Show notes
As an atheist, Rob Oram presumed God didn’t exist until unexpected circumstances caused him to reconsider. Trained as an investigator, he began to look at the question of God more closely. 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. Side B is that side of the story that you don’t usually hear. Growing up, I used to buy vinyl records and listen to side A, the popular song that everyone knew and loved, but oftentimes, side B would just get ignored. It just wasn’t as well known, perhaps not worth listening to. Occasionally, I’d turn the record over and give it a chance. Every once in a while, I’d find a song that I rather liked and began listening to it even more than the song that I’d bought the record for in the first place. In the same way, we’re naturally driven towards the songs of people that we like, the ideas that we believe, side A, and we don’t often give the other side, side B, a chance, and when we do, we sometimes find ourselves a bit surprised by what we hear. We might even come to like it. We become more open to a different idea, a different way to think about the world and our lives. At the very least, listening to other perspectives helps us understand and relate to each other better than to distance and to stereotype and ignore. That’s the purpose of the Side B Podcast, to hopefully interest you in listening to ideas and perspectives you may not have heard. For Christians, it’s to help you understand the lives and perspectives of skeptics and the various reasons they may push away from God, and for skeptics, it’s to help you see how and why intelligent, thinking people may actually turn from disbelief to belief in God. Welcome to the podcast, Rob. It’s so great to have you on the show! It’s lovely to be with you, Jana. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself. Obviously, I hear something very English in your speech. Where are you from? Yes. So I’m in Hereford, England. You might detect a Cockney twang. Some people sometimes accuse me of being from Australia, but no, I’m from London, England. Yeah, so I moved out to Hereford four years ago, which is in the west part of England. I’m 46 years old. A former policeman. I was a policeman for nearly five years, and then I basically left to become a legal advisor in criminal defense, so in a sense, I went from arresting people to defending them, and then you could say, or someone said to me a few years ago, which I quite liked, “So you’ve gone from arresting people to defending them to now trying to save them,” because I’m now in the ministry with the Church of England. I’m a vicar, or in America you might say a pastor, with the Church of England, which I’ve been doing for the last six years, I suppose, if you include the training. Well, since this show is about talking with former atheists, now that you are a reverend, you really have gone full circle. I’m eager to get into your story. That’s quite a change over a lifetime. So why don’t we, at the beginning, just set the context for where your beliefs in atheism arose? Tell me about your understanding of God and religion and faith growing up. What kind of community were you in? What kind of family were you in? Did anyone believe in God? Or not? Why don’t you talk with me about that? Yeah, sure. I came from a loving but very secular household. So I grew up with… I’ve got two brothers, a foster brother, a sister, so we lived in a large house, a large household. But we never went to church or anything like that. I had loving parents, but certainly God was never part of things, really. We grew up interested in various sports and all the rest of it, and I certainly grew up very much as a practical atheist, I suppose. I never really thought about matters of God, and I very much lived… Certainly, as I grew up, as I got older, I lived for myself, so now I would look back and I can look back, and you’re probably, if I go into different parts of my story, you’ll hear why, I lived very much in rebellion towards God and very self centered, and it never occurred to me that there’d be a reason to do otherwise. Well, no, it’s not that it didn’t… It seemed to me the only way to logically live was for yourself, but actually the strange hypocrisy of that, if you like, as I grew up and got to my late teenage years, and especially at university, it became even more abundant, “What’s the point?” So I never took the trouble of investigating God until later on, and I’ll explain when and why that happened, but to me, it was just a given that… It just seemed natural, it just seemed innate that you’d live for yourself. What’s the point in doing anything else? And then actually, more than that, what’s the point of anything? And I became increasingly basically an apathetic hedonist. Those are the words I would use. My atheism was basically just borne out by a deep sense of apathy and hedonism. And there instinctively didn’t seem to me any greater point, meaning, purpose, or value in life than beyond those things. Now, I can look at Paul in the Bible, in, I think it’s 1 Corinthians, you know, “eat, drink, for tomorrow we die,” if there is no God. These sorts of things. So I just lived by that presumption, as if there was no God. Right. I guess there weren’t any other pictures in terms of Christianity, embodied Christianity, other Christians or religious influences around you that even made you question whether or not God existed? Or if you didn’t or didn’t have anything like that, what did you think that God and Christianity and all of that was? Yeah. I thought it was… Secularism has obviously been fairly rampant in the West, especially England, probably even more, a lot more so, actually, than America. And so you’re kind of indoctrinated from an early age, because everybody else tends to think the same, where within all of the media, within all of popular culture, at least the majority of it, it’s as if we’ve grown beyond that, and without making any effort, one is indoctrinated to believe that there’s no more truth to Christianity. Jesus Christ is no more real than Father Christmas, to give a silly example. Which now is bizarre when you actually stop and look at the evidence, but to me, it was just the cliched types of things when I looked at or came across Christians. I remember, at university for example, arguing with Christians on campus on a couple of occasions, and that was where I was clearly an atheist and would come across as an angry atheist to them, because my presumption, and these were no more than presumptions, was just that Christianity was a strange crutch for deluded people. I remember seeing a documentary in which Peter Atkins, an Oxford… great friend of Richard Dawkins, just said that anybody… “What do you think of people who believe?” he was asked, and he just said that they’re stupid. And I think, back then, I just assumed the same thing, that people were giving some attachment to some delusion because it made them feel better. Or more than that, I just suspected that people became Christians because they were just selfish, and so I remember challenging them, saying, “So why are you a Christian?” and basically suggesting that, “Well, you’re just a Christian because you want some deity to take care of you. Because actually you’re obsessed with your own salvation,” and I knew enough to know about Christianity to know that supposedly it was a route to salvation, and therefore, by default, my assumption was that these strange weirdos, these strange Christians, were just deluded people who needed a crutch who were just obsessed with getting themselves saved. And therefore actually it’s not a religion of love and charity and all the rest of it, but actually, deep down, Christians were just selfish people who wanted some mystical deity to save them. Does that make sense? I mean now as I try and say this stuff, it sounds nonsense, but this was kind of the way I thought back then. Right, yeah. You describe yourself as somewhat of an apathetic hedonist, but perhaps that was a little bit later on, in the sense that, if you had so much anger and contempt, that doesn’t sound apathetic to me. It sounds like you had a rather strong sense of self about your atheism and a strong opinion otherwise about Christianity. Yes. I was very suspicious. Regarding myself and how I lived, I lived with enormous apathy and hedonism, so together. But in terms of how I viewed Christians, because I never actually looked properly into Christianity, but I viewed Christians with great suspicion for kind of the reasons that I just mentioned. Right. So yeah, I was a strange mix. We all are. We all are. Indeed, we are. Right. So you lived this way, with this sense of apathy and really a sense of self pursuit in your own way because you didn’t see any meaning or purpose in life, and I’m impressed with that statement in the sense that, as an atheist, you must have been somewhat thoughtful about what atheism was or what naturalism brought or did not bring. It seems to me that, when you absorb atheism within secular culture, oftentimes, you just go with the flow and really don’t think about the implications of that worldview, but in a sense, you had really considered atheism in some regard, in that… Did you really think through those implications of there’s no real objective meaning, purpose, value, morality, those kinds of things? At all? For me, it was on a subconscious level. One of the things maybe we’ll get to shortly that was a big trigger was a William Lane Craig essay, when he wrote, “Is there meaning to life without God?” or something. I think he ended up putting it in one or two of his books, but it absolutely shook me to the core, because he brilliantly articulated everything I’d always kind of assumed and lived by, and so I was confronted with it, but before I read that—and a lot of things happened before I did read that—I had just lived with a sort of subconscious… Everyone lives with a subconscious awareness that life is fleeting and that they are going to die, so I always had a strong sense of my own mortality. It’s just this inescapable end. The inescapable destiny that we all face. And I also had enough awareness to know how long this universe had been here, how brief and, you know, within 250 years, nobody is going to know anything about you. So even today, for example, we see more and more humanist funerals where people talk about people living on through other people’s memories and stuff, and it’s really a sham. I knew that life itself ultimately was absurd because, relative to what we know about time and the universe, our lives are just a grain of sand. So therefore very quickly, growing up, as a teenager and then especially when I got to university, I found no desire or enthusiasm or anything. All I lived for were the things that gave me immediate pleasures. So I went to university just to play sport. And I never did anything. I never did any studies whatsoever. I basically lied and cheated my way through just to manage to get through university. And just lived a very hedonistic lifestyle. And to me it was just obvious. Why would you bother to do anything else? So it was just an obvious reality to you. You’ve painted quite a picture. I think we understand where you were and the way you were living and what you were thinking. Walk me a little bit farther along and tell me what began to change for you. Or what opened you to the possibility that God exists or something might be different than you thought it was? So, in a way, my conversion if you like, or my testimony, is a story of three prayers, in a sense, and it’s the story of two women and three prayers, okay? What happened was… When I was at university, so I was about 20, 21 at the time. Bizarrely, I made this—and I remember these things very clearly in my head—I made a bizarre transactional bargain with inverted commas, big inverted commas, God, right? And this sounds bizarre, and it was, because I didn’t believe there was a God, but I basically made this prayer one day. No, there’s no way I’d call it a prayer. It was a bargain, but let’s just say… And it was basically… I saw this female that I desired, right? And she was with somebody else. And I was with somebody else. And I basically said, and this reflects a lot of what I was like at the time… Anyway, I won’t… I said, “God, if You’re real, if You’ll give me this girl, I promise You I’ll be faithful to her,” and then a little while later, we got together. Now, we were together for about two years, and I was a lot better. I think, for a while, I could genuinely feel I was happy. And this was a really fine individual. Have you heard of the Alpha course in America? Yes, yes, I have heard. But for those who haven’t heard of it, why don’t you tell us what that is. So the Alpha course is something that originated from a place called HTB Church in England, in London. A big church in England. And a guy called Nicky Gumble took on this course, which basically was a way of introducing people to Christianity and exploring questions of life through the lens of Christianity and Jesus Christ basically. And it’s basically become a global, worldwide phenomenon, this course, and it’s superb. So this lady that I was with at the time. Her name’s Jeanette. She went on an Alpha course, and to cut a long story short, she became a Christian, and she wanted to live like one, and although… So basically, when I say she wanted to live like one, it meant she no longer wanted to have sex before marriage, if I’m being blunt. Yes. This wasn’t really ideal for me, and I know that basically she was just waiting for me to propose and to marry her, and I didn’t do that. What I did was I basically tried to crush her faith. I thought, “How can you choose this mystical, bizarre God that you’ve sort of invented or that’s just been from this strange course that you’ve been on… How can you choose this bizarre God over me?” And so I was angry, and basically, I broke her heart. And I really broke her heart. And I was, in a way, trying to break her faith as a means of revenge for her betrayal, because she chose this nonsense mystical God over me. Eventually, everything I say will relate to each other. So just stay with me. Oh, absolutely. I thought I was going to be free, so as I did this, I was also aware that I was breaking my own agreement agreement with God. So, rather than marry her and this stick to this bizarre agreement I’d made with inverted commas God, this bargain, this higher power that I tried to make the strange bargain with, I thought, “Stuff You, stuff her, stuff this stupid superstitious nonsense! I’m going to go back and live for myself,” and so, in a sense, I betrayed this agreement I’d made with God. I’d obviously betrayed her in that sense. Because I was trying to crush her spirit and crush this newfound faith. I thought I’d find some more freedom. I thought I’d go back and find a sense of freedom, and I just threw myself into a major hedonistic lifestyle, far more than ever before. I really was living by the week, by the day, on a cocktail of drink, drugs, etc. Conquests. I was a serving police officer at the time, but I was going out most nights of the week with pockets full of this, that, and other. And it really was… yeah. Drink, drugs, sexual conquests with absolutely no regard to who I was hurting along the way. It was the optimum of rebellion. Now, a few years of living like this, I then met another girl, funny enough on a dating site. It probably won’t surprise you to know I was on a few of them, but… To cut a long story short, a whirlwind romance basically began. This was someone who lived in Wales. But we kind of started meeting online and then, within a year, she moved down to London to live with me. So many things about this relationship had been out of my control. How we met on…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
