheism? Yeah, I would say it’s probably all of those. Secular naturalism was definitely prevalent as far as the worldview that was presented in school, which I adopted without question. Predominantly, my family and closest friends, none of them were Christian, so I just kind of, basically from every end, that’s the way I adopted it. Also my home growing up wasn’t wonderful, so… Again, I wouldn’t have had the categories for it at the time, but the existential problem of evil was something that I felt tremendously without any sort of answer for, and I’m like, “The world’s too ugly for there to be a God.” Right, right. So it was really a combination of a lot of different things in your world, your home, your experience, your observation of the world, your friends, school. Did your science classes kind of feed into that understanding, too? You mentioned secular naturalism. For those who may not be familiar with that, can you describe what that is? Or what that was that you believed? Yeah. I was taught macro evolution in school. You’re really not taught anything spiritual, for lack of a better world. The material world is all that exists. There’s nothing that’s immaterial. Yeah. And it just made sense to you? It was just a pragmatic view of life? Yeah. It wasn’t really a view that I was argued into. It was just sort of the underlying presupposition of everything, and that’s just how I viewed everything. Yeah. So it was just kind of a presumed point of view. Right. If you had this kind of presumed perspective of life, naturalism. Did you consider any of the implications that might come along with that way of thinking? In terms of what it meant for your life or your own humanity, freedom, conscience, right and wrong, anything? Purpose, death? Yeah, I would say it’s kind of a mixed bag. On one end, the morality idea was a big one. I mean, I was like, “There’s no bearded man in the sky that makes doing this or that wrong or right or obligatory.” So I wasn’t really persuaded by a theistic case for the necessity of morality at the time. By God’s grace, I’ve always had a fairly moralistic bent, as far as… I definitely made my share of mistakes, but I was nowhere near as bad as I could have been in a lot of areas. I would say the biggest impact that I had, thinking through the outworkings of atheism, was just the idea of death was terrifying. I mean, I remember I used to just agonize for hours on end… Not every day or all day, but there were periods of time where you just try to understand what the world is, what it means. I’m like, “Okay. I’m conscious. I can think about things that happen. And at some point, I’m just going to be dead, and nothing will matter. And I won’t know that it won’t matter. There’ll just be nothing. It’ll just be emptiness.” And just that thought was so terrifying. So I presume you tried not to think about that so much. Well, I don’t think it will in unconsciousness now, so it doesn’t bother me the same way it used to. But at the time it was just horrifying. You get in these kind of ruts, and you’re like, “Why does anything I do matter? Why does it mean anything?” “And in the end, I won’t know.” The idea of being able to know that you won’t know, looking forward, to me, was just so haunting. So there were some things that really bothered you as an atheist, but then you didn’t know quite what to do with them. So how does your story then progress from there? You were in high school. What did you do after high school? After high school, I went into the military. I was in the military for four years. When I came back, my mom and my stepdad had gotten divorced, and so I didn’t really have a home to go back to at the time. And so I went to go live with my former best friend from high school. He and his family were basically my second family through middle school and high school, and so I lived with them for a while. Through him, I actually got in touch with my wife, Asia. They ran into each other three, three and a half years after graduating high school, and she found out that I was coming back. She’s like, “Oh, have Robert give me a call when he gets home.” So I got a hold of her when I came back because I almost had no friends locally, so I was trying to get in touch with people that I remembered, and I got in touch with her. She, from my perspective at the time, had unfortunately still continued going to church and do all that kind of stuff, which meant, for multiple nights a week, or days a week, she was sort of occupied doing church things. And then, as we started to get closer, I became quite aware if I wanted to spend time with her I had to suffer through some of those churchy things. So she obviously took her Christian faith quite seriously if she was involved several days a week in her church. She did. She was. I mean, she went to church on Sundays and then… it escapes me. It was one or two nights a week they would usually have some sort of young adult things in the evening or church services midweek, and so I went to those occasionally as well. So was that odd, as an atheist, to go to church services? What was that like? It was. Most of the people that I interacted with were all pretty nice. I mean, I’ve typically been able to get along with most people fairly well. The church that she was in at the time, they had not wonderful theology, and so, from the atheist side looking in, it seemed extra wacky to me, and so it was easy, for a long period of time, to sort of roll my eyes and deal with the medicine that I had to swallow in order to spend time with this girl that I liked. Well, you must’ve really liked her. I did. And we’d known each other, at that point, for more than ten years. We were good friends. We never dated in high school. I did ask her to prom my senior year, and she told me no. it wasn’t a real ask. The person that she wanted to go with was unavailable, so I said, “Well, hey, I’ll go with you,” and she’s like, “No. I don’t want to go,” and so I just went with someone else. It didn’t mean much at the time, but it is funny to look back on and say that, “I asked her to prom, and she shot me down, but we ended up getting married, so in the end, I won.” Yes, you did. You sure did. So how long were you going to church with her thinking this was extra wacky and trying to make sense of what was happening? I know you probably went in with a skeptical lens, obviously. Was there any genuine curiosity to you during this time? I wouldn’t say genuine curiosity. I definitely went in with a skeptical lens. I didn’t really talk to her about it at the time. Nothing says romance like trying to beat your partner into submission by telling them how dumb they are. But because I was becoming so much more immersed in a completely different worldview, I started reading a bunch of different books, both atheist and Christian sides, because I kind of wanted to be able to mentally state explicitly why Christianity was false. And so the books I started reading were really to sort of combat that, so when I got into a discussion with someone, instead of just being like, “You’re dumb. You’re wrong,” I could be like, “Here’s why.” Right. And so what I first started reading was in order to do that. Unfortunately, it seems to have backfired, and I went the opposite direction. Fortunately now but at the time I would have considered it unfortunate. Ah. So what kinds of things were you reading? I presume, like you said, it was a fairly balanced reading on both sides? Atheism and Christianity? So I wasn’t in any sort of research program, so I didn’t really pick a well versed catalog, but I did read a couple of Christian science books. Not Christian science, but… It’s been a long time. I can’t remember all the titles, but I think I read one or two books by Hugh Ross at the time, looking at creation arguments. I read at least one or two Richard Dawkins books.…

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Questioning Atheism After 9/11 – Brian Causey’s story(Audio) Sep 03, 2021

Show notes

Stunned by events of 9/11, financial trader Brian Causey finds his beliefs about life after death lacking and sets off in a search for answers. Brian’s book: Trading Gods – A Rationale for Faith Brian’s blog: www.briancausey.com Brian’s recommended resource: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast 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 came to believe in God and Jesus to their own surprise. There are different reasons or catalysts that may stop someone in their tracks and reconsider their own skepticism towards God and faith, towards their own presumptions, their own way of looking at the world. One of these catalysts is an unexpected sudden or significant event in the world. Disruptive events or circumstances often demand our attention. They raise our awareness beyond the mundane normal day-to-day activities to potentially consider the larger, deeper big questions of life. Those grand moments can sober us to think about our own beliefs, our direction, our purpose and meaning, what we think about death and beyond. Some people take those interruptions seriously as an opportunity to look more closely at their own lives. Others merely move on without deep regard or consideration for what it might mean for themselves, pursuing business as usual. In today’s story, Brian Causey, a successful financial trader, was one of those experienced an event that rocked the world as an invitation to examine his own beliefs, his own life, to open the door to the possibility of belief beyond skepticism. It jump started his intellectual quest to look for a better explanation for his life, to possibly trade what he knew and experienced of reality. It compelled his search for the existence of God. I hope you’ll come along to meet Brian and hear him tell his journeying from disbelief to belief. And, I hope you’ll stay to the end to hear Brian’s advice to skeptics who may be considering the possibility of searching beyond their skepticism and his advice to Christians on engaging with those who don’t believe. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Brian. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thanks, Jana. It’s so great to be here. I look forward to it. Wonderful! Before we tell your story, which I can’t wait to hear, why don’t we learn more about who you are today, and tell me a little bit about yourself. Yeah, sure. My name is Brian Causey. My day job is in the investment world, where I have kind of a strange and unique opportunity to work with some of the biggest pools of money in the world, mostly teachers’ pension funds and things like that. My side hustle is as an armchair theologian and an author. I get to live in Seattle, Washington, with the most amazing woman I know, my wife Karlie, our 2-year-old son Blaise, and Brodie the Burnedoodle. Bernedoodle. That’s obviously a combination of Golden Retriever and Bernese Mountain Dog? He’s Bernese Mountain Dog Poodle mix. Yes. And he’s in dire need of a summer cut. It’s too hot over here now. So, as we’re getting started, Brian, in order to shape the fullness of the story, let’s go back to your childhood. Tell me about life growing up, your family, your friends, your culture, your community? Tell me what life was like. Was it with God? Was it without God referents? Were you from the Northwest all along? Talk to me about that. Yeah, sure. Well, I grew up in a very loving home. I mean, my family is all very close still. My parents are headed towards their, I think, 57th wedding anniversary. But growing up, religion just wasn’t much of a consideration for us. We didn’t really talk about God or things like that. I kind of joke around with others that we were kind of like the Scandinavian countries. We had a foundation of Christian faith, but it wasn’t really part of our daily life. In many senses, I was just a classic none, N-O-N-E, which, in the lingo of polling, just means that I would have answered “none of the above” if I was asked what religion I belonged to. I think I had probably a faint sense of the spiritual. I mean I wasn’t a materialist. I knew that much. I believe there was some kind of greater power out there, but I didn’t know what it was or if it wanted anything from me. At the same time, probably if you would have pressed me back then, I would have believed in almost anything, I suppose. UFOs, telepathy, reincarnation, that all religions were paths to God. I was spiritual but not religious. “You can’t pin me down. You can’t put me in a box.” And I think that’s one of the attractions, probably, of being a none, N-O-N-E again. None of the above. You can’t pin that person into a set of beliefs or doctrines or attach them to a certain organization. I think that’s part of the attraction and why the “none movement” is so rapidly rising in all of the polling data. I think organized religion just held no appeal to me at that point in my life. I mean, in reality, I think I belonged to a religion of one, where whatever I said or did or thought was acceptable, and that concepts like God and faith were just an accessory to my life that I could put on or take off whenever I felt like it. I could change my standards in line with my behavior, such that I could never be guilty of anything. And that was very appealing to me growing up. So you had this kind of sense of self and independence, picking and choosing whatever fits at the time. Were there any Christians that intersected your world at all during elementary school or maybe middle or in high school? Gosh. Really not much. It’s a very secular community up here in Seattle. Honestly, the only people that took religion seriously growing up were my Mormon friends. Their lives seemed to revolve around the church schedule and calendar, but yeah, there weren’t really many Christians that spoke into my life at that point in time. None that could really give me any hints of life’s real direction. And so I kind of felt like I was floating like a wave in the ocean without an anchor. But you enjoyed the freedom of it? I did. I did. I think that freedom was the best way for me to enjoy the fascinations of life. I, at that point in my life, enjoyed the party scene and enjoyed wanting to live forever as an adolescent. I think it’s interesting that you had, in terms of an embodied picture of what religion was, it was Mormonism, which I know that there are some really beautiful and wonderful people and very moral people, but that religion as an embodied picture for you probably speak to rules and regulations and “do this” and “don’t do that,” and I would imagine that that kind of pushed against your sense of freedom and your ability to pick and choose whatever you wanted. Again, you said you didn’t like organized religion. There was something very off putting about it. But what did you think religion was at that point? A construct of some sort? A hobby? How would you have described religion? Yeah. Maybe as like a series of protocols. Things that you do. Might as well call it an exercise routine. Things you do, but the truth, whether it was true or not, I didn’t really think about that much at all. I don’t know why, but it just seemed like these were the steps. If you were a Christian or Mormon or whatever, these were the steps that you took because you belonged there. There was no why. It was all the what. “What do you do?” But not the, “Why are we doing it?” and “Why are we committing to something like that?” It just didn’t seem attractive to you, right? I wanted autonomy. I wanted self reliance. If I was going to worship any god and I didn’t call it myself, it would be the god of self reliance. I wanted to be in control. I mean I wanted to have the power over my life. I wanted to be financially secure, such that I could do anything I wanted. Those were the things that I really pursued. I didn’t pursue any other authority but my own. I think sometimes that seems so very attractive to so many people. This idea of independence and autonomy and that there are only positives that come from that way of thinking or being or living. You mentioned, those, that in some sense you felt like you were floating, like not grounded in something. I wonder if you felt any negative implications or ramifications from this kind of sense of autonomy. Did you make you feel isolated or too isolated? That you didn’t have a place of sense of belonging? Or were you just kind of the common teenager, “Hey, I’m just having fun! Let me eat and drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,”? There was definitely a time in my teenage life where I looked at the meaning question. I realized I didn’t know what life’s meaning was. And I fell into a depression, so bad that I really thought about suicide quite a lot, almost every day. And I went out of all sports and kind of went into my mind almost, retracted into my mind, stayed in my room a lot, and pondered the meaning question and what did it matter if I ended my life? There was no meaning to it. I was going to die and maybe be a part of the circle of life. And that was a real waking up for me. That was one of the many moments in my spiritual life that led me to who I’ve become today. I went through a pretty bad period, and I did realize, at the end of that period, after I got out of it, was that… maybe two realizations. One, many other people have had this bout of doubt and meaning in their life. So I realized that there were other people in the same boat as me that got out of it. And that was very helpful for me, to basically mature in that direction. And maybe the other take-away for me was I realized I couldn’t solve this myself. I couldn’t keep looking inward and find the answers. I needed to start looking elsewhere. I needed advice. I needed good news, really. I needed to find what other people had thought about the big questions of life. Because I was struggling, and I needed some help. So when you were in that place of openness of needing help, did you consider wondering whether there was a God who would have something to say about the meaning in your life or any other religious person? Where did you look when you started thinking you needed to look outside of yourself? I think there were a few moments in my life where I started to look toward God or what I thought might have been God. And one class I took in college was really helpful, and it was called The Philosophy of Religion, and that introduced me to all of the faith beliefs. It introduced me to atheism, too. And we started with atheism in that class and read the classic atheistic thinkers and some current-day thinkers, and I was persuaded initially that this made a lot of sense to life. And then we countered that with great thinkers of believers, too. And so you want to hear both sides of the story, just like this podcast, and that’s what that class was doing. But at the end of that, I don’t think I really came to a conclusion. I still was waffling in these great themes that the university system was showing me. Everything from relativism, which is maybe the sneakiest of them all, that truth is subjective and that we each define our own truth. That’s definitely what I believed heading out of college. But also secular humanism and naturalism. Those were both huge themes in the university system that really influenced the way that I thought about things. And I think at the end, by the time I graduated, I was still in this camp of anything goes, that all religions are basically the same, that freedom and autonomy are always good and should never be impaired, that we each determine our own morality, that we can define truth for ourselves and that it’s okay to believe in whatever you want to believe. I was in that camp, and I didn’t think there were any good reasons to question these things. And I wasn’t the only one that felt this way. I think a lot of my friends, a lot of my teachers probably were in this same cultural current, and again, with no real anchor, I just got swept up in that current, too. So basically what you decided as a teenager, relativism, autonomy, they were only reinforced as you grew older. And the questions of meaning, I guess that would’ve been self determined, right? By the time you got out of college, it was still the same. The answer was still the same, that even though you had looked externally, I suppose, at other worldviews, or even considered what naturalism, atheism was, what secular humanism was, relativism, —you were learning more about it, but your sense or view of the world and of life became more educated but existentially the same, I would imagine. Yeah. That’s interesting. And so it took a moment—it took a real game-changing moment in my life to shake up that worldview. What was that? It was 9/11. It was 9/11. And so the terrorist attacks just really were shocking to me, as to everybody I’m sure. I was in my early twenties. I was in the investment world. My job was going great. I had lots of friends, kind of was living as if I was invincible. And then 9/11 hit, and it really shook me up. It made me stop and wonder about my own mortality. I don’t know why this had such a big effect on me, being in Seattle, so far away from the terrorist attacks themselves, but this is the thing that forced me to say, “I need to figure out the big questions of life. I need to dive into what happens after I die, because I don’t know. I’m feeling a little naive here.” And so the Sunday after 9/11 was the first time I really went to church. I was invited by a friend, thankfully, and I’m so thankful that that church was right next to the University of Washington, so it meant that it had very connections to a lot of academia. The library at this church was stock full. It was… I didn’t know churches had libraries, and many don’t still, but this one did, and it allowed me to do a lot of personal self reflection because it had things on audio tape, back then, where I could pop in a tape or a CD on my commute. I could check out books for free, and so I did a lot of that. I took the Alpha class, which they offered. And I really just dove in to trying to answer all of these tough, tough questions. And I had a lot of tough questions. I mean faith and doubt, science and religion, evolution, the age of the universe, miracles, lots of questions. And they had thoughtful responses to all of these, not just from the Christian perspective, but they would have interviews with scientists, world-class scientists, that would come and speak in person at the church. And have debates, have talks, all sorts of things that were just eye opening to me. And so not only did I approach this whole challenge after 9/11 by diving in, but for whatever strange reason, 9/11 also was this turning point in this new movement called New Atheism. And the New Atheists kind of created a publishing sensation with all of these books that hit after 9/11 basically saying that a religious believer is illogical, unscientific, and probably harmful for the world. And that really blew through academia, it blew through the media, and really made a lot of people quite influenced by their thinking. And I had to kind of battle with all of those thoughts, too. Not only the classic thinkers and my own questions but a really in-your-face style approach of these skeptics. That’s an interesting moment historically and as it intersects with your life because it was the moment that set you on a search, an intellectual search, but at the same time it was almost like this tsunami of intellectual atheists who were coming against what you were finding. I’m sure you were wrestling with both sides of those very diverse perspectives, one claiming one thing and another really piling on from the other side. How were you processing through those really dichotomous views at the same time? It was really hard. It was ha…

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I Believe in Science – Bruce Blackshaw’s Story(Audio) Aug 20, 2021

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Can the thinking person believe in God? In today’s episode Bruce tells his story of moving from atheism as informed by science to a rational Christian faith that informs both science as well as the most profound questions of life. You can find out more about Bruce through his blog Philosophical Apologist at https://philosophicalapologist.com Episode Transcript Welcome to the podcast, Bruce. It’s so great to have you on the show! Thank you for having me. As we’re getting started, I’d like to get to know you a little bit. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself, your background. I know you have quite an impressive academic background. Why don’t we start there? Okay. Your listeners will probably think, “Wow! This is someone who’s just spent far too much time at university.” To start with, out of high school, one of I guess my first loves, as it were, was mathematics, so out of high school, I did a degree in mathematics and physics and became a high school teacher and taught in high school for a few years, mainly mathematics and physics. This is in Australia. After probably about four or five years of that, I got I guess a little bit bored of teaching the same thing, and I was always interested in computing, so part time, I went back to university and started a degree in computer science and eventually, after a year or so, I grew to like that quite a lot and quit my teaching job and spent a year full time finishing off that computing degree and then got a job in a research center at a university doing programming work. So that was, I guess, the start of my career in computing, which I’ve been doing for many, many years now. I worked for a few years in that, and I was working in another research group in a large private computer company in Brisbane, Australia, and I got the idea of doing a master’s degree by research, so I spent the next year and a half doing a master’s degree in computer science, kind of combining some of the research work I was doing for the company with research for the master’s, and so I did that for a couple of years. Finished that off. Had a long stretch of over a decade without any formal study. Got a bit, sort of itchy feet again, so, “What am I going to study?” And I was always interested, having been a Christian for quite a long time by that point, I was interested in Christian apologetics and had done a lot of reading in that area. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, to be a good Christian apologist, to defend the faith as an apologist, I needed to understand philosophy better, and so, for me, that meant going back to university and doing a degree in philosophy. Which I did from the University of London. I was in Australia at the time, but University of London has a great international program, where you can do degrees by distance, and so I spent five years in total doing my bachelor of arts degree in philosophy through the University of London, Birkbeck, which I really enjoyed. And towards the end of that, I started thinking, “Well, what am I going to do with this?” and I’d met a friend who’s been interviewed on this podcast before, Daniel Rodger his name is, and we’d done a lot of talking about bioethics, and I think he and another friend convinced me that I should go on to do a PhD in bioethics. And that’s what I’m doing now. I’m probably in the last third of my PhD, and that’s at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Wonderful school. My alma mater. Oh is it? Really? Yes, yes. That’s where I received my PhD. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I’ve been on campus. I’m doing that by distance as well. I’m in Australia right now, but I actually started while I was living in London, and I have been to the university campus a number of times now, and it’s a great spot. I really like it there. Well, good, good. You’re in good company with William Lane Craig. Yeah. That’s right. He did his PhD there as well. Right. In philosophy. Or one of his PhDs. Exactly. You’re right about that. So you’re obviously extremely well studied and continue to have obviously an active mind and pursuing really rich and deep truths. Particularly, I’ve noticed that you have quite a resume of academic publications in the area of bioethics, so even though you’re actively in a PhD program, you have published prolifically in that area. I would say quite impressive. So it sounds like you have… You’re currently in Australia, right? That’s right. Yeah. I moved here in December last year from the United Kingdom, where I spent the previous six years. And that is your home, so why don’t we kind of take your life now back towards the beginning? Because we want to understand what your thinking was earlier in your life. Did you grow up in Australia? I did. I was born in Brisbane in Australia and mainly grew up in Australia. Interestingly, though, one of the big influences on my life was actually in the United States. My parents were both atheists or agnostics. They don’t really have any belief in God at all. They’re both scientists. My mother, when I was a child, in primary school, she did a PhD in animal behavior and became a lecturer in animal behavior and quite a well-known one. My father was a physiologist, and he studied reproduction, and he worked for many, many years at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, so I come from quite an academic background, and it’s kind of been a natural thing to go on and do more study myself, just because of the example of my parents. My grandfather was also an academic as well, so yeah, there’s quite a long line in my family from that regard. But my parents didn’t have any belief in God, and growing up, I didn’t either. I naturally took the sort of view that if you can’t prove it with science then it’s not really worth anything. And I guess one of my earlier memories in that regard was… My dad spent a sabbatical year in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States. He was at Washington University there. And I can remember I started a year of school in St. Louis, Missouri, at a school called Brentwood, in a place called Brentwood in St. Louis. And I can remember in the classroom the teacher asking who believed in God and who didn’t, and I was the only person in the class who didn’t believe in God, and they asked me what I believe, and I said, “I believe in science,” so that’s one of my very sort of earlier memories of not being a believer. The culture that you grew up in as well, beyond your family… Was there any reference to Christianity in your culture or among your friends? Or was it- No. Australia is not like the United States. I guess people worship the weather and sport and things like that, so I didn’t set foot in a church in Australia until I was a teenager. I didn’t go to Sunday school. I didn’t do anything in that regard. It was quite easy when I grew up to completely avoid church altogether. It wasn’t something that ever even occurred to me to do or anyone I knew would… No one I knew would go to church. So no. It just wasn’t on the radar. It wasn’t on the radar. And that’s fairly normal for a lot of people in Australia, I think. So, during this time, it just wasn’t a thought for you. It was totally irrelevant. What did you think God and religion and religious people… what was that for you? What did you think it was? It wasn’t really anything at all. I guess unusually I grew up without a television set. My parents were keen on kids wasting their time watching TV, so I didn’t get a television set in the house until I was about 16, so I did a lot of reading, but I was a little bit ignorant in other ways. Any of the more popular TV shows, I didn’t know anything about them. I didn’t really have any, or very little, thoughts about God whatsoever. Probably the only thought I remember as I was a young boy was wondering what happened when I died and thinking of the world without me in it, and I think I found that a bit of a disturbing thought, that I would die and the world would go on as if I’d never existed and no one would really care too much. So that was probably the only thought I remember on those kind of lines. So, as you’re moving along, you found yourself at church one day. It seems like there’s a pathway from not thinking about it at all to being in a church building. What happened between those two things? Well, when I was living in the United States for my dad’s sabbatical year, in the summer holidays, just to keep the kids busy, mom and dad packed us off to a vacation Bible school for a week. And that was my first time I had ever read the Bible, had it taught, and there was something about it that really rang true to me, and I think, from that point… I guess maybe I wasn’t a believer, but from that point, something really resonated with me, and I thought, “This really feels as though it’s kind of true,” and I was pretty young then, but I think in some way, looking back, I think God had His hand on me from that point in particular. Something changed at that point, and when I came back to Australia, I didn’t have any capacity to do anything about it. I didn’t even think about it. But it was a couple of years later, maybe three or four years later, when I started high school, I ended up going… There was a Christian group at school which I got drawn to, I think, a little, but my brother ended up going along to a youth group on Friday nights at a church, and when I got to high school age, I was eligible to go as well, and so, not having much better to do, because there wasn’t really too much to entertain myself with in Brisbane in those days, I went along to youth group on Friday nights. And that was run by a church in Brisbane. I’m curious what your parents thought about that at that time. Obviously, you were a high schooler and a teenager, but knowing that… I guess if you worshiped science in a sense, or your family did, or that was the way of thinking at the time for your family, were they taken aback? Or disconcerted in any way for you going to something like this? No, they weren’t. No. They were quite happy for me to go along. I think they… In their view, it would probably keep me out of trouble as a teenager. And I had a sister who got into a little bit of trouble during those years, the teenage years, and so… yeah. I think they just thought it was a fairly safe place for me to be. I guess safe in some regards, perhaps not in others, in terms of the way that they were thinking. What were you hearing? Or was there something that was drawing you in even as you were at this youth group? I think… As far as the youth group was concerned… I mean, God had His hand on me in a way that I look back and see now, but at the time, it was the most interesting thing going on my life. The guys that were running the youth group were very outdoorsy types, so we would do interesting activities. We would have what they called car rallies, where we’d race around in cars, and we would do rock climbing. We would go on hikes. And the guys who ran that youth group took a real personal interest in the kids that they were looking after. And it wasn’t just the youth group that they ran. They kind of involved a lot of the kids in their lives in other ways as well, so when they went out and did something like go on a hike on a weekend, they would invite us along with them, and so… yeah, we had some really important Christian role models from that point of view who became my friends. So you were developing some meaningful relationships. It was more than just merely a social activity that you attended. you were developing a sense of community and friendships with some people, I guess, that you, like you say, respected in a way, that they were role models. That’s exactly right. That is a really beautiful way, I guess, to show Christianity, in addition to just telling you about it. So what was it about them or their lives that was attractive in a sense, that was something different or other than perhaps what you had experienced outside the Christian community? They were nice guys who really cared, who really, really invested some of their life in the kids in the youth group, including myself. And, even today, that’s not that common a thing, I think. Yeah. We are in such a culture of isolation at the moment, especially with COVID, but yeah, that is something quite wonderful in terms of investing in the other and feeling known and belonging. But I know, again, as a thinking person, that satisfies some kind of existential need in us, that need to know and be known and to belong, and that’s very attractive. What else were you learning about Christianity that was drawing you more towards that? I think I was doing a bit of catch-up in a way. I knew very little about the Bible, didn’t really know the Bible stories or anything like that, and so there was quite a long period there I was just becoming familiar with what was between the covers of the Bible, reading it and being taught it. And I think part of that was people I respected believed it. They lived it. They were very consistent in their Christian faith, and so I could see it at work in their life, and I think, over time, I began to think, “Well, this is probably for me as well.” So what were you finding in the Bible that rang true for you? What was it that was making sense, that you felt like it was something that you wanted to adopt in your life? Was it just the moral principle? Was it something deeper, more spiritual than that? I think it grew into something more spiritual as the years went on. During my teenage years. And I began to see that I could make sense of the world through the story that it was telling, that I could understand now why we were here, that when I died there was actually meaningful life after death as well, and yeah… all the pieces started to fit together in a way, particularly for the questions that I could see science couldn’t answer. It’s often said that science and belief in God are irreconcilable, but obviously you’re a scientist and a Christian, and how were you, at this point in your life, reconciling those two things? Well, I should correct that you that I’m not actually what I’d call a scientist. I did a bachelor of science degree, that’s all. If anything, I’m a philosopher and a software developer, not a scientist, but having grown up with scientists and had a lot to do with science, I guess I do understand the scientific mindset a little. I don’t see any necessary conflict between the two at all. I mean, science is a tool for investigating our world. It operates by certain rules, and using those rules means we discover the natural laws that govern our planet, and we can learn a lot about the life on our planet, but I don’t see that there’s any inherent conflict between science and faith. So that was not as an issue as you were embracing this religious understanding of the world, that it was making sense for you and it was answering some big questions, but they were different kinds of questions than perhaps the mechanics and the how, as compared to the why. Yeah, that’s right. One of the leaders of our youth group was studying science at university and doing an honors project, a research project which I helped him quite a bit in. It was to do with the introduction of exotic fish into local waterways, and I spent a lot of time traipsing around with him, helping him catch fish and things like that, and… Yeah, I couldn’t see any conflict between what I was learning about the Bible and faith with what he was doing as an early budding scientist. And as you were reading more about the Bible and Jesus and what the Bible was saying was ringing true. It was making sense of your life and of the world in the way that you knew it and experienced it. Were you questioning it at all in terms of the historical nature of the Bible? How do I know that these events are true? What about the person of Jesus? Was He a real person in historical time and space? Was the resurrection true? Were you having any of those kinds…

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From Nihilism & Psychedelics to Faith – Ashley Lande’s Story(Audio) Aug 06, 2021

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Former skeptic Ashley declared herself an atheist as a young woman. Dissatisfied with atheistic nihilism, she turned to psychedelics and mysticism in her search for something more. Her longing eventually led her to reconsider God. Ashley Lande‘s blog: www.ashleylande.com Episode Transcript Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Ashley. It’s so great to have you! Thank you. I’m so very glad to be here. As we’re getting started, before you tell your story, I would love to know, and I would love the listeners to know, a bit about there. It seems like you have a lot going on in your life that you love and the things that you love to do, and I’d love to hear about that now. Okay, sure. I’m an artist and a writer. I live with my husband and two children, a boy and a girl, in a little town near the Flint Hills of Kansas, and I home-school my two children, and my husband works on a wind farm. And we have chickens. That’s something I really enjoy. And I have a website displaying my art and a blog on it as well at www.ashleylande.com. Yeah. And that’s what I do. It sounds like a really intriguing, almost idyllic, place to live these days, outside of the city in the rural country. Wow. Living somewhat of a simple existence. It sounds very wonderful in a way. That you have that space. And chickens! That’s very interesting. So I presume that you collect eggs, and you probably grow a lot of vegetables and do all that kind of thing with regard to sustainability and living. That’s terrific! We do love the chickens. I have yet to master gardening, but one day. Someday. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Me, too. I tried my hand a little bit at gardening, but just a few flowers here and there. Yeah. [1:55 But I understand, from your story, that it’s a little bit different than many of the stories that we’ve heard so far, that many start with… Okay. Ashley, I’m going to start that over again. Mark, X that out. Okay. Okay. All right. Okay. So, Ashley, as we’re getting to know you and your story, let’s start back at the beginning. Tell me about where you grew up. Did you grow up in Kansas? Is that where your home is? And what was that like? Your family, your friends, your community. Was God anywhere in the picture? Yes. So I actually grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, on the Missouri side. Us Missourians are very emphatic about that. The bulk of Kansas City is actually on the Missouri side, and I grew up in a suburb called Blue Springs that was about 20 miles from the city. I grew up kind of in a unique situation. We were in a suburb, and we were in the city limits, but my dad had… He was from southern California, and he met my mom, who lived in the Midwest, and decided to move back here with her because he could own land, whereas in southern California, near the coast, that’s an impossibility unless you’re a millionaire. So he bought the land and was actually grandfathered into the animal ordinance, so we had all kinds of animals. We had horses, and we had a cow at one point. We had a llama. Chickens and ducks and kind of tucked back in the woods, even though we were in a suburb, so my childhood was wonderful in many ways. I had a sister. She was about 2-1/2 years older than me. She passed away in 2017, but I grew up with her. And faith was—it was kind of a peripheral part of our lives in that season. We went to church—usually two or three times a month we’d go to church on Sundays, and I remember going to vacation Bible school and Sunday school, and my dad was very busy with his business. He was a commercial interior designer, and he built his own business, had a business in Kansas City, so he commuted every day. He was very busy with that, very consumed with that, and he was also very strong in his political identity, and so the church we went to was a Methodist Church, which was the tradition that my mother had grown up in, but for my dad, the Methodist Church was too quote-unquote liberal, and so he kind of phased in and out of going to church. Bible reading was not necessarily a big part of our lives. Faith just seemed like something that we participated in on Sundays. And I don’t say that to criticize my parents. They were doing the best they could. They both grew up in highly dysfunctional families. I do remember having conversations with my dad about infinity and the nature of God in a very abstract way, and I just remember trying to contemplate infinity, and it was so mystifying to me that I just could not wrap my head around the idea of infinity. But I remember Jesus was just kind of represented in my mind as kind of a gentle, passive figure, and I know I must’ve heard the gospel at some point. I remember singing Jesus Loves You in Sunday school, but somehow it never really sunk in. And around the time I was, just getting into trouble at school and with the police here and there, and so that was a, and church attendance kind of dropped off at that point. My sister had started refusing to go, and my dad didn’t go very much, so I thought, like, “Well, why should I go? Why should I have to go?” Because it. It didn’t seem substantive. And around that time, I was probably, I don’t know, 14, I remember very reluctantly going to church camp with one of my best friends, and I just realized at that church camp, “I don’t believe any of this.” And I knew—sorry, I’m kind of just jumping into the story. No, that’s great! Yeah. And so that was my family background. So there was some foundation, but it just didn’t—I don’t know. Yeah. So it was a really—as a child, at least, there wasn’t a sense in which you took hold of that in a personal way. It wasn’t like you had belief or felt belief, it was just some ritual that you did, some activity on Sunday, but it’s something you never really truly believed. Right, right. Exactly. So you wouldn’t have considered yourself really a Christian at any point in your life really prior, at least in your preteen days before you stopped going. No, no, I wouldn’t have. I think I took the existence of God as kind of a given, and I remember I had a half brother. I have a half brother who’s quite a bit older than me. He is 15 years older than me, and so I didn’t grow up with him really, but we would see him fairly often, at least once or twice a year, and I remember when I was probably 9 or 10 and we were riding with him… We were visiting him in California, and my sister and I were riding with him in his car, and this song came on the radio called, “Dear God” by a British pop band called XTC, and the lyrics were all about, “Dear God, I can’t believe in you. I won’t believe in you,” and it was just describing this man’s… all his grievances against God and how he would not believe in him. And I just remember being scandalized, thinking, “I didn’t know people were allowed to not believe in God,” so it’s interesting. On one hand, I wouldn’t say I had any kind of personal encounter with Jesus Christ. I’m always a little envious of people who say that they had moments in their childhood where they felt God’s presence really strongly because I don’t remember ever having that. Yet, at the same time, I feel like there was. So yeah. Yeah, so that moment in the car, when you were 9 or 10, that actually opened the door to the possibility that perhaps that isn’t an assumption for everyone and that it gave you the freedom, I suppose, when you are at that church camp, to say, “No, I really don’t believe any of this.” Yes. And that possibility felt dangerous, certainly, but it also was exotic and a little enticing, and yeah, and then at that church camp, I just realized—and I remember I was bold enough at that point, I guess, to announce my atheism. We were having this little gathering around a campfire and sitting on those benches that are made of half of a log, and I said I just didn’t believe, and there was just dead silence. And one of the counselors took me aside afterward and encouraged me to read the work of C.S. Lewis, and he said I should start with the Chronicles of Narnia, and I kind of just said, “Oh, okay. Yeah. I’ll look into that.” I didn’t at the time, but I remember being really confused because I remember watching a cartoon version, an animated version of the Chronicles of Narnia when I was a child, but I literally had no idea, until I was an adult, actually, that Aslan was supposed to represent Jesus. It just went completely over my head. And so that really made me stop and think, “Oh!” And even at that point, I don’t think I realized until I was an adult, so yeah, I did have some influences like that, but I don’t know. They just never took hold. It just intuitively seemed not worthy of belief. That is, it’s not as if you went on this intellectual journey and said, “Oh, Christianity isn’t worth believing.” It was just like it just didn’t feel like something that was worth believing in. Was it, do you think, more intellectual at that time? I mean, I know you were a preteen or you were an early teenager, 13 and 14, but at that time, was it just, “Man, it just seems like…” What did you think Christianity was if it wasn’t true? You know, I look back now, and I can see that I was just out-of-hand dismissive of it and also around that time, I started—I’ve always loved to read, and around that time, I started reading some very adult things that were very… like existentialist, nihilistic, just about the absurdity of life. I read The Plague and The Stranger by Albert Camus, and one of my favorite books around that time was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which is kind of all about the absurdity of war and, by extension, the absurdity of life and the futility of life, and I started reading the Beat Poets, like Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso was someone I was really into, so I was introducing myself, I guess, to these really cerebral writers, and I was attracted to that, that intellectualism. I was very attracted to that, and I had never been introduced to any kind of intellectually robust Christianity. I didn’t take that guy’s recommendation to read any C.S. Lewis, and I just didn’t even know it existed. So I think I just dismissed Christianity out of hand as something that was shallow. It was delusional. It was for… just all the stereotypical… you know, it was for weak people, weak-minded people. It was for stupid people. Yeah, yeah, so I think there was that seduction, I guess, by those existentialist, kind of nihilistic writers going on at the same time. Well, that’s curious. Especially, again, for someone in your teens to be delving into substantive writers like that. I wonder, when you were reading this existential material, or these novels or writings, did you believe that nihilistic worldview? And if so, also, did you embrace that kind of outlook on life? Did it affect your life in any way? Yeah. And I think I thought I did. Looking back, I can see I had such a shallowness of experience, being, you know, 14, 15, 16 years old. Ashley? Mark, obviously, there’s a pause here. It looks like she’s offline. Okay, there you are!] Okay. I’m sorry. I moved myself into the other room, closer to the WIFI router. Okay, good, good. So hopefully, this will go better. I’m sorry about that.] No! No problem. I don’t know if you heard my question. I was asking whether or not reading this existential material caused you to believe in nihilism and existentialism. Did it affect your life in any way? Yes. I think at the time I would’ve said that. I just thought, to me, they seemed, which now it just seems so bizarre to me. But yeah. I mean, and I think that certainly had an effect, that I was reading all those things and embracing all that kind of thinking, but I think, as far as thinking through the logical consequences of there being no meaning to life, I think I didn’t think that far. So I presume that you, with this kind of outlook, I would imagine that you created whatever life that you wanted to create? Because life was nothing but this reductionistic understanding of making your own reality? I presume that probably gave you a lot of freedom, but I wondered how long did you embrace this kind of philosophy or go along this pathway? Yeah. I think… Gosh, for quite some time. And looking back, I can see there was a lot of emotional pain over the… Those years were very chaotic in my family because of everything that my sister was going through, and so I think that probably also some of it was a little bit reactionary to what was happening with her, and also, I had always felt like a rule follower up to that point. I always got good grades. I never did anything dangerous or risky, and so I guess, and of course I was, at that time, too, listening to the… I would have been that it can be casually enjoyed, and I think I went along with that and drinking, too, in college. In college, I really kind of crashed and burned as far as the drinking went. I recovered a little, though, and I was able to finish college, but I would say into, I very much embraced, I guess, a kind of even if I didn’t necessarily follow it all the way to its logical consequences or its logical outcome. During any of this time, did the issue of God ever come up? Did you ever reconsider that at all as even a possibility? Did you run into any Christians? Were there any influences like that in your world through any of this? Yeah. I remember, in college, I really. I was drinking a lot, and I had actually known a young man who… There was a summer in college, I think it was between my sophomore and junior year, and I had known a young man who was in an illicit relationship and had gotten murdered, actually, by the man that he was involved with. And it was just such a dark, dark time, and I was having and I remember I started going to an actually, and I only lasted for, gosh, probably less than a week, but sitting there and listening to people, these people who… most of them were a generation older than me and had completely hit rock bottom in their lives, and just listening to them talk about, and of course, AA is not necessarily a Christian organization, but there are, and so that, for sure, even though I kind of wussed out after a little while. And I remember, too, around that time, going to a church. There was one Sunday morning. I’m sure I was hung over, and I just was so miserable and so I remember I went to a Methodist Church service, and I went inside and I sat down, and shortly after, the pastor just kind of greeted everyone, then, he invited everyone to greet one another, and I remember there was. I was just filled with shame. I think because I just and I actually… as soon as the greeting time was over, I fled. I just ran out. And so there were moments where I look back and think, “Wow! If I had just surrendered to what I think God was trying to do at that point, that would’ve made my life so much easier,” but I did not at that time. So you continued on. I guess you said you were in young adulthood at this point, and you were still, I presume, moving along in this way of living and thinking and perhaps difficulties in life and a little bit of despair. I presume at that point you would have considered—you mentioned that your worldview at that time really gave you no help, no savior, no recourse. So that was a situation or a circumstance or moment in your life where you actually were forced, in a way, to look at the implications of your own nihilistic worldview, that there was nothing there for you. It didn’t offer, perhaps, what you needed or what you were looking for. So even though you weren’t, I guess earlier, looking at the logical implications, in some ways, existentially, your existentialism kind of came to roost and to show its true self and your point of need. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah. Which they inevitably do, don’t they? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That our ways of thinking have a way of finding us in our lives. So tell me then what happened next in your journey? So I, and I lived with my parents for a few months, and then I got a job and was out on my own. An…

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