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This was a post i put up here on a message board responding to a guy named Dan, he was an atheist and was asking questions about GOD and debating and all that blah blah blah....anyway this is just somehting to put up here for now and give you guys something to read. It's pretty much my testimony in a Readers Digest form... have fun




Ok, now this should get a little interesting.

-stick with me here-

Id first like to say that I think the discussion here is very informative and helpful for everybody, believers and non-believers. My father printed out this whole post and gave it to me and said "this is pretty interesting, read it." So, I did....

here goes nuthin.

I believe all the christians on here has spoken nothing but the truth so far, and i believe that you have nothing but GOD's love inside you and are tryin to help him receive his children. BUT you guys just dont have what Dan is "looking" for.

I was an atheist, a hardcore I dont believe in GOD there is no way it doesnt make any sense at all. I had many christian friends who would always talk to me about it and i was immature and i would(unlike Dan)rag on it and bash it like it was a game. It was so easy because all these Christians would talk about faith, and stuff that you cant see. So when i threw out some "logical" facts and ideas at them they would studder and stagger because i would laugh at a hint of faith evidence.

Well Dan, this is your lucky day. I was a true non-believer, a true atheist, a true intuitive mind that wanted to know what was out there. And the keyword is WAS. Nobody on this board has tried to relate to Dan, I KNOW that when someone does not have faith, you can not have a faith based conversation and expect them to change. I couldnt. The thing that's unique about me and Dan is that he isn't blowing people off, we would dig into the brains of Christians to see what the heck is goin on up there!

Let me tell you this, I know what it's like to be a Happy Atheist(i love that) and you know what, thats the worst kind of Atheist there is, a happy one. What do you say to someone who says there is no GOD, and Im STILL happy. I think it's much easier to convert a depressed I hate GOD, or I just dont care and dont wanna know non-believer. Well guess what Dan! Your in some trouble now, I know exactly what you feel like, I think ive brought up ever question there is against faith in GOD so nothing you have or will say will suprise me.

"How does an atheist become a believer?"....
I thought you'd never ask.

My testimony:
GOD,Heaven, Hell!!!? Why cant people just deal with the fact that we die and thats it, why is it that people need and require this "crutch" of GOD. I dont need a crutch, ive lived this far, i have my original parents, a good job, my stomach is full and Im SMART, I have a girlfriend who i love, you tell me that i need or that there is a GOD. Football is on Sundays, GOD who?

I was the best atheist there was, who could say all that and still walk 2 feet without being struck by lightning(which i have actually DARED GOD to do one time amongst Christians....i am SOOOOOOOOOOO sorry!!!)
Anyway, i let me stop telling a story and start talking.
After becoming a Christian I realized an unbelievable amount of things in my life, it was like i stole a secret code book to life. And to tell you the truth, I wouldnt be as strong today in my beleifs if i wasn't an atheist....i dont know if i should thank Satan or GOD :-)(Ill give GOD the benefit of the doubt)

How to become a christian----
Dan, this is what i had to do in my life to really find the truth, not even that there was a GOD but just an answer of whats goin on. And to like me, you seem very interested, and you love to think. This will make you a VERY strong Christian, but a horrible atheist (and yes i did say WILL).

I saw myself of having 2 options,(1) either believing that we die and there is nothing more to be said about it. (2) there is SOMETHING other than this. This is how i came to my answer.

First, I already saw that i had "defeated" all my Christian friends at almost any conversation we had. So i began to look at the other things, the real things, the things that I could actually SEE, FEEL, and COMMUNICATE with. Well after evaluating my sources i.e. books, TV, nature, my dog, people etc... I noticed that I had everything thing i needed to come up with my answer....LIFE. I studied just LIFE for a long time, i saw how people treated other people, i saw how we treated animals, i saw how we viewed nature and technology, money, everything. And after I saw all this and ran it through the filters of my brain, I saw 1 thing that was relevant in EVERYTHING...that 1 thing wasn't GOD, it was Love. (Dan if you're married i think this will be a smooth transition, if not oh well :-))

Love is everywhere, everybody wants it(whether they say it outloud or not), believers and non-believers seek it (odd), we love the little branches of love (sex,family,hope,acceptance,completeness,relaxation) no matter where you are, love will have some affect on you one way or another (how convenient).

So after i found this thing Love, i started to disect it. What is it that we are so drawn to, why do we need it, why do we feel weird inside when we first have it. This is the hardest thing to figure out. How could someone that would sit and listen to me rag on their religion, tell them that they do not know the truth, and that i am smarter thatn they are still say that they loved me and wanted me to find what they found. Woah! This is we're i hit my snag in atheism, I as an atheist am trying to drag them down into a dark hole with no hope, and they out of the willingness(sp?) of their heart are wanting to give me a reason to believe. Love=Good NoLove=lonliness, misery LOVES company huh? :-)

Yeah, now i see that, but why dont i have a feeling of lonliness? Why do I feel happy then? I was in a relationship where I, ME! someone who is a non-believer LOVED another human being, I wasnt forced to, she wasn't my mom, or my sister. I picked this person out of the crowd and said "I Love you". How contradicting.

We are given 3 gifts. Faith, Hope, and Love. But the GREATEST of these is Love. (1 Cor 13)
So many of us can deny Faith and Hope, but true love...yeah right(i didnt know this until after i read it, but it makes so much sense to put it here right now..please keep reading, it only gets better)

So I saw that love was a pretty big thing. SO! That was it. SO!...i had no where else to turn. But GOD had a plan. After I saw love i was naturally(:-)) drawn to people that really loved me. And out of all my friends, the ones that expressed TRUE love(patience,selflessness,kindness) were christians, not atheists. So now i directed my views to Christians, boy did i hate that, you mean im supposed to be one of THOSE people? Christians were liars, they were cheaters, they were boastfull and most of them are full of crap! This was true, all my Christian examples on TV, in my life, at my job, everywhere they were walking hipocrits! I will not be one of them....i will not BE one of them, that cant be the truth.

I couldnt trust my Christian examples, I couldnt trust the TV(hahahahaha) I couldnt go to church..where was i supposed to go? This is where it got real easy for me, and it will be easy for you to Dan.

I decided that my whole belief structure was based on what OTHER people believed, what OTHER people thought....christians believed in being kind to one another, but most ive known were still hateful, atheists had it all figured out but they seemed so empty. I wasnt like either of them, i was an atheist full of happiness and love (it is possible, GOD is a wonderful thing). OTHER people told me that GOD exists (i.e. parents,friends,priests, and even the bible). OTHER people told me that there is no GOD (i.e. books,evolution,teachers,friends,TV), this was where i shined in my thinking. I, ME, MYSELF!!! Am going to FIND the truth. This meant, no church, no bible, no preachers, or outside christian thoughts and ideas. If anybody was going to tell me what to believe, it was this so called GOD. I figured, if GOD REALLY wanted me and existed, that he would except me bare bones, no questions no thoughts no ideas. Afterall......he is GOD.

**Your gonna love this**

After I decided that I wanted to see if there was a GOD. I just asked...and i did. Nothing, ok well, maybe he takes a little warming up....nothing. This went on for a few days, and then I started thinking, do i HAVE to go to church...do I HAVE to read the bible?? NO! I Refuse to!! I will find this out for myself!! So I asked again...nothing. I did this for a long time, I believe a good month went by until it happend. No strike of lightning, no great miracle....all of the sudden GOD just started putting things in front of my face, guiding me on the way to get to him (honestly, if i wouldve seen a strike of lightning i wouldve died, and that would've defeated the purpose)...the biggest thing he did was put one of the biggest Christian influences in my life. It was the most Christian girl in high school, the prettiest, the nicest, most amazing person i had ever met....and i knew this as an atheist! God works in mysterious ways. I look back now and realize that she would always pop up in my mind, out of nowhere. And then all of the sudden after this month has gone by I just felt the need to up and called her one day (this was GOD at his finest, he would use her cause he new that i liked her to get me closer to him, SMART). I called her up (we hadnt spoke in years) and I told her that i was asking for GOD(which felt very weird to say) and she was the biggest believer i knew so i was a little scared to say it. I wont go through all the details of all that but GOD is very very very SMART, some say perfect :-). Anyway, I told her that i was doing this on my own and that i didnt want to go to church and i didnt want to read the bible, i wanted to know the absolute truth and i didnt want any corruption from believers or non-believers, it was all up to GOD.

Well GOD knew this and he finally decided that it was time for me to REALLY get to know him. And the only way for that was to read the Bible, how did i get the bible(i was an atheist, i didnt have one) if i wasnt wanting to read it yet. GOD knows man, he gave it to me through the girl of course!!! She didnt even say read it, or look at this, she just said if you believe in GOD you should at least have the bible!

So i was at an interesting point do i read it or not??! I quickly decided that GOD wanted me to read the bible, and so i did. Well, hmm so many people talk about so many different things in the bible, all these chapters and verses, where do i start? Page 1 of course!!!!! It was only natural, so i picked up the bible opened to page one, and then BAM!! "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." IVE HEARD THAT BEFORE, this is where they must've got it from! What a way to start a book.....i was done for, GOD grabbed me and said "Finally! 'Ive been waiting for you', here! 'look at this', or 'see what i did!!'"

From that point until now i have been reading the bible from cover to cover page 1 to page whatever, and i am now just finishing the old testament!

Thanks for reading my story, I now need to tell you the rest! Ill let you go to the bathroom........go ahead, ill wait.

When i started reading the bible(from the beginning, this was very important to me) I soon realized why i thought the way i did, why i was an atheist, why i lived the life i did. It was all so very very clear. My life was doomed with negativity the DAY i was born!! How horrible, i realized that i wasnt born on the earth with GOD, i was born on the earth with Satan!

Once i realized that Satan was the one down here with me, i wanted to keep him as far away as possible, so i started to learn how he works, where he lives and how he controls his people. See the sneaky part of my faith is that to truly believe in GOD, i had to see where the devil played. Satan doesnt live in where we can "see" him. He found a backdoor....and its in our feelings of frustration,doubt,guilt,denial,deceit,anxiousness,selfishness, worrying, and many more(maybe another post)....I quickly found out that GOD does not work at all in these situations, it is so hard for him to come into your life when he is so reliant on your faith when you have all these other emotions.

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This is the secret to GOD, all you have to do is believe that he exists, and that he is the one and only true GOD, and have a want to be with him....HE DOES THE REST!
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He PROMISES (and has proven to me) that if you just worship and rely on him, not money, not even your parents, not your car, not your neighbor,not your books, not your TV, he WILL give you everything you need to survive. AND THENSOME. Once you believe in him all the secular wants and desires literally dissapear, money worries is the biggest and easiest thing to notice.

Enough faith talk. :-) IM NOT DONE!!!

Lets look at a few issues here. The one that got me smiling right off the bat was where you[DAN] said "(Before reading further, please understand that I respect everybody's opinion on any matter..)" how nice! You are such a caring person of my well being..what a GODLY thing. DID YOU KNOW GOD IS LOVE. :-) Once you read (and you will) the bible, you will see that GOD exists in everybody merely by Love! SIMPLY LOVE.

You also state in your first post that you are skeptical on mouth-to-mouth testimony. Have you done the necessary scientific research...i know i didnt, i relied on evolution and scientific ideas just as much as Christians did on the bible...interesting. Dan you dont know this yet, but Satan lives and thrives in the details, he knows that the more deep you get the harder it will be to climb out. And he also knows that us as humans have an interest in the truth so he will bombard you with "paperwork" to go through just to keep you away from the answer. All GOD says is "Love". I dont know about anybody else, but i hate paperwork.

You also say that you KNOW there is no GOD. You KNOW only as much as you have learned. I totally believe and UNDERSTAND what you are saying, of course you KNOW there is no GOD, just like you KNOW that you arent dead right now. You only know up to your understanding, did you KNOW that I have brown hair?? Now you do. People learn NEW things everyday. You must understand that you will not KNOW there is a GOD until you see him, it is a totally FAITH based religion. GOD only gives you reasons to believe.

Look at this parallel...as humans we are always controlled by SOMETHING, whether its a superior(i.e. parents, teachers, bosses, money etc. ). Its in our NATURE to follow. Why is it so hard for us as non-believers that there isnt one all superior parent,teacher,boss...GOD? Remember Satan?

Dan you also talked about chemical reactions to feelings and stuff "the only reason that i think dogs are cute is because their presence triggers a chemical reaction in my body." How do you think GOD works?? Satan lives in the details! If GOD created us, woulndt you think that he would know how to make us feel a certain way? Satan is such a horrible person, he makes us so used to what we see that its normal! Look at our bodies! Look at how intrique we are, look at all our little nooks and cranies....think about your BRAIN!!! GOOD LORD! Please help them understand!! <:-0. Think about this, GOD knows how to make us feel certain ways, and if our chemicals are at his control...what a beautiful great thing.

What was before GOD??! Satan has a firm grasp on you! I hated it when he did that to me and i found out! I felt so abused....hahaha, GOD doesnt want you to think about anything but he is the one and only GOD creator of all things! You are on a need to know basis with GOD, deal with your life before you analyze GOD's! He will tell you everything you need to know when you need to know it once you believe it.

You also "Christianity provides answers that are simply too easy" GOD does not want us to suffer, so he did make it easy! Satan is the one that made it hard.

You also said that something about we[Christians] think we know what you think and that we act like we know your wrong ann that we want to help you...GOD clearly maps how this came to be in the Old Testament. Read it sometime, it's very interesting.

Let me touch on this homosexuallity issue, this is where one of Satans best work is. I have no hatred for homosexuals at all!! But i do see that it isnt what GOD INTENDED. The easiest way to see this is think of everything to the most extreme point...if everybody was a TRUE christian we would all be happy and loving and caring, there is no doubting that i hope! The other extreme, if we were all homosexual, human existence would cease. No procreation would exist. Satan would just LOVE this!!

Noahs Arc...you know what makes me mad, i listened to the radio the other day and this speaker was telling the whole story and telling us how to explain it to a non-believer. Of course i cant explain it all and it makes me very mad right now, but oh well, he said how it would take a boat the size 3 football fields to hold 2 of each species, since the average animal was the size of a sheep and well more than half of the animals were water based. And once you see that GOD is real and once you believe, you will see that GOD will do whatever he wants to...and he CAN! But that is purely a faith based comment..do not battle me on that please.

In closing(i think) The main point i want to bring up is stop relying on other peoples beliefs...you are your own person, GOD wants YOU! Not someone elses beliefs, He wants 100% YOU. Satan wants the same thing, but he doesnt have any RIGHT to you at all, so he puts things in your way to get you away from GOD. To make you stop thinking about him, or if you are a smart thinker (like you) he will fill your head with so many questions you will be lost in confusion, either way you will NEVER know. Satan thrives on this and decieve you by giving you scientific "facts". Do you realize that scientific theory changes constantly, but the basic belief of the bible still works today with no change whatsoever....just LOVE. But to truly understand the LOVE that is intended you must first understand what the origin of Love is....read the bible. Nuff said.

THANK YOU ALL for reading! Im so sorry it's so long, but GOD MADE ME!! :-) hahaha i promise, after i read all these posts my heart started beating so fast I couldnt resist. I could keep typing if i believed everybody would read it, but my thoughts are at everybody's disposal ASK ME ANYTHING.

IM DONE!! or am i.....
Thank you,
Paul

slwrdr330@aol.com