eX-skeptic

Many people think the stories in the bible are mere myth and legend. As a historian, so did Frank. In today’s episode he talks about moving from a skeptical view of Christianity to one which changed the whole of history as well as his own life. Episode Transcript JH: Podcast will listen to the story of a former atheist to change their mind and came to believe in God the culture today it’s hard to find places and spaces where you can listen to two sides of a story but for the guests who come on this show they have not only listened to both sides they have thought and lived as atheists and they have thought and lived as Christians so this puts them in a unique position to give us insight as to what motivated them to become atheist but also what changed their mind we can listen and learn from both sides of their story. Today we’ll be listening to Frank Federico who lives in Sydney Australia is a former atheist who came to Christian faith something he thought he would never do. Welcome to the podcast Frank. It’s great to have you on the show. As we’re getting started, tell me a little bit about yourself. FF: Thanks for having me on. My name is Frank Federico. I’m a high school history teacher in Sydney, Australia. JH: Tell me about the religious or secular culture there in in Australia. FF: It’s really a highly secular society. It’s not common for people to openly talk about their faith if they have one. There are a lot of people in Australia that do have a faith. In the census that we had a couple of years ago, over half the population said that they were Christian of some sort and then there are other faiths as well. We’re quite a multicultural nation. But generally speaking, we’re not at a culture that is open in terms of religious belief. People are tolerant and people are welcome to have different faiths but it’s not one where we overtly talk with one another about what we believe JH: So backing up then as you were a child, what was your sensibility about religion and Christianity or God or any of that? Were you raised in a family that had any religious beliefs at all? FF: I was raised a Catholic. I went to Catholic schools all my schooling. I also regularly went to church until the age of 14 or 15 when I didn’t want to go anymore. So I had an understanding or limited understanding of Catholicism and certainly had experience in that. Both my parents were strong believers and regular churchgoers. JH: I know you went to church. Did you have a belief in God? Did you believe that God was real or true or was it something that you went through the motions? FF: I definitely believed it as a little kid. I remember going to church sometimes on my own and praying. I had some rosary beads that I would pray through. I remember having my confirmation and believing that. I was ten when I had my confirmation. But it was around the age of 14 or 15 where I started to drift away from that and refused to go to church with my parents. I was a bit too old for them to force me to go and if I did go and the back of the church and listen to the radio through an earpiece rather than pay attention what was happening. That may have embarrassed them a bit. In the end ,they gave in and let me stay home while they went. So, it was around that age 14, 15 when I really started to rebel against it and dislike it. 4:36. JH: That rebellion – did it come from a place of doubt like you didn’t believe what they were saying or you didn’t like it? What was it that made you push back against what your parents were trying to show you or teach you? 4:55 FF: It was a long time ago. When back upon it, it was a combination of frustration at school because we had religious education at school. I was reaching an age where I was starting to question what I was hearing. So, my experience of Christianity as a child and a young young teen was that I learned what we were meant to believe and I learned what we had to do but I was never taught why these things were true. And, I remember particularly when I was in year 10 around the age of 14-15 where I had a particular religious education teacher that year. He was very passionate and I found his passion interesting but also a bit grating. And, I wanted to ask him questions about why he held the beliefs that he had. I didn’t find the answers that I got from him particularly satisfactory and that became my experience also when I started asking my parents. 6:12 My parents didn’t have much of an education and they had a simple faith. They couldn’t answer the kinds of questions I was asking. But also it was coinciding with a time in my life where I was becoming more and more influenced by my peers and most of them had no interest in religion. We were interested in aspects of culture, music, TV, film that was very far removed from the kinds of things that Christianity wanted from us. it was a combination of those things.

We hold beliefs for many different reasons. In today’s episode Peter talks highlights the combination of motivations he had for disbelief as well as belief in God. Episode Transcript Hello and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Each podcast, we listen to the story of a former atheist who changed their mind and came to believe in God. There are lots of reasons why we believe what we do. We don’t hold our beliefs in a vacuum. We’re not purely rational beings. Our beliefs are wrapped up in a story. A story of how we got here and why we believe the way we do. Sometimes we believe things because we think it’s the rational intellectual thing to do. Sometimes we believe things because it’s what our friends and family and culture believe. And other times we’ve decided on what we believe because of what we’ve experienced or perhaps what we feel. Still other times, we believe things just because we want them to be true. Most of the time, it’s a combination of a lot of different things, a lot of different motivations, memories, experiences, and desires, and you have to look in a lot of different directions to tease them all out, and oftentimes, you hear them when you hear someone’s story, when you hear them tell their story. Today, we’ll be talking with Peter Byrom, he’s a former atheist who came to Christian faith a few years ago. Welcome to the podcast, Peter. It’s great to have you on the show. As we’re getting started, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? Certainly, yes. And thank you. It’s really great to be on the show with you. So tell you about myself, where to begin with that? Well, I think, given what we’re going to be talking about today, it might be worth starting from university years, really. I graduated from the University of Kent, and that’s in Canterbury in England, United Kingdom, doing drama and theatre, of all things, and so that was things like sound design, performing classical texts, Shakespearean stuff, and multimedia theatre. And then, after that, after a fairly windy journey that I’m sure we’ll get to talking about, then went on to do things like video editing, graphic design, editing, including for a number of Christian ministries, and now I work for SPCK and IVP, who are Christian publishers, doing digital production and workflow and those sort of things, and I live with my wife in our children in the rural southeast of England. So that’s a quick summary of where I’ve come from over the last decade or so, let’s say. So, Peter, in setting the context for your story, I always like to understand about the place where you grew up and the people who surrounded you. Were there any religious references in your world? Well, I was raised in a Christian home, and I have and did have Christian parents, and so, yes, you could say that I started with those influences, and even around teenage years, I thought that I had a religious conversion experience and would’ve called myself a Christian then. I even went to the point of getting confirmed in the Church of England, I think, round about the time I was probably about 17 years old. So started with Christian influences, but they didn’t really last beyond leaving home. That was the key turning point there. It’s one thing to grow up with them, but when you leave the home and start doing your own thing, that’s when the real test begins of whether you really own those beliefs or not. So what happened when you left home? What was it that made you start to doubt your own Christian upbringing, your Christian faith and belief? I think, at the time, there was just… I think it was quite gradual. I think there was a sense of gradually thinking it didn’t make sense or that it didn’t fit my particular experiences or that it wasn’t particularly relevant. It just seemed to gradually be falling away into the background, and I think also the people I was associating with and the kind of experiences I wanted to have at the time had an effect. I mean, let’s be honest, if you’ve been brought up under your parents’ authority and then leave that authority, the idea of having a continuing authority over your life isn’t particularly attractive a lot of the time, and I think that’s how I saw it, which was, “This is my chance to do my own thing.” I think, more specifically, during my gap year and at university, the friends and the people that I mixed with, I think I very much became part of a culture that liked to think of itself as being quite expressive and sophisticated, because remember this is the arts and the drama, acting crowd, you know, and students in general, anyway, right? And it’s easy to get into conversations, and it’s easy to j

In today’s episode author and scholar Dr. Carolyn Weber tells her story of moving from a busy place of survival to a place of contemplation at Oxford University. There she met authentic Christians and was able to investigate Christianity on its own merits for the first time. You can find out more about Carolyn’s work and writing by visiting her website at www.carolynweber.com. If you’d like to read more about her story, Carolyn’s award-winning memoir describing her journeying from atheism to Christianity is Surprised by Oxford (2011) https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Surprised+by+Oxford&ref=nb_sb_noss. And, her newly released book Sex and the City of God (2020) explores what life looks like when we choose to love God first. https://www.amazon.com/Sex-City-God-Memoir-Longing/dp/0830845852/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Sex+and+the+City+of+God&qid=1607450263&sr=8-1 Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. We talk with people who have believed and embraced atheism as the best explanation for reality but then changed their minds and came to believe in Christianity. From childhood, our beliefs about God, whether or not he is real and what God might be like or not like, are often shaped by our family experience. It works both ways. Some families teach their children to believe in God. Some teach their children not to believe. And some just don’t talk about it at all. For others, their childhood experience of their family or perhaps with their father may shape the way they may or may not believe in God. Whatever the case may be, there are several different theories about if and whether a child’s relationship with their parents affects whether or not they’re drawn towards or away from God. In my research of over fifty former atheists, about one in every five rejected a God imaged as a heavenly father because of a negative or even a positive experience with their own earthly fathers. That wasn’t the only reason for their disbelief, but it was generally part of their narrative. Again, that was true for some but certainly not for all. Here, I believe it’s important to recognize that, although theories are out there regarding the nature of atheism and the reason for disbelief, it’s important not to broad brush an assumption about anyone before you actually listen to their story, and that’s what we’re going to do in our time together today. I’m so pleased to have on the podcast today Dr. Carolyn Weber. She’s a bestselling, award-winning author, speaker, Oxford University scholar, and literature professor. She’s also a former atheist who came to belief in God. Her book, Surprised by Oxford, talks about her journey from atheism to Christianity. It has won several literary distinctions, including the Grace Irwin Award, the largest award for Christian writing in Canada, and I must say, on a personal note, that Surprised by Oxford is truly an excellent piece of writing, beautifully crafted, a compelling story that’s just hard to put down, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly. She also has another book, her fourth, just being released called Sex and the City of God, and we will hear more about that today on the podcast as well. Welcome to the podcast, Carolyn. It’s great to have you on the show. Thank you so much, Jana, for having me here and for the very gracious introduction. As we’re getting started, Carolyn, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your new book that’s just being released. In a way, the title’s really quite serious, so it pokes fun at our culture, and many of us have heard of Sex and the City in terms of that notion of how we see sex in the media, but I wanted to contrast that with Augustine’s idea of the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, and how that really is the ultimate line in the sand of our citizenship. Which city do we belong to? Do we choose to belong to the City of Man and the temporal or do we choose to belong to the City of God and the eternal, and those cities are called to live in peace, as Augustine identifies in his famous work City of God, but they also have very different ends, and that kind of teleological difference makes all the difference, really, in the world. And so I wanted to set those two side by side and explore that concept in terms of how I’m trying to live that out and use personal story to look at relationships but also looking at how, when we choose to be citizens of the City of God and we’re extended grace and we receive that grace, we’re also married to Christ first, regardless of our relationship status. So it doesn’t matter if we’re single or married or whatnot according to the world, we’re married first to Christ and how are we ordering our love, as Augus

Many people reject God because of a heartbreaking event in their lives. In today’s episode Brandon talks about not only what pushed him away from God, but also what drew him towards belief in God. You can follow Brandon on his Facebook page called Crooked Sticks at https://www.facebook.com/watch/Crooked-Sticks-110454164069538 If you’re looking for the Cold Case Christianity book investigating evidence on Christianity by cold case detective J Warner Wallace, you can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Case-Christianity-Homicide-Detective-Investigates/dp/1434704696/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1KK9XLRDQFBVD&dchild=1&keywords=cold+case+christianity+by+j.+warner+wallace&qid=1598019213&sprefix=Cold+Case+Christianity%2Caps%2C224&sr=8-2 Episode Transcript Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining me today. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Each podcast, we listen to the story of a former atheist who changed their mind and came to believe in God. We explore both sides of their life, their life and views as atheists, what made them become open to another perspective, why they decided to become Christians, and how their lives have changed. There are seemingly many reasons to reject God. One of them is disappointment with God. God doesn’t really seem to be there to answer prayers. He seems to be missing in action, and He doesn’t see or hear us when we ask for Him to intervene, to do something. In my doctoral research, I asked more than 50 atheists why they didn’t believe that God existed. On the survey, they could select all kinds of answers, including a lack of all kinds of objective evidence, but one of the most surprising findings was that the number one answer to this question was a lack of subjective evidence for God. That is, they doubted His existence because He didn’t show up in some personal way in their lives. If there was expectation, it was followed by disappointment. If God exists, He’s not good, or perhaps God just isn’t there. But no matter the reason for disbelief, it always begged the question for me what made them change their mind about God and become a Christian? What made them look to the other side, to Side B, another perspective? There must have been something that outweighed their prior doubt, disappointment, and belief. Today, we’ll be talking with Brandon McConnell. That’s his story. He was a former atheist who came to Christian faith against all odds. Welcome to the podcast, Brandon. It’s so great to have you on the show! Hey, thank you so much for having me. I’m happy to be here. As we’re getting started, Brandon, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? Yeah, my name is Brandon McConnell. I’m 39 years old. I actually turn 40 in October. I live right outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m married. I have four kids and a golden doodle. A golden doodle. I love dogs! I love dogs. I have two goldens myself. They keep you busy, sometimes even more than the children, I must say. Yeah. I’m actually not a dog person, but my wife and kids love dogs, and we needed something hypoallergenic, and I actually him better than any dog I’ve ever had. Well, it’s hard not to like dogs, especially anything with a golden mix. Yeah. Yeah. So, Brandon, let’s start your story. You are a former atheist, so that started somewhere. So why don’t you give me a little bit of framework for where you grew up. What was the culture in which you grew up? Was it religious? Was it not religious? Was it nominally religious? Why don’t you tell me about the community and the culture in which you were raised? I grew up in a very small town in western Pennsylvania, and it was almost entirely Catholic, Roman Catholic, and I was kind of like an outsider because I wasn’t Italian, I wasn’t Catholic, and I wasn’t religious, Christian, whatever at all. And everybody just did the Catholicism thing. What do you mean by that? Did the Catholicism thing? There was a sense in a community that it was just part of the furniture there? The rituals and the rhymes of Catholic faith were around? Yeah. Like when I was in late elementary school and junior high and high school, they had these classes that they went to after school to learn more about Catholicism and the Catholic Church, like CDC, I think, was one of the acronyms I always heard, and it just seemed like everybody was part of something that I had no idea what was going on. And I grew up out in the country outside this town. Not a lot of people around. My parents were super duper poor, and I had a very isolated upbringing. It was just me and my brother, for the most part, and me and my brother weren’t interested in the same stuff. So in your family, Brandon, did they have any kind of religious reference at all? Or even if they didn’t h

Raised to think critically, Jordan Monge began to question her own atheism at Harvard University when she was intellectually challenged to investigate the grounding of her worldview. Resources recommended from this episode: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Liar, Lunatic, Lord argument) (https://www.amazon.com/Christianity-Lewis-Signature-Classic-2016-04-07/dp/B0161T0VVQ/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=C.S.+Lewis%2C+Mere+Christianity&qid=1605194057&sr=8-4)   Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for joining in. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. Each podcast, we listen to someone who’s been an atheist and has also been a Christian. Through listening to their story, we listen to both perspectives from someone who has thought and lived on the other side. There’s something inside of us that we all seem to know, that is undeniable, and more than that, unavoidable. There’s that something that reminds us that our thoughts and our actions are sometimes good and sometimes not so good. If we take God off the table to find our moral freedom to determine what is good for ourselves, that comes with a cost. With atheism, there is no real good or bad, no real right or wrong. Those are merely feelings we socially construct to survive in life. The moral choice, then, becomes an oxymoron. There is no real choice. There is no real chooser. According to Richard Dawkins, we are just DNA dancing to its music. Nothing done or said is inherently bad, so there is no moral culpability. If we can’t even control our own thoughts or actions and they’re determined for us, there is no moral responsibility, but it begs the question, why are we constantly judging ourselves and others if good and bad are not real moral issues, but rather it just is the way that it is? Why do we complain about something we think is bad in the world, in others, and in ourselves, if things just are the way they are? If we accept a godless reality, we also deny the reality of our own dignity, our free choices, the things that make us human. We give up any real standards of good or evil. That was the dilemma confronting today’s podcast guest. A very intelligent, thoughtful atheist, Jordan Monge also held to a strong moral understanding of herself and the world. The problem was she didn’t have a way to make sense of her own moral judgments within her own atheistic worldview. How did she resolve this problem? I hope you’ll come along with me to see. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Jordan. It’s great to have you today. Thanks for hosting me. I’m excited to be chatting with you. As we’re getting started, so the listener can have a sense of who you are, Jordan, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background and maybe where you live. A little bit about your family. Yeah. So I’m originally from Irvine, California, and I graduated and went to Harvard University, where I studied philosophy, and after that, I worked for a couple of years, and then I pursued my Master’s in Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, which I completed a couple of years ago, and I finished it right before I became a mom, so I’m married now, and I have a 2-year-old daughter and I have a little 3-week-old here with me right now, so if you hear any noises in the background, you might hear him chime in just a little bit, and my husband and I, now we live in northern California, so that’s where we’re currently based, and I split my time between taking care of our two small children, and I do some tutoring on the side as well. Wonderful, wonderful. Well thank you that you’re here with us and that your new little baby is, too. Wow. Just appreciate you taking time out as a new mom. I know that’s not easy. It’s a nice mental break. Ah, yes, yes. Yes. As a mom, although I’m long past that season, I’m now an empty nester. I’m in a very different season, but I appreciate those days a long time ago and welcome those little noises if they do occur. So let’s get started with your story. you said you’re from Irvine, California. Why don’t you take us back to when you were a little girl and the context in which you grew up, perhaps your family and your community. Where did you grow up and was there any sense of God or religion or faith in your world? So my grandparents were Christian and Catholic, but my parents themselves didn’t hold any faith, so my mom just didn’t believe in God or in the Bible, but she’s not quite as adamant about it. My dad is actually a philosophy professor. He teaches at a couple of the community colleges in Orange County, California, and he has a very strong sense of what he believes and why, and his joke is that his parents sent him to 14 years of Catholic school and it was so good that he realized it was all false. That the

Former atheist Mike Arnold suffered an unspeakable childhood tragedy which suddenly catapulted him into atheism. After twenty years, he was given cause to reconsider not only God’s existence, but God’s goodness as well. Episode Transcript Hello, and thanks for being with me today. I’m Jana Harmon, and you’re listening to the Side B Podcast, where we listen to the other side. What happens to your view of God when bad, especially traumatic things happen in your life? You may have had expectations of a good, loving, and powerful God who’s supposed to protect you at every turn. The bad things aren’t supposed to happen. But they do. You begin to wonder, “Where was God? Who is this God that I thought existed? Maybe He doesn’t exist after all. How could He, in light of such horrible circumstances?” Belief in a good God often crumbles under the weight of pain. If that’s true of an adult, it’s especially true of a child. When a child suffers sudden, unspeakable loss, it’s not surprising when they also suddenly lose whatever faith they must have had in a God who seemed to go missing. Pushing God away is the only viable option left on the table. The only problem is life without God doesn’t seem to have any existentially satisfying answers, either. That’s the tension faced by the former atheist in our story today. Someone who hated God for nearly 20 years, a God, in his view, who didn’t exist, but comes to experience God in an unexpected way. Mike Arnold was a former atheist but is now a Christian and serves his community as a Christian pastor. Welcome to the Side B Podcast, Mike. It’s so great to have you! It’s great to be on as well and to join you on this cast. Thank you, thank you. As we’re getting started, why don’t we start by you telling me a little bit about yourself, where you’re from, and perhaps where you live now, what you do now? Yeah, well, my name is Michael Arnold. Everybody calls me Mike, and I prefer it that way. I’m a bit laid back, but if you’re thinking, “This man sounds really strange,” it’s because I’m from Wales. I’m a Welshman, but I’m actually living in a small town in the East Midlands of England called Long Eaton, where I’m a Baptist minister. And you’ve been in England for how long? I moved here 12 years ago, into a different pastorate. I recently left there and moved here, but yeah, 12 years ago, I moved from Wales into England, where I can honestly say that I’m a missionary. Yes, yes. That’s great. All right. So at least we know where you are now. And let’s now kind of start back at the beginning of your story. I presume, if you’re from Wales, you had a childhood in Wales? And your ideas of God and faith and religion developed there. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about that your childhood, your understanding of if there was a God, those kinds of things. Well, I grew up… My parents, like so many parents, didn’t actually attend church and had no faith at all. They wanted, I think, a quiet afternoon on a Sunday, and so they used to send me and my brothers and sister to Sunday school at the local Pentecostal church, and that’s where I went for about 18 months, up until the age of seven. The one morning I stopped going because the one morning I was woke up by my brother, Tony. He was 11 years old. I was 7 at the time. But he woke me up to say that the house was on fire, and yeah, sure enough, it was. We went to get Mom because she was sleeping in her bedroom. We went to wake her up, and then she raised the alarm by smashing out the bedroom windows, and I jumped out of the bedroom window, and my brother Tony, at the time, realized that my youngest brother, David, who was 3 years old, was still somewhere upstairs in bed, so he went looking for him. I jumped out of the bedroom window, and I have 47 stitches across my backside because I fell onto a piece of glass on the pavement, and I was taken into my neighbor’s house. When they were ready for me to go to the ambulance, as I was going to the ambulance, my brother Tony walked out of the front door of the house, and he was a ball of fire. He suffered third-degree burns over 90% of his body. Oh, my. Oh. Well, it is what it is, isn’t it? You know. He survived for five days in absolute agony. I was put in the ambulance at his feet, and for the next ten minutes, while they raced us off to the hospital, that’s all I could hear was him screaming in agony. And that was the last I saw of him. They found my younger brother, David, who was 3 years old, as I said. They found him curled up dead in my mother’s bedroom, near my mother’s bed. He never got out of the house alive. The following Sunday, Mom sent me to church, where the minister said, “Come and give praise to God,” and I thought,