Question: What “Made You” Want To Become A Christian?

Anonymous asked:

Since you were an atheist, what made you want to become a Christian?

I don’t mean to handwave your question, but here are some posts I’ve written on that:

- So you used to be an atheist

- So What’s Your Testimony?

- How Are You An “Atheist Christian”?

- Why Christianity?

In answer to your question, please hear me on this: I did NOT want to “become” a Christian.  It was the very opposite, really, since there are multiple advantages to not becoming one.  Such as: mindless sexual flings, drug buffets and alcohol binges, laughing at Christians with the cool kids and atheists and media, and always being able to loophole myself out of any absolute standardized principle. 

As C.S Lewis said, I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

What became increasingly clear to me over time was the horrifying evidence that Christianity might be truth.  I was scared that it was all real, because suddenly it meant some supernatural being loved me and wanted better for me than I did, which was all so terribly inconvenient since I wanted to keep my life my life. 

Part of recognizing God entails that we undergo the painful process of transformation, and most people are way too comfortable to experience the glorious vision that God has for us. 

So you know, we pick apart the Bible, pointing out one or two discrepancies, or we call out some of those hypocritical Christians, or we commit the fallacy of pitting faith against reason and yell, “I’m being objective in a science-vacuum bro!” No matter what you’ve heard, there’s always some kind of personal-emotional bias that drives the intellect, and that’s true for irreligious, religious, and every color in between.   

But all that to say: Christianity best fits the hard questions that every worldview should seek to answer.  The question of suffering, of existential meaning, of the universe’s existence, of certain events that have transpired throughout history, namely that damn curious thing which made all the Jews go balls-out nuts in the first century. 

Could we be wrong?  Maybe.  I am, after all, a skeptical Christian.  But I am also enthusiastically confident that the work and person of Jesus Christ is the truth.  I was a profoundly broken person who met Jesus and was radically transformed.  That is at least part of my undeniable evidence.