[00:00:00] Speaker A: We know that God's always pursuing you, but there is no person that reached out to me. I became not convinced of Christianity. I became convinced that materialistic atheism did not make sense. And then I started looking into it.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: What happens when the worldview you choose, the one you believed best, explains reality, no longer feels like enough.
For many who leave Christianity, atheism seems to offer clarity. It resolves tension and removes what once felt uncertain.
And for a time, it can feel like the most honest conclusion. But what if, over time, new questions begin to surface, not just about meaning or purpose, but about whether atheism itself can fully account for the world we experience and the life we're living?
Hello and welcome to Ex Skeptic. I'm Jana Harmon. This is a podcast sharing unlikely stories of belief from former atheists and skeptics and insights for those who are still searching and exploring.
But before we begin our next story, if you're asking these kinds of questions yourself, you can explore our curated playlists on YouTube or visit xskeptic.org to find stories and resources tailored to your journey. And if you'd like to support this work, we'd be most grateful.
Now, when the answers you once trusted begin to feel incomplete, where do you turn next?
If you've ever wondered whether atheism truly satisfies the deepest questions of your mind or your life, this conversation is for you. I hope you'll come along to listen in to my conversation with former atheist Stuart Tetimer.
Welcome to Ex Skeptic. Stuart, it's so great to have you with me today.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: Nice to be here, Jana.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Wonderful. I'd love for the listeners to know a bit about you. Stuart, as we're getting started, can you tell us a bit about your education, the kind of work that you're doing now, and the things that you're passionate about?
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Sure, I am.
I'm originally from Central Florida, Kissimmee, Florida. I grew up there, went away to college to Cornell University, where I got an undergraduate degree in information science, systems and technology.
Had a master's degree in computer science.
After that, I became a software engineer.
I was in Silicon Valley. I worked for a few big companies and then quite frankly, after paying off my student loans, figured I'd do something a little bit more risky.
Went through a few startups over that time. I moved away from Silicon Valley, Valley, Bay area of California, briefly in Colorado, and then back to Florida.
And so right now, I am mayor of Panama City Beach.
[00:03:11] Speaker B: That's a beautiful area of the world. Sugar beach is in an emerald coast.
It's really, really gorgeous. Probably a wonderful place to live. I don't know what it would be like to be mayor, but certainly a beautiful place to live.
But of course you're not here to talk about the beach today. You're here to talk about your story, which intrigued me when you actually published it in a local publication there. And I became privy to that article. And I'm just so excited for you to come and tell your story today because you, in the article, you talk about yourself as being an atheist at one time in your life, but you are not now. So let's, let's hear your story. Let's start back at the beginning in your childhood.
You said you were born in central Florida. Let's start there with your family life and talk with me about growing up in Central Florida and your family.
Whether or not religion or God or the Bible had anything to do with your growing up years.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah, so kind of typical middle class childhood. Growing up in Kissimmee.
Enjoyed biking around Kissimmee, about 40,000 people at the time I was growing up.
It is a tourist town right next to Disney World.
You know, it's just a pretty mundane childhood. Played a lot of soccer.
I was always fairly good in school. In terms of faith life, I grew up in the Methodist church. My parents are faithful Christians.
We prayed at meals. My dad helped with Sunday school.
But then probably around, right around the age of 13, we had ended up changing churches.
And I think maybe part of that disruption and also I wasn't, when I was asking questions, I wasn't getting solid answers. I remember asking. And it was, it's very easy if you don't have the burden of proof. It's very easy to play the skeptic, especially if someone's, you know, not well trained in necessarily apologetics. And that's the kind of answer you're looking for.
So that, that stuck with me.
But I wouldn't say there was a hard break. I think it was just ended up becoming less and less of my life. The transition to the new church and then taking a step back, that was just not a good fit for our family.
So we stopped attending Sunday services.
And then I just defaulted to atheism. So I would say it wasn't an important part of my life, just what Christianity did not remain and part of my life. And so I, I would say defaulted to essentially agnosticism.
And this is in the 90s and early 2000s.
The atheist, the new atheist kind of revolution was starting to happen. And as Someone who was online fairly early. I got exposed to some of that, went away to college, and I knew very few Christians. I don't think I knew someone who was a practicing Christian in college.
And so it was just the default.
I was lukewarm throughout my childhood, and then even in terms of atheism.
And then I started. I was on podcasts really early. Sam Harris was one of my, one of my favorites. And then I had some. I really should have taken a gap year between high school and college because I went from being from high school being easy to going to Cornell.
You know, I was middle of the pack at best. So it became very hard.
[00:07:34] Speaker B: As a teenager, I guess you had gone and you had participated in church. There were some troubling questions that seemed unanswerable in your Sunday school, your, your, your family moved churches, you kind of drifted away. It sounded like you didn't have a good reason to hold on to Christianity, that socially, you know, you're, you're, you're kind of drifting as a family and, and intellectually, it's not providing solid answers.
And then you, you move into a highly stressed, more secularized, Ivy League academic environment where no one is a Christian. So there are a lot of reasons why you might have drifted socially, educationally. Oftentimes when someone rejects belief in God and Christianity and you, you start to label an agnostic or even an atheist, what did exactly that mean to you when you embrace that label or that identity?
[00:08:46] Speaker A: It was not a conscious, it was kind of, it was, it was a little, it was a step by step process.
So to be entirely fair, I did not seek out reasons why Christianity would be true.
I just defaulted in to, this does not make sense.
I've not been given a good reason for it.
I don't see God in the world.
And then I went, especially when I was consuming some of the new atheists, I went looking probably just for validation. And those guys seemed smart.
You know, the, the idea of it being a conscious rejection. I don't think that I was ever fully formed enough to make a decision on my own. I just let it, just let it slide.
It was okay. I don't have, I don't have. I mean, listen, my, my dad, my mom, they're, they are good members of the community. They were great parents. They were always present with me. There was, you know, there's kind of the normal conflicts you would expect in a teenager in high schooler, but nothing that, you know, I never thought they did. I always thought they loved me.
So there was no Traumatic. It was essentially going from lukewarm to cold.
And then once cold, looking into. And if you.
Instead of weighing. I think what was happening for me is instead of weighing the evidence, I was trying to validate my position.
So when I, you know, kind of slid into, did not have, I mean, even in growing up, you know, my, my. Other than kind of a generic God discussion or acknowledging that God exists, we didn't, we didn't talk about Jesus. We prayed at meals.
I didn't have any friends who were anyone or anything other than cultural Christians. Even in my high school, there was one young lady who was actually on fire for the Lord. Everyone else was just normal, say normal lukewarm cultural Christians.
And so going into college, you know, I just really wasn't ever presented with a counter argument or presented with a counter witness.
I did not go seeking it.
But, you know, I just, I did not have anyone who would say, hey, you should consider changing your belief.
There was, you know, and we can get into, I'm sure, or we'll possibly get into this later.
That's actually the case essentially throughout my conversion as well, is I, you know, God was. We know that God's always pursuing you and.
But there is no person other that reached out to me.
I became not convinced of Christianity.
I became convinced that materialistic atheism did not make sense.
And then I started looking into it.
[00:12:59] Speaker B: What were you learning or what were you accepting about atheism before you began to see some of its limitations?
[00:13:08] Speaker A: They were presenting naturalistic explanations for really the miracles we see all around us. I would not have thought about it that way.
You know, I will just say, you know, I was an engineering major taking chemistry, physics, computer science. There was not any denigration of Christianity.
I don't think. I don't think anyone really. I mean, it just, it was just, it wasn't in the conversation at all. It seemed irrelevant.
And so for Sam Harris, a lot of his call it atheistic apologetics work is okay, why is there life at all?
What does consciousness? What is consciousness? That was a question that stuck with me.
So I was interested in, okay, how do we explain this? I was coming at it from a, this makes sense. This is the spirit of the age.
Help me understand it more.
Not, oh, this doesn't make sense yet.
So, I mean, it was, I think, just really my, my entire experience with atheism, is it just being the background, the cultural background of my life and not being presented and not searching for explanations that would deny materialistic atheism?
[00:14:56] Speaker B: I just wondered if there were any other issues with regard to your own life or life at large that seemed to make you scratch your head and go, hmm, I don't know. I don't know about that. Even though there's a presumption that that's the truth. The true story of reality, supposedly,
[00:15:15] Speaker A: if the presumed default is naturalism, there are answers to many of these things based on an evolutionary perspective, or there are at least answers that are presented.
So a basic answer to why is there life at all? And it's kind of a cheat.
And maybe I'm going to get the term for it wrong, or my understanding of it wrong, but I'm just going to say the term I'm aware of and my understanding of it, this anthrocentric principle, which is of course the universe had to create people because if it didn't, we wouldn't be here to see it.
Now that always you think about it for a little bit and it's not the most intellectually satisfying.
But if you're not digging, it's like, oh, okay, that's kind of a cute trick. I mean, if you've studied any mathematics, you know that there are many cute tricks that end up being good, have good explanatory power.
In terms of the meaning of life, I suppose I wasn't a particularly thoughtful person.
Obviously I thought about the meaning of life. But for me, I had this weird theory because I was like, okay, what does my life matter?
So I was like, okay, well, I impact other people.
My impact of other people, they impact other people.
And so that's the meaning of life is to have a positive impact on other people. That kind of ripples through behaviors. My understanding of a naturalist perspective is it is a closed system. It actually does for the questions it asks, provide to a non expert satisfying conclusions.
There's not.
And whenever you want to get into this, that's what bursted out for me was the theory of consciousness. Because there's not a satisfying.
That's where you go beyond the ability of naturalism to explain consciousness. That's how God used my curiosity, the curiosity he gave me to kind of poke that hole. It wasn't morality, because you can.
If you inherit a Christian society, Christian morality seems to make sense because it works.
There's nothing to say. And if you're not doing a deep investigation into it, there's nothing to say. It's like, okay, yeah, I could see how society would just evolve this way.
That makes sense.
So that's where it was for me is there seemed to Be to someone who was not spending detailed time reading papers. It seemed to me the popular explanations, they were satisfying enough to con, to confirm what I already believed.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense that there were all of these explanations coming from your atheistic perspective that seemed satisfying until you ran into the mind body problem, it sounds like, of consciousness, where you actually had to write a paper. And like you say, it's interesting how you can take explanations on their face and, and they seem convincing, like you were doing for a number of different things and listening to voices of authority and experts and the new atheists and whomever. But then you were called onto the carpet to take a look at this problem of consciousness, which is hard to explain if matter is all there is.
So walk us through that. Then. The mind body problem. How is there a mind if we are purely physical? Right. Live in a purely physical or naturalistic world. World.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: My answer for that was unsatisfying.
It was, it was to just.
In computer science, we call it another layer of abstraction. We would, I, I just moved the problem down one step. I said, okay, there's maybe just this dimension where physical reality, where the consciousness lives and there's just an interaction between that dimension and our XYT Z, our xyzt our three dimensions plus time and our dimension and then we just haven't found it yet. Okay, but there's no evidence for that. I mean, this is a philosophy class, but there's no evidence for that dimension.
But that's, But I knew it was a cheat, you know, I knew there was.
You know, we just have to.
If I'm going to assume strict materialism, everything has to be materialistic. And then associated with that is the problem of free will.
So, and then that starts to unravel.
Pardon me, that. So that, that has moral implications.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: So explain the problem of free will if you're an atheist.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: If the rules of reality, of physical reality, reality as described by physics is all there is, then you are not there as an agent. You cannot make a, you are not making a decision. As I mentioned before, my solution or my half solution to the meaning of life, this series of waves of interacting behaviors, you're simply the culmination of all your influences and then potentially randomness and that's it. So you don't have, you can't have free will. And then the moral implications of that. And this is something that, to his tremendous credit, Sam Harris did engage with. He engaged with the problem of consciousness and the problem of moral culpability if you lack free will.
His solutions to Those are, were not satisfying.
But if you, if, if I'm, if I have no agency, then I can't be said to have responsibility for any of my actions, good or bad, any more than a program I wrote could be blamed for doing something that I didn't do that it wasn't programmed or did for doing what it was programmed to do. And I will just say there, there was a level of attractiveness just for their, quite frankly, their confidence, you know, they, they confidence. And some of them were, you know, quite amusing.
In the meantime, it's not that I, you know, was not engaged in kind of trying to refine my consciousness. I did go on meditative retreats at some point. I had taken a trip to Japan, so I looked into Buddhism. Actually, I bought a little book on my Kindle to read while I was in Japan.
I personally found it unsatisfying, its explanation of reality, but it seemed the most consonant with an atheistic perspective.
So I was like, you know, if you take the metaphysical and just the physical, how does it affect my behavior?
You know, you do get a calming effect when you go into meditation. You do get a focusing of the mind when you go into meditation.
And I'd taken some meditation classes in college as a, as a PE course. So we were required to take physical education at my university.
So I'd taken some and I'd actually gotten great benefit out of it.
So I'd explored that. I found that unsatisfying as well.
It's just its explanation of life, being suffering and of utter detachment from the world as being a goal was not personally satisfying.
So that's where I was, is okay, I'm essentially inherited from the world, an atheistic perspective, almost everything, except for these kind of edge cases.
And we can discuss whether they're actually edge cases or not.
It all makes sense. We have good explanatory power.
Science has taken us to the moon.
Modern medicine has tremendously benefited our lifestyle. I'm working in technology now. In the meantime, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm fairly successful and my life is not particularly satisfying. I would start off early in my career.
I would work a lot because it was just so fun to work.
And then eventually that gets old, right?
And so I, I'm starting to just say, okay, you know, what, what do I want out of my life? What's my goal here?
And it just seemed to be preparing for retirement.
For whatever reason, I was not interested in a family at that time.
So it was, I want to do good things in the world, I want to influence it positively, but I also just want to accumulate enough material wealth myself that I don't have to worry about it when I'm old.
So that's also unsatisfying. So for me, I guess it took.
Living out my morals and my belief system over time to allow it to the unsatisfying nature of it to become apparent to me.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: So it became dissatisfying not only intellectually in some ways, whether it's the problem of consciousness in the mind body problem, or perhaps the dilemma with free will and not and the, the lack of moral culpability for our own personal decisions. And then existentially in your own life, it was dissatisfying as well.
Even though you tried these other seeming compatible efforts, whether it's Buddhism or meditation or work and finding, trying to make your own purpose through work that, that you were, you were dissatisfied seemingly everywhere you turned.
So what did you do with that?
[00:27:42] Speaker A: Well, at some point, the turning, I mean, what did I do with that? I engaged in, really, in physical pleasure.
You know, I wouldn't say overly hedonistic, but you know, go out, play games, you know, you know, go hang out with friends, go out drinking, you know, purchase things.
You know, I've been making a decent amount of money, so you know, I'll go buy toys.
And then at some point I was listening to, I think it the name of his podcast at the time, and it may still be the case.
I was listening to a Making Sense episode from Sam Harris and you know, I wish I could go find this one to check my memory on it, but he essentially fully denied the existence of consciousness and free will at all.
Instead of saying, I have an explanation for it, he said, okay, you experience this consciousness, you're actually, you're a passenger, right?
You're a passenger in your body's life. And his explanation for it not being apparent is he could go into these. Or not being real or an illusion is he could go into these meditative states himself at the time. And I don't know if he's still doing it. He was really selling these kind of meditation classes and lose a sense of self. You can lose your actual sense of self. He didn't become unconscious, which is where the disconnect was.
And I just remember thinking, well, if that's your explanation, that's not an explanation. That doesn't make sense. Okay, so if that doesn't make sense, then it's possible there is a God. There is something supernatural anyway, something outside naturalistic explanations.
So I Started investigating Christianity. Now, I didn't pick.
I essentially because my perspective, all supernatural, all non naturalistic explanations were potentially equally valid. I did not say, oh, Christianity has a lot of evidence for itself.
What I said was, this is the most accessible to the divine my culture has provided me.
So I'm going to investigate that.
If you're doing an investigation, going to the place where you have the, the most opportunity to investigate, it seems like a logical place to start.
And so my investigation of that was mostly online, trying to find church communities.
I was in California at the time and I didn't end up finding any church communities at the time online. Orthodox Eastern Orthodoxy was very popular.
And so that seemed different enough from what I experienced in mainstream American Christianity.
There's also a strong sense of the mystical that they preserve, a strong sense that they call it mystery, not mystery as in it can't, in a sense, it can't be understood fully in this life.
So when I moved to Colorado, I found the nearest Orthodox church. It's kind of counterintuitive because I said I wanted the closest to my culture in Christianity. And then I go to this fairly obscure faith community, which is Orthodoxy.
But I just figured, okay, there's not really a sense of this world being so infused with this world.
So I started attending Orthodox services. There's a strong sense of reverence throughout the entire service.
And then I started talking to the pastor there, Father John, and he was just extremely kind, inviting. And also for someone who is curious, there's a lot to investigate. There's a lot. I mean, there's a deep tradition from the early Christian fathers up through modern times. There's a deep tradition to explore. So it's a very deep well.
And so I went through that. I became what they would call a catechumen.
So that's someone who's looking to enter the church.
And I stayed in, taking those classes, talking with Father John for, for actually a couple years.
[00:33:19] Speaker B: Can I ask you that? That's very curious to me. I know you were curious and open to a better or a greater explanation than naturalism was offering, but that's different than you were attending a church. Did you believe at that point or through that process that there was a God who existed? It was ontologically real. That was a better explanation for the dilemmas that you were, had encountered prior.
How was that working its way out? Or were you, I hesitate to say, going through the motions of it, that you belong and then you believe or you know that what were you thinking during that process?
Maybe you were having conversations with Father John about these larger, more intellectual issues.
[00:34:09] Speaker A: I wouldn't have an issue with saying going through the motions. That was exactly what I was doing. I wanted to believe, but I didn't. I wanted there to be a God, but I, but I, but I didn't believe.
You know, at the time I called it, and I probably got this from Father John, I called it putting on the clothes of a Christian.
Right?
Because.
And this is one of the thing that really struck me, that was very clear in Father John's presentation of orthodoxy is the incarnational aspect of Christianity.
We are not just spirit and we are not just body.
We are body and spirit.
So going through and doing. And there's a lot of physical movements in orthodoxy.
You make the sign of the cross, you will prostrate yourself at traditional service. You'd be standing the entire time, but they're sitting, standing.
There's a lot of sensory inputs. There's incense smells and bells if you want to be a little bit, you know, more glib about it.
So that, that, that was compelling to me. It, it made sense that if it's our incarnational and I had experienced just personally in other understanding, learning more about human psychology, learning more about human behavior, that mind follows body.
So I had no issue, like I said, putting on the clothes of the, of a Christian. What I did have an issue with is I never joined, I never joined the church at that time, the catechumenate, the kind of intro class supposed to be typically about six months. There's not a. Not very rigid, but you can expect it to be about six months. I was in it for two years.
I watched people come in, go through it and become baptized, confirmed, full Orthodox Christians.
And I was still there at that time.
This is around.
I move, this is around 2020 now.
Covet hit.
And so I was working. The reason I was able to live in move from the Bay Area of California to Colorado to be with my. My parents ended up there. They had moved. They had left Florida when they retired and wanted to see the, See the country. So I was looking for a place. I'd never lived in the South. I'd lived in the Northeast in Ithaca, New York to go to school. I lived out west in California and then Conifer, Colorado.
So I never lived in the South. I wanted to be in a place in Florida. I really enjoyed Conifer's kind of small town feel.
There's a real sense of community. I, I just remember being struck. People waved at you when you drove down the road.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: Oh, yeah,
[00:37:33] Speaker A: I'd never experienced that before. So I kind of. And so I'd heard about Panama City Beach. I moved, I moved here, Panama City Beach.
So I moved to Panama City beach, and I'm still going through these catechism classes or meetings in. At St. Herman's and because I had a remote job, I had a.
I had purchased for myself a Zoom Pro account so I could host them. Right.
So I, you know, I was basically the secretary. I would send out the meet, the invites. I, at that point had been, you know, know, I want to say a professional catechumen, but a very experienced catechumen.
[00:38:14] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: For a while.
Yeah.
And so, so I, I came here, I started attending an Orthodox church here. That's what really started to attract me to Christianity is that sense, that continuity with all of human history.
You know, instead of being a disembodied.
Automaton, you're entering into this stream, this story of the human, of human history.
So that was my first ecclesial community in, where I live now, Panama City Beach.
Eventually, just the fact that it was really a. It is a Greek Orthodox Church and they're very kind people, but it is, you know, it is there. It is pretty clearly for their community. I couldn't invite people to service.
Right.
I couldn't invite people to the services because, you know, as much as I'm happy to try and understand liturgical Greek, you're not going to, you know, I'm not. You're not going to invite a friend and have them get much out of it.
So eventually. And I still didn't believe like, I was still not. I was still putting on the clothes of a Christian. So I'm like two plus years into this.
I'm getting something out of it. Right? There's like, I, I do want to believe not. And I'm not, I'm. I'm not looking into apologetics.
It's just, you know, I'm, I, I am, I'm starting to appreciate. I, I enjoy the services. There is a, you know, there is a reordering of my life that is happening there, and I, I wanted to believe still, but I, I did.
Never ended up joining that community.
[00:40:20] Speaker B: Wow. Okay.
Yeah. It's kind of reminding me a little bit about.
Of what Blaise Pascal says is, you, you want to kind of enter in you, you act as if you believe, you know, you go through the motions of Christianity, you include yourself in the community there and go through the motions of the service. And, and like you say, the embodied nature of the Orthodox Church, I'm sure it brings you in body, fully embodied form of faith.
But it would be a bit disconcerting, I would imagine, if you still intellectually aren't embracing.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: Yeah, and I got some aspect of the community, so I never, I had not growing up, read the Bible.
When I moved to Panama City Beach, I was looking for a way to integrate myself. So I actually went up there.
I think it still exists, this app called Meetup.
So I went on Meetup and I was just like trying to. Trying to find different meetup groups. And there was this group called Beer and Bible. Okay.
And so Beer and Bible is a tremendous ministry. It is not affiliated with a particular church.
All they do is.
And it's. It's for beginners. It was for people like me. And now I'd been reading the gospels, particularly the gospel accounts, as part of my transition into the Christian faith through orthodoxy.
But what Beer and Bible does is they meet, they have a meal. They meet out in the world. They have a meal and also typically at a place that serves beer, hence the name.
And then they study the gospel counts. They take about 17 verses and they go. And they just. Every week they go through the next 17ish verses and they ask you five questions for discussion.
They ask you, what did you like, what didn't you like? What does it say about God?
What does it say about people?
Oh, and what stands out is the third question, which I skipped. So they ask you those five questions and then, you know, there's an icebreaker. It's kind of good small group technique to begin with.
And then they ask you, at the end of the discussion, they say, okay, we do not study the gospel for its own purposes. It should change our lives. What's one concrete, we would call it I will statements was one concrete I will statement. Think of it as smart goal that you will work on this week. Okay. And so that community really nurtured me because we had a sense of belonging.
The person who was running the community at the time, who became and is still a very good friend of mine, Chris Clubs, you know, he did a good job of making sure there are events outside of just our weekly meetings. But that's how I learned the gospel. Like the gospel accounts, I should say the actual gospel texts.
But even that was still. It was still intellectual. I was, you know, I was reading commentaries, I was preparing.
I was like, okay, I want to understand this stuff. But it was still intellectual. And it wasn't until I went to. So I left. I decided the particular parish for the Orthodox church wasn't for me.
I went to a local church community here called Ark Church, which is a non denominational church. But they have this very important ministry of providing transition housing for people who do not have homes for homeless people for whatever reason, getting out of jail, coming off the street, bad family situation, or just, you know, a lot of people in this world are essentially three bad things away from homelessness. You know, your car breaks down, you, you break your leg and your child's sick or some, you know, there. And people, there's a lot of reasons people become homeless. So that was very attractive to me, especially given my time in California. Cause it's so, in the Bay Area. Cause it's so pervasive there.
You just feel this sense that you can't do anything. It's like, hey, you know, I, I can't, I, I, I, I can't help you. I can't change, I can't change this.
So as I was moving into arc, I would say ARC is where my faith went from my head to my heart.
It was very basic.
I helped a little bit with the transition housing, but apart from doing some work and eventually mentoring, really what I started doing was I started sweeping the floor before service.
And I don't know, that's really where I started to experience that. Like, and maybe it was also just that buildup of living like a Christian for so long.
The kind of three things that were going on in my life. Well, one, being around, being around a lot of Christians, right? Being around people who lived their faith not just in church service, not just in prayers before meals.
People who live their faith.
You know, to my experience, engaging intellectually in a satisfying manner with this deep history I was exposed to via orthodoxy and then just service, you know, just actually, again, it was for me, the entire thing.
And thinking back on it is so interesting. The entire thing was the solution to the mind body problem, right? It was we are, and that's what initially attracted it to me. It was we are incarnate.
Christianity's explanation for, for the mind body problem is yes to both.
Yes, we are physical and you see that like both and nature of Christianity, you see that, you start to see that everywhere.
So yes, we are physically embodied. Yes, we have, you know, physics does apply to us, but also, yes, we are spiritual beings and that's where our moral culpability comes from.
That's where our consciousness, you can say, and maybe at some point there will be a better materialistic explanation for consciousness. I don't know.
But at least for Me at the time, that's where, I mean, that's where consciousness comes from. And eventually even that question started to recede for me because I was experiencing it. I was experiencing the love of God. And then looking back, I could see him in his own particular way, walking with me and using the, the, my life story, my history and my particular inclinations to speak particularly to me.
And he let me seem like it was my choice and it was my choice, but it was also him moving first. Right?
So for, and I will just say just the importance of being around an on fire Christian community was just tremendous because you can read about this stuff. You can read, I have lots of books you can read about it. You can't read about how to live and actually live it. Unless, I mean, maybe people of tremendous willpower can do that. But you need someone to talk to, you need someone to say, to engage with this. Like the, the mind is very good at fooling you into thinking that you know something. I, I think that's why writing is so powerful because you actually have to expose all the flaws in your thinking. But just talking to someone about it, having an exchange back and forth with a real person and a person who is coming from a faithful perspective, I mean, all of that is what got me to fully believe in Christianity. Reflecting back on my story, I realized that what at least my version of atheism. There's different versions of atheism, right? At least my version of atheism, the only one I was aware of, was denying, was the entirety of our experience.
Right?
Almost all we experience is our consciousness. Right? So all you had to do, or all I had to do to be an atheist was to say, let's take out the dominant experience the way I experience reality, and then everything works. And that's just, I mean, sorry to put it this way, it's a junk system, right? It's a foolish system if you have to say.
We know from philosophy that it is very hard to have a solution for consciousness, but that's how you experience reality through your consciousness.
If you have to throw that out in order to make your scientific explanation for reality, that explanation does not apply. It's a, you know, it's a category error, right?
You're trying to make your theory do too much work, but you still have to, you know, from my perspective, the Lord gives you, he'll give you all the evidence you need, but you still have to take a step of faith, right? And that was my experience, is I was taking a step of faith and staying with it now he was giving me all sorts of benefits throughout it. I was seeing a behavior change. I was coming into a community, right? So it wasn't. There wasn't, it wasn't just, I'm gonna do this, you know, regardless.
But you still have to take a sense of faith. But there are for, for those with eyes to see if you have, if you feel where God has been moving with you.
Try it out, you know, and particularly for me, the, the incarnational aspect of it is the essential aspect of Christianity.
Literally, it is Christianity.
God became incarnate as man, right?
That is a central mystery of our faith.
So having you can be, you can be convinced intellectually all you want, but if you don't try and live it, you're not going to get the evidence you need.
And then God is also relational, right? He is a personal God, which means you should find other faithful Christians to be around and to come into community.
God wants us to be united in with him, you know, through Jesus Christ and with each other, right? It's the, it's the cross. There's a vertical connection and there's a horizontal connection, right? You want that connection you have. We have direct connection to Jesus, to the Father through Jesus, right? There's a vertical connection, but we also live in the world and we have connection to each other. That's a horizontal connection.
That's, that's, that's the mind body problem, right?
That's, that's the incarnation.
It is stitching together those two things. Not stitching together because God created it that way. It's putting back together those two things. You can see evidence for God, but that's not going to necessarily for someone who isn't going to believe. That's not necessarily going to convince them.
What's going to convince them is the change in you. What's going to convince them is the change in themselves.
I help to teach now our membership class called OCIA Office or Order of Christian Initiations for Adults. And people ask me, you know, how do I, you know, how do I convince my girlfriend? How do I convince my friend? And it's like, you know how you convince your friend? It's by being with them and also letting them see the change in you.
And then, and this is crucial, you have to invite people, people and, you know, I, I, I, I'm an elected representative. I'm mayor of Panama City Beach.
One of the most interesting things I've learned as mayor is people want to be asked, right? It gives, I don't know if it's like, it gives them permission. But people, you know, in city stuff, and particularly in faith stuff are, you know, in the faith realm. People want to be asked, people want to be invited. And guess what? They're not going to necessarily say yes the first time. And, you know, you be a good person about it. You don't have to be belligerent about it. You got to be gentle.
But you can push a little bit, right? You can push a little bit. You don't, you know, don't overly push. Give them time, you know, don't be like, you know, do this, do this, do this. But if you walk with them and then occasionally offer, hey, you know, let's go to mass. Hey, let's go to a fellowship thing where you're around other Christians.
Hey, let's read scripture.
Hey, at least in our tradition, let's go to eucharistic adoration. Hey, let's, you know, my pastor at ARK used to say, the highway to Christianity has many on ramps. God becomes incarnate, and then he provides. He provides evidence for those who want to see. In our Christian walk, if we want to bring people to the fullness of the faith, to the world, or to the life that God has called all of us to, we can emulate that. We can walk with people.
We can walk with people in a community, and we can also take action, you know, whether that's a direct service project. Studying is great, is good to know things. And if you're particular calling is apologetics, that's wonderful. Although I would say even apologetics, if you don't have a life of prayer, if you don't already have a life of service, you know, those have to be part of your Christian walk in order for your apologetics to really, really have a force. Because, I mean, one of the, one of the best, you know, a couple of the best arguments against Christianity are one, hypocrisy, right?
Unrepentant hypocrisy is a tremendous argument against Christianity.
And that's kind of, you know, if, if you want to like, I, I do try to like as, as a believer, I try to like, what's the best case against God.
And it would be the problem of evil. The problem of evil is tough, and Christianity has an explanation for that, right? It is, you know, it is the fall, right? And a full understanding of what sin not just does to us individually, but does to the entire world.
But if people see that in you, if you're not living out your faith, right, if you're not forgiving them if you're not walking with them, if you're not being present with them, why would someone believe that?
You know, and the other good argument, quite frankly, against Christianity is its lack of unity. It's when Christians fight with each other viciously and publicly. Now you can disagree, and we want to disagree. I mean, there are entire church councils where people really believe one side or the other, and they, they, they hash it out. They use. So you can publicly disagree, but if we're not unified in Christ, we are being a bad witness.
So if you want to live out your faith, if you want to bring other people to the faith, walk with people, invite them to a Christian community and show them the love Jesus has given to you, but also give them particular invitations. God shows us that he cares about us. We are to live in the way in which he is demonstrated for us. So show that you care about that other person. And it's going to take time. And it's, and it's not, it's not a numbers game, right? Every soul has infinite value, right? If you spend your entire life evangelizing to some one person and God works through you to save their soul for all eternity, good job. And if you're an atheist, if you're watching this podcast, I would say find the best example of Christianity you can think of in your life and go talk to them. What they're going to do, very likely, unless they're apologetically trained, what they're going to do is they're going to provide you a witness and then try it out. Just try it out. I mean, you know, if you're, if you're, particularly if you're an atheist, what's your cost?
What's your cost? It's a, it's a little bit of effort that you would been doing something else, right? Is your time, you know, you've been watching your phone, you would have been, right? You know, it. Just give, give a little offering, try it out, but try it out and get into a community because it's very easy to fall away if you feel anonymous. So talk to other people about it.
And then if you are engaged in apologetics, you know, I feel like I, I do want to have a full balance. I love apologetics work.
It is very fun. It is great for answering those people's, for people's questions.
So if you are an apologist, you know, keep at it. But remember, you're speaking to individual people, right?
And your goal is to let God work through you to help them take that next step.
[01:00:57] Speaker B: In some ways, it's hard for me to believe that you have followed Christ for a relatively short time, just a few years, honestly, because of the riches of the wisdom, lived experience and deep spirituality that's evident in you.
It feels as if we're hearing from someone who has experienced a lifetime of walking with Christ.
But yet, honestly, I am. I am sitting back in amazement at what the Lord is doing in and through you, how he has formed again such a deep and rich spiritual reality in you. Your soul, your spirit, your mind, your body, the embodied way in which you are embracing faith, the way that you're explaining faith, that it is a fully orbed sense of all of reality, that it makes sense of all of reality, of your own life, that it is communal, it is historical, it is real and it is true. And it all focuses on the person of Christ.
This has been such a blessing, really, to have you and to hear you. And I know that so many will be blessed by listening to you as well. So I want to thank you for spending your time, for putting your life on display, for really opening yourself to the possibility of God when you found those flaws in atheism and you were willing to look outside of what was comfortable for you to find the answer and you found it in Christ.
So thank you for again, just being someone who leads the way for others who are looking.
[01:02:59] Speaker A: Well, Janet, I just, I want to say, first of all, I really appreciate the opportunity. I really.
This is a tremendous ministry you're doing at X Skeptic, trying to meet people where they're at.
So thank you, thank you for the conversation. And I'll just end this in saying, you know, God has blessed me so much in my life. He blessed me when I didn't deserve it when I was walking away from Him.
Any small part I can do to participate in his will is absolutely nothing compared to what he has done for me and what he has and when he promises all of us, which is eternal union with Him.
So, you know, thank you. Thank you so much for this time. This has been a really, really special opportunity.
And you know, I wish and I pray for success in this endeavor that you have embarked on. And we were talking a little bit before the podcast about your particular journey and how it's brought you to this spot.
You know, I wish I had something like this when I was, you know, starting to question.
I wish I had and you know, about my, you saw my story or heard my story. I didn't, wasn't particularly looking. But just having having options here and the way you've chosen to do it, which is through witness, is just. I mean, it's perfect. It's beautiful. It's an incarnational.
Thank you again and God bless you and God and to whoever's watching this, may God God bless you.
Have a wonderful, blessed day.
[01:04:59] Speaker B: Thank you again so much. Stuart an amazing way to end when the answers you once trusted begin to feel incomplete, the journey isn't over.
For many, that tension becomes the very place where deeper questions and more honest searching begins.
And as we've heard heard today, sometimes the path forward isn't always about settling for easy answers, but continuing the pursuit of what's true.
If this conversation resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone who may be asking similar questions. You can also explore more stories like this through our curated playlists on YouTube, organized around questions that many are already asking. And if you're engaging these conversations conversations with others, we'd love to come alongside you. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and connect with
[email protected] X Skeptic is part of the C.S. lewis Institute podcast Network and is produced by our wonderful producer, Ashley Kelfer. Thanks again for listening. We hope to see you next time, where we'll hear another unlikely story of belief.
