"How I grew up atheist and ended up Catholic" -Jennifer Fulwiler, THIRST 2013

this is a great group someone asked me earlier if I get nervous speaking to large groups of people and I said I've got six kids the oldest of nine the youngest is six months this is relaxing compared to what I do on a daily basis so here I actually used to live here so it is it's really a pleasure to be back I didn't know if I would ever end up back in Bismarck I went to read a Murphy elementary which i think is not too far from here and my parents when I moved around a lot and we always said that Bismarck was one of our favorite places maybe not so much for the weather but we do recall that the people were so warm and friendly and supportive of one another and we always miss that oddly enough so truly it's a pleasure to be back and I was I was an atheist even as a child when I lived here so a lots happened since then that I have to catch you up on and I look forward to telling you my story one of the reasons is because it just fills me with a joy to talk about what God has done in my life but the other reason is that I think help you as you prefer and you reach out to people you might know who have fallen away and I'm guessing that you do know at least a few people who have fallen away or maybe they've always been atheists or whatever according to the Pew Research Center the number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace 1/5 of the US public and a third of adults under 30 are religiously unaffiliated today the highest percentage ever in Pew Research polling in the last five years alone the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15% to about 20% of all adults in this country their ranks now include more than 13 million 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics and we are only talking about our own country here as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation in Austin we call that spiritual but not religious a third of people who say who say they were raised Catholic no longer practice so we have our work cut out for us let's start to turn those statistics around and so let me start by telling you my own story from when I used to be one of those statistics so it was always an atheist I have no memories of believing in anything supernatural not even when I was a child I would sit in the class down at reading Phee elementary and sometimes I think it was actually here in Bismarck that a girl asked me she said have you made him the Lord of your life and I actually said Who but it never occurred to me to believe in anything like that and I certainly had no religious training my parents mainly my dad had this idea that they wanted to be good people just for the sake of being good people they are to this day they are very kind and generous individuals and my dad especially really liked this idea of why don't we do good out of the goodness of our hearts you may have heard this before from people you know who don't believe you know why did we need a god you know threatening us with hell to do the right thing can't we just do the right thing on our own and that made perfect sense to me it was really my dad who was he was the atheist of the family and he was he was raised I think a kind of non-practicing Methodist but he started asking tough questions when he was a teen and he didn't get answers so he was you know pretty open about his atheism my mother is what philosophers call a Macy's and that's someone who is far more concerned with whether Macy's has an additional 30% off this weekend than whether there's a compelling case for a monotheistic God so in my dad would say in the Hebrew here in the air she thought about coming which would have been weird in humor here I think that he would say that he did not raise me to be an atheist per se he was really big on this idea of seek truth and question assumptions even if it's something that I as your father and telling you question it stake truth and so that that would that would end up being a very important part of my childhood that it wasn't just we're atheists so go be an atheist it was seek truth question assumptions and so I did and as a young person that seemed to lead me to atheism I went to college I actually started out at a very religious public university and I transferred to the University of Texas at Austin because it had a reputation for being very secular at my previous university it was like you know they'd have Bible studies and stuff and I got to UT and atheists yeah this is this is much more like it so I the College atheists if you wanna hang out with and really even some of the professor's they were really a testament to just how much our education system has lost a sense of history when it comes to philosophy in the liberal arts I mean I would actually hear professors say things like well people believe in God started because people didn't know how to explain things before science and that's the only reason anyone ever believes and you now that I have studied it a little bit of philosophy I'm no expert but I just cracked the surface on it I think I cannot believe that people got away with saying that in an institution of higher learning I mean have you never read the ancient Greek philosophers I mean you might not agree with them but there's this whole wealth of knowledge that they were not drawing from and what it reminds me of is one of my very favorite quotes ever sums up this whole phenomenon it was the London Review of Books their review of I believe it was the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins otherwise known as your atheist relatives favorite book I'm sure what they said and and I can just hear the British accent I wish I could imitate it they said of The God Delusion imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the British book of birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology I love that and that really perfectly encapsulates what I experienced among atheists even in the university setting and it was interesting though because we'd like to have these discussions we like to ask big questions and you know think tough thoughts that the Christians supposedly weren't thinking but I began to notice some some problems would come up that people couldn't really answer that well for example someone has from one time in an atheist group that I was meeting with um you know how do we how do we know that it's the right thing to do to be a good person for example to just you know give back to others maybe volunteer at a homeless shelter because the group that I was with they were really into that they really did want to be good people like my parents you know serve the community give back and so they said you know from an atheistic point of view obviously we're not like those silly Christians whose God tells them what to do but so so how do we know that it's the right thing to do and the person in the room who was considered you know very intellectual and knowledgeable said oh well yes you know if you look at evolution you can see that humans thrive they function best when they are in peaceful communities it leads to harmony and and therefore we we have a gene it's you know hardwired into us to seek peaceful communities and but I was sitting there thinking um well yeah but you can also look at the evidence from evolution to see the evolution kind of favors survival of the fittest to the strong dominating the weak so it seems like from an idiot from a purely atheist materialist perspective you could also concoct a moral code in which beating up the weak and the poor and stealing their stuff so that you can be rich in your offspring can survive seems like that could also be perfectly justifiable from the Atheist material materialist perspective and when I would bring up these issues to sum up you know the relati discussions but one summary of the of the typical response I got was along the lines of shut up because because again a lot of these people wanted to be good people and so they thought that I was saying atheist want to be bad people or something I said no I just want to know how we derive a moral code from our own belief system because it seems to me like you can't and when I go toe to toe with atheists in the blog world which is always a pleasure because you know how wonderful people are when hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet that is one of the things that comes up a lot that that really that really sets people on fire when you bring up this question of how can you deduce a moral code they don't have an answer I waited for a good answer when I was in college I still have not gotten one so I had those questions in my mind but I was still very much an atheist because one thing that my dad instilled in me well was this idea of you might not like where the truth leads you it might not be comfortable but you follow the truth nonetheless we look for what is true not what makes us feel good and so I was concerned about these issues of moral code but in the spirit of seeking truth I was still committed to being an atheist the first thing that just made me you know really start question even more than I than I already had been that made me think maybe start to consider at least theism was when I met the man who is now my husband so he has an interesting story he was really he was raised by a single mother we were very very poor so much so that they often couldn't even afford to run the heat in the winter which is said that it was Texas I mean it wasn't like you know here and so she a her big thing because she grew up in poverty like no running water poverty and so her big thing was you've got to get out of poverty you've got to seek success and she had heard on like movies and TV shows of these places called like Yale and Harvard and so knowing nothing about it you know the blind leading the blind here she was like well I'd you know I think you should go to one of these schools and my husband had never heard of him he was just a kid from you know small-town Texas and he said okay I guess I will and so he went to Yale undergrad graduated with honors Columbia Law School Stanford Business School and did most of the coursework towards a master's in computer science while he was at Stanford so no one could say he wasn't a pretty smart guy so after we started dating and I just assumed he was an atheist because you know atheism is for the intelligentsia right a very much bought into that stereotype and so one day something about the subject of religion came up and he forgot what it was but he said something that indicated that he believed in God whoa what what was that Wow crazy and in she said the c-word he said he considered himself a Christian I was just I mean I really it was like in my this is a dream this is a dream I badly need to wake up now I believe what he had just said and said but one of my first questions was natural question I was like well I mean I had a never seen you go to church I have never seen you read the Bible and you know this is Austin so he's a oh no but I'm a Christian you know like you don't need to do anything you know pray to go to church like no I'm still a Christian because he had had a really profound experience he did a full dunk baptism in a Baptist Church when he was 13 and he said you know I experienced something and I know Christ is real and I had no idea what to do about it but I know that this is that that he is real and so I met some of his friends some of these people who you know from law school law rights that these people had agrees that I could not even pronounce and some of them claim to be Christian you know people who were their intellects blew me away and so that was the first time that I had to let go at that silly silly stereotype that smart people aren't religious and looking back when I first gave this talk I actually didn't even mention that because now it sounds so ignorant to say that I actually believed that smart people are never religious but you know that's the thing when you buy into stereotypes I mean stereotypes always come from you have this little worldview and you want to protect it and so you make a stereotype so that everything in your world fits you know very neatly within your perception and you just get further and further into it you further and further isolate yourself from reality so that's what I had done and hanging out with these really intellectual really smart people was the first time that that I thought okay I need to stop saying that belief in God is insane I need to stop saying that no reasonable person could believe in God because these people are really smart they are very reasonable and they believe in God I didn't think they were right but I that was a first step I just I let go of those those silly stereotypes so Jo and I got married and this confirmed for me that he wasn't that religious because we decided to reinvent the wheel on the wedding we got married in a theater and I wore a dark purple dress and we had all these ideas we were going to like sign a contract and we wrote our own vows that kind of a mess but we learned a little lesson one that I hope none of your children ever need to know but if you are going to reinvent the wheel on a 2,000 year old tradition or older you might want to rehearse it first because for all of these ideas about what our wedding was going to be like we never timed it and so we had all of these people like that Joe knew flowing and flying in from all over the world and I get up on the stage and I have a dark purple dress on and it was only seven minutes because we kind of do time that and so as I was walking out people were like so huh so I just flew in from London for like she just like looked up there and now it's done and so anyway little lesson learned on when you you know go against like thousands and thousands of years of tradition so a year later our first child was born and that was the real starting point of my conversion you can see that the stage had kind of already been said might you know I was already thinking at a certain direction but when I hold that baby that was the first moment of realizing that there were some real problems with atheism and that it was time to address them because you know in the spirit of another thing that my dad always taught me was this idea of follow your beliefs to their logical conclusions don't just say you believe something but then don't walk the walk when the going gets tough you have follow your belief to their logical conclusions and so I held my newborn son this amazing miracle and I was like what a gorgeous randomly evolved set of chemical reactions what is amiss nonsense what is this because I remembered it there when I was in college there was this professor I can't think of his name some of you've probably heard of him he made the statement he's a big yes he made the statement that it would be more morally acceptable to kill a newborn baby than an adult Pig because pigs are more cognitively complex and that has stayed with me all those years because at the time that I read that paper I was like this is garbage he's making 80s look bad I was like that is wrong because well actually you know because when people would ask me so every now and then I'd accidentally run into a religious person and even more accidentally get in a conversation about it and sometimes they would ask me questions like you know how how do you know that human life is more valuable than say a gnat and I would say like oh well in this you know quoting from other atheists I'd say well obviously you know we're more cognitively complex and we're more aware of the world and so essentially complexity is how you derive value and I looked at my newborn son and I thought well I mean babies are pretty smart I mean like the pig is more cognitively complex than this newborn and I realized that by my own atheist materialist worldview I was saying that my baby was not as valuable as an adult human being because he was not as cognitively complex so that was wrong and the biggest moment was when I sensed this love that I felt for him and again in the spirit of being you know intellectually honest I said okay where does this love come from that I'm experiencing I thought well it's just a feeling it's just chemical reactions in my brain and I thought that's not true that is not true I know that the love that I feel for my son and that I have experienced in this little family of ours has a source that is somewhere outside of us I don't know what it is I don't know who it is but I know that it's there and that if the whole world blew up tomorrow and there was nothing left of us that that love would still be real and it would still exist and that was the moment and that was the moment it is no longer an atheist I didn't know what I was but I was not an atheist so I figured it because you know I did I grew up in Texas I mean we have religious people there I figured that now is when I was supposed to say a prayer but I never tried that and I was not clear on how you distinguish talking to yourself from talking to God by a vision I literally said I was like is this thing on like how do I know when I'm talking to every thought maybe there could be gods I mean it's Austin we're open-minded I don't know I didn't know what I was talking to but I just sent out this really lame prayer just saying if anyone is out there the source of that love like I said something I know it's there whatever is that the source of this love you know what holla at me like just let me know Billie I don't know what I'm supposed to do next but you know let me know that you're there and what I didn't realize at the time is that I was actually responding to the grace of God that had already began to work in my life and due to the prayers of many of the wonderful people that I met throughout my life that knew I was an atheist and were praying for me I love this quote from the Catechism where it says God calls man first the living and true God tirelessly calls each person to that mysterious encounter known as prayer in prayer God's initiative of love always come first comes first our own first step is always a response and so little did I know I was simply responding to this to this hand that had been extended to me for so long and that's a tip by the way for your loved ones who have who have fallen away encourage them to just pray and I know they'll laugh they'll say that's ridiculous why but I pray I don't believe in God but why do we have to lose all right so you spend two minutes talking to yourself how hard is that because as you'll see when we get later into my story that really started things in motion that really opened a door for me that first prayer as lame as it was what I did not understand and this is another thing that you might want to convey if you suggest this to non-believers is I thought that prayer was kind of an instantaneous thing like you know you put the card into the ATM machine and you get money you know I thought that like I would say the prayer and then if there were a God or something he would do something you know like he's a magician or said that is like there to impress me I don't know I I'm just picking things up from the culture in it from the culture around me so I said the prayer nothing happened and so I thought well I guess nothing is out there or maybe there's something out there that's impersonal I did not go back to atheism I was 100% convinced that atheism was false but I thought maybe there's not you know the personal God that you that you care about so much so seven months went by and I had actually kind of forgotten about it and then if anything happened going to a bookstore to you know find some just some reading to pass the time I had no particular agenda and it was a weird thing as I was walking in the store the only way I can describe it is to say that it's almost like there was a light on this one book at the back of the room I mean there wasn't literally but I was so drawn to this book and I just had to go see what it was and so I had my baby with me and I pushed the stroller back there and I laughed when I saw that it was in the Christianity section and the last time I was in the Christianity section of anything was when I was in the fourth grade I took the Bibles in our library and I put them in the fiction section which I thought was like the most engi atheist joke the whole fourth grade had ever seen so but in the knack to the Christianity section since and I was about to walk away but then I saw that the book was called the case for Christ and there was some tag line or something that said that the author used to be an atheist and I thought like oh that's ridiculous like I said this will be fun you know take this book apart that's you know this is just going to be absurd and I found that the book was actually not too bad I mean it's you know now that I read it it's written by a Protestant author named Lee Strobel great guy but you know didn't necessarily have the fullness of truth I wouldn't necessarily say that the book contains all the answers that you could ever want to know but for me at that time they really planted a seed for me it really piqued my interest and one of the things was that I noticed this guy spoke my language I believed that he was really an atheist and this is another tip that one that I would find out later there there was something especially at that time and I still feel it a little bit there's something that I would always sense is that people who had always had faith it's like we were speaking a different language in a day would say something like you know don't you feel chained down by the weight of sin and I would be like but I don't believe in sins so it we were just constantly missing each other but this guy in CS Lewis and GK Chesterton basically later I would find that what I needed to be doing was seeking out thinkers and authors who are once atheist themselves and that really they really knew how to speak my language so anyway and in the case for Christ I'll just give you one example of of a point that he made through interviews with with Christian experts he made some points that just kind of got me thinking I wasn't convinced but they got me thinking like for example this philosopher Protestant philosopher named JP Moreland struggle struggle interviewed him and this guy pointed out that what you see when you when you look at first century Palestine is that you know there were all these Jews that for centuries through unspeakable persecution they had held to these religious and social structures such as animal sacrifice and keeping the Sabbath and nothing you know not not the worst persecution that the world could throw at them would would get them to let go of these days customs and so and this is a quote from from him in the case for Christ he says these Jews they didn't live the to abandon these institutions would be to risk their souls being damned to hell after death now a rabbi named Jesus appears from a lower-class region he teaches for three years gathers a following of lower and middle class people gets in trouble with the authorities and gets crucified along with 30,000 other Jewish men who are also executed during that period but five weeks after his crucified over 10,000 Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion and get this they're willing to give up or alter all five of the social institutions that they have been taught since childhood have such important both socio law Lee and theologically and Moreland says and kind of hard to argue with you have to admit that something explosive happened to Jewish culture in first century Palestine atheist or Christian you have to admit something happen and his own explanation was simple they'd seen Jesus risen from the dead got me thinking again I wasn't convinced but I thought okay that's an interesting point I'll think about that so I so that's what I did I just kind of thought about it and but I thought that Joe would be excited since since since he was a Christian oh and by the way one thing when we circle back and say note that that book was very much a result of that that week prayer that I had said earlier if someone had given to me that Pope that book the year before I would have just made fun of it and set it aside what initiated my openness to to being able to receive some of the messages in that book is that I had begun to open myself to God's grace so that's something to know that it is not always the right time to throw books at our friends who are non-believers you you know you want to kind of wait and see that they have opened themselves a little bit to God's grace so anyway so I came home and I told show like oh you won't believe this this is you're going to be so excited I am going to start reading about religion which is that's what we nerds do I said I'm going to start researching religion and guess what I am going to put Christianity at the top of my list and Joe I think he was like eating or something he was like well yeah I guess you would start with the only lasting world religion whose founder claimed to be God I thought like oh well yeah because that does make sense and I thought you know that's been a move you know cult leaders throughout the ages to say like I'm God give me all your money and then they do the very fun godlike move of dying and staying dead and their religions don't go very far so I thought yeah I just I should have been exploring Christian anything all along so so I bought a bottle now because they're you know a Protestant South I mean I know that's what you do you know after you say your prayer you you buy a Bible so it's like alright I'll get a Bible now you have to understand I my ignorance as in so many cases was largely due to pride I mean I did to their credit I had some University classes where they tried to expose me to the Bible its cultural literature but I was really into this idea that we live in a post Christian culture and so we didn't need to read the Bible anymore even his literature so I was as ignorant of Scripture as you could possibly be in live in modern America and every now and then when I was a kid maybe even sometimes here in North Dakota I would spend the night at a friend's house and my parents were not morning people so if the kids were going to church my parents were like you know we might be a yes but we are not getting up early so that they can drop you home before they go to church so just go to church with them so I've been to a few sunday-school services and so my impression of the Bible was like there were fishermen and like we sang songs about like sheep and stuff like I really wasn't sure what to expect but so I figured Jesus probably I can't believe I'm admitting this I did not understand the difference between the Old Testament in the New Testament so I figured ok this is Jesus's book so he probably comes in on what like page 40 50 because you want to lead up to it and probably don't put in there on page one so I open the Old Testament and I'm like where the Sheep in like the song is about fishermen and I'm in Leviticus like enjoy coming from working or complaining about a problem and I'd be like Joe have you tried killing a bird over a clay pot and in dipping red yarn and hyssop and it's blood it's just looked at me I feel it's in the Bible I'm reading about it so Joe finally clued me in he said you've got to stop you've got to get to the New Testament it's all going to make sense when you get there so there'll be okay so finally we have some talk about Jesus in the New Testament now okay I feel like we're going so I read the whole New Testament and it was amazing it was I could give a whole talk just on how it was different than what I would have expected it was incredible to immerse myself in these scriptures but I was still very competing more confused than before I read it because this is going to sound silly but I'm being serious when I say I expected like a what in sales they call like a call to action at the end I mean you know get to Revelation Wow okay and then the book just ends and I thought like so what do I do now you know and and I didn't want to go to an external source because I thought like surely we need to just trust the Bible or not you know what other people are telling us to do and and the other thing that was confusing is I did not see a clear case for the traditional Christian moral code like for example I would say okay I think I heard that Christians are against abortion and euthanasia and I would look in the Bible and I just it wasn't clear to me and so then you know like that you know nerd internet nerd that I am I'd so I'd go online and I Google and I would see forums where people would say like oh yes absolutely a scripture is totally against euthanasia and if you look at these verses you know that's going to pretty much show you that it's right but then the next person down the thread would be like oh no no Christianity says it's fine in in some cases you know depending on the circumstances so here are some other scriptures and when I would ask the few religious people I know I knew like you know how do you how do you know which ones right they'd say like you have to study the Scriptures and you know read them in accordance with one another and I felt like I have a one-year-old I mean you know I just I'd love to study the Scriptures but are you telling me that you have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible in order to get the most basic questions answered I mean I just I don't I would love to but I thought like I don't have time to become a scripture scholar and and then and some things that were kind of clear but I wasn't sure if Jesus was talking to the people in that time in place or talking to us because I get to the part where you know he tells the rich man that you have to give up everything if you want to follow me and I'm looking at my lot like every really like everything and so I would ask Christians like does that so I mean do I have to like what garage sale I mean like you know what how do I go about this and they'd say like oh don't worry that just he was just talking to that one guy but then I keep reading and we have the lesson for Mary and Martha and they'd be like oh no no no that no that focusing on the Lord instead of little tasks no that's for everyone and I'd be like do you guys have an appendix because like my version doesn't have one I am I do not understand where you are getting these interpretations and so Joe you know like a good Protestant was like you need to buy a concordance that's that's what's gonna or a biblical Encyclopedia that's gonna you know make it make it all make sense and I was like but if the writers of the concordance weren't inspired you know by God then why should I listen to them I you know I that doesn't seem to make sense and then the other thing I started to think about was widespread literacy is a brand new phenomenon in human history I mean you look at the history of the world and even a lot of places today most people cannot read and so I told Joe I said the system you're giving me of like I spent hours and hours like you know like studying the scripture and then looking at the concordance in the encyclopedia I was like it doesn't work if you have a job or you know can't read and everything is it requires the printing press the printing press was invented in the 16th century before that the average family probably could not even have a Bible let alone a bunch of supporting documents and so the question that the question boiled down to two to paraphrase from the title of Mark shay-bo which I highly recommend it was very convincing to Joe by what authority authority I had all of these Christians making all of these claims about how to interpret the Bible and what the Christian moral code is but I don't think I could have articulated it this succinctly but I kept saying by what authority what gives you the authority to say that we interpret this verse this way and we interpret this verse that way I was completely confused so did doing what people like me do I started a blog in a very modern turn of events and for those of you who are familiar with blogs it's just a website that's easy to update but the distinguishing feature is that it has at the end of each little post that you write there is a comments forum where people can respond and you can have dialogues and that's that's the big difference between a blog and other types of online medium so I didn't have any readers and so I decided to recruit readers and I knew just right ago there was a there was a website called the raving atheist very aptly named I cannot even hint at some of the things that this man would say about Christians the hatred that he had for people of the faith was palpable and and I was aware of the site is he was the biggest atheist blogger at the time but I noticed that he had this following of Christians who did an excellent job of responding to even his most hateful posts and the other people in in the in the comments I mean these Christians would they did an amazing job of addressing atheist arguments and one thing is they did it with charity and with peace and I thought and if someone had said that to me you can't even imagine what I would have responded with and I saw these Christians and there was the sense of man I want that they have like that I mean that's just--that's superhuman the way the way that they're able to deal with these people but most importantly at the time anyway was that they could demolish atheist arguments and one interesting thing is I recruited I think six people to come answer questions on my blog I would find out later five of them were Catholic these people that I had specifically identified as being able to demolish atheist arguments and there were other people on there but the ones that I picked out all Catholic so anyway so I had these Catholics reading my blog and at the time I'm not sure if I even understood that they were Catholic and so I started talking about these problems that I was having with Scripture and so they told me a very interesting theory they said what if when God inspired the writers of the Bible you know fallible people who make mistakes but he inspires them to convey infallible truth they said what if he didn't stop doing that after the Bible was written what if he kept doing that in a church that he founded with his own authority and what if it is still around to this day and I thought that is crazy questions me and I thought that that sounds really right and then they told me they were talking about the Catholic Church I was like oh no oh come on that is just ridiculous like in Joe that the Southern Baptist was like oh dude this is you need to get away from the internet because these people are there don't for easy talk but I had nowhere else to turn because I had pursued every other Avenue and so I just started reading and Joe started reading and as happens I think those of you who are converts and reverts I know this is going to resonate with you you start to look into it and you're like well why didn't someone tell me that there was all this great stuff here but you didn't you know CNN doesn't talk about this when they talk about the Catholic Church I mean we found this incredible moral code and it was perfectly internally consistent it didn't contradict itself and it was full of this wisdom that was totally counterintuitive and yet so right and one in the particular issue that really convinced us was the one of the issue of abortion and contraception Joe and I both considered ourselves pro-choice and we without contraception was like air and water I mean that's it's like a needed thing that humans have to have and when we realized that the church was right on that issue we thought I don't think this comes from people I don't think we give people enough credit to come up with this and keep it going especially this teaching that every Christian denomination agreed on these teachings about abortion and contraception up until the 1930s and then as public opinion shifted all the other churches shifted except for the Catholic Church so I started writing on my blog like guys this is amazing this teaching is so beautiful theology of the body you need to listen to dr. Janet Smith and read Christopher West and God was up there like hahaha watch what I'm about to do so I was pretty with my second child I got a deep vein thrombosis a life-threatening blood clot and I was diagnosed with a blood clotting disorder that is exacerbated by pregnancy and I was told by my doctors you need to use like ten different forms of contraception and at the time I wasn't even Catholic and I thought so so now I'm the religious nut in the office I mean like a couple years ago I was the atheist and like now I'm the religious fundamentalist and it really put me in this difficult situation and I haven't told many people about our journey but I told a few people and and and their response was to say like well just you know just skip that one teaching you know just just be Catholic but you know don't don't follow that one like cuz that's crazy I mean nobody really you know nobody does that in this day and age and I'm as tempted as anyone to take the easy way out but what show and I realized is that when you're asking a question of the Catholic Church when you have a problem there's really only one question to ask and that is is this church guided by God in its teachings or not because if it is not then throw it on there's no need to listen to anything it says including its claim that it chose the correct books for the Canon of the Bible but if it is than to say that you know better than the church is to say that you know better than God and I'm pretty arrogant but I wasn't ready to go there so so we so we said all right we're going we are going to trust God on this and we are going to be Catholic all the way we're not going to pick and choose we are going to do this right and so we decided to become Catholic because what we had seen was that this church was more reasonable than atheism at the time I still thought that atheism was a somewhat reasonable view I didn't think it was entirely crazy but here I had found a worldview in a philosophy that was more reasonable than atheism and it is the only one I had ever countered encountered into the state of ever encountered that I found nor reasonable we had gotten the answers to that question of by what authority this was the authority that both Joe and I didn't go and his life as a Protestant and ion my conversion had been asking like how do you know that that's how the Scriptures are supposed to be interpreted that question was answered it also answered the question of literacy that that question I had had of so you know sir what if you live in 1408 and you don't have about a thousand dollars for a Bible and you can't even read and you work 14 hours in the field the mass in this sacraments and the deposit of faith through the church that answered all those questions about how those people come to know God - and interestingly the scandals were going on at the time and some people said you know what you've you've heard about all these things that are happening in the Catholic Church doesn't that you know doesn't that concern you and of course it did it was terrible news that you know grieved us and as it grieved all of you I'm sure but in terms of deciding you know whether or not this church was God's true church in an odd way it made the case more compelling because what we were seeing on the news was non-stop coverage of the church's corrupt especially its hierarchy just bad people bad people everywhere they're so you know they're so simple they're so corrupt it's just all through the church and always has been and so Joe and I thought we'll wait a minute corrupt sinful selfish people are always the first to sell out they're always the first to just tell people in power whatever they need to hear so that they can get more power for themselves and of course we knew that these media reports were largely in actually inaccurate and completely biased so it's not like we believed them but they some of the ones that were were painting the church in the worst lights but we said if what the media is saying is true then that makes it even harder to explain how this church has been around for 2,000 years it is the largest continually operated or in human history it has stood strong and said things that make people furious for 2,000 years and higher after Empire has fallen a way around it and it is still speaking truth and it won't go away and how do you explain it what you're saying is even 1% true that its hierarchy is filled with imperfect people it just gave me chills I just thought like maybe a tiny portion of what they're saying about some people's faults is true but this I mean this is God you know people can't do this on their own so in terms of the issue of what we did about you know the people often ask well what is the follow-up you know with the contraception issue and you know just having the deep vein thrombosis and that it's a whole separate story that I have a book coming out next years that'll give you all the details but what we found the short version is it did work out and what we found is that the rules that God gives us through his church they are not necessarily easy but they should be thought of and this is an analogy I heard an amazing priest used once they are more a prescription for living a life of peace and love than they are a set of confining laws and so was it always easy to follow that prescription is it to this day easy to follow the prescription no it's not God never said it would be but when you follow it it's given it's given to us through the perfect doctor who wants only the best for us and when you follow that prescription you will find that your life is filled with peace and with love and what we found with all the struggles that we faced and continued to face with this clotting disorder of mine is that God does not ask us to have all the answers he just asks us to be faithful in conclusion Joe and I became Catholic at Easter Vigil in in 2007 and and actually I'll tell you we have time I'll tell you a quick little bonus story I often save this for later but after we became Catholic we had my son baptized he was three I learned you know lots of different denominations disagree about infant baptism but everyone agrees that toddler baptism is a terrible idea up in the front of the church he screamed that he did not want to be baptized and kicked and screamed the whole thing screamed his way out of the church so that's a lesson if you have kids who are not sure if they're going to get their children baptized tell them to do it early they want to do in their toddler so so that morning I was I was praying and I said Lord how did I get here I I I came from so far away and I you know I any moment I could have taken a wrong turn and ended up on a completely different path I was running around trying to find something to wear I wear almost all black I had nothing white to wear to have a baptism so I pulled open a drawer and something slid to the front and it was a candle it was my baptism candle my mother came from a Catholic family she was she doesn't like to go into details she was very fallen away I didn't really know that side of the family closely certainly not those grandparents they passed away when I was very young and they were also from a different part of the country than us and her siblings fell away as well so it was kind of this little relic that yeah there was something about like Catholic that sounds familiar to give you an idea of how little that Catholic heritage was passed on to me at one point some why I asked a question and someone answered that the rhetorical question is the Pope Catholic and I had to take the person next to me aside and say is the Pope I really didn't know it was a rhetorical yes or no but you know they came from a cultural Irish Catholic family and before my grandparents passed they did ask that I be baptized as an infant and so when I said that prayer you know Lord how did I end up here I was literally saying those words as I opened the drawer and I found that candle and it was just it was an answer from the Lord that the grace of my baptism had been working in my life all along and finally the grace of baptism is real and it works and remember the baby me theist blogger told you about I didn't hear from him after I didn't see a sight after I became Catholic the next year at Christmas he had a new post up for the first time in a year it was a picture of our Lord and it said I dedicate my life to the service of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ he is now at Catholic pro-life activist but I hope that my story teaches you is that nobody is ever ever so far lost that they are beyond the reach of God's grace thank you

Channel: Bismarck Diocese

Views: 257,013

Keywords: Catholic, Church, Bismarck, Diocese, Diocese of Bismarck, Bishop Kagan, Kagan, Roman Catholic Church (Religious Organization), Atheism (Religion), convert, Jennifer Fulwiler, Fulwiler, THIRST, THIRST 2013, conversion

Id: Z_Ab6l0q784

Length: 48min 59sec (2939 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 17 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/HermesTheMessenger]

Previous discussions;

• https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/search?q=Fulwiler&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all

[u/namtog1]

I wonder if any one else thought that Jennifer Fulwiler was a atheist? There is a talking head on CNN, S.E. Culp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._E._Cupp#Personal_life

who claims to be a atheist except that I've never heard anyone else call her a atheist.

[u/stew933]

Atheism isn't dogmatic so claiming you once were one and now not means nothing. You could have simply been raised in an environment devoid of any religious teaching or discussion... while you are technically an atheist you're an ignorant one. If you are atheist but haven't had the chance to think critically about religion you're as big a target as an infant.

I agree with the folks here that say this is aimed at the faithful to enforce their beliefs.

[u/PixelFreak1908]

She says that she follows her father advice of seeking the truth even if it's not pleasant, then rejects atheism because it's not pleasant...Which btw, her reasoning [the pig being more important than her baby] is flawed because atheists argue about that the same way Christian argue about what is moral. Atheism doesn't make that assertion.

I'd like to see a good argument against her because her story is pretty legitimate and I can see how someone like her can think that way.

[u/HermesTheMessenger]

What I wrote about a year ago;

---

Yep. It's silly. The 'I used to be an atheist' angle is aimed at the faithful, not atheists.

If the person was really an atheist before, they could use their understanding of what an atheist is to talk with atheists. Yet, that's not what happens.

The only credible 'ex-atheist' stories I hear are from people who had some 'experience of god' and admit they can't explain it to someone else. The more common and less credible examples are the people who focus on abstract points of religious dogma while ignoring any talk about why they are personally convinced that any gods exist. This is basically what the blogger is promoting, but the target audience can't be atheists because there is no indication that they know what would be credible or compelling to an atheist.

If an actual former atheist wants to convince atheists that gods exist or that gods are credible, there are better ways to approach us. They would be better served by remembering what they know about being an atheist and simply talking. Attempting to get credit up front for being an atheist in the past is just ham fisted. Can they mention it later? Yes, but not till they show they know what the hell they are talking about and who they are talking with. Even then, though, it's not a very good idea.

[u/[deleted]]

"I used to be an Atheist like you but then I found God" is typical bullshit from someone like this. I don't believe her for one second. I've heard that story so many times from people who just feel like talking down to me because I don't believe in God.

[u/gpearce52]

How could she surrender her human rights to Catholic dogma?

[u/PixelFreak1908]

She mentions Ancient Greek philosophers and how she can't believe they got away with saying that people made up god and religion to try and explain things before science, etc... Can someone expand on this? Specifically about ancient greek philosophers. She made no attempt to expand on it herself.