Ex-"New Atheist", Now Christian

[RosaRubicondior]

Hello.

Please consider this to be my introduction.

I am well aware of the fact that joining an atheistic forum as a passionate Christian is, perhaps, a naive undertaking; it seems likely that I will receive some hostile responses from some members.

I used to be an exceedingly firm atheist. I fell into the contemporary trap of being a Richard Dawkins disciple, and was a keen viewer of the "Atheist Experience" show on YouTube. I have read many books from the leading "new atheists", from Dawkins to Krauss, for example. I took a great deal of pride in my atheism; therefore, I feel qualified on this matter.

I know exactly how it feels to perceive Christianity (and all other monotheistic religions for that matter) as absurd, illogical nonsense for which there is not a single shred of verifiable scientific evidence. I took pride in the fact that I "knew the truth" about the absurdity of religious belief, and how emotionally intelligent and strong I was for accepting that human beings are nothing more than mortal material organisms, ultimately derived from the last universal ancestor via the process of evolution by natural selection. For the record, I am not a creationist and I accept the Darwinian paradigm as scientific fact.

My anecdote for converting to Christianity: I had an extremely profound experience over the Christmas period 2012 (December 24th). Three things that I took for granted: (1) my ability to love, (2) my ability to empathise and (3) my sense of morality ceased to exist and I truly felt an exceptionally evil presence. It was at around this time I started to believe that love, altruism, morality and, indeed, subjective consciousness are inexplicable by human reason and material reductionism (neurobiochemical reactions); I ultimately attributed them to God/Christ's core message. Of course, this could be explained by the extremely simplistic scientific label of "psychosis" (hallucination and delusion), but it is far more complex than that. I no longer hold the belief that logic, science and reason can account for everything in the human experience. For a long time I have wanted God/Christ to provide "evidence" of its existence, and for my subjective life experience, the evidence provided could not have been more powerful.

I think I had an extremely simplistic view of Christianity when I was an atheist. I thought what most atheists think, such as refuting the idea that Christ died for our sins and denying the historicity of the resurrection. After studying the history of Christian theology, I now know that these core ideas, in popular denominations such as Catholicism, are simply theological interpretations of the significance of the life and death of Jesus. I do not believe that his crucifixion signifies a redemptive sacrifice for our sins; this is a ridiculous concept to me. I am also a skeptic concerning the historicity of the resurrection. However, I firmly believe that Jesus' consciousness was divine and that his life was vastly more important than his death; just consider how profound an impact his life has had on civilisation as a whole. I also believe that The Bible is not particularly important.

I am now very fond of the extremely intelligent academics Alister McGrath and John Lennox (who I believe are much brighter than Dawkins). I also admire John Shelby Spong. I disagree with McGrath's and Lennox's core Christian views as they both subscribe to the Anglican tradition. Spong's views are very much more in tune with mine. Here is a short YouTube video that sums up how I view Christ:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJICIGQl0JU.

Thanks for reading.

As an Atheist, how did you know which god to ascribe causality to and how did you eliminate all possible natural explanations for your 'experiences', please?

What specific piece of evidence convinced you a priori that your chosen god actually existed so you could justify including it in the explanation, please?