| Jennifer Fulwiler |
(...)When my first child was born, staring at this precious little life shocked me into digging up all those long-forgotten questions about meaning and morality, and to ask some more to boot. And this time, something was different: For the first time in my life, I was willing to ask the big questions with humility. Back in college I’d approached all discussion of these subjects with a heavy dose of pride. But one look at my newborn son was enough to change my motives entirely. I didn’t care if I looked stupid. I just wanted to know what was true.
I set out on a search to find out what was at the root of that mysterious sense I’d always had that there is one moral code out there, and that it’s extant and true regardless of human opinion. It was impossible to avoid religion when studying this subject matter, and one day while looking for books about Buddhism I stumbled across some Christian authors who laid out a historical case for Jesus being who he said he was and the Resurrection having actually happened.
I was surprised and intrigued to hear a reasonable, logical case for the founding of this religion. Only a few months earlier I would have flatly blown off any such notions as impossible since I refused to consider anything supernatural, but this time I was willing to hear more. I’d realized that we atheists certainly were far from having it all figured out, so I decided to suspend my assumptions for a while and just read a few books by Christians.
Breakthrough
As my bedside table piled up with books by authors like C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton and St. Augustine of Hippo, I slowly began to see that this religion was not what I’d perceived it to be. Though I was increasingly impressed, I also ran into some big problems. For one thing, I could not make heads or tails of the Bible. Without any Christian background, I had no idea how to interpret it—and when I researched Christian answers, it seemed like there were as many interpretations as there were people. Also, it seemed that the notion that the Bible was the main way to know God would be fundamentally unfair to people who were illiterate or had poor reading-comprehension skills—a concerning proposition considering that the printing press and widespread literacy are relatively recent phenomena.I wasn’t quite ready to give up on Christianity, but I didn’t know any practicing Christians, so I had almost nobody to talk to about all these issues. I decided to start a blog to see if I could find any Christians who could answer some of my questions. After a few months of discussions with readers in which I threw out every tough question I could think of, I began to notice that the Catholics had the most compelling defenses of everything from the scientific case for God to the accuracy of the New Testament stories to the Christian moral code. Though obviously I would never become Catholic since I "knew" that it was a superstitious belief system founded on a corrupt Church that had done a lot of bad things throughout history, I couldn’t deny that the Catholic worldview was insightful and intellectually consistent.
On the advice of the Catholics from my blog, I decided to pick up a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Once I read it, I never saw the world the same way again. I pored over these teachings and marveled at how they resolved so many questions I had—everything from the meaning of life to how we can know there’s a God to how to interpret the Bible. I shared what I found with my husband, a lapsed Baptist with anti-Catholic views of his own, and we both agreed: This was too consistent, too wise, too prescient, too perfect to have come from human beings.
This Church claimed to be guided in its teachings by Something far above humans, and we were both starting to believe that this just might be true. After beginning to apply these teachings to our own lives, as well as spending a couple years devouring stacks of books that addressed everything from Catholic teaching on contraception to the Crusades to the popes who committed immoral acts, we were completely convinced. My husband and I both entered the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil in 2007.
Written on Our Hearts
What I found was that the Catholic Church offered a perfect articulation of the moral code that’s written on the human heart, that unshakable sense of right and wrong I’d been aware of all along—and what had initially seemed to be a confining set of arbitrary rules was actually a prescription for living a life optimized on love.To my great surprise, I found that Catholicism was not as much a departure from the atheistic belief system I’d grown up with as it was an elaboration and fulfillment of it. I’d merely followed all those longings I felt for things like truth, beauty, justice, and peace and found that they had a source—a living, personal Source.
Most atheists are closer than they think to believing in God. I think of the atheists I know who are so dedicated to living a life of love, kindness, and empathy that if it were scientifically proven tomorrow that these things were neither beneficial to the individual nor to society, my guess is that they would still live lives of love, kindness, and empathy. They believe that if these things are not good and true, then nothing is good and true—that in some ways they’re more real than reality. And, as I’ve found, when you embrace that realization, you’ve had your first encounter with God.