Hi, I originally wrote this is reply to a post about coming to faith in the "new Christians" section, and realized it was as good a testimonial as any and might help people come to Christ, so I decided to repost it here:
I came to faith very recently, and through the unlikely path of reason. I was horribly dissillusioned as a child towards everything related to Christianity, and first spent many years studying the occult, ceremonial magick, and paganism.
Eventually, more and more I was studying philosophy and logic. I came to the conclusion that the occult was pointless, that it was driving people I knew to corruption and self-destruction. This was not really in any epic ways, more like just plain stupidity and wish fulfillment. Magick never actually accomplishes its goals, and that is coming from about 15 years of serious study. You can sometimes get some weirdness to happen, but magick itself and all its theories are simply bunk...if it worked we would have a world full of lottery-winners with harems all for the price of a badly manufactured amulet and Aleister Crowley would not have died alone, a junkie, in a boarding house in London, penniless and broken.
After I came to those conclusions, I left the occult store I owned to go back to college as a student of philosophy and mathematics. The idea was since I found no ultimate truth in magick, I would find ultimate truth in logic. I spent the last several years being trained in how to establish and prove the validity or invalidity of sets of propositions, to be able to take a series of ideas and establish beyond a shadow of doubt whether the ideas are true. This sounds weird to non-math people, but this is exactly what mathematics and logic does.
Eventually I became well trained, and my focus became more and more in information science and computability, as well as formal logic.
So, one night I am thinking and reading, and it occurs to me that no amount of true premises would convince me of the truth of the conclusion of the Biblical God. This is, for a logician, an awful realization. We love our thoughts, we love our reason. To find such an incredible flaw, a literal blind spot in our reasoning, a place to which a priori we would not allow our reasoning to go, is awful. I was literally stricken.
So I considered my options. I could continue on as I had been and ignore this blind-spot, or I could rexamine the problem in the light of my training. Since my journey of life up to this point (and make no mistake, I consider my conversion to be the climactic event of my life...everything after this is just a development of what I gained when ransomed by Christ) had been an ongoing search for ultimate truth, where I had eventually settled for the very limited truth of logic and math, I saw that I needed to appoach the issue again.
So, I considered the problem. The Bible was the obvious place to start. I decided it was reasonable to propose that if the Bible was the Word of God, it would show certain properties that would validate it. I won't go through my methods and my work right now because it is about a book's worth of research and work, suffice it to say that after a great deal of work I came to the following conclusions:
1. It's all true, the whole trip. God, Jesus, the Bible, sin and salvation, everything.
2. Most objections are pseudo-problems (like the problem of evil, problem of free will, historicity, evidential issues, etc) based on not taking the Bible and the concept of God and a God-centered universe seriously enough and can be resolved with little effort.
So I was saved, and my faith is certain because I have proved it in a way equivalent to a mathematical proof or a law of physics.
I hope this helps bring you to Christ. I am not going to go into apologetics at this point, but I wish to assure you that I would stand in front of the Professor I TA for, the entire academic community, and a Grand Jury under pain of perjury and assert that the Bible and Christianity is the absolute truth.
Also, even if the situation was somehow reversed, that believing in Christ was what got you into Hell and I knew that, I would still believe. It would still be true, period. My faith is in no way contingent on the threat of Hell or reward of Heaven (those things are really nice, don't get me wrong, but threats or rewards don't make something true). I can't even be said to believe...I know.
God bless, and may the Spirit move you to faith.
I came to faith very recently, and through the unlikely path of reason. I was horribly dissillusioned as a child towards everything related to Christianity, and first spent many years studying the occult, ceremonial magick, and paganism.
Eventually, more and more I was studying philosophy and logic. I came to the conclusion that the occult was pointless, that it was driving people I knew to corruption and self-destruction. This was not really in any epic ways, more like just plain stupidity and wish fulfillment. Magick never actually accomplishes its goals, and that is coming from about 15 years of serious study. You can sometimes get some weirdness to happen, but magick itself and all its theories are simply bunk...if it worked we would have a world full of lottery-winners with harems all for the price of a badly manufactured amulet and Aleister Crowley would not have died alone, a junkie, in a boarding house in London, penniless and broken.
After I came to those conclusions, I left the occult store I owned to go back to college as a student of philosophy and mathematics. The idea was since I found no ultimate truth in magick, I would find ultimate truth in logic. I spent the last several years being trained in how to establish and prove the validity or invalidity of sets of propositions, to be able to take a series of ideas and establish beyond a shadow of doubt whether the ideas are true. This sounds weird to non-math people, but this is exactly what mathematics and logic does.
Eventually I became well trained, and my focus became more and more in information science and computability, as well as formal logic.
So, one night I am thinking and reading, and it occurs to me that no amount of true premises would convince me of the truth of the conclusion of the Biblical God. This is, for a logician, an awful realization. We love our thoughts, we love our reason. To find such an incredible flaw, a literal blind spot in our reasoning, a place to which a priori we would not allow our reasoning to go, is awful. I was literally stricken.
So I considered my options. I could continue on as I had been and ignore this blind-spot, or I could rexamine the problem in the light of my training. Since my journey of life up to this point (and make no mistake, I consider my conversion to be the climactic event of my life...everything after this is just a development of what I gained when ransomed by Christ) had been an ongoing search for ultimate truth, where I had eventually settled for the very limited truth of logic and math, I saw that I needed to appoach the issue again.
So, I considered the problem. The Bible was the obvious place to start. I decided it was reasonable to propose that if the Bible was the Word of God, it would show certain properties that would validate it. I won't go through my methods and my work right now because it is about a book's worth of research and work, suffice it to say that after a great deal of work I came to the following conclusions:
1. It's all true, the whole trip. God, Jesus, the Bible, sin and salvation, everything.
2. Most objections are pseudo-problems (like the problem of evil, problem of free will, historicity, evidential issues, etc) based on not taking the Bible and the concept of God and a God-centered universe seriously enough and can be resolved with little effort.
So I was saved, and my faith is certain because I have proved it in a way equivalent to a mathematical proof or a law of physics.
I hope this helps bring you to Christ. I am not going to go into apologetics at this point, but I wish to assure you that I would stand in front of the Professor I TA for, the entire academic community, and a Grand Jury under pain of perjury and assert that the Bible and Christianity is the absolute truth.
Also, even if the situation was somehow reversed, that believing in Christ was what got you into Hell and I knew that, I would still believe. It would still be true, period. My faith is in no way contingent on the threat of Hell or reward of Heaven (those things are really nice, don't get me wrong, but threats or rewards don't make something true). I can't even be said to believe...I know.
God bless, and may the Spirit move you to faith.
