"theBeaver" <theBeaver@nowhere.net> wrote in message
news:nQCjd.2557$bH2.1063@trnddc09...

Imagine someone who stands and watches and does nothing to intervene
when little girls are sawed in half from the crotch downward (so the
blood runs to their heads so they stay conscious for the longest
possible time)

Something the American left, and leftists in general allow to happen today,
because they refuse to allow capital punishment to be used against the
people that engage in such acts.

Something the American left, and leftists in general allow to happen today,
because they refuse to allow capital punishment to be used against the
people that engage in such acts.

"~ DlVIDED STATES OF AMERlCA ~" <CHRISTIAN_BRAINROT@CRAPPY_STATES.NET> wrote
in message news:1099888685.qM/FwbM7KVk++Th3Seny0A@teranews...

Please stop spamming alt.politics.bush.

The only one who could be close to be considered spamming is you.

This is a newsgroup devoted to discussing the atrocities, war crimes &
injustices committed by George W. Bush.

I thank you in advance for your cooperation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------




Words of Truth wrote:

FROM SKEPTICISM TO WORSHIP

by A.S.A. Jones


MY PERSONAL TESTIMONY
I was a devout atheist for over twenty years. In July of 1998, I
finally managed to see the biblical truths that had managed to elude
me. The following is an account of how I went from hardcore skepticism
to hardcore worship of the Savior, Jesus Christ.


RATIONAL THOUGHT REPLACES THE GOD OF MY YOUTH
I was raised a Roman Catholic in a home where the name of Jesus Christ
and God was never mentioned. I was encouraged to attend catechism and
church every weekend, but the concept of God was never made completely
real to me. I entertained the notion as any child would, but I just
wasn't into the imaginary friend scene and by the time I was thirteen,
I had concluded that God was merely a vicious adult version of the
Easter bunny. I abandoned the lie, informed my upset parents that I
would no longer be attending church, and began seeking truth.

In the absence of a religious belief to answer life's questions, I
turned my mental energy to science. Science had an awesome track
record of solving many problems and its resulting technology had
provided tangible benefits to all of mankind. Science was the answer!
I reasoned that if we could educate our populations and continue to
make advances in medicine, agriculture and energy production, we would
one day have the mythical Eden as our reality.

I threw myself into my studies, determined to become a scientific
messiah who would one day deliver people from the bondage of disease.
At the age of sixteen, my IQ and my grades made me eligible for my
high school's early release program and I began my studies in biology
and chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh.

RATIONAL THOUGHT REPLACES MY COMPASSION FOR OTHERS
I graduated from college with high honors and my prized science
degree, but I had lost any motivation to apply that knowledge. I
recalled staring at a swarming mass of termites one sunny day,
thinking that, from a comparative distance, there was little
difference between them and us. I smashed a few dozen with my shoe and
ground them into the dirt. What did it matter if these died? What did
it matter if they all died? People died every day. The end result
would always be death for both the individuals and, eventually, the
species.

Humanity had become nothing more to me than an organized network of
molecules and enzymes. I viewed people as mere organisms going through
their daily routines of metabolizing nutrients and expelling wastes,
ovulating their eggs and ejaculating their semen. I knew the
psychology of humans almost as well as their anatomies. The hidden
things that pulled them this way and that were very evident to me.
They were like guinea pigs, only more predictable, and my chief form
of entertainment was to see how skillfully I could manipulate them. I
knew that I was supposed to care about them, but I didn't. I couldn't.
If mankind's goal was to alleviate its own suffering, a bullet to the
head was more efficient and made more sense in my thinking than
screwing around with medication or disease control.

What was the point of prolonging any one life? What difference did it
make if a girl didn't live to marry or her mother live to see it? Of
what value were temporary emotional experiences? They were simply the
biochemistry of the brain reacting to sensory input and, upon that
individual's death, any remaining memory of that experience would be
thrown away along with the person who had experienced it. My extreme
point of view had reduced people into throwaway metabolic units; I had
become as cold and indifferent as the logic that I exalted.

If my education would benefit anyone, it would benefit me. I passed up
an offer of a low paying research position for a secure and higher
paying job in a chemistry lab. My brain rotted there for 40 hours a
week for 10 years.

RATIONAL THOUGHT TURNS FROM SCIENCE TO PHILOSOPHY
Science had done nothing to answer the questions that raged in my
head. Why should I care? How much should I care? Should I care at all?
What is my purpose in life? Is there a purpose? How can I love people?
Should I love people? Which people should I love? How can I forgive
people? Should I forgive people? Have I done what is right? Have I
done what is wrong? Is there a right or a wrong?

I turned to philosophy. I started with Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and
Nothingness". This man had won a Nobel Prize for basically taking
white and logically demonstrating how it was really black. I tried
several other atheist philosophers who tried to assign meaning to a
life created by chance and I decided that they were all full of crap.
If our life is the result of randomness and chance, it is meaningless,
no matter how we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

That was fine with me. I was prepared to live my life by this truth
and discovered that the prospect of a life without meaning can be a
very freeing experience. I set out to take advantage of moral
relativism and effectively destroyed any of my remaining conscience.
Friends, let me tell you, I fell far, far away, but I didn't know it.
I busied myself with one diversion after another, trying to fill my
life with meaningless activity in order to forget how meaningless it
was. In my desperation, I grew self-righteous and indignant. I was
secretly envious of the morons who seemed blissfully unaware of their
own meaninglessness. I wanted to shake them awake and get them to see
how worthless their lives really were.

MY PHILOSOPHY TURNS ANTI-CHRISTIAN
The worst idiots were the Christians. I hated them because, in their
ignorance of naturalism, they failed to see that there was no reason
for the rest of the world to believe in their god, live by their
standards or give a damn about what they had to say, yet there they
were, acting as if they had a copyright on truth. Their
pretentiousness sickened me, despite my being equally pretentious
toward them. After all, I was justified in my pretentiousness! At
least I could give logical reasons for not believing in the
supernatural. I would challenge them to give reasons for believing in
something that couldn't be seen and they would reply, "You can't see
the wind but it's there." I would then try to explain to them that
wind was created by differences in pressure and that there was plenty
of scientific proof for the existence of wind but none for their god.
Even the most intelligent Christians I knew had a difficult time
articulating their reason for faith.

Most of the explanations I heard rested on the Bible's authority. "The
Bible says... the Bible says... the Bible says." Who cared what the
Bible said? I certainly didn't. "It's all a bunch of made up,
superstitious baloney. Can't you see?" and I would then go into pagan
origins, etc., and try to demonstrate that Jesus was a manufactured
myth. I ended up knowing the Bible inside and out just to be able to
debate against it.

My anti-Christian arguments became my ultimate diversion to a hopeless
life. I learned that religious debate wasn't as much about truth as it
was about language and presentation. I began seeing flaws in my own
logic while trying to demonstrate certain instances of Biblical
errancy, but that didn't keep me on the bench. To justify my desire to
destroy Christianity, I had to find reasons to discredit it. I railed
against its hypocrisy, the behavior of its followers, the wars fought
in its name and I questioned the motives of its bloody god and the
religion's effective outcome. In short, I began seeing it as the
supreme evil, despite the fact that my own view of moral relativism
did not permit a logical defense of the concept of evil.

THE PARADOX OF BIBLICAL JABBERWOCKY
One night, I was very tired and alone in my study. I didn't reach, as
I usually did, for a book of religious argument. I grabbed Lewis
Carroll's "Through The Looking Glass", plopped myself down in a comfy
chair and sleepily began reading. I skimmed through the pages and
stopped at Humpty Dumpty's explanation of 'Jabberwocky' to Alice. A
thought occurred to me that if I were to read 'Jabberwocky' the same
way I read the bible, it wouldn't make any sense at all. I put
Carroll's book aside, folded my hands and stared at the wall, lost in
thought.

The Bible didn't make sense to me. But why did it make sense to
others? What were they seeing that I didn't? Did they so desperately
want there to be a God that they had deluded themselves into thinking
that there was one? It was New Year's Day, 1998. I made a resolution
to read the entire Bible again, only this time I was going to read it
as I would poetry or fiction, and not as a proposal of fact.

In the months that followed, I kept my resolution and I began noticing
a change in my way of interpreting the Bible. Intellectually, I found
that my mind could logically accept two very different interpretations
of almost everything I was reading. One interpretation of any verse or
passage would render the whole story as nonsensical. But the other
interpretation allowed the whole story to make sense.

If my mind was capable of accepting interpretations that allowed the
whole book to make sense, then what was it in me that wanted it not to
make sense? This book was reading me as surely as I was reading it.
Every time I found fault with its god, I ended up finding a fault of
my own. What was I doing when I condemned this god for commanding
Moses to kill? Was I arrogantly making my morality superior to that of
the being who allegedly authored all of morality? Was I condemning the
actions of an entire nation, which was trapped in a kill or be killed
situation? What was it in me that wanted to express outrage at Jesus
Christ for telling me that I had to give away everything to be
considered worthy to follow him? Was it my own selfishness?

For weeks, I was on a high, the type of high that comes about by
feeling that one is on the edge of making some sort of profound
discovery. I wasn't sure what I was discovering but my perception of
this world was changing. In July, I read these words of Jesus Christ,
understanding them for the first time after having read them for
years; "Who do you say I am?"

I SEE IT!
What I had to say about who Christ was, said more about me than it did
about Him.

At this moment, I saw it. I saw what the truth of the Bible was! And I
was humbled. More than humbled, I was broken. The truth wasn't about
cud chewing bunnies or how much precipitation fell during Noah's
flood. It was the truth about human nature and our efforts to rise
above it! It was the truth about human spirit being led by divine
spirit! It was the truth about each of us, imperfect in our love for
one another, needing to be made complete by the perfect love of God!
The truth was about how one man, without sin, had died for us so that
we could live! The truth of the Bible was and is JESUS CHRIST!

The moment I was made aware of my despicable nature, I realized that
Jesus had died for me. I never had recognized sin and, therefore,
thought that Christ had died for nothing. But this man was able to see
the horrible nature present in all of humanity and yet he had
sacrificed himself to save us from ourselves. In a very real sense, my
sinful nature had caused the death of an innocent man. I never
believed in hell prior to this, but one of my first thoughts, after
seeing how hellish a person that I was, was that I deserved to be in
it.

A NEW CREATURE
I had been a fool. I had paraded around, thinking myself to be the
sophisticate, oblivious to the trail of toilet paper clinging to my
shoe. For the first time in my life, I became aware of my soul and how
dirty it was when the light of Christ fell upon it. My accusing finger
turned around and pointed right back at me. I sucked! Christianity
wasn't what was wrong with the world! A lack of education wasn't what
was wrong with the world! I was what was wrong with the world. I began
praying for forgiveness to a god whose existence I had thought was
intellectually indefensible. But He was very, very real. Within days,
almost every viewpoint I had once so loudly announced, changed. I
could no longer justify my advocacy of abortion, homosexuality or
pre-marital sex because I recognized these options for what they were,
that being selfishness. I couldn't enjoy television because much of
what it offered was an offense to the god I had discovered. But the
most astounding change that took place in me was that I was freed from
my cold indifference in matters of the heart. My atheistic philosophy
had allowed me to lose my compassion for others. I no longer had the
ability to love anyone, not even myself. I had become apathetic to
life itself. For years, I had been dead, but because I continued to
walk and talk, I didn't know it. But now, I was born again and the
spirit that was in me, which had allowed me to understand spiritual
things, connected with the glorious and perfect higher consciousness
of Jesus Christ. He restored my heart and my conscience. Christians
speak of this as a veil being lifted, but, for me, it was more like
the iron curtain was being torn down. For the first time in my life, I
was seeing the world as it really was. I no longer saw people as a sum
of their components or this life as a meaningless exercise, but I now
saw both as something more valid than my rational thought had allowed.
I had spent most of my years examining life, crouched over and focused
on the microscope of logic, incapable of seeing the Big Picture that
was going on around me.

The more I emptied myself of myself, the clearer the truth became. It
had been my own selfish sin that had kept me from seeing it before.
Jesus Christ became my God and my grand obsession, and for many
months, I spent hours with my mind locked in meditation, trying to
connect with Him in a more tangible way. I wasn't disappointed. There
is a point that one can reach in prayer where there is nothing at all
left of oneself, and it is in that moment that God makes Himself
known.

For me, Biblical truth wasn't verified through historical accuracy,
inerrancy or reliability of the Gospels, because my initial
assumptions didn't include these things. I saw divine inspiration in
the actual content of the words attributed to Jesus Christ. The fact
that I, or anyone, was capable of understanding spiritual matters
became my evidence for the soul.

Learning the things of the spirit dramatically changed my attitude and
my outlook on life. It wasn't that the information available to me had
changed, but that my perception had changed and as a result, I was
changed. I was dead, but Christ woke me up! He saved me from my
selfish self and I have given myself to Him because I am thankful for
that which He has given me and hopeful for that which He has promised.



http://www.ex-atheist.com/from-skepticism-to-worship.html

"~ DlVIDED STATES OF AMERlCA ~" <CHRISTIAN_BRAINROT@CRAPPY_STATES.NET> wrote
in message news:1099888685.qM/FwbM7KVk++Th3Seny0A@teranews...

Please stop spamming alt.politics.bush.

The only one who could be close to be considered spamming is you.

This is a newsgroup devoted to discussing the atrocities, war crimes &
injustices committed by George W. Bush.

I thank you in advance for your cooperation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------




Words of Truth wrote:

FROM SKEPTICISM TO WORSHIP

by A.S.A. Jones


MY PERSONAL TESTIMONY
I was a devout atheist for over twenty years. In July of 1998, I
finally managed to see the biblical truths that had managed to elude
me. The following is an account of how I went from hardcore skepticism
to hardcore worship of the Savior, Jesus Christ.


RATIONAL THOUGHT REPLACES THE GOD OF MY YOUTH
I was raised a Roman Catholic in a home where the name of Jesus Christ
and God was never mentioned. I was encouraged to attend catechism and
church every weekend, but the concept of God was never made completely
real to me. I entertained the notion as any child would, but I just
wasn't into the imaginary friend scene and by the time I was thirteen,
I had concluded that God was merely a vicious adult version of the
Easter bunny. I abandoned the lie, informed my upset parents that I
would no longer be attending church, and began seeking truth.

In the absence of a religious belief to answer life's questions, I
turned my mental energy to science. Science had an awesome track
record of solving many problems and its resulting technology had
provided tangible benefits to all of mankind. Science was the answer!
I reasoned that if we could educate our populations and continue to
make advances in medicine, agriculture and energy production, we would
one day have the mythical Eden as our reality.

I threw myself into my studies, determined to become a scientific
messiah who would one day deliver people from the bondage of disease.
At the age of sixteen, my IQ and my grades made me eligible for my
high school's early release program and I began my studies in biology
and chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh.

RATIONAL THOUGHT REPLACES MY COMPASSION FOR OTHERS
I graduated from college with high honors and my prized science
degree, but I had lost any motivation to apply that knowledge. I
recalled staring at a swarming mass of termites one sunny day,
thinking that, from a comparative distance, there was little
difference between them and us. I smashed a few dozen with my shoe and
ground them into the dirt. What did it matter if these died? What did
it matter if they all died? People died every day. The end result
would always be death for both the individuals and, eventually, the
species.

Humanity had become nothing more to me than an organized network of
molecules and enzymes. I viewed people as mere organisms going through
their daily routines of metabolizing nutrients and expelling wastes,
ovulating their eggs and ejaculating their semen. I knew the
psychology of humans almost as well as their anatomies. The hidden
things that pulled them this way and that were very evident to me.
They were like guinea pigs, only more predictable, and my chief form
of entertainment was to see how skillfully I could manipulate them. I
knew that I was supposed to care about them, but I didn't. I couldn't.
If mankind's goal was to alleviate its own suffering, a bullet to the
head was more efficient and made more sense in my thinking than
screwing around with medication or disease control.

What was the point of prolonging any one life? What difference did it
make if a girl didn't live to marry or her mother live to see it? Of
what value were temporary emotional experiences? They were simply the
biochemistry of the brain reacting to sensory input and, upon that
individual's death, any remaining memory of that experience would be
thrown away along with the person who had experienced it. My extreme
point of view had reduced people into throwaway metabolic units; I had
become as cold and indifferent as the logic that I exalted.

If my education would benefit anyone, it would benefit me. I passed up
an offer of a low paying research position for a secure and higher
paying job in a chemistry lab. My brain rotted there for 40 hours a
week for 10 years.

RATIONAL THOUGHT TURNS FROM SCIENCE TO PHILOSOPHY
Science had done nothing to answer the questions that raged in my
head. Why should I care? How much should I care? Should I care at all?
What is my purpose in life? Is there a purpose? How can I love people?
Should I love people? Which people should I love? How can I forgive
people? Should I forgive people? Have I done what is right? Have I
done what is wrong? Is there a right or a wrong?

I turned to philosophy. I started with Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and
Nothingness". This man had won a Nobel Prize for basically taking
white and logically demonstrating how it was really black. I tried
several other atheist philosophers who tried to assign meaning to a
life created by chance and I decided that they were all full of crap.
If our life is the result of randomness and chance, it is meaningless,
no matter how we try to convince ourselves otherwise.

That was fine with me. I was prepared to live my life by this truth
and discovered that the prospect of a life without meaning can be a
very freeing experience. I set out to take advantage of moral
relativism and effectively destroyed any of my remaining conscience.
Friends, let me tell you, I fell far, far away, but I didn't know it.
I busied myself with one diversion after another, trying to fill my
life with meaningless activity in order to forget how meaningless it
was. In my desperation, I grew self-righteous and indignant. I was
secretly envious of the morons who seemed blissfully unaware of their
own meaninglessness. I wanted to shake them awake and get them to see
how worthless their lives really were.

MY PHILOSOPHY TURNS ANTI-CHRISTIAN
The worst idiots were the Christians. I hated them because, in their
ignorance of naturalism, they failed to see that there was no reason
for the rest of the world to believe in their god, live by their
standards or give a damn about what they had to say, yet there they
were, acting as if they had a copyright on truth. Their
pretentiousness sickened me, despite my being equally pretentious
toward them. After all, I was justified in my pretentiousness! At
least I could give logical reasons for not believing in the
supernatural. I would challenge them to give reasons for believing in
something that couldn't be seen and they would reply, "You can't see
the wind but it's there." I would then try to explain to them that
wind was created by differences in pressure and that there was plenty
of scientific proof for the existence of wind but none for their god.
Even the most intelligent Christians I knew had a difficult time
articulating their reason for faith.

Most of the explanations I heard rested on the Bible's authority. "The
Bible says... the Bible says... the Bible says." Who cared what the
Bible said? I certainly didn't. "It's all a bunch of made up,
superstitious baloney. Can't you see?" and I would then go into pagan
origins, etc., and try to demonstrate that Jesus was a manufactured
myth. I ended up knowing the Bible inside and out just to be able to
debate against it.

My anti-Christian arguments became my ultimate diversion to a hopeless
life. I learned that religious debate wasn't as much about truth as it
was about language and presentation. I began seeing flaws in my own
logic while trying to demonstrate certain instances of Biblical
errancy, but that didn't keep me on the bench. To justify my desire to
destroy Christianity, I had to find reasons to discredit it. I railed
against its hypocrisy, the behavior of its followers, the wars fought
in its name and I questioned the motives of its bloody god and the
religion's effective outcome. In short, I began seeing it as the
supreme evil, despite the fact that my own view of moral relativism
did not permit a logical defense of the concept of evil.

THE PARADOX OF BIBLICAL JABBERWOCKY
One night, I was very tired and alone in my study. I didn't reach, as
I usually did, for a book of religious argument. I grabbed Lewis
Carroll's "Through The Looking Glass", plopped myself down in a comfy
chair and sleepily began reading. I skimmed through the pages and
stopped at Humpty Dumpty's explanation of 'Jabberwocky' to Alice. A
thought occurred to me that if I were to read 'Jabberwocky' the same
way I read the bible, it wouldn't make any sense at all. I put
Carroll's book aside, folded my hands and stared at the wall, lost in
thought.

The Bible didn't make sense to me. But why did it make sense to
others? What were they seeing that I didn't? Did they so desperately
want there to be a God that they had deluded themselves into thinking
that there was one? It was New Year's Day, 1998. I made a resolution
to read the entire Bible again, only this time I was going to read it
as I would poetry or fiction, and not as a proposal of fact.

In the months that followed, I kept my resolution and I began noticing
a change in my way of interpreting the Bible. Intellectually, I found
that my mind could logically accept two very different interpretations
of almost everything I was reading. One interpretation of any verse or
passage would render the whole story as nonsensical. But the other
interpretation allowed the whole story to make sense.

If my mind was capable of accepting interpretations that allowed the
whole book to make sense, then what was it in me that wanted it not to
make sense? This book was reading me as surely as I was reading it.
Every time I found fault with its god, I ended up finding a fault of
my own. What was I doing when I condemned this god for commanding
Moses to kill? Was I arrogantly making my morality superior to that of
the being who allegedly authored all of morality? Was I condemning the
actions of an entire nation, which was trapped in a kill or be killed
situation? What was it in me that wanted to express outrage at Jesus
Christ for telling me that I had to give away everything to be
considered worthy to follow him? Was it my own selfishness?

For weeks, I was on a high, the type of high that comes about by
feeling that one is on the edge of making some sort of profound
discovery. I wasn't sure what I was discovering but my perception of
this world was changing. In July, I read these words of Jesus Christ,
understanding them for the first time after having read them for
years; "Who do you say I am?"

I SEE IT!
What I had to say about who Christ was, said more about me than it did
about Him.

At this moment, I saw it. I saw what the truth of the Bible was! And I
was humbled. More than humbled, I was broken. The truth wasn't about
cud chewing bunnies or how much precipitation fell during Noah's
flood. It was the truth about human nature and our efforts to rise
above it! It was the truth about human spirit being led by divine
spirit! It was the truth about each of us, imperfect in our love for
one another, needing to be made complete by the perfect love of God!
The truth was about how one man, without sin, had died for us so that
we could live! The truth of the Bible was and is JESUS CHRIST!

The moment I was made aware of my despicable nature, I realized that
Jesus had died for me. I never had recognized sin and, therefore,
thought that Christ had died for nothing. But this man was able to see
the horrible nature present in all of humanity and yet he had
sacrificed himself to save us from ourselves. In a very real sense, my
sinful nature had caused the death of an innocent man. I never
believed in hell prior to this, but one of my first thoughts, after
seeing how hellish a person that I was, was that I deserved to be in
it.

A NEW CREATURE
I had been a fool. I had paraded around, thinking myself to be the
sophisticate, oblivious to the trail of toilet paper clinging to my
shoe. For the first time in my life, I became aware of my soul and how
dirty it was when the light of Christ fell upon it. My accusing finger
turned around and pointed right back at me. I sucked! Christianity
wasn't what was wrong with the world! A lack of education wasn't what
was wrong with the world! I was what was wrong with the world. I began
praying for forgiveness to a god whose existence I had thought was
intellectually indefensible. But He was very, very real. Within days,
almost every viewpoint I had once so loudly announced, changed. I
could no longer justify my advocacy of abortion, homosexuality or
pre-marital sex because I recognized these options for what they were,
that being selfishness. I couldn't enjoy television because much of
what it offered was an offense to the god I had discovered. But the
most astounding change that took place in me was that I was freed from
my cold indifference in matters of the heart. My atheistic philosophy
had allowed me to lose my compassion for others. I no longer had the
ability to love anyone, not even myself. I had become apathetic to
life itself. For years, I had been dead, but because I continued to
walk and talk, I didn't know it. But now, I was born again and the
spirit that was in me, which had allowed me to understand spiritual
things, connected with the glorious and perfect higher consciousness
of Jesus Christ. He restored my heart and my conscience. Christians
speak of this as a veil being lifted, but, for me, it was more like
the iron curtain was being torn down. For the first time in my life, I
was seeing the world as it really was. I no longer saw people as a sum
of their components or this life as a meaningless exercise, but I now
saw both as something more valid than my rational thought had allowed.
I had spent most of my years examining life, crouched over and focused
on the microscope of logic, incapable of seeing the Big Picture that
was going on around me.

The more I emptied myself of myself, the clearer the truth became. It
had been my own selfish sin that had kept me from seeing it before.
Jesus Christ became my God and my grand obsession, and for many
months, I spent hours with my mind locked in meditation, trying to
connect with Him in a more tangible way. I wasn't disappointed. There
is a point that one can reach in prayer where there is nothing at all
left of oneself, and it is in that moment that God makes Himself
known.

For me, Biblical truth wasn't verified through historical accuracy,
inerrancy or reliability of the Gospels, because my initial
assumptions didn't include these things. I saw divine inspiration in
the actual content of the words attributed to Jesus Christ. The fact
that I, or anyone, was capable of understanding spiritual matters
became my evidence for the soul.

Learning the things of the spirit dramatically changed my attitude and
my outlook on life. It wasn't that the information available to me had
changed, but that my perception had changed and as a result, I was
changed. I was dead, but Christ woke me up! He saved me from my
selfish self and I have given myself to Him because I am thankful for
that which He has given me and hopeful for that which He has promised.



http://www.ex-atheist.com/from-skepticism-to-worship.html