Confessions of an Ex-Atheist, Part I

Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

It was while in the midst of a deep clinical depression 23 years ago that I first started to realize my long-held refusal to even consider the possibility that God existed might be a dead-end in the most profound sense of the term. Unsuccessfully battling what had become a life-threatening emotional and psychological crisis, a kind of “perfect storm of the soul”, I began to realize that that all the many and sincere efforts of human beings on my behalf at the time to restore me to mental health were not enough. I had already come to know that I could not simply will myself back to any kind of life that was worth living in my own strength. Now I was discovering that the rest of the world did not have any definitive answers either. To say this was terrifying is an understatement.

Beyond this I had the growing sense that the usual way out for an Atheist in despair, self-destruction, might only make the terrible space I was occupying a permanent address. It was my first inkling that human beings might actually continue to exist beyond physical death and that what we are at the time of our death might determine what kind of an existence that might be. It was the unpleasant opening of my eyes to a spiritual truth that, just weeks earlier, had not been something to which I had ever given any real thought. Spiritual things, in fact, were pretty much not on my radar screen, nor did I want them to be.

So here I was, realizing that maybe the word I had used all my life as a casual curse or as the venue of uncounted bad jokes might actually be a real place, and one I might be heading for if I acted on those thoughts of self-destruction. At that moment Hell became very, very real for me and such a place did not seem like a very desirable place to end up. It began to occur to me that, if there was a God, He might be the only person who could keep me out of there.

When people who cared about me began to catch on to my “spiritual awakening” some of them suggested that I begin to explore my religious options (I had, you see, been raised in about as close to a totally non-religious home as I think can exist). So for a short time that is exactly what I did. I can remember checking books on world religions out of a library and reading about the core beliefs of each one. As I did this something was simultaneously becoming clear to me. My condition needed to be utterly transformed; in fact I needed to be utterly transformed if I was to stay out of a permanent darkness I sensed waited for me on the other side of death. Some self-chosen, a la carte philosophy or religious system was not going to be any more effective in achieving that in me than the psychiatrists and medication and group therapy had already been.

If a God existed I needed one who could do something for and in me that would fundamentally alter the deepest part of who I was. The only religion that offered such a God was the one which said he had once shown up “in the flesh”, so to speak, and had walked the earth telling people like me that he and he alone, was capable of doing just that.

Even a man like I was at the time, one who not long before had gleefully referred to the adherents of this religion as “Bible-Belt Bumpkins” knew who this particular God’s name was.

To be continued…