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From Secular Humanism to Christianity – Susan Leonard’s Story (Audio) Sep 29, 2023

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Former skeptic Susan Leonard was a secular humanist and worked as a successful professional on Capitol Hill. She saw no need for faith until she encountered Jesus Christ in a way she couldn’t ignore. Resources/authors recommended by Susan: Dr. Jeff Myers, Understanding the Times Josh McDowell, Sean McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, Christian Apologetics Atheists Finding God book by host Jana Harmon https://sidebstories.com/atheistsfindinggod/ Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of our stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page. You can also email us at info@sidebstories.com. We love hearing from you! Our lives tell a story. We can look at someone’s life and get an idea of who they are, what they believe, what they pursue, what seems important to them. But more than that, our individual lives are usually lived within a bigger story, a worldview has a storyline all its own, a view of the world that says what is real, why we’re here, who we are, and where we’re going. Religions tell stories, creating narratives that answer those big questions. With so many religions in the world, though, it begs the question: Are religions only merely stories? Are they invented to help people get along in life? Is there one that’s more true than another? In today’s culture, many people want to create their own story, create themselves, and create their own answers. But even that self-created narrative is housed within a larger story, the worldview of postmodernism or relativism or secularism, where there is no absolute truth but only truth decided upon by a person, or by a group. It’s a matter of power or survival. In today’s story, former skeptic Susan Leonard rejected all the religious stories of her youth to embrace the worldview of a secular humanist who did not believe in religious stories. Now she’s a strong defender of the Christian worldview, a story of reality she is convinced is more than merely a story, but is objectively true. I hope you’ll come along to listen to her journey from skepticism to belief. Welcome to Side B Stories podcast, Susan. It’s so great to have you with me today. Thank you so much. It’s a privilege. And thanks for having me. Susan, as we’re getting started, I’d love to know a little bit about you and who you are now, your interests, your academic studies, both past and present. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I’m married for 27 years this July. I have two young adult children. I’m a Christian educator. I’ve taught middle school for about seven years, high school, and substituted at the elementary school level. So pretty involved in the K-12 education sphere. But I didn’t start out in education. I started out in politics, worked on Capitol Hill and in the White House actually for President Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, 41. Later, when I moved to The Hill, I met my husband, but then I had a conversion, and everything changed. The entire trajectory of my life changed after that moment. Yes. And you’re even pursuing a doctoral degree right now, aren’t you? I am getting my PhD in educational studies at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, and I do think that it will be very helpful to have more PhDs at the K-12 level, so I’m hoping to have impact there, but if there’s anything I’ve learned that’s different as a converted Christian, I do not control the future. God does. And obedience is not necessarily a straight line, as I like to say. So we’ll see where He takes me. I’m open to that. Yeah. Well, you have certainly piqued my curiosity. Certainly having spent a lot of time in DC, but let’s go back to your childhood. Tell me where you were born and your family of origin. Was religion a part of your home? What did that look like? So I have, I think, an unusual background. I come from a family that’s quite pluralistic. No one religion held a privileged status in my family, and that was considered virtuous. My grandmother on my mother’s side grew up in the hills of Virginia, in Appalachia. Very poor. She was baptized in the Jackson River. Fully dunked. Advent Christian. My grandfather is a Jew from East Liberty in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and they have two children, one obviously my mom. And so my mother—this is fascinating! My mother starts going back for two weeks every summer, going back to Appalachia with her mother to help on the farm, while she’s a child. And so my mother starts to go to vacation Bible school for those two weeks each summer, from about the age of 7 to 15. And she gets baptized, fully dunked, in the Jackson River during vacation Bible school! But why I tell the story is because what fascinates me is, back in the Washington, DC, area where she was raised throughout the year, her mother, Advent Christian grandmother, started to help out at B’nai B’rith, a Jewish foundation, and she becomes president of that organization. My Advent Christian grandmother even has a stint doing that. And my mom starts helping out, and my mom starts helping out at the Hillel Foundation, which was a foundation set up at the University of Maryland to help to Jewish students who didn’t go home So my mother is getting formed…. As she likes to describe it, she describes it as quite unusual. And so what she will say is that she was taught that no religion was more superior than any other religion. And that she was taught religious tolerance and to not be bigoted towards anyone, which is why she counted it as virtuous. I can see that. Right. So then she gives birth to me and my sister. And she marries—get this: Now, my mom marries a man, my father, from the Bible Belt, a Baptist from North Carolina. So now I have a Jewish grandfather, who—by the way, I didn’t mention this: His brother, my Uncle Leon, married an Orthodox Jew. My Advent Christian grandmother from the hills of Appalachia, And now my mother marries a Baptist from the Bible Belt. That’s quite a mix. So by the time it gets to my sister and I—I said to my mom recently, “Did you and Dad ever talk about raising us in one particular tradition?” and she said, “No, never.” So I would say my father was a nominal Christian at this point, stopped going to church probably around the time of college, which is not unusual. And then I even remember, as a child—and this really does sum up my life—hanging in my grandmother’s kitchen was a sign, a little tiled sign, and it read, “Shalom, y’all.” Y apostrophe A-L-L. But that was my life. And so, what’s fascinating about that, Jana, is that I was learning the exact same ideal or principle from the culture, where the culture was teaching me the exact same thing, that no one religion had a privileged status. And being influenced by that philosophy in my community and culture. And again, that was counted as virtuous. Wow. So when you were being raised, these different voices of these different religious traditions, how did that look? Did you actually attend any kind of church or synagogue? Was there any active kind of movement within these religious traditions? Or was it just something that you held ideologically? The simple answer to that is things came at me sort of in episodes, episodically. So I remember my Mom saying once… The pastor of the local Methodist church walked down a dirt road to our home, and was knocking on the door asking us to go to church, so we ended up going, my sister and I, when we were little, for maybe a year or two, to Sunday school. So I have faint memories of that, at the local Methodist church, but then I became a competitive gymnast and actually started to compete at the national level, and so we were traveling all over the East Coast as early as age seven or eight, and so we stopped going. And I say it’s episodic because sometimes there would be somebody in my Jewish side of the family that would die, and so I would not know this because no one really talked about it, but I would show up at my grandparents’ house, and there would be candles burning. And not just a candle burning. I mean, it was actually a ceremonial candle burning. And I remember once walking over to it to blow it out, being a little kid, and someone screaming, “Don’t do that!” But of course, that was something that you would do, you would light a candle when someone passed. But you don’t always, as a child, ask why. You are really just going through the motions of being raised, and you’re looking at your authority and the elders and sort of just following, and you’re just taking it all in. And in some ways, if I look back at it, I really kind of felt like a pinball in a pinball machine. I mean, it was just kind of being bounced to and fro from ideas. And you have a certain body of knowledge to be able to ask a good question. And so, as a child, I didn’t know enough to ask rightly. And so it just started to become part of this mosaic in me, a sort of mismatched ideology, where I was confused. Yeah. I can see where that would be very confusing, because the religious traditions all have different claims about what is true and what is real. So I would imagine it would be confusing when you’re being bounced back and forth between different religious ideas. Yeah. So did you have even a sense that, “Well, I believe in God,” or did you pray to God? I’m just not sure… the Jewish God or the Christian God. Or did they all kind of go to the same God? How was that forming in your little mind? Right. In my little mind, God was the same God for all of them. So there was no distinction. I think you said that well. It was the same God. And I would use words like universe, very cultural words to describe the universe. Like I would say, “The universe is forming today.” “I feel at one with the universe.” If I prayed to God, and there were times that I did, it was just this… God was not a person. God was more of a… I guess in some ways was a mishmash, sort of pantheistic. I mean, God was more just an energy or force. But I had no sense that God was a person. So then, as you were getting a little bit older, Did you start to think more distinctly about that or clearly about that? Or is it something that you started to embrace more and more? Or is it something that you stepped away from as you started growing up? You know, I guess as I started to grow up, I was really just formed by… I believed this cultural reinforcement of a secular worldview and the culture of the time. I grew up in the ‘80s. I know now we’re created to worship. We all worship something. I worshiped my country, patriotism., I mean it was the time of Ronald Reagan. Capitalism, consumerism. That was all the object of my worship. As a young girl in the ‘80s, I cared about the way I looked, how I dressed. I was probably a feminist. I know I was pro-choice. And just like the secular worldview we know, which is such an important tenet of it, God is, or was, for me irrelevant. I was in charge of my own destiny, and as far as I was concerned, I was very opinionated and very independent and very self centered. And so, because of that, I would drive down the road, I’d see signs for churches, I’d see different denominations. I knew nothing about that, which is really phenomenal now, considering how much I’ve learned about it and all the education that I’ve had. The foremost thought in my mind was that God was irrelevant, did not need any of my attention. I was fine on my own. And so if there was this thing called the church—and I knew people that went to church—that’s just something they did. It was part of their story. It was one story among many other stories but didn’t require any commitment. So I can imagine it would be phenomenal growing up in the shadow of the Capitol Building there. I mean, just in the DC area, and the influences in politics, and it seems like the center of the universe there in the United States, everything coming and going there, and it would be somewhat exciting and I guess, again, the word you used was secular and it sounds like that’s how you started defining yourself. You said making your own choices. Did you develop this strong sense of self without God? I mean it sounds like you were a confident young woman who was finding her way. Yeah. And of course we know that behind that confidence was really a lack of confidence. I mean, it wasn’t true confidence. Because we know what that looks like post-conversion and with a Christian identity. But without that identity, it was standing on my own stilts that I had created. My own stilts that I had created, my own strength that I was walking on. Which God, of course, would pull out from underneath me in my conversion. But yes, I think that—and we can talk about that, but just to answer your question, that in the shadow of the capitol in Washington, DC. I mean, we used to drive by the White House, My father actually grew up in the Capitol Hill area. My grandparents, all four, lived in that area. So those were the roads that I traveled, and so those buildings… I mentioned this before, we’re created to worship, and we all worship something and then seek to achieve something great, right? In the Christian story, we’re worshiping, obviously, Christ, and we seek to give God the glory. What I did was to worship myself and to place that glory in something. It had to go somewhere. What did I want to glorify? Because that actually exists. It’s not something that I re-create. It’s just what we are created to do and for. And so, in my life, if I could get into those buildings and work in them, I would then create this strong self, right? I would achieve glory. I’d be working at the pinnacle of the nation, right? I would be at the top. And so that’s what I did and that’s what I pursued, and then I met my husband. Yeah. So you pursued that path, and it sounds like you didn’t need God. You didn’t need God, like those who went to church who needed God. When you looked at other people, it sounds like, when you considered religious people, it’s not like you had disdain or hostility towards them at all. It was just something that you didn’t need. Is that right? Yeah. And I think the culture has and had successfully divorced the intellect from faith. And so, when that happens, it’s not just something we study academically now and say, “Okay, that’s what happened,” and we can study that academically. When you’re growing up like I did, it’s entrenched in everything. It’s in the water we drink. And so, as far as I was concerned, there were people who had an intellect and they were living their lives and doing their own thing. And then there were people who had faith, and they needed it, like you said, and I didn’t need it. Until I did. Yeah. Because I would start to ask questions, because the other thing that’s so interesting about human beings is that you can’t get away from the questions. I remember going to a funeral… no, a viewing. And I’m standing, looking at the body of a close dear friend of ours at a viewing. This was an open viewing, open casket, and I’m standing there staring at this body and skin, and it’s not moving, and it’s just a shell, and I’m haunted, and I’m alone, and people are milling about, and someone I remember distinctly who came up next to me, a close friend of the person who had died and a close friend of our families, and she said, “Susan, are you okay?” and I said, “Where did he go?” And she said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Where did he go? It’s just a shell. Where did he go?” And so I would have been 25, 26 years old. Well, that continued to sort of sit in the back of my head, kind of like, “…

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A Scientist Searches for More – Dr. Alister McGrath’s Story (Audio) Sep 15, 2023

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Former atheist Dr. Alister McGrath dismissed Christianity and embraced science as the only way to understand the world until he began to see problems with this limiting view. Once he opened the door to alternative views, he found the biblical worldview provided a more comprehensive and grounded view of the world and of himself. Alister’s website: http://alistermcgrath.weebly.com/ For more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of our stories on our website at www.sidebstories.com or through our YouTube channel. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page, and you can also email us directly at info@sidebstories.com. We do love hearing from you. In the world of ideas, some people are experts in their field. They are scientists or historians, theologians or philosophers. They have a particular understanding of the world from their unique expertise, academic training, and personal perspectives. Sometimes, however, a concentration on one area of thought can skew the vision of the whole. The risk is that some become so specialized that all other sources of knowledge become subdued to their own unique slice of understanding of the world. With expertise in one area, it can become harder to see how that one piece of the puzzle relates to the bigger picture of reality. It can lead to a false confidence that their small area of knowledge explains the whole when perhaps it may not. In our podcast today, you’ll hear from former atheist Dr. Alister McGrath, who holds three PhDs from Oxford, one in science, one in theology, and another in intellectual history. He’s also the author of more than fifty books. Although he dismissed belief in God due to his belief in science and the naturalistic worldview, he changed his mind. Now, he is one of the world’s greatest proponents of the necessary integration of a wide range of knowledge in order to best understand and explain what we observe in the world and in ourselves. And because of his broad academic accomplishments and years of coursing through the strengths and weaknesses of diverse ideas, including atheism and naturalism, he has the unique ability to see the big picture, integrating sub-specialties into a whole and making sense of all of reality. Through his erudite mind, he contends that the Christian worldview is not only the best explanation for what we see and experience in the world, it also provides the best story for our lives. In his view, the Christian story best answers the big questions of who we are and why we’re here. It best fulfills our deepest longings, as compared to other worldviews. I hope you’ll come along today to hear his story of moving from atheism to Christianity. Dr. McGrath is also going to introduce us to his new forthcoming book, Coming to Faith through Dawkins. Many of you might recognize the name Dawkins as referring to Richard Dawkins, a recognized biologist and one of the four horsemen of the New Atheist Movement. This book is filled with twelve stories of former skeptics and atheists who were once enthusiasts for the claims and the writings of the New Atheists, but they became disillusioned by the arguments and conclusions of Dawkins, causing them to look deeper and with more objectivity at religious faith and became Christians. They became convinced that the authentic Christian faith is in fact more intellectually convincing and robust than atheism. I’m looking so forward to today’s podcast. Welcome to Side B Stories, Dr. McGrath. It’s so great to have you. Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you very much for having me as a guest on your program. Terrific. As we’re getting started, Dr. McGrath, you come to the table with much gravitas, I must say. And I would love for our listeners to know exactly a bit about your academic background, your three PhDs at Oxford. You’re an author of over fifty books. There’s so much to say, but I also know that you have a new book coming out, Coming to Faith through Dawkins. So could you introduce us a little bit to who you are, your academic background, and even your new book? Yes. I’d be delighted to do that. I’m a person who began as an atheist and a scientist, and then I went to Oxford University and began to realize that things weren’t quite as straightforward as I thought. I was an atheist when I was a teenager. I thought life was very, very simple, that science disproved God. I came to Oxford, discovered it wasn’t really quite that simple, so I discovered Christianity, and that was wonderful. And then I moved on from there to begin to explore the relationship between science and Christianity, eventually studying theology, and then moving on to begin a detailed study of the Christian faith and also learning how to teach it. I think that was very, very important for me, because being able to teach faith is really important. It helps to understand what’s really important and what really matters. And, as you say, I’ve written lots of books, including textbooks, but the most recent book I’ve written is this very interesting account of how a lot of people in effect felt moved to read Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion, and then, when they began to read it, discovered it didn’t make sense at all and actually that it seemed to be rather inadequate and instead discovered Christianity. So we’ll talk about that later, but that was a very exciting project. That’s really wonderful. So, let’s get back into your story. You encapsulated it there, as an atheist who came to Christ, but let’s start at the beginning of your story, because, as you know, we all embrace a story with our world, with our worldview, and I wonder of the worldview in which you were brought into the world. Talk to us about your childhood, where you were born, your family. Was God part of your family? Was Christianity or worship in any way a part of your world? Well, I was born in Northern Ireland back in 1953, which is a long time ago. And my family were conventionally religious. I suppose that’s the best way of putting it. And I couldn’t see what faith was all about. It made no sense to me at all. What I discovered as I was growing up was that I was really interested in the natural world around. In other words, I really knew I wanted to be a scientist. I think that was a thing that really drove me. And as a teenager, I think I bought into this idea that science and religion were at war with each other. And therefore, if I wanted to be a scientist, I had to say no to God, no to religion. And I did so without really having looked at that critically, so I did that and became very involved in atheism. I became interested in Marxism, which gave added intellectual resilience to my atheism. And then I began to have some doubts about my atheism as I prepared for moving up to university. I think that it seemed to me initially that things were very, very simple, that atheism was just the obviously right position for a thinking person. And I then began to realize there are problems here. I mean, I believed there was no God, but I couldn’t prove there was no God. It was a faith position. And that rather unsettled me. And so I began to realize that things were just not as simple as I had thought. So- Oh, okay- So I said, “Well, look, when I get to Oxford University, I’ll sort everything out,” but it didn’t work out the way I expected it to. Wow! Okay. There was a lot there. I’d love to slow walk through a lot of that. Let’s go back to even when you were starting to question your Christian… you said the conventions of Christianity in which you were raised. You started to question that. You started to doubt that, as it sounds like a teenager or in your earlier years, when you started encountering science. Let’s kind of camp out there for a minute. What was it about science that you understood at that time in your life that was incompatible or made you push back against your Christian upbringing, as it were? I think the key thing was this: Science proves everything. Religion, Christianity, just asserts various things and isn’t able to prove it. So I think I was intolerant of uncertainty. I wanted to be sure about things. And therefore I wanted to inhabit a world where I could know everything for certain. And so I think that led me to the conclusion that science would be able to answer all of my questions. And if it couldn’t answer my questions, then they weren’t real questions in the first place. So I think that was the really important thing. It wasn’t so much that science disproved Christianity. It was that it offered a different quality of knowledge, much more secure, much more reliable. And that’s what I was looking for, something that was safe and secure. Okay. So would you say that they were, in that sense, non-overlapping magisteria, in that Christianity and God and that world, they, like you said, made assertions, but they weren’t seemingly grounded in as concrete a way as what you could find in the sciences. So it sounds as if you were moving toward more of a scientific view or lens of the world, but, with Christianity, was that something that you weren’t dismissing? You were just saying that it perhaps didn’t give as substantive answers as science, so you were turning your attention to something else. It wasn’t as if you immediately went into atheism. That form of knowledge was not as robust or confidence building as what you could find in science. I think, to begin with, it was exactly as you’ve described, that in effect my initial feeling was, “I want something that is reliable, that I can trust, that can, in effect, give me secure answers.” And that was saying, “Well, Christianity is a different kind of thing.” But then I began to buy into this idea which I heard from many people, which was that Christianity and science were incompatible, that they were at war with each other. And that moved me in a slightly different direction. In other words, saying, “Well, look if I love science, I cannot be a religious person, because these are incompatible. They’re at war with each other.” Now, you might reasonably say, “Well, where did you get that idea from?” Well, it was in the intellectual and cultural environment. I just bought into it rather uncritically, and in fact, I spent the rest of my life kind of undoing that. But I think it was very, very… That was a very widespread perception at the time, and certainly I bought into that. So in many ways what you could say is, I began, in effect, by saying, “I’m looking for secure knowledge, and I don’t think Christianity gives it, but that doesn’t make Christianity wrong. Science gives that to me.” And then, taking this one stage further and saying, in effect, “Because science is so good and because science and faith are incompatible, that means I have to choose. It’s one or the other. I choose science.” So I think that’s really the kind of teenage logic that lay behind my decision. So when you embraced science then as incompatible with religion or faith, then did you, at that time, label yourself or identify as a naturalist, a materialist, an atheist, even in your teenage years? Yes. I did self identify as an atheist. I would say, “I’m an atheist.” And I would make it quite clear that I was saying not that I don’t believe in God, but I believe there is no God. It was a much more positive, aggressive form of atheism. And I think also there’s a cultural element here, which is I found religion rather stuffy back in Ireland. And proclaiming myself as an atheist kind of gave a sort of frisson, a sort of edge to life. I felt I had a sense of superiority over other people because I was intellectually superior. Now I know that sounds very, very arrogant but that’s the way I was back then, when I was a teenager, and it seemed to me atheism put me on the right side of history. Back in the late 1960s, that was the way things seemed to be going, and I wanted to be part of a movement that had a future. So there are a whole series of things, science and culture coming together and moving me in that direction. Culturally speaking, there was a lot of religious unrest in Ireland. Did that feed into your perspective of: “Religion perhaps may not be true, and it may not also be good.” I think you’re right. I think that one of the thoughts I had was this: In the late 1960s, religious violence did become a problem in Northern Ireland. My logic went like this: If there was no religion, there’d be no religious violence, so get rid of religion, all the world’s problems are solved. So it was very simple. In fact, it was really very simplistic, but that’s the way I thought at that time. So in many ways, I think I was kind of, in a way, buying into a number of reasons why I fought religion was wrong. Violence and inability to intellectually justify itself. And also this perception: Science and religion are incompatible. So I felt I was moving to an intellectually coherent position which was a stable position. And that’s one of the reasons why I think I did not expect to review my positions at all as we moved ahead. So yes, it felt like a safe, secure perspective. As you say, I think it’s often the case that those who are intellectually driven find that atheism or at least presume that atheism is a more intellectually superior position as well. And that I’m sure in some ways felt, as well as the way that you thought, that it was the right place to be for you. I think that’s right. I think that I felt, “This is the right place to be,” and more than that, that I’d sorted this question out, that I now know what I think, and I won’t need to revisit this question. So I thought that I’d closed down the discussion and could move on to other things. So at that time, when you had decided that science was the direction you wanted to go, what did you think religion was, other than it may be potentially dangerous? But how did you perceive Christians, Christianity, during that time? I had read some Sigmund Freud, and I knew about this idea of religion being a wish fulfillment. And that seemed to me to be a self-evident truth, that actually religious people were inadequate people who in effect needed something to give them stability and security, and there was no God, so they invented a God. And I thought, “Well, that’s all right for them, but I don’t need this.” Now the problem was that, deep inside me somewhere, I think something said to me, “Maybe atheism is your wish fulfillment,” in other words that actually maybe I was constructing a worldview that suited me, rather than one that was true. Now, that thought went through my mind several times, but I did not follow through on it, I think partly because I found it a little bit disturbing. I thought I sorted everything out. I didn’t want to reopen the question. Yes. And when you close the door on another worldview and think you leave the superstition behind, it’s not something you want to reopen, in a sense. I can imagine there would be some resistance to that. As you were pursuing what seemed to be a very positive aspect of being grounded in the naturalistic worldview, did you… I mean you’re obviously a very intellectually driven, logical, analytical person. Did you look at the logical implications of that worldview? You obviously were very well read. I’m sure you read Russell and Nietzsche and those people who actually understood that all that glitters is not gold, in a sense. There are some dark sides or despairing sides if you embrace fully the naturalistic worldview. Well, I agree with you completely. What I realized was atheism was very bleak. It was very austere. There’s no real meaning in life. What yo…

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Looking Past Hypocrisy to Christ – Loren Weisman’s Story (Audio) Sep 01, 2023

Show notes

Former skeptic Loren Weisman rejected the Jewish beliefs of his youth to embrace atheism. Although he encountered bad examples of Christianity in his search for truth, he looked past those experiences and found Christ. Loren’s Resources: https://www.lorenweisman.com Resources/authors recommended by Loren: The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist Norman L. Geisler, Frank Turek www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website or YouTube channel. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page or through our email, at info@sidebstories.com. We love hearing from you. As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, at the end of each episode, these former atheists give advice to curious skeptics as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don’t believe. I do hope you’re listening to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic but who is now a believer. There are different stories of reality, and we live within some narrative that defines who we are, how we got here, where we’re going, what’s broken, and how it can be fixed. Some stories are closer to truth than others. Sometimes we look at people who are living out of certain stories and beliefs and make a judgment about the truth of that story. If someone says they believe one thing, but their lives reflect something else, something that is rather unattractive and hypocritical, then those looking on often think that that story must not be good or true. Many have rejected God because of bad experiences with or observations of people who say that they are Christians, but their words and actions don’t seem to line up with someone who’s supposed to be following Christ. In my research with fifty former atheists, right at half of them, 48% to 50%, said one of the reasons that they rejected belief in God was because of a perceived sense of hypocrisy among Christians. Of course, although someone’s behavior may not, and often doesn’t, align with their beliefs, it doesn’t mean that the beliefs themselves are not true, but hypocrisy can and does fuel reasons why people walk away from God. In our story today, former atheist Loren Weisman encountered Christians who lived as if they were not. That is, their attitudes, words, and actions did not reflect well on their faith. Surprisingly, despite these bad experiences and exposures, Loren’s heart was open, and he was willing to seek towards truth to see past those negative examples to look towards Jesus. Now, Loren strives to live a life of authenticity and truth in order to be a positive, winsome ambassador for Christ. I hope you’ll come along to hear of his journey past the obstacle of hypocrisy to come to know the real and true Christ. Welcome to Side B Stories, Loren. It’s great to have you with me today. Thank you for bringing me on. Terrific! As we’re getting started, let’s paint a picture for our listeners of who are a little bit. Give us an idea, Loren, a little bit about you, about your life now. My life now. I’m a messaging and optic strategist for the Fish Stewarding group, and what I look at for this organization is how we share our story, how we share what we have for products, and looking a little deeper than the idea of here’s how we market or advertise, but much more so how can we be heard organically, authentically, with authority, when a lot of people say a lot of things. So, to me, it’s almost like the first step before marketing to know if that story is true, if it’s moral, if it’s honest, if it’s real, and when we build that foundation, regardless of what we do or who we are, we’re building on a rock and not on the sand. Wow. Okay. That is very intriguing to me, especially in light of the story that you’re going to give us today. If those values you hold dear are truth and transparency and authenticity, I’m anticipating an amazing story of your own. So let’s go back. Paint a picture for us of your childhood. Talk to us about what your life was like and the family that you grew up in. Did you go to church? Was religion or God or any of that a part of that picture? It wasn’t. As you can probably assume from the last name, I grew up Jewish, Passover was fun. Hanukkah was presents and lights. I went to Sunday school, preparing for a bar mitzvah. I do remember being a little child and frightened and saying, “What happens when we die?” and being told nothing. That was a terrifying thing when I was smaller. I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, which is the center of a five-college circuit area. You had the University of Massachusetts, the Ivy League Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Hampshire. It was a very broad experience in growing up at that time. And my parents, things did not go well with them. I make the joke of it was the uncommitted divorce that took many years. I think they got together and separated numerous times until finally divorcing a little bit later in my youngest years. But that back and forth was a bit of a thing. I’m sure that had a little bit more of an impact. I was a lot more emotional than my brother was. My brother seemed to hold it all in. I was emotional, and in some ways, I feel like that let it out. And, in growing up in that, I found the drums. And the drums were everything. I found the drums at 13. And I didn’t want to do anything else. I had had a drum set from a neighbor for about two weeks, and nothing was interesting to me. I needed to be a drummer. Mm. So it completely captured your heart, or your passion, immediately it sounds like. Yeah. So before we get into that and your musical career, so this home that you grew up in. You had a Jewish heritage, in the sense that you went through the motions of Shabbat and high holy days and bar mitzvahs and things like that. What was that to you? Was that just some tradition that your family took part in? Was there something real there? Or was it just something that you did? I’m sure we’ll go in later in the conversation, but I’ve kind of enjoyed sharing this quote a little bit, that I learned more when I became a Christian about Judaism than I ever learned about Judaism growing up steeped in it. And again, that’s why kind of the first-gear Jew concept of, you know, Passover. We would read about the sons and the Elijah cup. It would sit on the table, and we’d ask questions, and sometimes it was, “Oh, we’re going to celebrate Shabbat,” but then we’re not. And Hanukkah was lighting candles and even going to the synagogue occasionally. It was all very ethereal and not directed. When we were learning Hebrew—Hebrew school was on Wednesdays and Sundays, preparing for the bar mitzvah. And what we were learning inside of the Torah was how to read Hebrew and not understand the words that were written. So the focus in the Jewish community of Amherst, and I’m not trying to bad mouth, but it was a sense of, “Here’s the alef. Here’s the bet.” My Hebrew name is Eliezer Ben Shimol, and the most that I understood is that it’s your name, son of your dad’s name. And we’d sing the stories about Noah and the forty days, and we’d sing small things in the seven days of creation. But none of it was ever put together or delivered, even for a kids’ level, in anything that to me would plant seeds. So would you say that these stories that you were taught, were they merely stories, some mythology? Or or did you think that there was some historical veracity behind them? Obviously, the Jewish people, over centuries, have been celebrating things like Passover, and that’s historical, right? But I guess what I’m trying to ask is: Did you think that there was something real to even the Jewish God? Or was it just a story or a ritual? During especially inside the separations, I wanted it to be real. It didn’t feel it. It didn’t exhibit anything. But it seemed very allegorical. It felt like, “Okay, maybe this is just a story to teach you a lesson.” And, “Okay, they’re roaming around the desert for forty years.” None of it seemed anything outside of fiction. The closest that I had, my grandfather. I remember going with my grandfather a couple times to a synagogue. And the heart that he had in it, and the way he prayed, those were a little sparks of maybe there’s something more. But then there were times years later, going like, “Maybe this is just kind of like a boys club or a thing to do.” It didn’t feel rooted or anchored in anything beyond tradition. Okay. All right. And how long did you stay… I know you mentioned that your parents divorced, and your mother had actually taken on a Jewish identity, I presume because of your father. So once they divorced and separated, did you continue in any kind of Jewish practice at all? Or was it just something you left behind once they separated? Well, the bar mitzvah, which… and that was closer. I mean they had divorced finally shortly before, but the bar mitzvah was sort of like the out. It was, “You have to study,” and then it was Hebrew school and Sunday school and a Hebrew tutor, and getting everything ready for, I think it was June 13, 1989 or 1990. I can’t remember exactly. It was getting the suit. It was inviting all these family people. I mean, even walking around the bar mitzvah afterwards, it was like it was for everybody but me. And, again, not trying to make it a selfish thing, but it represented, in a way, “I don’t have to do this anymore.” And then I would go to synagogue for my grandfather, and I would do certain things, but I mean I was kind of skipping out on most of the Hanukkah stuff and Passover. Passover was kind of a weird thing at my family on my father’s side of: It was the same jokes done each year. I mean, Passover at that time was a whole bunch of food with a pre-game of ritual tradition. And then find the afikomen and get a couple bucks, and it was very… I don’t know And I’m not trying to disrespect my grandfather in any way, but it was just… it was out there to me. So that was something that was easy to leave behind. Oh, yes. And your attention then turned towards the drums. So it sounds like that captured your full, or at least primary, attention. Talk to us about that part of your life, in adolescence. So you were kind of leaving this religious thing behind, and of course your parents had separated, and you’re an adolescent, so that’s a very interesting time of life for anyone. So talk to us about that part of your life. There was a confidence, and there was a fun in the drums. I think I picked up the drums, and a couple months later, I had a girlfriend! Oh, yeah! You were suddenly cool! Right? Oh, yeah. It was great! So, you know, I don’t know if I was shy as much as a little withheld, and the drums gave a confidence. And there was an assertiveness in, “I want to be a drummer.” And then I got to meet a girl. And then there was an opening of just a fun direction. I didn’t want to be a lawyer like my father. It was just nothing. I mean, I would visit his office, and there was nothing about that that I enjoyed. I was looking at what different people were doing, and then some people would say, “Oh, you’ll get into what you want to do later.” It was immediate. I mean, sitting at the drums, everything felt in place. And when I was playing the drums, the divorce wasn’t an issue, or school wasn’t an issue, or God wasn’t an issue, or…. You know, at that time, if we die and turn to dust, at least I have this time with the drums. And so the drums became everything to me. So you had mentioned a couple of kind of big questions that you had asked as a child. What happens to you when you die? And that sort of thing. But you said, when you played the drums, it filled you with so much joy, and you were able to escape into it, essentially, for a while, and obviously you were very good at it. I mean obviously, with the breakup of your family and all of those big things that you deal with, Were you still asking some of those big questions? Or, I guess, was the drums just a way forward out and through all of that and to a different life? It was both. I mean, the drums were a way forward. I had a great fear of death, and I had a misunderstanding about the universe, and I listened to the things that we learned about, and it didn’t add up. And there was something that was just off, and it took me in later on, which made more sense in the apologetics journey later down the line. But I remember being in eighth-grade science class and just the stories at that time about, “Well, everything’s just been here, and it’s always going to be here, and, oh, the sun will burn out.” So how did this happen? And these other elements about the Earth and these other things, they were bothering me. I mean, when I was in ninth grade, I remember—and again, I was tucked away in the world of drumming, but I found myself asking the questions of, “Well, if there’s nothing, why do we have to be nice? Why can’t we rob a bank? Where is this law set that, ‘Okay, so we have to follow these laws,’ and there’s nothing?” And then, at the same time, this chaos theory that’s been so scientifically explained, and yet, if there’s nothing, why are we not in chaos? And I think some of that was anger at the chaos of my parents and just watching relationships and watching things happen. I was, even as much as the pleasure that I got from the drums, I was angrier in that eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh grade. Yeah. Because obviously you had experienced some personal brokenness and chaos, I guess you could say, in your personal world. “If this is a godless world, what does it mean?” You know? Right and wrong, good and bad. Where does it all come from? How do things all fit together, whether it’s in the universe or in the world or in my mind? Those are all big, big questions. So talk to us from there. What did your life look like as you were continuing to pursue music, I presume. Was that something you pursued professionally? Or what did that look like? Yeah. I went to Berklee College of Music. Not the California one. Right. Berklee College of Music summer program. And after that, and for many of the drummers that I admired, they all went to Berklee. And I explained to my mother that I was going to apply to one college, and if I didn’t get in, I’d get good enough to get in. And my plan was to go to Berklee. I felt Berklee was where I belonged, where I wanted to be, and so I put all the eggs in one basket. I did get in, and I remember opening the letter and being like, “Okay, is this really stupid?” And I got the acceptance, and I make the joke about, if you graduate Berklee College of Music you become a professor or a teacher. If you drop out, you’ve got a chance of becoming a drummer, or a musician. And so I was only there for a couple semesters and began to work with different groups. I only wanted to be that hired gun. And I learned about how there were other drummers covering Ringo Starr’s parts for The Beatles, and I understood about The Beach Boys and all these people that were considered ghost musicians. And they would come in, and they would clean up things, and they would not get the popularity credit, but they get the call, and it became this idea that I really enjoyed, and then I began to meet more people, and I met guys that were becoming famous in Boston, and I liked the idea of the discretion, of the quiet, of the being behind the scenes. I mean I enjoyed playing live, but I didn’t need the credit or the popularity. And so…

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Chasing Achievement – Dr. Vince Vitale’s Story (Audio) Aug 18, 2023

Show notes

A Princeton and Oxford graduate, former skeptic Dr. Vince Vitale valued autonomy and pursued high achievement as the greatest good in life. When investigating Christianity, he found it to be worth his ultimate belief, value, and trust. Vince’s Resources: podcast: Unbelievable? https://www.premierunbelievable.com/shows/unbelievable Book: “Non-Identity Theodicy: A Grace-Based Response to the Problem of Evil” https://academic.oup.com/book/32027 Resources/authors recommended by Vince: Blaise Pascal, Pensées GK Chesterton Jana Harmon’s book: Atheists Finding God. Use code LXFANDF30 for a 30% discount offer at Rowman & Littlefield To find more stories of atheists and skeptics converting to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page. You can also email us at info@sidebstories.com. We always love hearing from you. As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, at the end of each episode, these former skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening in to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic but now is a believer. We have much, much to learn from them. There is a common idea in our culture that religion, at its foundation, is nothing more than a fairy tale to help those who are scared of the dark, that faith is blind, that only uneducated, weak people believe. There’s a sense that religion is nothing but merely wishful thinking for those who aren’t themselves thinkers, that Christianity is a man-made religion with no connections to facts, reality, history, or evidence. But that begs the question: What of those who are thinkers, who are academically accomplished, who take their beliefs seriously as something substantive, worth believing, and for good reason. There’s something more than wishful thinking. Are they all deluded as a skeptic might suppose? Or could it be that an intelligent, thoughtful, serious-minded person may actually have investigated the claims of Christ and Christianity for themselves and found them to be convincing and true? This especially raises eyebrows for those who were skeptics of faith and then find themselves to become one of Christianity’s most passionate proponents. Such a dramatic shift, from disbelief to belief, causes you to lean in and question what comparing evidence it must have taken to cause someone like them to change not only their views about God but change their entire life, helping others to see and know the truth about Christ that they’ve found. Today’s story is just that. Vince Vitale was a thinking skeptic who did the hard work of investigating the claims of the Christian worldview and did not find them wanting. Rather, he became convinced that they were not only true, but they led him to the Author of all truth, Jesus Christ, and that his life has never been the same. Come and listen to his fascinating story. Welcome to Side B Stories, Vince. It’s so great to have you with me today. Oh, it’s wonderful to be with you. I appreciate the invitation. Excellent. So the listeners can know a little bit about you, Vince, before we get started, can you give them an idea of perhaps where you life, a little bit of your life, maybe your academic background, and the things that you’re involved with now? Sure. I live currently in East Palo Alto, California. I’ve been here for just over a year. My wife, Jo, and our two kids, Raphael and JJ, now four and two years old. We were in Atlanta before that. We drove out here in our little Kia, and once you… At the time, they were even a bit younger. So once you include their two car seats and the pack and play and the stroller, it wasn’t much room, so it was quite an adventure. Oh, I bet! But we loved it. We loved it and seeing a lot of the country. We’ve been out here for about a year now. We’re part of a house church community that has really been family to us, welcomed us with open arms at a very difficult season in our lives. So we’ve been so thankful for that, and we’ve just felt like this has been a place of provision for us in a time when we really needed it. And we’re close enough to the beach that I can get out to surf every couple weeks, which is a particular joy of mine. So I’m very thankful for that as well. Before that, we were actually in England. My wife is from England. We met in graduate school there. I was there for twelve years and then, before that, in New Jersey, which is where I was born and where I grew up and stayed through college. So you graduated both Princeton and Oxford, right? Yes. That’s right. Yeah. Princeton was my undergrad. And what was the focus of your study? It was both philosophy and theology, religion. Interestingly, I got to Princeton not as a Christian but as somehow knowing that I wanted to study philosophy, even though I had never taken a philosophy class in high school. It wasn’t offered at my high school, but somehow I just knew those were the types of questions I asked and the way my mind worked. And I’ve always thought there was a faithfulness of God in that, in that He put me on a trajectory that aligned with what I ultimately was called to, even before my heart was in a place where I could understand why that would be the case. That’s fascinating. Really interesting when you can look back and reflect on that and see God’s hand in your life and the way that you were guided. And one other thing: Don’t you have a new opportunity in your life, something to do with Unbelievable? from Premier Radio? Yes. That’s right. Thank you, Jana. I’ll be one of the hosts for the Unbelievable? podcast, which I’m really thankful for, especially because I feel like those types of conversations, as I assume we’ll get into more even on this podcast, conversations between Christians and non-Christians in a constructive manner were such a big part of my own story. The questions I was asking initially, it would have been very easy for Christians to dismiss me, and they didn’t. They actually disagreed with me really well. And so that’s part of my story. Wonderful! And we will…. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Unbelievable? podcast, we’ll put a link in the episode notes, so that you can find it. All right. It sounds like that you have had an intriguing life. I am curious, as someone…. Obviously you’re a deep thinker. Even going into college, you knew you were asking big questions. So let’s back way up. Let’s start in your childhood. And, Vince, tell us about what your family home was like. Where did you live? Where did you grow up? Was God a part of that picture? Did you go to church? All of that. Let’s start there. Sure. Okay. I grew up in New Jersey, Italian-American cultural background. I guess if you had asked my family if we were Christians, people would have said, “Well, of course. We’re Italians. Therefore, we’re Christians.” It was part of the ethnic heritage, an important part of the ethnic heritage, but didn’t generally reflect what we believed or how we went about our lives. So that’s my cultural background. And from a religious perspective, again, it was cultural, ethnic, something we didn’t think about too much throughout the year, and then, at like 10 pm on Christmas Eve, somebody would say, “You know what? We should go to Midnight Mass!” And then we’d gather up everyone and once a year maybe we would go to church. So I don’t remember, as a young person, meeting many people who thought very seriously about questions of faith or for whom belief in God made a very significant difference. In terms of whether people believed in God or not, I wasn’t able to discern a significant difference in terms of what life looked like, so I guess that’s a bit about my background and maybe why I was asking the big questions of life but not clearly coming to the position of belief in God. So it was just something out there that you did on occasion, on Christmas, and really not much more than it. But again, you referred to yourself in a sense that you were a question asker. You were inquisitive. Yeah. Even as a child, I guess you were starting to just think about things, think about life or questions. What kinds of things were you thinking about? Yeah. That’s right. I mean, as you were saying that, I was just remembering. So I came across this letter to Santa a number of years ago. It was actually written on a paper plate. And so I have this paper plate, all yellowed around the edges, and as kids, my brother and I, we used to put letters in the chimney, and then Santa would, whisk them away, and we would hope to get what we asked for from Santa. And so, one Christmas—I think, based on the writing, I was just learning to write cursive, and so I think I was probably like six, seven years old, and I wrote on this paper plate, “Dear Santa and God, was God ever born?” And I put it in the fireplace. So there’s a couple of interesting things about that. One, at a very young age, I’m realizing there are some difficult questions. Like there’s a little bit of explaining to do when it comes to God. Okay, was God ever born? If not, can something just not have a beginning? So I was starting to ask questions like that, which explains a little bit the philosophy education later. But it’s also very interesting that I wrote, “Dear Santa and God,” because I think, in my mind, I had trouble pulling them apart. They were conflated. Santa and God were both people who could see the way I was acting, were keeping a record of good and bad. You didn’t want to be on their bad side. You might get good things if you’re good. You get bad things if you’re bad. And they come by…. Again, maybe we’d go to church once a year. They come by once a year, and they don’t stay long enough to say hello. It’s not something that would be relational, but both Santa and God were both this far off, disconnected thing in my mind. So yeah, that paper plate in some ways encapsulates my early childhood. I was asking difficult questions, seeing that there were these difficult questions that needed to be explained in some way, if God was going to make sense, but also having a very thin understanding of who God might be and having trouble differentiating between Santa and God. So then, I think, at some point, when Santa didn’t exist, when I learned that Santa didn’t exist, it then raises the question, especially if you think of Santa and God as very similar. “Okay, that was just a myth. And maybe this is just a myth as well.” So is that where you landed there for a while? It was just this concept, that perhaps was a childish way of thinking about good and bad, and maybe it was motivating me to be good for a little while, but that’s not really real. Yes. I think that’s right. I think when I started to ask some of my hard questions about God to people who believed in Him, I often didn’t get very robust answers. Maybe I had some reasons to question, “Why would God exist?” if Santa didn’t, but it was also convenient for me, because I wanted to be my own god. I didn’t like the idea of someone being superior to me, being better than me. I wanted very much to have control over my own life and very much had a philosophy of life which was, “You take control of your own life. You work hard. You are successful. You win this one big competition. You’re better than other people. You work to be the best, and that’s where your value comes from.” And so if you, in a sense, surrender control of your life to someone else, well, then, “How am I supposed to have any value? Because all of my value comes from me controlling things and putting in the effort, and therefore being rewarded with things because of what I’ve achieved.” And there were things going on in my culture. There were things going on in terms of my family background, beginning to ask hard questions and maybe not getting robust answers, but it also was convenient for me to not take God very seriously because of the way I wanted to be at the center of things. So it was easy to leave behind and blaze your own trail, I guess, especially, like you say, as someone who’s driven towards achievement. So as you were growing up, you were pushing those kind of questions to the background, at least with regard to God and religion and faith. I’m curious. As you were growing up and just maybe dismissed that, did you give any thought to really what that was? What was religion? As a thinker, I’m thinking, “Okay, if that’s not real, if that’s just perhaps made up, or maybe nobody really believes it,” what was religion in your mind? All these people who went to services on Christmas, what was all that even for? What was that? Yeah. That’s an interesting question. I think to some extent I probably felt like it was something for the weak to some extent. If you needed someone else to tell you what was true about life, if you needed someone else to do the things for you in life that you can’t do for yourself…. I remember even at times in my youth coming up with my own philosophical, spiritual, metaphysical, whatever word you want to use paradigms for what was valuable in life and how you were supposed to order your priorities, but it was very much I, Vince, in the late 20th century, as an individual. “I’m going to figure out the way it’s supposed to be. I’m going to figure out the correct philosophy. Everybody else has it wrong, and now, of all the billions of people who have lived….” Again because life was one big competition. And I, in sports and in academics, I had done well at things, and so it reinforced this idea of, “Okay, yeah. That’s a way that I can see the world and I can do well and I can have value. Because I can do well at sports, be better than other people. I can do well in academics, be better than other people.” And so now, when it comes to the deep questions of life, “Okay, let me create my own philosophical mindset.” That kind of thing. Nobody else was smart enough to figure this out yet. “It’s of the universe, but now I figured it out.” And it sounds very silly and arrogant, and it was, but it’s kind of the natural conclusion and the natural place that you come to, if you think life is all about one big competition. Whatever it is, sports, academics, or your philosophy of the universe, you need to create it yourself, and it needs to be better than everyone else’s. And yet, even during this time, when I think I was just resisting God in my heart in a really serious way, I now look back, and there are a few moments where—probably many moments when He was reaching out to me. But there are a few that I now look back on and think, “Whoa! How gracious of God to interact with me in that way, give me that experience, at a time when I had my hand up to Him saying, ‘No, thank you.’” Just one example: I was in high school, and I rear-ended a car in front of me. And so we get out of the car, and the man says we should exchange insurance. And so I go back to the car. I’m thinking, “Oh, this is terrible!” I go back to the car and get my insurance. Sick to my stomach. We walk towards each other. I go to give him my insurance card, and it’s like something just stopped him. I would now say the Holy Spirit just stopped him. And he looked me, and he said, “You know what? My family’s going through a really hard time. Why don’t you just agree to pray for us, and we’ll just leave it at that?” Oh, my! That’s unu…

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Exploring the True Story – Dr. Josephine Thomas’s Story (Audio) Aug 04, 2023

Show notes

Archeologist, world traveler, and former skeptic Dr. Josephine Thomas once thought all religions were fictional stories until she finally encountered the ‘true myth’ of historical Christianity. Resources/authors recommended by Josephine: Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis The Resurrection of the Son of God, N.T. Wright Visit Side B Stories’ YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/@sidebstories For more stories of atheist and skeptics’ conversions to Christianity, visit www.sidebstories.com TranscriptEpisode TranscriptHello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page or YouTube channel. You can also email us at info@sidebstories.com. We love hearing from you. Also, please know that many of these former atheists have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If you’d like to connect, again please email us at info@sidebstories.com, and we’ll get you connected.We live in a culture that tells us that we must create our own story, that we must create ourselves, our own identity, our own purpose, that we have the freedom to create our own truth for ourselves and the power and personal authority to make it true. We also live in a time where there are many different stories that we choose to believe in, many religions who tell different stories answering the big questions of life: how we got here, who we are, where we’re going, why we’re here, what’s right and wrong, why things seem to be broken, and how things can be made right. How do we navigate all of these choices? How can we know which story is true? Not just true for ourselves as individuals or even true for groups of people. How do we know that what we believe is not just a story, a myth, but what is really true? After all, we all want to be part of a bigger story, something that is grander than ourselves, something that is true and life giving.You see, the irony is that, even though we desire ultimate freedom to choose our own story, our own destiny, to create our own reality, the harder it is to actually live in a self-created world because whatever we decide is true for us bumps up against the real reality, the true truth. A true truth seeker searches for what is really real, what matches with reality.In today’s story, former agnostic Josephine Thomas was a trained explorer. She knew what it meant to search through history and archaeology to find answers. She also explored different human stories throughout history, searching for the one true story that made sense of her life and of all of reality. She eventually found it in Jesus. I hope you’ll come along to listen to her fascinating journey of discovery.Welcome to Side B Stories, Josephine. It’s so great to have you with me today.Thank you so much for having me, Jana.Before we get into your story, Josephine, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, where you live, perhaps a little bit about your educational background, your family?I live in south of Scotland, about 3 hours south of Glasgow, but that’s not where I’m originally from. I am actually from Germany, but I’ve been in Scotland for about 10 years now. And I live here with my family. I’ve got two young children. My daughter’s about 5, and my son 18 months. And, yeah, my background is really that I trained to be an archaeologist. I’ve got a PhD in archaeology. But, yeah. I came to Scotland and worked with special needs people, and I met my husband here, and that’s where I’ve been, ever since yeah.Okay. That’s terrific. So let’s go back to your childhood. Tell us where you were raised. Were you raised in Germany? Or tell us a little bit about what your world looked like as a child, with your family, with your culture, with religion.Well, my background is German and Dutch, but I was actually born and brought up in Indonesia. I was born in Jakarta and spent the first 16 years of my life there. But we lived in a sort of ex-pat community. So my upbringing was, my schooling was in German and English. So I my family is really…. I would say they were nominal Christians, at least my father’s family, my mother’s not at all. She’s very agnostic, atheist, although maybe open to a supernatural or spiritual element. So the main influence was really from my father, so he did introduce me to the protestant Christian faith. And he would pray with me at that time. And especially from my grandmother. She would really… she still had this very traditional Christian faith, and she gave me an illustrated children’s Bible quite early on when I was little, which I have to this day. So that is really actually where the main influence came from. And yet, of course, I mean, being in a predominantly Muslim country, I was very much exposed to different religions and different faiths. So I began to look at these things from very early on and wondering about it. Yeah.Yeah. So, yes. It sounds like you were in quite a fascinating place, Did you have any touch points with the religion and the religious tradition of what was going on in Indonesia? Even though you were in this ex-pat community and being raised in German and English and Christian?Mm-hm. Yes, I did experience lots of things like that. For example, I mean, I knew what Ramadan was as a child. I would wake up to the Muslim call for prayer early in the morning. And I also knew what Hinduism was to a degree because, when we went to Bali, I would see the temples and everything very much alive. But I think, with my family, it was very much in this sort of German Protestant tradition that you… I call it life insurance Christians. You sort of sign up for it, sort of to be sure, you know? But you don’t really engage with it very much.Did you ever go to Christian services? Or did you have any personal rhythms of prayer, grace at the table, or anything like that at all?Not so much. I mean, I did mention the bedtime prayers, but they were very much sort of childlike, that you ask God to watch over you and other things that you might want. Or also praying that animals are kept safe in their habitat and these kinds of things. That was really what my father taught me to pray. But it wasn’t really this greater view or a worldview that went beyond that, really. And I was then, later on… I mean, I got baptized as a baby, and then, when I was about 13, I did have some education to get confirmed in the church. So, interestingly, although my father doesn’t really have an active faith as such, you do accept it as something that traditionally was done, but it is not really something that informs your life. It’s not really something that you live with on a daily basis, that goes beyond maybe some bit of, “Oh, yeah. Christmas!” It’s very secular. But you just have it in the background. And when I started going to these classes once a week, which went on for a year, it was something that did spark my interest, so I began to take it seriously. It was something that I wondered about because, when I was even younger, I started to have these existentialist questions that I remember, saying to my stepmother, “Oh, isn’t it strange that I am me?” And she was just a bit taken aback and thinking there was something strange about that. But it was really that, when I was about nine or so, I began wondering about these things and actually getting a sense of really my own sort of limitation, my mortality if you will, really very early on and somehow a sense that something is just not right.And so, when I started having this sort of more formalized education, what I discovered was that there weren’t really any clear answers. It was really in this German tradition of higher criticism that everything is allegorical. So you approach the Bible as something that is sort of wisdom teachings, but it’s not really anything tangible. It’s not really…. It can guide us, but it’s not something that somehow keeps us safe or is in any way any other use, really. And I remember, during that time, really formulating my own version of Pascal’s wager, although I didn’t really know about it back then. It was this idea that I thought, “Okay, either it’s really true, or it’s something that somehow just helps me to get by and get through life and not be too afraid, and then that’s the only purpose. There’s no other reason for it.” And I found that so bleak and so… yeah, that actually…. That’s when I began looking into other things under the influence of my stepmother, really, who was very much into New Age and did all these things like Reiki and everything and that I read a lot about these kinds of things then and also the idea of reincarnation and all the rest of it that really began to take root in those days. And yeah. And really, so I drifted away because there weren’t really any other answers that were satisfying.Okay. And of course, were looking around, and you were observing other religions. Were you being you considering those and just all of religion kind of different stories that weren’t necessarily true? Were they all in the allegorical camp as well, that whatever their story is it’s just a story? So were you becoming skeptical of all of that?Yes, I think I was. I was really, despite the fact that my schooling, it was really the religious education was Christian. Interestingly. But it was really that I began to wonder, in this sort of pluralistic sense, really, to think, “Well, are all of us wrong? Or who is actually right? Is it the same God? What are we talking about?” And of course, back then, I came to the conclusion that somehow it must be, although of course I don’t really think that way now anymore. But back then, that was the only explanation I got, and the problem is really that nobody could help me through this confusion or this conundrum to think what is actually the right path, and that actually became completely arbitrary. It’s almost as though, “Yeah, well, it doesn’t really matter. Whatever feels right for you.” And I did not find that satisfying at all because there was no actual intellectual rigor, either, or it wasn’t really something that also satisfied my heart. So I was really at a loss to think, “Well, I don’t want to believe something that’s maybe not true only because feels all right, because it makes me happy. I really want to rely on something that I have good reasons to believe in.”So even as, say, you were a teenager, and you began to become more invested in your mom’s New Age spirituality or way of thinking, did you pursue that with some kind of rigor for a period of time and find that wanting? Or was that something you just dabbled in and left behind? How did that look?Yes. I was really sort of dabbling in it a little bit, and I did explore lots of these things. I remember reading books about all of this. Also very much self help books, about reincarnation, about even Wicca and these kind of… everything. These nature religions and thinking, “Okay, we go beyond everything that’s old in a way,” and that was at the time when I started to be very interested in history, in archaeology, in these kind of things, and the Celts and the Vikings and everything really sparked my interest. And I really somehow looked to connect to this. And that began actually in my early teenage years, that somehow I was looking for answers. I wanted to know where we’re coming from and where we’re going. And I thought maybe that there would be answers if I went back in history.So where did the quest end or take you, I guess? Did it take you farther from belief in God and religion, or did it take you more towards belief?Actually, really away from it, because, like I said, it was really this feeling that it was completely a matter of opinion, and it didn’t really matter. It was a totally private thing, and I think, in Europe, that is very much the case, that nobody actually really openly speaks about it, especially if you’re a Christian. And that’s a tragedy really, that it’s something that you hide, that’s something that you do maybe not even amongst your family members. You don’t really talk about it very much. It’s almost something that is not intellectually respectable.In the time when I then went on to university to study archaeology, I really experienced quite a long period of time where I was totally lost really in this quest and quite fearful of what I might find. And there was almost like a time where I deferred this, that I said, “Yes, I’ve got lots of questions. I want to know about it, but where do I look? Where do I look first? Who can give me the answers?” And it’s really this sort of sense of being so lonely and in this isolation because, like I said, you’re not really supposed to talk about it very much. You will get a wry smile and just thinking, “Okay, well, whatever you want to believe. Fine for you, but that’s not something we talk about here.”Yeah. That would be a very isolating experience and discouraging, I’m sure, in many regards. You’re you’re wanting or searching for answers, but there’s seemingly no resource or no person to help guide you towards that end. And I find it interesting, too, that you were venturing more into history and archaeology, which are, I guess especially archaeology, a bit more tangible kind of source of grounding. I mean literally speaking, grounding of reality there, in terms of not metaphysical grounding of reality, but hints of things historically that could perhaps, on your quest to search for something, like you say, that’s true for everyone. You just want to get something tangible that you can believe in, and so what did you find in your quest historically, archaeologically? What were you finding as you were putting the metaphysical in the background and searching more for the tangible?Yeah. It became such a great disappointment, really, because I didn’t really find what I was hoping for. I don’t really know what I thought as a teenager, what kind of connection or sort of almost ancestral connection that I was looking for. But it actually only went further into this almost despair. I also vividly remember a conversation with two professors, and it was about this question, really actually about spiritual dimension and the afterlife and everything. And I just remember one of them saying, “Yeah, how many bodies have already disappeared?” And I just sat there thinking, “Oh, right.” And it’s almost as though that really drove me back into this. How could you believe in a bodily resurrection? But that’s also because now, of course, looking back, it had not been taught in a way that I could deal with it. Of course now, I would say, “Okay, I’ve got answers to that. I can really look into the historical evidence of what actually happened in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. But there, I was just really at a loss to think, “Okay. I don’t know how to answer that.” And it was just… I don’t know really. I remember even mentioning it to a friend, and all you got was really, “What are you talking about?” Almost as though, “I can’t understand how anybody could still believe anything like that,” or something.And yet there was something really that was actually one of my first catalysts. And it was when I was working in France on an excavation. And we were coming back. It was 2004, that was. And the strange thing is what happened to me then is that…. I was about 23 at that time. And I had a very, very strong… I was moved emotionally, I was thrown into something that I can only describe as really existential fear. And that was towards the end of it. And I began to sort of suddenly, after many, many years, to pray again. And the strange thing was that, on the way back, we had a terrible, terrible ac…

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Finding Real Answers to Real Questions – Nigel Goodwin’s Story (Audio) Jul 21, 2023

Show notes

English gentleman, actor, and former atheist Nigel Goodwin was raised within a Marxist worldview. He saw church as fabricated theatre until he found the real God. Podcast episode notes: Nigel’s Resources:

Biography of Nigel Goodwin written by author David Porter – Arts and Minds: The Story of Nigel Goodwin

Resources/authors recommended by Nigel:

Francis Schaeffer books
- The God Who is There
- Escape from Reason
- He is There and He is not Silent

Atheists Finding God book Rowman.com/Lexington Promo Code: LXFANDF30

Searching for Something More – Neil Placer’s Story (Audio) Jul 07, 2023

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Former skeptic Neil Placer was apathetic about the question of God until his own dissatisfaction in life led him to search for something more. Neil’s Resources: Podcast: A World in Tension -This podcast explores the universal struggles of life. Externally, we encounter conflict with others. Internally, we engage in a constant debate between our hearts and minds. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-world-in-tension/id1647690656 For more stories of atheist conversions to Christianity, please visit www.sidebstories.com Side B Stories YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@sidebstories416 TranscriptEpisode TranscriptHello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics flip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on our Side B Stories Facebook page about these episodes, and you can also email us directly at info@sidebstories.com. We always love to hear your comments.As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories, but at the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic but who is now a believer. Also, please know that many of these former skeptics and atheists have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If that’s you, just please connect with us at our email at info@sidebstories.com, and we’ll get you connected.If there’s something common to us all, it’s that we want a life of meaning and purpose, to know and be known, to love and be loved. We want a life that feels important because it is important. It is valuable. The inevitable question before us though is how do we find that kind of love, that kind of life, that kind of meaning and value? Can it be found on our own in a world without God? Or do we need to look beyond ourselves to find what our hearts truly long for? C.S. Lewis is a former atheist who recognized the important difference that it makes to live with and without God. He knew that if God was real and Christianity was true, there was nothing more important than that, saying, “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.” In other words, God makes all the difference in the way that we can and do experience and see life. For those who believe, it should mean everything.In today’s story, former atheist Neil Placer moved from being completely apathetic about the question of God to now holding Him as of infinite importance. How in the world did that happen? I hope you’ll come along to find out.Welcome to Side B Stories, Neil. It’s great to have you with me today.Thanks, Jana. It’s great to be here.Wonderful. Tell us a little bit about yourself, so the listeners have an idea of who you are before we get into your story.Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Neil Placer. I’m 46 years old. I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I’m trained as an engineer, so I’m a mechanical engineer, but I would say that I’m probably an atypical engineer, in the sense that, well, number 1, I like communication. Although I consider myself an introvert, I do like to communicate. I do like to think deeply about things and really communicate those truths to others. So yeah. I’ve just always been someone who likes to consider topics, and part of what we’re going to talk about is how I came to faith and how that was a bit of a journey for me, very analytical, yet also leaps of faith.That sounds intriguing, Neil. Why don’t you start us back at your story, at the very beginning. Tell us about where you were raised. Were you always from Tennessee? Tell us about your family. Was religion or God or church any part of your family life?Yeah. So I think if people are tuning in from Tennessee, they’ll pick me out instantly and say, “That guy’s not from Tennessee.” So I actually grew up in the DC area, which is kind of the international, cosmopolitan land where there really isn’t an accent. So Northerners think I’m a Southerner, and the Southerners think I’m in Northerner, so I can’t win. But, yeah, I grew up in the DC area.My father was Spanish. I say, was; he recently passed away. So his background, being from Spain. If you’re not familiar with that, you’re basically born Catholic, right? It’s just part of the culture. Everyone kind of just connects themself to it, but from a spiritual perspective, that really didn’t mean much. So they took us when we were kids to Mass, and we participated. I think they wanted the influence of it, but sooner or later, as my brother and I were getting older, we kind of became like Easter and Christmas Christians, if you will, right? So we just showed up for the major events. And they were… it was more like an event, so there wasn’t really a strong focus on that, even though there was a religious component to my life.Okay. So it was just part of the tradition or ritual, I suppose, of your family. It was something you did, not necessarily, I presume, something you’ve believed? Or did you have any kind of a tacit belief in God because this was part of your life?No. I mean, I didn’t really think about it much. I was thinking about this. I didn’t really have… Growing up middle class, upper middle class, I didn’t have a need for God, right? I had everything that I wanted materially. My parents kind of let the rope out pretty long, so I felt like I could do whatever I wanted. I was an athlete. I played soccer. So I just felt like I didn’t… that was kind of for a goody goodies. And I was, by definition, truly just agnostic. Like I didn’t care. I wasn’t an atheist. I wasn’t against it. I just didn’t care. I didn’t detect any need for it in my life.Yeah. So just, I guess, what they might call apatheism, right?Yes.Yeah. You just don’t care. It wasn’t important to you. You obviously didn’t need it. So, was this the case throughout your growing up years? It sounds like you were very occupied, had a great family, great life. And did you have any touch points at all of what you would consider to be authentic Christianity in your world?Yeah, it’s funny how, when you reflect back in the past, you kind of see where God was working. So I think the first moment was, my senior year of high school, I remember going back to the Catholic church on my own. So my parents weren’t going, my brother wasn’t going, but I wanted to just kind of explore. Instead of being the kid that just sat through it and said, “When is this over?” I wanted to actually seek. “What are they talking about? Is this a viable pathway of life?” My parents didn’t even understand it. They said, “Are you going to impress some girl?” like, “What are you going for?” But I just said, “I just want to find out. What are they saying?” And I did that for a little while, and my conclusion, and I think it was a shallow search to be fair, was, “Yeah, this isn’t really for me. Now I’ve actually listened to it with open ears, and yeah, this is not for me.” But that was kind of the first moment of considering something outside of myself.What made you… I’m just curious. What sparked that curiosity? Was it some kind of dissatisfaction in your life? Was it just some intellectual curiosity? Or something that your friends were doing? Or it just kind of came from nowhere?I honestly don’t know. I mean, of the categories you just gave, I think probably intellectual curiosity was probably the answer. Other people were not doing it. I don’t think there was some major gap. I think I was just curious. I’ve always been a curious type and willing to explore things, even if the crowd’s not doing it. So, again, I think looking back, I think God was working on me. I just didn’t realize it that way. So I don’t really have a great answer.No. That’s fine. Sometimes we just do things without real, deep thoughtful considerations to something we’re motivated to do. I’m also curious. You went to go see what it was, and you felt like it wasn’t for you. What did you think religion was at that point? You knew it wasn’t for you, but what was it, did you think? Was it just a place where people gathered. They needed community. What was it, did you think?Being that it was Catholic, I thought it was very ritualistic, right? So it was just very, you know, up and down, knees. Liturgies, there was a lot of formality to it. But in the end, I just kind of thought it was empty. I just felt like people were going through the motions, checking the boxes for whatever reason, to make themselves feel good. I mean, it’s kind of connected to my background. Like, why did we go as a family? I don’t know. It’s just because that’s what we did. That was the culture, right? So that was my conclusion. It just kind of felt a little bit empty, although, again, I’ll say my search was shallow. I don’t know that I was on a truly deep search at that point.Okay, okay. So you tried it as a high schooler, which is admirable. Before you went to college. And so walk us on from there. How did your life look? Then you left high school, went on to university, and what happened?Yeah. So my first year of school… so I played soccer in college. I went to Virginia Tech. And I would categorize my life, my first year of school, as kind of living in the joy of sin. And now that sounds funny to say. But like I really… I enjoyed the sin, right? I felt like I had all things going for me, right? I was studying engineering, so I was doing things hard with my mind. I was an athlete, so I was working my physical self. And I was also partying, so like I had all elements, I thought. And so I enjoyed sin. But the thing is sin has a season. Sin has an ending, because sin’s pathway is alluring at first, but as Scripture says, it’s sweet in the mouth, but then it’s bitter in the stomach. And sometimes that bitter takes a while to realize. So I would say I really… I’m not going to say sin isn’t fun. That’s why people do it, right?Right.But I think that whole freshman year was kind of like that. And then, after that, I started to realize…. I didn’t make the soccer team the next year. School was much… the first time I struggled with school. Like, “Maybe I’m not as smart as I think I am.” The whole partying scene became empty and old. “What what am I doing? What’s the point?” So I would say after that was really the journey of struggle of, “What am I here for?” So God kind of pulled it apart. But I’m kind of saying it that way because there’s people that just don’t want religion because they think it’s oppressive or it’s going to wreck their lifestyle. But I would say, “What is this lifestyle that feels free and sinful really giving you?” Because, at the end, it doesn’t give you much.So you were feeling empty and spent and challenged, and life wasn’t as pristine, I guess, as it had been prior. There were challenges coming in your path. So it caused you to introspect, I guess. And I think sometimes those difficulties are disruptors that cause us to step back and take a look at our own life, the way that we think, the way that we live. And so what did that disconcertion or tension or challenge do for you in terms of what were your next steps?Well, it got me thinking and wrestling with things. I mean, I said earlier I’m kind of an introvert, and in terms of, like, to recharge, I need to go off to the side, and I need to think. So I just thought about topics, and, like, “What am I here for?” I mean, college is just kind of a good season for that because there’s a bunch of people around you also that are going through that. And I don’t remember all the bumps and turns, but I do remember concluding that it must be about love, right? All this other stuff is superficial. So it must be about love. And in the context of no God, then that means a human relationship, right? Like another person, that must be kind of…. The holy grail of happiness is that, which involves also kind of a, “It’s not just about you. To make a relationship work. You have to mutually bring that joy and benefit to one another,” so that’s kind of where I landed after sort of years of struggling through it.And guess what? Surprise, surprise. That pathway became empty, too, right? There were some relationships that you thought would be going in a good way and they didn’t. And so it was at that moment—and this is just to kind of walk you through the timeline. So freshman year was all about fun. Then, I would say it was closer to… I did 5 years of school because I was an engineer, and we did a co-op, so it’s just kind of built into the program, but it was right around kind of that senior year or right before it that I just kind of said, “Okay, relationships don’t work either.”So now I don’t know. Now I’m like… I’m really lost. I don’t know what the answer is. And I’m about to graduate. And I’m about to get some job. And I kind of, for the first time, maybe categorized it as hopeless in terms of a deep meaning of life. I could have gone and done the job and done what everyone else does, but that was the moment where it was just like, “All right. I don’t know what the answer is.”So I guess you knew that religion, at the time, wasn’t for you, prior to all of this. And you understood…. Did you, I guess, understand the logical [17:00] implications of atheism, that it does not bring objective meaning? I mean, were you that thoughtful about it? Or was this just something you were experiencing because you were just doing life without God?Yeah, no. I wasn’t thinking about sort of those apologetic arguments about atheism at all. v And I think that’s where the story gets interesting about that’s where God’s hand is… like God’s hand was always working, maybe more subtly. We don’t know how God works, but He kind of lets you get to a place where you’re ready. And I feel like, at that point, I was ready. And then He really started to press in, and again, I think the story becomes interesting there.Yes. I’ve heard it said. Well Os Guinness said, actually, “When someone becomes dissatisfied with their own worldview then they become open towards another.” And it sounds like you reached that point of dissatisfaction, so that you became willing or open to see, “Is there something more than this flat immanent frame,” I guess, as Charles Taylor would say. Is there something more? Or is there something more that I’m missing? I guess you felt that kind of earnest need or that angst in a sense. So what did you do with that dissatisfaction? Again, it sounds like you were willing to look for something more. What did you do?Yes. So like I was saying, it got interesting. There were kind of three distinct people in my life. So I had my friend John, who I went to high school with, that he actually was kind of a professing Christian in high school, and then once he got to college, he kind of fell away from it. So I had him in the circle, this buddy who kind of knew faith and now doesn’t have faith. So he kind of becomes more important at the end. But then there were two other people, and they were both ladies on the soccer team. So one was just a good friend of mine. And ironically, believe it or not, her name was Trinity. Now, she wasn’t a believer, but what was really interesting about our relationship is that we both reached this point that, as friends, we were pushing each other towards faith, and we didn’t believe it.So I’ll give you an example of just kind of one of these moments: I love these pause moments that God gives us to kind of just reflect. So we’re out to breakfast, and again, I t…

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Truth Seeker – Dr. Stefani Ruper’s Story (Audio) Jun 23, 2023

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Former atheist Stefani Ruper was intellectually convinced of secular atheism, but found that it lacked substantive answers for her life. More than 13 years of scholarly pursuit of truth led her to choose belief in God. Stefani’s Resources: Youtube Channel: http://youtube.com/stefaniruperInstagram: http://instagram.com/stefani.ruperWebsite: http://stefaniruper.com Resources/authors recommended by Stefani: Dominion by Tom Holland Works of William James TranscriptEpisode TranscriptHello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics slip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories on our Side B Stories website, at www.sidebstories.com. We welcome your comments on these stories on our Side B Stories Facebook page, you can also email us at info@sidebstories.com. We love to hear from you.As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories of moving from disbelief to belief in God and Christianity, but at the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious seekers as to how they can best pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians as to how best to engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening in to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been on both sides of the big questions of life. We have so much to learn from them.No matter how intellectual and rational we are, we all make decisions based upon what we’ve experienced, what we know, what we want. Sometimes we want to know what is true, and other times we tend to avoid the truth because it doesn’t seem to align with our desires. Regardless, we’re constantly making choices towards some things and away from others. We choose to believe. We make our choices. Sometimes choices lead to confusion, to deception, darkness, and distress. Others lead to clarity, truth, joy, and peace. Although we can’t know things with 100 percent certainty, we can make choices based upon good, solid reasons that not only satisfy intellectually but existentially in our lives as well.In today’s story, former atheist Stefani Ruper was driven to find truth. As an intellectual, her scholarly pursuits led her to find solid answers to the big questions that had long haunted her, but only after years of study and contemplation was she able to choose to believe in the reality of God. But it has completely transformed her life. I hope you’ll come along to listen to her story.Welcome to Side B Stories, Stefani, it’s so great to have you with me today.Hi, Jana. Thank you so much. I’m honestly so happy to be here.Excellent! As we’re getting started, Stefani, so the listeners know a bit about you and the gravitas you actually bring to the table, tell us a bit about who you are, your academic background, your passions, whatever you’re pursuing at the moment.Great. I’m going to try to reign it in and not talk about Jesus right away. I’ve always been deeply academic in everything I’ve done, just obsessed with intellectual rigor, actually. I did my first degree in the sciences. I studied life on other planets. I did that at Dartmouth. Back in 2010, I finished. And my second degree was a masters of theology, specializing in the relationship between religion and science. And my third degree was a doctorate at the University of Oxford, which I finished in 2020, and that was also studying in the religion and science cohort of the religion and theology faculty of the University of Oxford.Okay. Excellent. I’m hoping that some of that expertise will just flow out of your story today and what drove you and how you perceive things. I’m sure it will all be fleshed out through your story. So let’s get started. Bring us back to your childhood, where you were raised. Talk to us about your family. Was there any religious flavor in your home at all? Tell us about that.Yeah. Obviously, such an important thing. So I started having panic attacks about dying and the meaning of life when I was 4 years old. And that set the stage for everything, because I didn’t tell anybody, but I became obsessed, obviously. I became obsessed with finding an answer. But I was raised in a home where we didn’t have religion. And in fact, if anything, religion was for stupid and weak people, so I couldn’t. That just wasn’t something…. We didn’t talk about this kind of thing. So I just carried that personally in myself, and it became a huge piece.I remember one moment swinging on the swing set with a bunch of other girls, and they were talking about catechism. And I was like , “What? Yeah. Me, too. I do that.” But I was just lying, because I had no idea what that meant. So so that set the stage. But I was always deeply, deeply hungry for meaning. And so I started going to the library by myself when I was a kid.I would pack up my backpack and a little CD player and go to the library, and there were maybe ten philosophy books in the dustiest, darkest corner of the library, and I would understand nothing, but I would read them. And I just got excited about the potential that I would be able to address this deep drive I had to try to make sense of a world that just… I had nothing. The universe was cold and dark and nothing, right? And we’re just fleshy organisms that blob around until we die. And that was just how I felt about things.And I really, really, really, really wanted meaning, and the only thing that felt deep enough for me and meaningful at the same time was science, which is why I ended up studying life on other planets. I wanted to say something about, well, the meaning of life, well, the meaning of life. And I’ll just give you this bit before I finish my monologue. I got through my entire undergraduate degree. I made it basically to my final semester before realizing that I had prided myself on open mindedness my entire life, intellectual rigor and open mindedness was my jam. That was who I was. And yet, I had dismissed the most cherished beliefs of 99 percent of people who had ever existed without ever engaging it. Religion was just dumb. It was just dumb. It was just weak, not something I would ever consider. I woke up to this realization, and I thought, “Oh. This is something I have to fix.” Yeah.So that’s a very provocative statement. But before we get there. There’s a little bit of living you’ve done growing up prior to that point, and I wonder why… Obviously, you were a very serious minded child, and you were pursuing deep philosophical, intellectual answers for this haunting question for you even as a 4 year old, which is pretty phenomenal. That just tells us a little bit about you, how thoughtful you were even as a child. But why do you suppose you did dismiss I mean the thing that 99 percent of the people in the world supposedly believed. Were there elements of faith around you? Was it not in your world? Were there religious-minded people that challenged you? Or did you seek out answer or counsel from anything outside of a secular world view?I’m really glad you asked that question because, yeah, there was some interesting nuance, I think. The examples of religion that I had around me and that we had around our family were not. Particularly conducive to their and others’ flourishing. And so there weren’t a lot of examples, I think, and the people around me. It just wasn’t appealing to me. But I also… this is very interesting. I think there’s a kind of a subsection of resistance to faith and religion, distaste for it, that is kind of…. It’s rooted in a hyper individualism.Mm-hm. Yeah. That sounds like quite a struggle, really. And I do wonder… obviously, you had a perspective of Christian people as, or religious people, as less than. It wasn’t something that was appealing or attractive to you at all. Were those opinions made at a distance, as kind of the other? I know you speak of a highly individualistic self, and you pursued a lot of this probably autonomously, but did you ever even see what you would consider perhaps now an embodied form of authentic Christianity in someone who might have been intelligent or in the sciences, for example, that might have broken down those stereotypes at all? Or was this just you were so kind of driven by this secular kind of scientism, in a sense, that you weren’t even seeing or recognizing potential counter narratives to your perspective?Yeah. Thank you. It was definitely a scientism. I loved Richard Dawkins, right? The God Delusion, I think, came out when I was in high school. And that was big for me. I want to be clear. I was talking about my deep loneliness and all of sort of thing. I mean, I grew up in a fantastic, loving home, right? And the people around me were so warm, and I considered that to be just one of the most… I mean I’m so privileged for so many reasons, and that’s that’s just huge. My family was so fantastic, and I did sort of… I carried this by myself. I never told anybody. And this feeling of kind of like existential abandonment or isolation. Again, I just never brought it up. And I’d never…. No, I didn’t have examples. They’re weren’t people around me who lived a religious life in a way that I nowadays would identify as, I don’t know, something I like, something that I want to move towards. I really had to see the… I think I really had to live. And this has been a theme throughout my entire life up until this point. I had to live through the negative consequences of what I was doing to realize that it was incorrect or I didn’t want it anymore. My life has been a very long sequence of events in which I just tried something, realized it wasn’t the answer, and kept going.And I have a friend who describes it as like sometimes you have to hit your head against the wall hard enough to realize that it’s a wall and you’ve got to walk around it, you got to find a way around it, or grasp Jesus’ hand on the other side I might say now. I wouldn’t have said it that way before. Yeah.Did you call yourself an atheist or an agnostic? Or how would you have perceived yourself or your identity during that time?I think I probably… through my undergraduate degree, I did the same thing that Dawkins does, I’m quite sure he says, which is, “I’m 99 percent atheist because, technically, with my degree of intellectual humility, will not say, full-on 100 percent,” but if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. So if I looked like an atheist and quacked like an atheist, I may as well call myself an atheist. And that was quite my resistance. I say in one of my bios, like the first sentence is, like, “My whole life, I prided myself on my atheist resistance to the temptations of faith.” And that was quite central. And I think the way that we… identity is so important to our existential stability, to our sense of the world, to who we are, and that intellect and that pride were huge, quite huge, I think.So there’s a real strong narrative within atheism that, of course, religion is for the weak minded, for the superstitious, and the list goes on. And atheism is more for those who are bright, who are intellectually minded. I’m curious. As you were dismissing all religion and faith and everything that goes with it. You like a truth seeker to me. You were seeking to know what was true and real within the sciences or whatnot. I know that you had some existential angst in there, but prior to getting to that, how did you ground your atheism as true? Was it just that it’s not religion, it’s not supernatural? Or were you grounding your naturalism or materialism or in whatever camp you landed in terms of your atheistic worldview, how did you know that that was true?Well, you know, our experiences of what is true… I think of knowledge as a feeling. This is why we say things like, “Well, that feels…,” right? “That feels true.” If you feel certain of anything, like certainty is a feeling. And so I say this because everything that I think we all experience as true comes from what we’ve experienced in our lives up until that point. What we’ve been exposed to. We all know, right? We all know that we’re deeply embedded in the worlds into which we have been born and the ideas to which we have been exposed. And so, in retrospect, right? This is me looking back at who I was. My experience of truth just came from being born into full-on secularism, full-on the consequences of the arc of the last 500 years, with the collapse of traditional religion, the pluralization of religious forms, the rise of nihilism, the rise of this supposed divide between religion and science. I mean, I was just born into a world where what it is, what the world is made of, is material stuff, and anything that you try to interpret beyond what you can see and touch is a fantasy.Now, in retrospect, I understand that’s a wild oversimplification. I don’t believe it anymore. But anything beyond what I could see and touch was a fantasy, and I appreciate you saying that you see me, even past me, as a truth seeker, because I was. I think we all are. And we’re so motivated, and we’re so loyal and honest and passionate about our ideas of truth. Because we think they are real, they have to be real, right? I very, very, very much, I knew that I would’ve loved for God to be real. But I couldn’t believe in it because it was a fantasy piled on top of the real world. And that was just like the metaphysics that I was born with. And I am working today, all day, every day. I’m still working on trying to pick that apart and inhabit the world in a way that is not so empty and reductive, because it doesn’t have to be that way. It just… that’s the metaphysics that I was born into.So as a sober-minded intellect who was a truth seeker, and you believed that anything beyond what you could see, touch, taste, smell, feel was a fantasy. Now, a part of embracing atheism or naturalism or that kind of—I will say the word reductionistic view, is that there are certain things about yourself that you would have to say are fantasy as well, like the ability to choose freely or objective moral values and determining what is right or wrong or your own consciousness. Things… that sustainable you who is not physical, that sustains throughout time. And of course, things like meaning, that thing that you were wrestling with, which I guess, as an atheist, you would have to call a fantasy in some point. There must have been a dissonance between knowing that you are a meaning-seeking person but yet, meaning on its own does not hold objective value within the naturalistic worldview. So I’m wondering: How did you live out this view of the world where everything beyond your senses was fantasy?Well, it was. And that’s why it sucked so much. I didn’t carry any illusions about objective… like I didn’t believe in objective truth or value. And free will is possible without God, right? You can imagine a nondeterministic, materialistic cosmos. But I wasn’t sure about free will. I was like, “Oh, I don’t know.” I couldn’t decide, and I wasn’t well schooled in the philosophy of mind, and I’m still not. But I think I was…. I really like intellectual consistency. I did what I could to be as consistent as possible, and the elements of… I was deeply hungry for meaning. I wanted there to be free will. I wanted my consciousness to matter.So that’s how I did it. Just everything that I wanted sucked, and I… one of my biggest struggles has been trying to defend making truth claims, because there was no basis for me to make a truth claim. I saw myself, again, just as this fleshy blob meandering around the planet, bumping into other fleshy blobs until I die. So that created for me a very existentially disturbing, I would say, feeling of uncertainty, like I could never say anything. I’d see a shirt. I’d look at a shirt, and I’d be like, “This is blue.” And then I’d be like “B…

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Atheist to Christian – Matt Bagwell’s Story (Audio) Jun 09, 2023

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Negative life experiences caused former atheist Matt Bagwell to reject God and Christianity. Change in life circumstances allowed him to find an authentic kind of belief in God that he didn’t think possible. YouTube: @marksofmanhood matt.d.bagwell@gmail.com Atheists Finding God book Rowman.com/Lexington Promo Code: LXFANDF30 Women in Apologetics https://womeninapologetics.com/ TranscriptEpisode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics live the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or skeptic but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our Side B Stories website at sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page, or you can email us directly at info@sidebstories.com. We love hearing from you. Also, please know that many of these former atheists and skeptics have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If you’d like to connect with one of them, please email us at info@sidebstories.com, and we’ll get you connected.As much as most of us would like to say that our beliefs are well thought out, are rational conclusions based on reasoned investigations, the truth is that sometimes, in fact many times, our beliefs are grounded in something other than rational. Sometimes what we think has been shaped through our experiences in life. Negative circumstances and difficult experiences can and do lead people to conclude that God isn’t real because life isn’t good, that if he was real, then life wouldn’t be so bad. Or sometimes negative experiences with religious belief and believers may also prove convincing, not towards belief in God, but rather away. So negative experiences, whether in life or through religion or with religious believers, can cause someone to turn away from belief in God as something or someone worth believing in. But then, most express their disbelief for rational reasons, demanding that belief in God requires reasoned arguments and evidence.Let’s just say that the motivations and influences towards disbelief and belief are complex and complicated. The reasons for moving away from and towards God are not always clear, and the pathway away and towards God is not always straightforward. Oftentimes, there are meanderings and wanderings, three steps forward and two steps back. More like a journey of twists and turns than a clear path from change in believing and living from one way to another.In today’s story, Matt Bagwell was once an atheist who now devotes his life to following Jesus Christ with a desire to be a church pastor. His road from atheism to strong belief was not always straightforward but rather a process of change over time. I hope you’ll come along to listen to his journey.Welcome to Side B Stories, Matt. It’s so great to have you with me today.Thank you for having me.Wonderful. So the listeners know a little bit about who you are before we get into your story, Matt, tell us a little bit about where you live, perhaps what you do, a little bit about your life.Well, up until recently, I was the youth pastor and elder of a local church here in Rockaway Beach, Oregon. So I am literally half a mile away from the Oregon coast. I can walk right to the coast every single day.Oh, that must be so nice!Yeah. And, currently, I have a YouTube channel. It’s called Marks of Manhood, and it’s a little hit or miss right now, because I’m still trying to figure out how to deliver content, how to write content for an audience rather than a local church, but my desire is to have this channel and also, eventually, to lead a local church as a head pastor somewhere. My primary calling is to preach and teach God’s word.That’s amazing, especially knowing that you have atheism in your history, that you are a pastor now, so I’m really looking forward to understanding that journey. So why don’t we start there? Let’s back up to your childhood. Let’s figure out how all of your beliefs were formed, both atheism and Christianity. Talk to us about your home of origin, your family, your friends, your culture, your surroundings. Did you grow up in Oregon? Where are you from? And what did that look like as a child?Yeah, thank you. So, okay, my story begins, as far as I can remember it, in Milwaukee, Oregon. And I’ve lived in Oregon all my life, kind of bounced from home to home, living in different places, different cities, but all within Oregon. And it was largely… I would consider it secular. So in other words, there were some instances of times when my dad, for example, would pray over the food. There were times where God was discussed, but very, very briefly. And other times, I actually have only one memory as a child, as a young child, going to like a kid’s church. And so just one memory, one instance of going to church in largely a secular home.We didn’t know anything of Jesus. I’m talking about my formative early years.Right.So I do recall, though going to three hours south in Oregon, to where my both of my grandparents, on both my mom and dad’s side, were living at. And I do recall seeing religious things, like a cross, or I would see a Bible, or there’s the common painting of a man praying over a Bible and a woman praying. And I would see these things. But, again, it was never discussed. It was never pushed on us in the sense that, “Hey, Matt, do you believe in Jesus Christ and trust Him as your Lord and Savior?” There was nothing like that at all. So like I said, largely secular.And same with my friends. Again, growing up, elementary school kind of thing, where that wasn’t really a focus of ours. It was mostly sports and art and stuff like that. So largely secular. Yeah.So there were bits and pieces or signs of faith around you, but really nothing penetrating your life in any kind of substantive or personal way. It was just perhaps in the background of your life or dotted here and there?Yeah. You know, I do want to point this out, because I look at this memory very fondly now, and so I do want to point it out. I do remember one time—I was probably about 6, 7 years old, something like that. Very young. And I went into my grandma’s room. I don’t remember why. And this is grandma on my mom’s side. And I went into her room, and my grandfather had died years prior to this. And I went into her room, and I still remember it like it was yesterday. She had a desk in her bedroom, and I went, I approached the desk, and I could see this book. And the book was this Bible. And the Bible was highlighted, underlined, I mean the pages were dirty, and you could see that this Bible was so looked at and just absorbed into, and I have such a fond memory of that moment, because I have no doubt that my grandma prayed for me. I have no doubt about it.That’s a sweet memory, really, I’m sure. Did your grandmother ever talk with you about God or the Bible or Jesus?Unfortunately, I have no recollection of that. And I wouldn’t say that it’s her fault or that this is a failing on her part.No.I actually… I look at things quite differently now, that first of all, it was God’s will that I were to grow up the way that I grew up and experience the things that I experienced. And so I don’t look at it as a failing on grandma’s part or my parents’ part anymore. It was largely a cultural thing, within Christianity. So for example, I have noticed…. This is my experience, so I don’t have any statistics or anything. I have noticed that the older generation, the baby boomers, they were not so focused on discipleship, and they were not so focused on the Great Commission to go out into the world and make disciples, teaching them to obey all that Christ has commanded us. That wasn’t really a focus of the older generation, as it is now, in our present generation.Right. Yeah, I think perhaps several decades ago, I guess you could say Christianity was a bit more culturally present and perhaps taken for granted and presumed, and perhaps they didn’t feel the need for going deeper or trying to influence others, because it seemed that everything or everyone was Christianized in a sense, perhaps even in a nominal sense, but nevertheless, your parents had some remnant of Christianity, it sounds like. Baptist or whatever, but you didn’t have any active, like presence of going to church or anything like that?It wasn’t until around thirteen or so that I started to really truly form atheism or my belief around God in any measurable sense. Yeah. Because I started actually briefly attending church because my parents separated and then got divorced. And then, all within one year by the way, I think it was like fourteen months, that my parents separated, got divorced, and my dad was remarried, all within about fourteen months.Oh my! That’s a lot. It’s a lot for a child.Yeah. And so, just being brutally honest, what that began was this bitterness and anger and outright hatred towards Christianity, because every other weekend—I went from seeing my dad sparsely when he was in the home. And again, my dad was providing for the family. I have no animosity towards that. I think it’s great. To then, after they’re divorced, I would see him every other weekend. And, again, being a stupid teenager like myself, I was just so angry and so bitter that I didn’t want anything to do with my dad. I wanted to just spend time in my room alone, isolated, and just dwelling on all this anger that I had. And no outlet to get rid of it.But every other weekend, I would go to his house, his new house with his new family, and I now had a new stepbrother and stepsister. And I would start seeing the Christians and their walk with the Lord. And I started seeing so many different problems, so many different problems.What were you seeing?Well, I would see them… and this is my perspective. It’s tainted, like I said, by anger, bitterness, and sin, that you’re watching these people, and they’re smiling at each other. They’re saying nice kind things. They proclaim to love Jesus and the things of Jesus. But then church gets out, and it’s like a light switch would come off. Oh, okay. Check that off the list kind of thing. Don’t have to be a Christian right now. And, I mean, anecdotally, how many times have we heard that the worst tippers in a restaurant are often Christians.Yeah.And I would see this behavior, this hypocrisy. Or at any rate, the hypocrisy that I perceived.Right.So yeah. I mean, that’s just some of the issues, but my thing was, “Okay, well the answer isn’t in some deity in the sky.” Instead, the answer for me was science. So I looked to science to solve the questions of this life. So, yeah.Okay, yeah. I can see, from your own life experience and how disappointing that would be, particularly, yeah, being torn from your father. And then the hypocrisy of the Christians, it was just kind of a lethal combination for you there at that time. And so you separated yourself from any kind of religion or faith or God. And then you embraced what science had to bring for you. At that time, were you identifying as an agnostic or an atheist? I mean, were you saying these kinds of things out loud? Or were you just kind of thinking them to yourself, “There can’t be a God. I can’t believe in God. Science is a more rational or reasonable way forward.”I would say I started off… just I didn’t know, flat out didn’t know. I wouldn’t call myself agnostic, and I most certainly, you know, thirteen, fourteen years old, I wouldn’t call myself an atheist quite yet. I do recognize, though, that, as time progressed, I moved swiftly from, “I don’t know if God exists,” to, “Science now has all the answers and can solve all of life’s problems.” And like I said, the consistent observations I was making about the Christian faith. And it just continued to be all these holes in the Swiss cheese, so to speak, of belief-I see.… where it was, “Okay. Oh, there’s another hole. Oh, there’s another hole,” until finally, you know, the collapse of morality that I truly became an atheist. But really, I mean, you know what scripture says about atheism. What is it? Proverbs and in the Psalms, it says, “The fool says in his heart that there is no god.” And I truly was foolish. I was very, very foolish. Atheism, for me, is just another extension of me wanting to do what I wanted to do, in sin. My selfish desires carried out. You know, Romans 1, the depravity of my mind. It was trying to invent new ways to sin, you know?So, it became where, you had stability in the home, then there was divorce, some trauma, spiritual trauma, so to speak, mental trauma. Not necessarily that I’m identified by these things, but they marked me. I was an angry, bitter, young man. And so it was just this constant tearing down of belief until finally it collapsed, where now it’s just, “All right. I don’t believe in God at all.” And then, from atheism, then the quick progression from atheism to hostility to Christians. And that’s a very quick slide often. So yeah.So that was when you were a teenager, middle school, high school, around that time, where-Yeah. Middle school. Mm-hm.Yeah. That’s such a pivotal time, isn’t it, when you’re becoming a bit more independent, starting to think a little bit more deeply, also trying to find a sense of self and independence. It even sounds like something you just didn’t want in your life, that you wanted, like you say, to do what you wanted to do and that science would provide the answers. Again, I know that peers also influenced… Were friends of yours thinking similarly?Well, actually, this is actually something kind of interesting about what you’re asking because… so before everything really started to accelerate, with events that we’ll get to in a little bit here, but… so this is a freshman/sophomore time frame in high school. So I’m fifteen, sixteen years old. And I didn’t have very many friends growing up. I would have one or two growing up here and there. And so I did have a friend in high school, and I’m actually going to point him to this podcast. I’m not going to name him.Okay. All right.He didn’t necessarily encourage atheism, but he did start the process of talking about the Lord. Where he was just a lot more passive than I would have been back in those days. I was way more aggressive, way more in your face, way more, “God doesn’t exist, and here’s why. Let me write a dissertation for you.” Instead, he was just more passive, in the sense that, “Yeah, there’s a God. He exists. Jesus died for our sins. The end.” Very matter of fact, and then that was it. But on the flip side, and this is my criticism of my friend, is that he never…. So I started stealing during this time and lying. I had a whole philosophy of belief when it came to lying. I knew what lies would work. I knew what lies didn’t work. I knew that if it’s tinged with truth, the lie would work better. And so I had a whole belief system around lying and then consequently around stealing. But ultimately, to really put it succinctly, my philosophy around stealing was, essentially, “I want that, I don’t have that, and so I’m going to take that.” So there was no, “Oh, well,” you know, because I used to rationalize and say, “Well, I’m broke,” or, “I don’t have a job,” or, “I will never get this,” that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, the true reason that I was stealing was because I wanted it. It’s just sinful selfish desire. And so, I was stealing. And I was lying. And I was telling my friend about all these things that I was doing. And never once did this Christian friend, say, “Hey! You know, bro. That’s not the wisest course of action. You shouldn’t be stealing. It’s really not good,” or some sort of corrective kind of speech or anything. He was very, very hands off in that way.You know, it’s an interesting thing that it seems easy to hold contempt against a group of people or, you know, an ideology,…

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Reasoning Towards God – Joshua Rasmussen’s story (Audio) May 26, 2023

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Former skeptic Joshua Rasmussen left Christianity to pursue truth through reason and philosophy. Over time, his intellectual pursuit led him back to a strong belief in God. Joshua’s Resources: Defending the Correspondence Theory of Truth, 2014 Necessary Existence, 2015 How Reason Can Lead to God, 2019 Is God the Best Explanation of Things, 2019 For more stories of atheists and skeptics becoming Christians, visit www.sidebstories.com TranscriptEpisode TranscriptHello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to Side B Stories, where we see how skeptics slip the record of their lives. Each podcast, we listen to someone who has once been an atheist or a skeptic, but who became a Christian against all odds. You can hear more of these stories at our website at sidebstories.com. We also welcome your comments on these stories on our Facebook page and through our email at info@sidebstories.com.As a reminder, our guests not only tell their stories. At the end of each episode, these former atheists and skeptics give advice to curious skeptics as to how they too can pursue the truth and reality of God. They also give advice to Christians on how best to engage with those who don’t believe. I hope you’re listening in to the end to hear them speak from their wisdom and experience as someone who has once been a skeptic or atheist but who is now a believer. We have so much to learn from them. Also, please know that many of our former atheists and skeptics have made themselves available to talk with anyone who has questions about God or faith. If you’d like to connect, again please email at info@sidebstories.com, and we’ll get you connected.None of us want to be deceived, to believe what is not true. None of us want to be taken in by a false narrative. We want to believe what is true. We want to think that our beliefs are true, that they match with reality. These days, it seems that truth can be hard to find amidst claims coming from many different directions. But when you pursue truth above everything else, when truth becomes the clear path through the fray, sometimes it can lead you to beliefs you thought you would never hold.As a seeker of truth, Josh Rasmussen valued rationality and reason above all else. Although his intellectual questions first led him away from Christianity, his continued search led him back to a profound belief in God. He now holds a PhD in philosophy and helps others discover the truth that he has found. I hope you’ll come along to hear his journey from Christianity to skeptical agnosticism and then back again.Welcome to Side B Stories, Josh. It’s so great to have you with me today.Thank you. It’s just great to be with you. I’ve been looking forward to this.Excellent! As we’re getting started, so the listeners have an idea of who I’m speaking with, why don’t you tell us a bit about who you are, a bit about your education and what you do for a living.Yeah. Thank you. So my name is Josh Rasmussen, and my work centers on trying to understand things as deeply as I can. So I’ve been doing work on the foundations of existence, of a deep explanation of why anything exists. That’s been a project of mine. And then more recently, thinking about the nature of our minds, how we think, where thinking comes from. Can atoms produce thinking? How does that work? And I would say kind of the theme of my work is to really try to get wisdom that can be a treasure for people. I got my PhD from the University of Notre Dame. Currently, I’m a professor at Azusa Pacific University. And I just love my job because I’m doing the thing that I love the most, which is to think about big questions and try to help people get a little more wisdom about things that really matter to people. So that’s about kind of who I am.No, I love that! So formally speaking, would you say you’re an analytical philosopher?Yeah. You could describe that as analytic philosophy, kind of using the approach of logic and trying to make clear distinctions. At least that’s our goal. As well as, I think more recently, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the kind of observation approach that scientists lean into. And I think this is really important in my work, where you combine the analytic, the analysis, with observation. But yeah, analytic philosophy would be kind of my area.Okay, wonderful. All right. Well, I’m curious. You’re obviously a deep thinker as an adult, but I bet if I had to ask or… we’re going to venture back into your childhood, that you were probably always a curious child. But let’s start back in your home, where you grew up. Tell us about your family. Was there religion, any understanding or belief in God in your home?Yeah. So I was raised in a home that made me feel safe. We had a garden outside, and I had my own little sandbox. And I remember I could go out there and just build and create and even begin sort of my earliest thinking about, you know, what am I? What are people? And I’m just kind of playing. And I remember just having that feeling of safety. My parents let me play. They let me explore. They let me go free. I never felt like I had to stay inside or I had to stay in a box. I always felt that way. And it’s really cool because my parents, both, they’re Christians, and they raised all of us—I have three siblings—in the values of seeking wisdom, loving people, cultivating joy. That would be a message that my dad would often model for us. He would talk about it, and then he would model it. He would tell us, “Don’t waste your pain.” If you’re suffering, if you’re feeling pain, you can control your attitude. You can control your response. And so he talked about how to cultivate joy in trial.So, yeah, a religious home, a loving home. Even that word religion sometimes gets associated with more of like a limiting frame or like, don’t explore, don’t be free. Maybe a little bit more rigid in some circles. But for me, it just was not that. It really felt like I was free to explore, to be who I am. And I always felt loved, unconditionally loved, by my family.Wow, that’s an amazing testimony to your family of origin. I mean, so many people would love to be able to tell that story. So as you were growing up and your parents were Christian, did you embrace their faith at all? Did you believe in God as a child? Did you pray? Did you go to church?Yeah. Absolutely. They modeled it, and it made sense to me. So, yeah, part of it is I didn’t really have kind of alternative large-scale worldviews to compare with. That came later, as I met people who represented different ways of thinking about the world, which ultimately led me to have my own kind of crisis of faith or reexamining of my own worldview. But yeah, Absolutely. I shared their values and loved God, would pray, would go to church, these sorts of things.And did that extend into your teenage years? Or when did you start to question this belief in God or the views of Christianity or whatever it is that you were believing at the time?Well, it’s interesting because, in some respects, I feel like I was always kind of questioning things. I remember, in second grade, looking at my classmates and kind of thinking, “Well, I’m pretty sure they’re real, but how do I know that?” I was questioning that in my mind.Okay.I was always kind of questioning things. I remember asking my dad about the numbers and how high they go. And somewhere somebody suggested that God is infinite, but then the numbers are infinite. So I wanted to know, are these the same infinite? Are the numbers bigger than God? They go up higher than God? And so I remember questioning that and asking about that, how does God relate to the numbers? I still think about that sort of thing.Wow! In second grade. That’s extraordinary.Well okay, somewhere around that age, yeah.Right! No, yeah.Thinking about that. Yeah. Because I was really fascinated with the numbers, how high they go. I remember looking up at my mom and just asking her, like, “What is the highest number?” “Well, they go up forever.” “Oh, okay. They’re infinite. Kind of like God. I thought God was supposed to be greater than everything else, so how does that work?” So I had these questions, but it really wasn’t until in about high school age where I had conversations with people who represented different views of the world. And that kind of changed things for me, because now these representations of different views of the world, they weren’t abstract characters in my mind. I wasn’t thinking about the category, non-theist or Muslim or whatever it was from another culture. Here I am having friends in class who were just talking with me as real people, raising their questions, representing different views. And that really caused me to reexamine my own view, especially because I remember just realizing I can’t just take for granted the view that I was sort of raised with, especially if other people have a different view. They’re raised with a different view. How can I just privilege one view over another?And it’s not that I didn’t have some thoughts about these things. I remember thinking about the design of the universe. I remember thinking about the beginning of the universe, needing some kind of a cause. But when I was talking with—this was is in a biology class in particular. I was talking with a friend, and I asked him kind of what he thought about the cause of the universe, the design of the universe, and his answer was just so striking. I didn’t really anticipate this. He just said, “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I just don’t know.” He said, “Maybe there’s some cause of the universe. Maybe that’s right. Maybe beginnings have causes. I remember he said that. I’m not really sure what its nature would be.” He said, “I would love it if the cause loves me and knows me. I would love that. But I can’t just believe what I want to be true, and I just don’t really have the evidence there.” And there was something about it. It just intrigued me, just like, “Oh, man. He seems very, very sincere.” And I remember wondering, “Okay, God, do You want him to believe in You? Could you give Him more obvious evidence?” And that was already then sowing doubts in my own mind, because if God’s not more evident to Him, then I’m wondering, “Well, is God really good? I mean, does He want us to know Him?”And then I started having my own questions about, “Well, is my evidence good? I mean, sure, maybe beginnings have a cause, but how do I know the nature of the cause?” My friend was asking that question, and this led me to really just worry and wonder. Part of my worry was that I realized that reality doesn’t just have to conform with what I want.I came home from school, and I was kind of feeling worried about the nature of reality, purpose of life. I remember lying on my bed, looking up at my ceiling fan, and just wondering. What happens when I die? Is this world safe? Is the nature of reality good at the base? And I just remember thinking, “I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t really know for sure. Don’t know.” And not only didn’t know for sure, it was like… because then I was asking, “Well, is there a probability?” And it felt like it was pretty much 50/50.I looked up at my ceiling fan, and I still remember this, just thinking, “Okay, God. If you could just move that fan, just move it, that will give me a sign, give me an indication that you are really there.” And so I prayed. I asked God to move that fan. And I mean, to this day, let me just say I’m grateful that the fan didn’t move, because it led me on a track that I think broke a limited box of view that I had of God and of the world. That broke. And I think moving that fan would have sort of kept me in that box that needed to break, so I could go on the search, see a greater world, come into a worldview type that I call this the meadow type of worldview. So you got the box worldview that’s got these nice, safe boundaries. And the meadow worldview is very beautiful, but it goes out to the horizon. You don’t actually see the edges. So there’s more and more truth, beauty, and goodness to see out in the meadow.But at the time, I was very worried because I remember just wondering, “Well, God, I mean, if You really do want me to know that You’re real, just like with my friend, if you want the friend to know that You’re real, could You just be a little more evident?” And let me just say, I was not hiding a secret sin or trying to run from God in this moment. At least as far as I could tell, everything within me just wanted some assurance. In fact, that very desire for assurance is part of what created the pain point for me, because I was so worried that my desire to have reality conform to what I want was blocking me from being honest about reality. I would watch these documentaries by these scientists who were displaying a curiosity and an honesty to face reality, whatever it is.Right.And I actually think this experience helped put me into contact with the value of honest truth seeking, sort of by contrast, because I felt the pull of my desire. And it also gave me this appreciation for my friend from school that I didn’t have before. I didn’t understand what it was that he was attracted to, facing reality, being honest with the evidence. And so that led to both a decision and then a search. The decision was… I remember the decision. It’s like in the Christian circles you talk about deciding to follow God? Well, in this moment, I decided to follow reason to the truth, whatever it is, to seek the truth. That’s what it was. And I couldn’t ask God to exist because if He doesn’t exist, He can’t make himself exist. And if He already exists, He can’t answer the prayer. He already exists. I can’t ask Him to exist. I did have a prayer like this, like, “God, if you’re there, please be real.” That prayer makes no sense. You can ask Him to show Himself. You can ask for clues. But for me, it was a decision to really seek the truth. So that kind of led to the next path of my journey.Yeah. That sounds like a significant turning point in your journey. As you were mulling over these things in your mind, did you pursue…. I’m just curious how how you pursued your truth. Not your truth, how you pursued truth. Your parents, were they a source of wisdom or understanding or knowledge to be able to engage you in the way that you needed to be engaged? Or how did that look?Yeah. I love this question because it brings me back to the value of my upbringing. For me, both my mom and dad, they were a source of support, emotional support and safety. I never felt like they were worried about my questions or that they were upset about them or they needed me to come to a certain conclusion. I remember talking with my mom at the kitchen table, kind of sharing with her my worries. And I never felt from her any sort of ideas that would help me answer my questions, if that makes sense.Right.But I also felt from her that there was just that safety. She wasn’t alarmed by it. And same thing with my dad. Now, my dad, he’s a thinker. He’s a reader and a teacher, and in fact, he’s been teaching at churches as a pastor, so he knows the language of these things.So my dad gave me a book. And this book went very deep into kind of how to explain things, the causes and the effects. And it went past some of the, let’s say, first level and second level kinds of objections that my friend was raising, that I was raising. It demonstrated an insight. Also on my own I went to a library and checked out some books by non-theist philosophers arguing for atheism. I remember J. L. Mackie’s book The Miracle of Theism, reading that. I remember. Kai Nielsen, a book. Quentin Smith; he has got a book. Many other philosophers. And it was very interesting for me to kind of take notes. I was outlining the different books, and they would talk about similar arguments, like an argument from cause and effect or an argument from design, but they would talk about them kind of from dif…

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