As an atheist I enjoyed testing the Biblical knowledge of my Christian friends and family, because they usually failed dismally! Having proved my point, I liked to explain to them how we atheists were atheists precisely BECAUSE we had actually read the Bible.
And it’s a fair observation that many professing Christians have a very poor knowledge of the Bible, so the point of view expressed by many atheists that they know the letter of the Bible better than many Christians has plenty of truth to it!
So what changed my opinion of the Bible?
After all, I became an atheist after going to Catholic school, and having done Biblical Studies as a compulsory subject, so I was hardly ignorant of its contents. In fact, as an atheist I liked to quote one of my favourite authors, Richard Dawkins, who famously wrote:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” [1]
So, what changed my mind?
Wow!
And of course he can point to specific verses to back up each one of these opinions, with one exception of course – which is his tongue-in-cheek reference to it being fiction – although he certainly is convinced of it.
So again, what changed my mind?
Ironically, it was from Reading The Bible!
I simply re-read a small part of the Bible while I was looking for a quote to back up an argument that I wanted to make about Christians being “sheep”: how their faith was blind, and how they don’t know how to use logic or think for themselves. The quote is this:
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish.
These words, which the Bible claims are from the lips of Jesus himself, he said to his enemies (who were the RELIGIOUS people of the day!), explaining to them why they COULD NOT understand him.
He was telling them in no uncertain terms that they DO NOT POSSESS the capacity to appreciate the truths that he is claiming, including the fact that he is God. You can read it in context for yourself at www.bible.com.
So what if …
This led me to consider the possibility that, as an enemy of God (although I had conveniently convinced myself that there is no God), I too was unable to understand any kind of truth from God.
Was I like a tone-deaf person listening to Mozart, or a colourblind person looking at a rainbow? Was I just brushing aside the questions raised by these statements in the Bible with the simplistic humanistic thinking of “What kind of God would do that”, without wondering how deep the truth actually was?
Or was it indeed just “fiction”?
So I started at the beginning of one of the “Books” in the New Testament, being the Gospel of John, and before I had finished the first few chapters I knew with absolute clarity and certainty that:
-
God IS
- He is who he says he is in the Bible, and
- I was indeed his enemy, rightly destined for Hell.
The same Hell whose existence I had been so busy denying with my shallow and self-serving humanistic logic.
I was also flooded with the realisation that, contrary to what I had believed about it up to that point, the Bible possessed a golden thread of qualities that reflected who he is, such as …
Beauty, Excellence, Authority, Harmony and Unity.
If you too are sceptical as I was, but curious to see how it is possible to go from agreeing with Dawkins to THAT, then I suggest you have another look.
I recommend the Gospel of John, and just read Chapter 3 from the beginning.
It’s the story of a religious man who was doomed because he had no relationship with God – just like so many of our religious friends and family today – who came to Jesus secretly because Jesus was seen by the church of the time as their enemy.
Give it a read – it will take you 5 minutes. What have you got to lose, other than a completely transformed existence? www.bible.com.
Once you’ve done that, look out for my next instalment on how the same religious spirit that chases so many of us away from believing in God, that has caused so many atrocities, and that led to Jesus being crucified by the religious people of his day, is alive and well among many so-called Christian churches of today.
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Reference Notes:
(1) Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006. Page 31.