How God Destroyed My Atheism (Christian Testimony)

thank you all right there's no other way yeah [Music] foreign [Music] imagine an underground world made of concrete and steel stairways and tunnels just enough light to see the signs on the walls Suppose there were people who lived down here all their lives and were never allowed to visit the surface and that these people were told from the time they were born that this world is all that exists wouldn't they believe what they're told to believe when they try to live like it's true suddenly a Madman stumbles down the stairs and says to the people living here don't you realize that you're underground don't you know that there's an amazing world right up those stairs and that a tomb no matter how spacious is still a tune but the people laugh at the man they say we understand our world just fine without all your rambling about another go back to your flying spaghetti World fool where the enlightened ones down here and in rejecting the world above they sink a little deeper into the world below when I was five years old I had a dog named Goliath one day my mother received a phone call she turned to me it was tears in her eyes and informed me that Goliath had been run over by a bus I looked at her and thought to myself so what it's just a dog but my mother was sad and I couldn't figure out why I soon noticed that other people got sad when something died seemed really weird to me crying isn't going to change the fact that it's dead so why are you crying I also noticed that people didn't share my amazing insights into the nature of reality remember sitting beside a lake when I was eight years old watching ants March in perfect formation and it suddenly became entirely clear to me that ants ruled the world and had only tricked us human beings into thinking that we were in charge do you have any idea how powerful and Brilliant they must be if they've managed to deceive the entire human population a few years later I figured out that pets actually controlled the planet whenever a cat or a dog would look me in the eyes I would think that it was communicating with me silently bragging that was much more intelligent that humans were so part of my youth who spent talking to animals telling them I know what's going on here I'm on to you but I grew out of that sort of silliness by the time I was in 10th Grade I was convinced that I controlled the weather I didn't know how I control the weather I just knew that I did it would start raining and I would think okay how did I do that I also had the ability to control time but I didn't know how to use this ability yet [Music] summer my best friend from elementary school died Jimmy had always talked about going parasailing he finally got the chance and his harness broke he plummeted to his death when I heard about it after knocking on his door I had the same reaction I'd had when my dog Goliath died namely so what but this time was different it seemed like I should be bothered by Jimmy dying so I started wondering if something might be wrong with me after pondering this for several months I realized why I was different I had evolved to a higher stage of humanity these sad little emotions the rest of you have they're like vestigial Tales left over from more primitive life forms but Humanity 2.0 had arrived and you earlier models were now obsolete okay following year I had a life-changing experience I was running from the police in the middle of the night and they had me surrounded on three sides the fourth side was the Monongahela River so I jumped in and swam across and started working my way through the trees on the other side I eventually emerged from a patch of woods and I found myself in someone's backyard in front of me was a beautiful garden I started to walk around the garden but then I stopped to philosophize I thought I don't care about the people in that house so why am I going out of my way to avoid stepping on their vegetables why am I being so courteous because I've been brainwashed that's why I've been breaking the law for years and yet Society had been manipulating my behavior all along greatness had been polluted by mediocrity as I stunt my way through that Garden I had an incredible Rush of Freedom the world has all of us on a leash a leash made of rules do this don't do that but it's a leash that slips right off as soon as we recognize that we don't have to do anything anyone tells us to do of course if you really want to break free from your handlers seems like you have to do the opposite of what you've been told going down started studying bomb building when I was 18. nothing fancy yet I got a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook I learned to make pipe bombs I learned to put together a homemade grenade launcher I bought a book on disguises so I wouldn't be recognized but it all felt a bit amateurish so I decided to become a chemistry major in college where I could learn to build something a little more sophisticated but my plans of becoming a bomber had to be put on hold because there are more important things in life anyone can blow up a bunch of random people you don't know them if you're sick of Life dangling at the end of society's puppet strings The Killing has to start much closer to home my dad was the only relative I had within a few hundred miles so he obviously needed to die and I had a ball peen hammer that would do the trick interestingly some of my amazing insights into the nature of reality actually slowed me down my dad was sitting beside me on the couch and I was about to beat him to death I had the hammer under a cushion but I suddenly realized that he was reading my mind and not just him everyone in the world was reading my mind I was part of an experiment and billions of people were in on it they were all waiting to see what I would do and as soon as I uh attacked my dad the walls would rise up The Observers would rush in and the experiment would be over since my dad is reading my mind I'm channeling my thoughts to him as we sit there he's watching television and I'm thinking look at me while you're reading my mind look at me right now I'm going to bust your head open finally I channel to him I think I'm stupid I'm not falling for this and then I got up and walked out but it wasn't over after a while my senses returned to me and I walked into my dad's bedroom at about two o'clock in the morning Thanksgiving Day I stood over him with the hammer and I tried to think of one wrong thing he'd ever done to me nothing came to mind so I drew back my arm and came down on him with all 230 pounds I didn't know how fast blood could come out of someone's head kept hitting him until I was sure he was dead and I walked outside and drove away there was no rush of Freedom this time I didn't feel anything anymore did I mention that I was an atheist I understand that most of you atheists out there live perfectly normal lives but I can never understand why you would want to think about it we've got this massive universe and over here is a tiny little crumb of a galaxy I don't want to the spiral arms of this galaxy is a thoroughly unremarkable ball of hot gas circling this ball of hot gas is a pathetic Speck of cosmic dust we call Earth and crawling all over the Earth are these feeble selfish self-destructive lumps of cells constantly diluting themselves into thinking that what they do is so important but the universe couldn't conceivably care less whether you love your neighbor as yourself or torture him to death for fun so you might as well do whatever you feel like doing with a little bit of time you've got and what are my atheist friends going to do with your 80 years or so let me guess you're going to go to school for a while then get a job work for a few decades maybe pick up a family along the way then retire and die of old age or some illness original free thinkers huh believe it or not some people don't want to live like cattle some people don't want to follow this pattern that we're all expected to mindlessly follow some would rather bash a man's head in or shoot up a theater or walk down their school hallway stabbing people and why shouldn't they because it's wrong it says who your grandma or should they try not to hurt people because people have intrinsic value here I thought that human beings are nothing but machines for propagating DNA most people don't want to kill in Slaughter but for those who do our civilization is rapidly destroying any significant reason they might have for resisting the urge to kill and Slaughter young people are lining up to dance to the music of their DNA all you can do now is hope that they get tackled when they stop to reload or that they make some huge blunder when their bloodbath begins I made a huge blunder when my bloodbath began I underestimated the amount of damage a human head could endure crushed skulls can apparently be pieced Back Together by doctors my dad had brain damage but he survived the attack I was taken to a mental hospital and later to jail is a place to sit back and reflect on the things you've done you've got plenty of time to sit back and think why did I get caught what steps can I take to avoid getting caught next time and without all of the empty repetitive tasks that ordinarily keep you mentally sedated you've got plenty of time to to figure out what's most important to you foreign the most important thing to me was not being a slave to people for whom I had nothing but contempt but people had controlled me in various ways throughout my life and this meant that they would need to be taught a lesson I had a list of people going back to kindergarten who were going to be brutally murdered but doubts occasionally crept in I would ask myself is there a point to any of this nothing really matters so what difference does it make whether I do everything I've been planning or I do nothing at all there's no blue ribbon for making the right decision here because there is no right but when I would start to think that life off the leash was just as meaningless as life on the leash I'd start to lose my mind I was able to hold things together to some extent mentally because I had something to do but if what I had to do was pointless then holding things together was pointless so I was at an edge and there's nowhere to go but over it [Music] life as a way of giving us an alternative at just the right moment one of my hands one empty Kettle he should be on his metal just because I'm presuming that I could be kind of human If I Only Had a Heart when I was in e-block in the jail I met a Christian named Randy a guy who had turned himself in for 21 felonies Randy seemed like he was from another world there'd be a fight in the dorm and he wouldn't watch he uh he turned his head away and pray for it to stop our main source of entertainment and he's praying against it Christian's cracked me up Randy was lying on his bunk reading his Bible one night and I walked up to him and said do you know why you're reading the Bible you're reading the Bible because you were born in the United States if you've been born anywhere else you believe in something else if you've been born in China you'll be a Buddhist if you've been born in India you'll be a Hindu if you've been born in Saudi Arabia you'll be a Muslim because people like you believe whatever you're told to believe I've since heard other atheists say the same thing and almost exactly the same words so I take it that this is a common atheist view of Christians which is hilarious in his level of hypocrisy I believe that the Universe exploded out of nowhere for no reason and that life formed on its own and that Consciousness was a natural product of particle interactions in our brains and that moral values were nothing but societal indoctrination and Jesus followers made up the story about him rising from the dead because they wanted his message to spread I believed all of this without anything remotely resembling a careful investigation of the evidence which means I believed a lot of what I'd been told but I'm pointing a finger at the Christian why because it's much easier to make fun of someone else than to do the difficult work of putting together a coherent well-grounded belief set something interesting happens when I made fun of Randy he fought back lots of Christians will go into Retreat mode if you start arguing with them they don't want to cause a scene but Randy sat up on his bunk and proceeded to embarrass me about some of the things I was saying 47 50th Street I was totally shocked I don't know what was going on I'm the smartest most advanced human being the world has ever seen and night after night when we are arguing uh Randy was just taking me to a to a school and he wasn't smarter than me he didn't have any special knowledge or degrees he he wasn't a scientist or a philosopher he just had an annoying habit of questioning everything I would say and when I would try to answer his questions about what I was saying it would become clear to him and to me that many of my beliefs when put into words sounded really really stupid things that made perfect sense when unquestioned made no sense at all when questioned I became so frustrated by our arguments that I began looking for other ways to defeat Randy I made fun of him for getting molested when he was a child I saw his uh his 12 year old sister in the visiting room and I said some things about her that I'm not going to repeat here I keep messing with him until he got upset and when he got upset I'd say look at you getting angry of me call yourself a Christian oddly enough Randy and I became friends we'd stay up all night playing cards throwing a roll of toilet paper around like it's a football and of course arguing about the Bible but I was still looking for ways to defeat him at something so we got into the world's first ever fasting battle it wasn't a battle for him he wasn't trying to outdo me at anything but I was certainly trying to outdo him Randy would fast for long periods of time nothing but water after a while I joined in and whenever he would complete a fast I'd start my own fast and then go a few days longer than he did for our first exchange Randy fasted one week I knew he wasn't eating because he gave me all his meal trays when he was finished I said all right I'm going 10 days I had never gone a day without food in my life but I went 10 days straight just so I would know that I had beaten the Christian we went back and forth with me always going a few days longer than he did eventually he asked me he asked me uh hey how come you always fast a little longer than I do are we in some sort of competition that I don't know about I said no I hadn't even noticed just coincidence I guess Randy fasted 40 days he went 32 days on nothing but water and then he added liquids like Kool-Aid for the rest told me that Jesus had gone 40 days and that's why he picked the number 40. I said all right I'm going 42. and even six weeks of nothing but water and rage I was going to beat Randy and Jesus on the 11th day of my fast uh a guard came in and told me to pack up my stuff I had passed out earlier and hit my head on the way down the medical staff knew my mental health history and they thought I was trying to start myself to death I'm trying to beat the Christian they think I'm trying to commit suicide really really slowly but they had seen that I'd lost enough weight to realize that there was a problem and a blood pressure monitor the nurse put on my finger said that I was dead so I had to pack up my books philosophy and Science and the Apologetics books Randy give me and head to my new home a cell with a camera where I could be watched day and night living the dream I lost about 80 pounds from fasting I developed a horrible rash all over my body it felt like felt like poison ivy it's called shingles it's caused by vitamin deficiency was having blackouts I was getting tunnel vision the doctor at the jail said he was going to tube feed me the social worker was talking about having me sent to my third mental hospital and when I wasn't reading all I could think about was taking people out to the woods and peeling their skin off but I found renewed purpose in my lonely cell with a library at my disposal and nothing else to do I had a perfect opportunity to prepare for an epic showdown with Randy I could study the Bible put together new arguments go back to e-block and destroy the faith of my friend I asked the chaplain for some Bible studies he gave me a series of studies on the Gospel of John with graded assignments so here I am a rapidly deteriorating atheist sitting in a poorly lit cell doing my Bible homework getting straight A's I haven't eaten in days and I read about Jesus saying I'm the bread of life he who comes to me will never go hungry I'm obsessed with liberating myself from a society that has me trapped in a six and a half by eight foot cell and I read the sun sets you free you'll be free indeed I'm wondering how long my body can take what I'm doing to it before my heart stops and I read I am the resurrection and the life he who believes in me will live even though he dies kind of creepy when a book talks to you but what do I know I used to think that cats were talking to me [Music] lying on my back day after day reflecting on life and Theology and philosophy three things started to destabilize my entire belief system first What's called the design argument finally hit me I was looking at a wall and how the bricks were arranged and I thought to myself you know if someone told me that these bricks went into this border by some process that didn't involve intelligence I'd smack him in the mouth and yet I believe that life formed without intelligence when the most basic living cell is unimaginably more complicated than some bricks stacked on a wall why did I blindly accept the extraordinary claim that life arose spontaneously from non-life without demanding some very good evidence second I found out how Jesus Apostles died most of them went to their bloody desk claiming that they had seen him risen from the dead my explanation for the origin of Christianity had always been that the apostles made up a story so that they could spread his message but now my explanation wasn't making sense if you're willing to die for something you have to believe it when a terrorist blows himself up he's obviously sincere so the disciples the apostles had to believe what they were dying for but this means that they were they were convinced that they had seen Jesus risen from the dead now usually when someone is willing to lay down their life for something it's for an ideology that they got from someone else and that ideology could be true or false the disciples were dying for something that they saw what could have convinced so many different people that they had all seen a resurrected man I could explain one witness by saying he's crazy but all of them something was going on here and I had to figure it out but I couldn't come up with any explanation for why they had that level of confidence other than they actually saw him third be better than me now if you're not a complete moral relativist or maybe one of the new atheists it's probably obvious to you that Jesus is better than me but I wasn't the clearest thinker on moral issues back then so uh getting my mind around this was very difficult here's the problem that emerged I had two beliefs that just didn't go together on the one hand I believe that human beings are lumps of cells meaningless lumps of cells that everything we did was pointless at the same time I believe that I was the best most important person in the entire world how is it possible to be the best most important worthless lump of cells if there were to be some sort of best person that would require something like you know a standard of good and that would require something like God and then someone like Jesus would be better than me so my beliefs were breaking down at the foundational level and once the foundations start crumbling everything starts coming down I went from believing that I was the best person in the world to thinking that I was the worst person in the world and In a Moment of clarity it all just hit me thinking I'm a guy who once choked my friend until bloody foam came out of his mouth I hit him with a shovel because he disagreed with me I don't even remember what it was about I used to watch my mom's boyfriend beat her and I wouldn't lift a finger to help her not because I was scared I was 200 pounds and I had a gun I could have stopped it at any time I just didn't care and I was proud of the fact that I didn't care I thought about what I'd done to my family what I was doing to myself they brought me food every single day and I was starving to death because I wouldn't eat it there were other starving people in the world but at least they could think straight I sat there thinking about torturing people my skin was turning yellow I was scratching myself bloody what sense did it make to think that I'm the best at anything when I was thinking about that situation I just thought you know it feels like I've just been stomped relentlessly into the ground and when I when I thought that I I started comparing it with a little Hospital stay about a year and a half earlier I got a new fight with seven guys I'm not saying that to be tough they want that one they won that one I got one of them he hit me with a gun and I hit him with uh with these guns and then his six friends got on me and got me on the ground and then took turns Soccer kicking me in the head but I was comparing that to to the situation I was in I was thinking foreign scratches on my neck I was dizzy walking around I had my arm in a sling but I was okay fighting seven guys is a joke compared to what I was going through in that cell I feel like I've just been stomped into the ground and when I thought that I felt like I'd been stomped into the ground I had another flashback one night I was walking home from a friend's house and a storm hit there was rain was so bad I could barely see lightning was striking all over the place and I looked up and mockingly said oh is that supposed to scare me if you want me to believe in you better come down here and make me believe I wasn't serious but given my circumstances in the jail I had to start wondering if God had taken it seriously that normally wouldn't have been uh an option I didn't I didn't think like that but since my entire world view was crumbling I wasn't in a position to dismiss alternatives but there's a problem [Music] if there was a god involved in all of this if right and wrong weren't merely useful fictions I was in all kinds of trouble not just for what I had done but for what I was how is the worst person in the world going to ever do the right thing there's no there's no magic switch that I can flip and oh now I care about other people so how was I going to do anything right and then it hit me that there are two possibilities either I'm violent and selfish and uncaring and that's just the way things are or there's someone who can help people like me either I'm all messed up and that's that I just had to live with that or there was someone who could deal with this sort of thing and when you start thinking like that I'd say you're about two inches away from becoming a Christian because when we ask ourselves who out of anyone ever who had the ability to take psychologically spiritually and morally shattered people and give them new life we get a list of one you get a list of one there's one person on the list he's the one who said I am the door if anyone enters through me he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy I came that they may have life and have it abundantly I didn't know if Jesus was who he claimed to be but I knew that it was Jesus or nothing it was Jesus or nothing if anyone has God's stamp of approval it's the guy who rose from the dead history is filled with dead options Jesus is the last living option so I bowed down on my bunk not sure of much of anything and I prayed I didn't know how to pray but I prayed and I said God I don't know if I'm going to believe in you tomorrow but I believe in you right now if you can do anything with me you're welcome to it and then I continued with a kind of sinner's prayer that I had read in those Bible studies and when I sat up from that prayer the entire world looked different like everything was a different color for the first time in a lot of years I didn't want to hurt anyone when I had a strange sense that I'd somehow known the truth all along God created the universe but we're something special we're created in God's image but we reject God and in rejecting God we strive to twist and warp His Image which we bear for years I was willing to sacrifice everything for a kind of Freedom just a freedom from external control to false freedom because we just end up using it to degrade and destroy ourselves tarnishing the image of God so that we won't be reminded of what we are and what responsibilities we share true freedom is found in not having this inclination and desire to turn against our creator that's the true freedom [Music] after I prayed I felt like I had been fighting not figuratively fighting I mean physically brawling my entire life and that I finally had a chance to sit down and rest that rest never went away [Music] as Lewis put it I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun is risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else [Music] lots of people and their testimonies will share their stories of what happened after they became a Christian we could talk about that some other time right now I just wanted to explain why I'm a Christian and my reason for being a Christian has never changed I stand on the words of the one who rose from the dead because there is no other place to stand and just to show you that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever I'll conclude my story with the words of another Christian from nearly 2 000 years ago the Apostle Paul tried to annihilate Christianity before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus shortly before his death he wrote a letter to his friend Timothy and said in words that could be echoed by thousands of other Christians over the centuries I thank Christ Jesus our lord who has given me strength that he considered me faithful appointing me to his service even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man I was shown Mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief the grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance Christ Jesus came into the world to save Sinners of whom I am the worst but for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me the worst of sinners Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life now to the king Eternal Immortal invisible the only God the honor and Glory forever and ever amen [Music] you ready for our interview

Channel: Apologetics Roadshow

Views: 607,336

Keywords: David Wood, testimony, Christian, christianity, gospel, Jesus, atheist, atheism, guillaume bignon

Id: jb2ggj9mKM0

Length: 33min 50sec (2030 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 30 2023