My first message was printed before I was able to proofread and correct the misspelling of “Christian” or to complete my thoughts. I intended to cover the same ground that you do. The Bible was composed in the context of the Commonwealth of Israel when the existence of God was treated as an established fact beyond dispute. The Bible’s various statements, therefore, do not deal with such issues. It deals with questions relevant to the minds of persons more or like myself, who treat God’s existence as presuppositional.
In Romans 1 the Apostle Paul treats awareness of God as a universal given. The implication is that humanity can only become atheistic by working up excuses to discredit a belief which causes them personal difficulty. I do not intend this remark as an insult but only as an explanation. Nothing is to be gained by insults. I accept your statement that you are a genuine atheist and not to be fooled with. My goal is to suggest what it means to be a thoroughly convinced Christian.
Your experience of the Bible is so different from mine that it is difficult to imagine that we are referring to the same book. Christians like myself claim that we have been “saved by grace,” meaning divine assistance, including an ability to understand the Bible as it it actually is. In my conversion, I was never aware of any “leap of faith” requiring me to suppress logic and reason. On the contrary the Bible helped me to think more clearly and comprehensively than I had before.
You bring up the issue of self-criticism by the scientifically minded, lacking among the religious. Both the scientific and religious should be self-critical. The New Testament word “repentance” translates a Greek verb meaning “change of mind.” This exercise is treated as an on-going process among believers in Romans 12. Obviously believers hold fast to their fundamental convictions just as scientists hardly expect to abandon basics such as that outer space is a transparent vacuum or that chemical compounds differ from the elements that they incorporate.
Interestingly you conclude by referring to the time when you, like all of us, did not exist. That theme of non-existence has played a major role in the history of Christian theology. It has served to explain the origin of “sin” in a human nature which was originally created in a state of perfection. The one thing that God never created was non-existence. Therefore sin can be explained in terms of the gravitational pull of our prior non-being. Some Christians regard that argument as double-talk, but it satisfies me. We all differ in mental predisposition.

Sincrely

John Pilkey

My life experience has been profoundly different from yours. Although I attended a variety of denominational churches as a child with my parents, I became an atheist in my teen years and then an ardent fundamentalist Christian at age 20 in 1962. I found that biblical Christianity answered all of my basic questions. It possesses great logical depth.
I never expected to encounter any miracle involving suspension of the laws of nature since the whole point of these miracles was to establish an authentication proper only to the times when they occurred. I am neither an Old Testament prophet nor a Chritian Apostle and have no need for such miracles to assimilate the faith as an established tradition with evidences stretching from one end of human experience (including mine) to the other.

The argument taken from another angle that he offers – the plethora of religious practices so divergent and even antaginistic as evidence of the non-existence of God. Diversity does not prove non-existence. To the contrary, it tends to prove existence of a common thread with diverse manifestations. I am always charmed by what happens after the President gives a State of the Union Address. The divergent rancor that ensues in the media as different political analysts and experts attack the speech makes me wonder whether they all listened to the same speech. Should we conclude that someone made up the speech during a moment of disillusionment because there are so many conflicting view points?

Let me assure Mr. Callahan that Christianity has been down this road before and always came back stronger than before. May the story of Madelene O’hare be a lesson to you: God walked right into her house and pulled out a preacher. That’s not hallucination; that’s realithy.