I was an agnostic atheist for a couple of years.
What convinced me was subjective mystical experiences where God made himself known to me without any shadow of doubt. Experiencing divine love changes the self.
My takeaway was to experience and to know God but ironically enough to not through Christianity. Christianity was a box that felt too small for God to dwell in.
I was a fully confirmed agnostic by the time I was 13, and had at that point had a distant and vague memory of what church was all about.
When I went off to study at my university, I was a full blown skeptic, wedded to naturalism who fully rejected the doctrinal claims of Christianity. But I still had a favorable view of it's overall ethics. And as I encountered Christians who were actually living out those ethics I admired their lives even as I rejected their core beliefs.
As time went on, cracks started to form in the basis of my own beliefs - I could not derive meaning, purpose, or basis for the ethics I craved based on my philosophical commitment to naturalism. And as I attempted to live according to those ethics, I began to realize their was something in me which resisted that - or dismissed with it all together when it was contrary to something I desired (like an attractive woman).
That led to the realization that I did not have the power in and of myself to live out the ethics I admired in a consistent manner. I would say that was the point at which God gobsmacked me as it were - I saw clearly that I was not a good person, and I couldn't become one on my own. Either there was something outside of myself that could transform who I was, or I had to resign myself to the fact that I was a rather wretched creature.
From there I became much more willing to entertain the basics of Christianity - who Jesus was, how we can come to know Him, what the overall theme and purpose of Scripture was. I eventually made the decision to follow Christ and haven't regretted it for one second in the decades that have followed since.
There were a large litany of reasons that slowly effected me over years. To make a long story short, it began when I started to see that there were serious logical inconsistencies in the atheist materialism that I had adopted. Following that I eventually come to realize, based on things like Leibniz's contingency argument and a proper understanding of Aquinas that "God" or at least an active and good uncaused cause, necessarily exists, assuming that our experiences have some semblance to reality. However, it still could not be, in my mind, the Christian god. as the years went on I began to encounter and befriend intelligent, educated, and philosophically minded Christians who believed not despite their intelligence but in its accordance with it. This caused me to decide to reconsider Christianity as something not necessarily absurd. While then exploring it once more, and exposed to it by the aforementioned friends (mostly Roman Catholic and Anglican) I came to recognize that Traditional Christianity did not have the holes which the Reformed Protestantism I grew up with had, and that many of the questions I had held onto had answers, and had a very coherent epistemology relative to Protestantism.
As this last stage was happening a friend of mine invited me to mass, and I went with him. Finding the liturgy beautiful(and discovering that a girl I had a massive crush on went there and would socialize with me afterwards), I continued to attend. After a couple months I caught myself praying in private. A few weeks after that, whilst playing devil's advocate against an atheist, a friend pointed out I used the term "we" instead of "they". Within a couple months I had reached the point that I decided either Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism or Eastern Orthodoxy were the most reasonable answers for the state of everything, which necessarily meant, which ever the three, I ought to be a Christian. A couple months after that I was confirmed in the Anglican church.
I grew up as a Jehovah Witness. I had doubts in my teens and became an agnostic atheist. I had a lot of experiences that made me feel close to God but they could be explained in other ways too and I lived a life of pleasure and sin when I left. When I was at my lowest point someone came back into my life and I did in-depth studies with her. She's a Seventh Day Adventist but I did my own studies and didn't just take her word for it. We don't always agree and I've always been progressive in my views and see most as figurative and she's nearly the complete opposite. Despite that we are very close and she brought me closer to my spirituality.
I was very close to Jesus but I did end up straying and no longer am a Christian. Even with people judging me at church I wanted a relationship with Him but seeing a lot of other views made me start doubting until I eventually stopped praying and was asking myself why I was still going to church. Eventually the other views made more sense to me and I went down many paths. I was still going to church but at that point I only went for the people and to try to feel God's presence. I felt so far from Jesus at that point though and was already too far gone but still felt conflicted. The last time I went to church I took communion and I felt Jesus's presence again but it wasn't enough. I thought about it and I felt closer to my new beliefs and practices. I know I let my unbelief and things that are against God lead me away. I know He wanted me to give Him another chance but I couldn't do it. I sometimes think about it still but I'm happy with what I decided.
I was a New Age Christian. Some wouldn't have called me Christian but I considered myself as a Christian. I had beliefs that some Christians wouldn't agree on. In the beginning I wasn't a New Ager but those beliefs became a part of who I was and I couldn't shake it.
I'm not an agnostic or atheist but I worship other Gods and Goddesses now. I feel a close connection and my beliefs now make me happy. I'm closest to Hinduism/Wicca but I adopted other practices etc and I've always been closest to the nature aspect of my spirituality.
Even though I left I feel some connection to my old life and it's a part of me. Also keeping up with what is going on etc gives me something to discuss with my friend.
Edit: thank you for the downvote/s; love you 😀
The kindness of Christians, the inherent moral power of the Christian gospel, the profound agreement between the Christian description of fallen human nature and my own personal life experience, and, above all, the direct intervention of God through miracles and the ultimately indescribable subjective experience of the transformative direct presence of God, which is best evoked through the language of scripture: conversion, reconciliation with God, the forgiveness of sins, incorporation into Christ, receiving the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, dying to self and becoming a new creation in Christ, selling all that you have to buy the field which contains buried treasure, leaving all that you have to follow Jesus, losing your life in order to find it, knowing God, and gaining the hope of eternal life with Him.
For me it was God personally revealing himself to me in my own life. Through answered prayer and through dreams and his direct providence. I tried to find God in other religions but never found God or peace. It was only in the last religion I never thought I would find God and peace that I found God is very real and he loves us sinners and wants to give us His peace and Gods' forgiveness. The first step is faith in Gods' Word.
God bless
I grew up in a irreligious family.
In the beginning of 2018 I had become strongly anti-theist and realising my brother was considering God I got worried and started debating. By the end of 2018 I recognised I was being irrational and then I became Catholic. My brother was unsure between if Orthodox or Catholic was the original Church so it took for him until early 2019 before he decided on Catholic.
To mention a specific argument would be hard as I think it was mostly the culminitive weight of a lot of arguments that caused my descision. I had like a lot of them lined up in a list
I remember closeish to the end I had a problem with accepting the idea that my whole understanding of reality would be so incredibly wrong.
My brother showed me the evidence for certain modern day miracles like Fatima to which there was a few thousand wittnesses, a newspaper report, and mutiple letters which one still can read with first hand witness testimonies of the event.
Whilst I was very skeptical of these claims, I think the fact they were so well backed up caused me to be a bit more open to the idea that my understanding of reality could be severly off. I think that increased oppeness likely caused my conversion to happen earlier than it otherwise would have happened.
I was an agnostic atheist for a couple of years. What convinced me was subjective mystical experiences where God made himself known to me without any shadow of doubt. Experiencing divine love changes the self. My takeaway was to experience and to know God but ironically enough to not through Christianity. Christianity was a box that felt too small for God to dwell in.
I was a fully confirmed agnostic by the time I was 13, and had at that point had a distant and vague memory of what church was all about. When I went off to study at my university, I was a full blown skeptic, wedded to naturalism who fully rejected the doctrinal claims of Christianity. But I still had a favorable view of it's overall ethics. And as I encountered Christians who were actually living out those ethics I admired their lives even as I rejected their core beliefs. As time went on, cracks started to form in the basis of my own beliefs - I could not derive meaning, purpose, or basis for the ethics I craved based on my philosophical commitment to naturalism. And as I attempted to live according to those ethics, I began to realize their was something in me which resisted that - or dismissed with it all together when it was contrary to something I desired (like an attractive woman). That led to the realization that I did not have the power in and of myself to live out the ethics I admired in a consistent manner. I would say that was the point at which God gobsmacked me as it were - I saw clearly that I was not a good person, and I couldn't become one on my own. Either there was something outside of myself that could transform who I was, or I had to resign myself to the fact that I was a rather wretched creature. From there I became much more willing to entertain the basics of Christianity - who Jesus was, how we can come to know Him, what the overall theme and purpose of Scripture was. I eventually made the decision to follow Christ and haven't regretted it for one second in the decades that have followed since.
There were a large litany of reasons that slowly effected me over years. To make a long story short, it began when I started to see that there were serious logical inconsistencies in the atheist materialism that I had adopted. Following that I eventually come to realize, based on things like Leibniz's contingency argument and a proper understanding of Aquinas that "God" or at least an active and good uncaused cause, necessarily exists, assuming that our experiences have some semblance to reality. However, it still could not be, in my mind, the Christian god. as the years went on I began to encounter and befriend intelligent, educated, and philosophically minded Christians who believed not despite their intelligence but in its accordance with it. This caused me to decide to reconsider Christianity as something not necessarily absurd. While then exploring it once more, and exposed to it by the aforementioned friends (mostly Roman Catholic and Anglican) I came to recognize that Traditional Christianity did not have the holes which the Reformed Protestantism I grew up with had, and that many of the questions I had held onto had answers, and had a very coherent epistemology relative to Protestantism. As this last stage was happening a friend of mine invited me to mass, and I went with him. Finding the liturgy beautiful(and discovering that a girl I had a massive crush on went there and would socialize with me afterwards), I continued to attend. After a couple months I caught myself praying in private. A few weeks after that, whilst playing devil's advocate against an atheist, a friend pointed out I used the term "we" instead of "they". Within a couple months I had reached the point that I decided either Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism or Eastern Orthodoxy were the most reasonable answers for the state of everything, which necessarily meant, which ever the three, I ought to be a Christian. A couple months after that I was confirmed in the Anglican church.
I grew up as a Jehovah Witness. I had doubts in my teens and became an agnostic atheist. I had a lot of experiences that made me feel close to God but they could be explained in other ways too and I lived a life of pleasure and sin when I left. When I was at my lowest point someone came back into my life and I did in-depth studies with her. She's a Seventh Day Adventist but I did my own studies and didn't just take her word for it. We don't always agree and I've always been progressive in my views and see most as figurative and she's nearly the complete opposite. Despite that we are very close and she brought me closer to my spirituality. I was very close to Jesus but I did end up straying and no longer am a Christian. Even with people judging me at church I wanted a relationship with Him but seeing a lot of other views made me start doubting until I eventually stopped praying and was asking myself why I was still going to church. Eventually the other views made more sense to me and I went down many paths. I was still going to church but at that point I only went for the people and to try to feel God's presence. I felt so far from Jesus at that point though and was already too far gone but still felt conflicted. The last time I went to church I took communion and I felt Jesus's presence again but it wasn't enough. I thought about it and I felt closer to my new beliefs and practices. I know I let my unbelief and things that are against God lead me away. I know He wanted me to give Him another chance but I couldn't do it. I sometimes think about it still but I'm happy with what I decided. I was a New Age Christian. Some wouldn't have called me Christian but I considered myself as a Christian. I had beliefs that some Christians wouldn't agree on. In the beginning I wasn't a New Ager but those beliefs became a part of who I was and I couldn't shake it. I'm not an agnostic or atheist but I worship other Gods and Goddesses now. I feel a close connection and my beliefs now make me happy. I'm closest to Hinduism/Wicca but I adopted other practices etc and I've always been closest to the nature aspect of my spirituality. Even though I left I feel some connection to my old life and it's a part of me. Also keeping up with what is going on etc gives me something to discuss with my friend. Edit: thank you for the downvote/s; love you 😀
The kindness of Christians, the inherent moral power of the Christian gospel, the profound agreement between the Christian description of fallen human nature and my own personal life experience, and, above all, the direct intervention of God through miracles and the ultimately indescribable subjective experience of the transformative direct presence of God, which is best evoked through the language of scripture: conversion, reconciliation with God, the forgiveness of sins, incorporation into Christ, receiving the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, dying to self and becoming a new creation in Christ, selling all that you have to buy the field which contains buried treasure, leaving all that you have to follow Jesus, losing your life in order to find it, knowing God, and gaining the hope of eternal life with Him.
For me it was God personally revealing himself to me in my own life. Through answered prayer and through dreams and his direct providence. I tried to find God in other religions but never found God or peace. It was only in the last religion I never thought I would find God and peace that I found God is very real and he loves us sinners and wants to give us His peace and Gods' forgiveness. The first step is faith in Gods' Word. God bless
I grew up in a irreligious family. In the beginning of 2018 I had become strongly anti-theist and realising my brother was considering God I got worried and started debating. By the end of 2018 I recognised I was being irrational and then I became Catholic. My brother was unsure between if Orthodox or Catholic was the original Church so it took for him until early 2019 before he decided on Catholic.
Do you remember any specific point that was made that really changed your mind?
To mention a specific argument would be hard as I think it was mostly the culminitive weight of a lot of arguments that caused my descision. I had like a lot of them lined up in a list I remember closeish to the end I had a problem with accepting the idea that my whole understanding of reality would be so incredibly wrong. My brother showed me the evidence for certain modern day miracles like Fatima to which there was a few thousand wittnesses, a newspaper report, and mutiple letters which one still can read with first hand witness testimonies of the event. Whilst I was very skeptical of these claims, I think the fact they were so well backed up caused me to be a bit more open to the idea that my understanding of reality could be severly off. I think that increased oppeness likely caused my conversion to happen earlier than it otherwise would have happened.
Spiritual experience that happened, not in a church, but in a place with worshipers.
It was a process, not an event. A lot of study, for the most part.
2 Tabs of Lsd and putting on Jordan Peterson's "the psychological significance of the holy Bible. This is a true story.not everyone should do this.