Dear friends:
Here below is a real story I have just read today. It's an interesting testimony. Guillaume Bignon a French atheist who met two ladies getting lost around a beach where they hitchhiking at the day's end... then he liked one of the ladies....yet her religious beliefs was in their way of any closer relationship... If interested, click the link for the whole story. Part of the story is pasted below for you. Watch the TV too.
THE ALL-IMPROBABLE HITCHHIKING
...One day, after we had spent the afternoon on a more distant beach on the island ( Caribbean island ), and for the very first time in my entire life, we decided to hitchhike our way home. In a matter of minutes, a car pulled over for us. Two young women, tourists from the US (one from Miami, the other one from New York) had stopped to ask us for directions to their hotel, as they were lost on their way from the airport (the beach was nowhere near the airport or their hotel!) Incidentally, their hotel was right next door to our house. We jumped in and started talking on the way back. They were attractive enough that the radar went up immediately, and we started the smooth-talk to make sure we would see them again during their stay on the island. We did. The one I was interested in lived in New York, and she happened to mention she believed in God (an intellectual suicide by my standards), but worst of all, she accordingly believed that sex belonged only in marriage (an even more problematic belief than theism, if it was at all possible). Nevertheless, we started dating. Spoiler alert: this is not the woman I eventually married.
Vacation ended, she flew back to New York, I flew back to Paris, and there we were, now involved in a problematic long-distance relationship.
THE UNBELIEVING PRAYER EXPERIMENT
Her religious beliefs clearly remained the problem, and my new goal in life was essentially to explain to her why all this was untenable, so that she could put this nonsense behind her, and we could be together without her misconceptions standing in the way. So I started thinking about the whole thing. What good reason was there to think God exists, and what good reason was there to think atheism was true instead?
This step was important, because my own unbelief was comfortably resting on the fact that (smart) people around me didn’t believe in God either, but it was more a reasonable life assumption than the conclusion of a solid argument. So I started to take the question seriously, to objectively assess its credibility. But of course, if I was going to refute Christianity, I first needed to know what exactly it affirmed. So I picked up a Bible to figure it out. And at the same time, since I’m a scientist, I figured there was at least one experiment that could be carried out to dis-confirm the belief that God exists: I thought “if any of this is true, then there is a God who exists right now and presumably cares greatly about this project of mine”, so I started to pray in the air as an atheist “If there is a God, then here I am, I’m looking into this, why don’t you go ahead and reveal yourself to me. I’m open.” Well, I wasn’t, really, but I figured that shouldn’t stop God if He existed. So I read in the gospels about this Jesus of Nazareth. And there, it didn’t exactly feel like what I expected. I was impressed by the authority of that man’s teaching. Sure enough, I didn’t have much room in my worldview for his talks of God and supernatural activity, but I was rather impressed by the way he maneuvered in conversation, and the wisdom of some of his retorts. I could say what I want, this man knew what he was doing, he spoke with authority, and it made me somewhat uncomfortable. Additionally, even as an atheist, I knew that the person of Jesus of Nazareth was not just a piece of mythology; it seemed clear he was at least a person of history who walked the roads of Palestine in the first century, and apparently his story was compelling enough that these ancient followers of his believed it and even suffered for preaching his death and resurrection. These considerations were making it harder to completely throw out the whole thing, and I knew that at some point I would need to give a coherent account of who I thought Jesus in fact was...
Also
Spiritual Journey Ends At The Cross
A near death experience set 19-year-old Mike on a spiritual journey through eastern religions, but one day Mike decided to learn more about Jesus, resulting in a miraculous revelation.
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