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by John Shepard
January, 1999
As I was growing up, my dad was an atheist who worked at Jet Propulsion Laboratories and worked with NASA in the early space exploration projects. He was vocal in his anti-God beliefs. My mom was an agnostic but never talked about her beliefs (in fact I didn't find out until decades later). I assumed that what my parents and school teachers taught me was true -- that there was no God and the universe and life came to exist through naturalistic processes.
However, as I entered college I began to question what I believed. Certain things I observed could not be adequately explained by naturalism and evolution -- for example, the existence of consciousness, evil and moral conscience.
I was introduced to Yoga and Eastern religious thought (pantheism) through a high-school friend and dedicated my life to the pursuit of enlightenment. I joined a yoga ashram (community) of which I was a member for several decades.
Adherents of the Eastern world view claimed that by practicing yoga and meditation, that a person would evolve spiritually, which would naturally include becoming a more spiritual person in this life. I expected that the practitioners would become kinder and more loving and would live their lives at a higher moral standard as a result of their years of dedicated practice. However, as the decades went by I observed that people were still immoral, that they lied, and that they were power-hungry and greedy. This was very disturbing, so I began to look elsewhere for the "truth."
I checked out the "New Age" movement for a while, but the practitioners were so spaced-out and had such a lack of integrity that I couldn't take it seriously. I also began to notice that the Eastern world view had serious problems and internal contradictions and inconsistencies. For example, their concept of God was confusing and contradicted itself -- was God a person or a non-person; was God separate from the created cosmos or was God merely the entirety of the living cosmos? Also, there was no good answer to the problem of evil. The explanation of what evil even is was very contrived and unsatisfying. The ideas about how reincarnation worked were contradictory.
The thing that disturbed me the most was that nobody seemed to care about whether the world view they committed their life to was based on truth and fact. But I was different (I don't know why) and cared more about discovering the truth than about merely following a particular belief system (although I have to admit, I was very slow in discovering which world view is based on truth and reality). The worst thing was that after decades of practice I still had no relationship with the living God who created me -- in fact, I still knew nothing about "Him."
I began to listen to Bible teaching on Christian radio (I was lucky -- the station I listened to didn't have any of the "health and wealth" teaching which is not based on sound Biblical interpretation). At first I couldn't take it seriously, but it began to make sense as a coherent world view, and it answered the difficulties and problems. I was also impressed with the way in which the Bible could be historically validated through archaeology and scholarship of ancient writings. The fulfilled prophecies were stunning evidence of the truthfulness of the Bible and of its supernatural origin.
I decided to take the plunge and to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior. Right away I had the sensation that spiritual blinders fell from my spiritual eyes and I could clearly discern spiritual things for what they really are, whether truth or lie.
Critics of Christianity claim that Christianity isn't true because Christians are sinners. But the Bible affirms that people are all sinners, even Christians, so this objection doesn't disprove Christianity at all. Hopefully, as we Christians are obedient to God's written word (the Bible) and to the teachings of the Church which He established, we will improve over time.
In conclusion, I became a Christian by desiring to know the truth about the important issues -- God, evil, the hereafter -- and by examining the evidence of the various truth claims that people throughout history have proposed. Upon discovering that the Christian claims matched what I observed, I was willing to commit my life to them. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing this. I used the scientific method to arrive at my conclusions -- I observed the world around me, I developed theories to explain these observations (actually I applied theories that other people developed), I tested these theories, and I accepted the one which passed the tests.
Christianity is "true science." "
:)
Merry Christmas Everybody!
come for my testimony too! leave a message if your interested :)
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