Discovering the Bible

I took Physics in my Junior year in High School. Doug, Chad, and Mike were all in that class. (Toni, who 11 years later would be my wife, was also in that class. More about that story will come later.) I noticed that they would bring Bibles to school and talk about religion, but they were also very intelligent and did well in science. They made me think that it could be possible to be intelligent, rational, and religious at the same time. Their example combined with my growing disillusionment with the unfulfilled promises of modern progress made me think I should give religion a chance. I decided that I would conduct a systematic study of the major world religions to see if any of them made sense. I believed that my Christian heritage was just something I happened to be born into, so there was no reason to believe that Christianity should hold any priority over any other religion. Therefore I should give them all a chance before making any kind of commitment.

Of course, I couldn't just Google Hinduism and bring up a Wikipedia article in the comfort of my bedroom. Such research in that day would mean a lot of time in the library just to get started. I had not made any progress towards my goal when I found myself in some conversations with these guys about the Bible. What made an impression on me was when they showed me how Jesus fulfilled so many Old Testament prophecies that had been written centuries before he was born. In the process of seeing these prophecies and their fulfillment, I had a kind of epiphany such that I knew that the Bible had to be a supernatural book. I suddenly had confidence that the Bible was a message from God, and losing all interest in other religions, all I wanted to do was to know and understand what it said.

About this same time, Doug, Chad, and Mike took me to a Christian youth meeting where they gave a simple gospel presentation that focused on the fact that Jesus Christ took all of our sins upon himself on the cross. We needed to trust in his work on the cross in order to receive forgiveness of our sins and eternal salvation. I wasn't sure if I had done that before or not, so I made a renewed effort at faith in Christ.

I began to immerse myself in anything Bible or Christian related. I wanted to make sure I had the right kind of Bible, so I ended up buying several. I would try to watch Christian television shows, but even in my enthusiasm, I couldn't take most of them. I did start to get into prophecy related teaching that predicted that Jesus was returning soon. I got into Christian music, including Michael Omartian, Keith Green, John Michael and Terry Talbot, 2nd Chapter of Acts and Daniel Amos. When I found out that there was a series of fantasy books with a Christian theme called The Chronicles of Narnia, I immediately started reading them. The Narnia books were very helpful because they worked on my imagination. As I stated before, growing up I had not found the person of Jesus to be very appealing. Now I believed that he was the Son of God and our Savior, but I still had trouble looking up to him as a person. However, in Narnia, Jesus was in the form of the lion Aslan. The way that C. S. Lewis portrayed Aslan was very appealing to me, and over time I was able to transfer the way I felt about Aslan to my conception of Jesus.

I continued to go to the same Presbyterian church our family had attended since I was 10. I got involved in the choir and was more interested in Sunday school and youth group, but my school friends went to a Bible Church, and I believed that they were closer to the Biblical truth. I visited their church whenever I got the chance.

As we neared graduation, we were all making plans for college. Mike was going to a Bible college, but I was going to Texas A&M. There was some concern that by going off to a big secular school, I would be endangering my new faith, so I prayed that God would protect me.

Entering the Digital Age

Sometime during my Freshman year in High School, I found a magazine on the dining table. The cover art suggested a science fiction theme, but the contents definitely had something to do with electronics. The title was very weird and confusing to me: Byte. The subtitle was not that helpful either: The Small Systems Journal. What kind of small systems are they talking about? As I tried to read the articles and analyze the ads, I began to realize that this magazine was about small computers. Up to that moment, my concept of a computer was something that cost millions of dollars and filled several rooms. When I was six, my dad had taken me to work on a Saturday, and let me go with him into the data processing center, full of cabinets roaring with forced cooling air, reel-to-reel tape drives, washing-machine looking disk units, punched card readers, all controlled from a large panel of switches and blinking lights. This Byte magazine had pictures of machines costing around a thousand dollars that could fit on a table. It now appeared to possible for someone to actually have a computer in their home.

This was mind-blowing for me; science-fiction was becoming reality. I pored over the magazine trying to understand what these machines were, what they could do, and dreamed about how I could possibly get one. It turned out that a friend of my dad's had given him the magazine, and more issues started to arrive. Some of the articles reviewed hardware or showed how to build circuits, but other articles talked about programs. Some of these programs were in machine and assembly language and were completely incomprehensible to me, but some were in a language called BASIC, and I could figure out some of what they did. Not long after that, the first computer store in Dallas opened up. My dad took me there and I got to see some of these machines in person. Some of them had boxes with switches and lights on the front, others just had a power and reset button. Some had keyboards and little TV monitors connected to them. I could press the keys and see the letters appear on the screen. On one of our visits there, I tried typing in a little program...

10 PRINT "GREG"

20 GOTO 10

RUN

... and my name went racing up the screen. What a thrill!

Thoughts of computers filled my mind. A company called Commodore came out with a computer called the PET which you could buy for $600, and it included everything you needed to write BASIC programs. My goal was to save up enough money to buy a PET, which seemed achievable with a lot of work. I did not consider the dream machine, the Apple II, which at over $1000 seemed unobtainable. In the meantime, I heard that my High School had a course called Computer Math that taught BASIC programming, so I signed up to take it my Sophomore year. I didn't think it would be a very good course, but at least I would get to program a computer.

That summer, my dad surprised me and delighted me to no end by bringing home an Apple II with 16K of RAM! I probably spent every spare hour I had that summer on the computer, typing in programs out of magazines, playing little games, and coming up with my own programs.

When it came time for me to take the Computer Math class, I had already learned on my own most what would be taught in the class. There was one other kid in the class, Chad, who also knew a lot about computers, and we became friends. Chad and I did well in the class, but Chad had stories of a kid named Mike who had taken the class earlier and was quite a computer wiz. Later that year, our teacher took Mike, Chad, and myself up to North Texas State University (now UNT) for a programming contest. This was my first time to spend any time with Mike, and although he was kind of strange, he was clearly very smart, and I admired him. We did not win the contest, but we had a good time. On the drive back, Chad and Mike put a tape in the car stereo, and a very strange song began to play. It seemed to have a religious theme, but it was not like any religious song I had ever heard. I couldn't tell if it was serious, or making fun of religion. I now know it was Larry Norman singing Moses in the Wilderness, and this song was a kind of sign of things to come.

Swords and Sorcery

Although the presence of the Force in Star Wars opened my mind to the possibility of something like the supernatural, I did not immediately turn to traditional religion. The Force was manifested in Star Wars through mind control, telekinesis, and skill in fighting; these are not things you find in most traditional religions. However, I began to think about the legends of wizards and witches from the Middle Ages, and I wondered if there was some kind of reality behind those legends.

In those days, you could not walk into a book store and find books on witchcraft or Wicca. If such things had been available to me then, I might have been tempted to actually try it. However, all I got into was Fantasy genre fiction and the Dungeons and Dragons game. Although I read a few different Fantasy series, what made a huge impression on me was The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. I was amazed by the detail and the scope of the imaginary world that Tolkien created, but I think there were deeper things that affected me. I was drawn to the beauty, goodness, and heroism in these stories that was stronger than anything I had encountered before.

I think my new interest in Tolkien improved my relationship with my friend, Doug, who had become religious a couple of years earlier. He was a Tolkien fan, and now we had this in common. This relationship would grow in importance through the rest of High School, and lasts even to this day.

The Summer of 1977

In the summer of 1977, my family piled into our van and took a two week road trip to California. It was a great, once in a life-time experience. We got to see many amazing things as a family, and we had a great time.

While we were on the trip, this movie Chuck had told me about came out, and it was a sensation. I couldn't believe what I was hearing on the news that people were lining up for hours to see a Science Fiction movie. Of course, the movie was "Star Wars," and while we were in a drug store in San Francisco, I picked up a copy of the book to see what this thing was about. When we got back to Texas, we stopped at Chuck's house in Lubbock. By then I had read the book, and he had already seen the movie twice. He immediately took us out to see the movie, and I was blown away.

Star Wars was not traditional Science Fiction, though. It didn't speculate about our future, but took place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." George Lucas even admitted that space travel and technology were just part of the setting for a classic hero's journey story. In other words, Lucas what not really very interested in Science Fiction, but just wanted to create an exciting, fun movie. This is why Star Wars had a much broader appeal than other Science Fiction like Star Trek. Although I was aware that Star Wars was not pure Science Fiction, I was so taken by the movie that I didn't care. This was the first movie I strongly cared about, and to my 14 year old mind, it was the best movie that had ever been made. (When "Annie Hall," a movie I had never even heard of, won the 1977 Academy Award for Best Picture, I thought, "What is wrong with these people?! Don't they get how great Star Wars is?")

Another thing about Star Wars that was new to me was that in the midst of a technological setting with space ships, robots, aliens, and blasters, there was a mystical element: the Force. I did not know what to make of the Force. At first, it seemed to be like the psychic powers I had encountered in other Science Fiction, but it was different in that it had a moral element. There was a light side and a dark side to the Force. Also, it was not just a power of an individual, but it seemed to be a power outside of and beyond the individual that aided the individual who cooperated with it. One man, with the Force as his ally, could take on a huge technological power.

Looking back, I see Star Wars as having an important role in my spiritual journey. It opened my mind to the possibility that the scientific and spiritual worlds might not be incompatible. I considered the possibility that if there were something like the Force, then ancient religion might be a primitive attempt to understand human experience of this Force, but such thoughts did not immediate lead to an interest in religion. I had no evidence that any religious people I knew experienced anything like the Force. Instead, my interests took a different turn.

Dystopia

Before going on to the Summer of '77, I want to mention that not all of the science fiction I encountered painted a rosy picture of the future. Concerns of devastating nuclear war, overpopulation, destruction of nature, and dehumanizing technology were reflected in some of the stories I read. These negative visions of the future introduced doubts in my mind that scientific progress would necessarily lead to good. I came to realize that science and technology could be used for evil as well as good, but my hope was that improvements in education would help the future turn positive.

Young Atheist

When I turned 10, our family started going to church regularly. This was a result of neighbors inviting us to their church. I started going to Sunday School, and it was a struggle to fit in, but I tried to learn the material in order to fit in and not appear stupid. Regardless, I soon came to see a conflict between the science that I loved and some of the things I was taught in Sunday School.

As I thought about this conflict, I came to the conclusion that science had given us a better picture of reality than was known by ancient religion. I chose science over religion, consistent with my overall preference for new things over old. In the same way I preferred an automobile to a horse and buggy, or an electric light over a candle, color TV over black and white, the Apollo spacecraft over the Mercury, or heliocentrism over geocentrism. Even in my short lifetime, I had seen that things were progressing, continually getting better as scientific knowledge advanced. Religion was part of the old knowledge that was surpassed by the new.

About this time I discovered Star Trek reruns and became and instant fan. In Middle School I got hold of any Star Trek related book I could, and I completely bought into the Gene Roddenberry vision of the future, where scientific and technological advances had solved all of our problems. My mind was always on the future, and I became interested in other works of Science Fiction. Anything that was old, classic, or even contemporary was uninteresting to me.

While looking for Science Fiction books to read, it didn't take me long to discover the prolific Isaac Asimov. While some of his books were a little too difficult for me in the beginning, I found plenty of others I could consume. I soon discovered that he wrote as much or more non-fiction than he did fiction.

Asimov had a doctorate in Chemistry, but he wrote widely on all kinds of matters of science, including what I like most, which was astronomy. I had at least a couple of books of his that were collections of articles on a variety of subject matter, and it was difficult to tell from their titles, what the subject was. I remember one article called, "The Judo Argument," in his book, The Planet that Wasn't, which turned out to be about arguments for the existence of God. I was happy to see that Asimov disproved several of the arguments that believers put forth for the existence of God. However, what surprised me was that in the end, Asimov said that it is not possible to disprove the existence of God either. It surprised me that someone whom I considered to be a great man of science admitted that he could not disprove the existence of God. Asimov himself was not a believer, but he did not side at that time with extreme atheists who unequivocally denied the existence of God.

Before reading "The Judo Argument," I had assumed that the non-existence of God was an open and shut case for science. I agreed with Asimov that there probably wasn't a God, but I also agreed with him that to be intellectually honest, we must admit that God's existence was not disproven. Still, I retained my preference for the new over the old. In fact, I remember in 8th grade that a friend of mine was all excited about a book, The Hobbit, but I was completely uninterested because it was not about the future. I remember this same friend had also developed an interest in religion and wanted to talk about it, but I was not at all interested. By now I found the whole thing annoying.

However, things were about to change. It was 1977, and my best friend Chuck, who no longer lived in town but kept in touch with me by letter, was telling me about a new Science Fiction movie coming out. The SF movie and TV landscape had been pretty bleak since Star Trek ended in 1969, and I was skeptical that Hollywood could make a good Science Fiction movie, but I was going to keep my eyes open.

Early Memories

I will begin my story of my religious journey with some of my earliest memories. We did not often go to church when I was a child, and when we did, I did not like it because it was a strange place where I didn't know the people or the routine. I did not like religious art; it seemed strange looking to me. Depictions of Jesus I saw did not make him out to be someone I would look up to or want to be like.

My real interests were in the realm of science and technology. I liked jets, rockets, lasers, and astronauts. I had little plastic dinosaurs, and I learned all of their names. I had a book about science that had diagrams of jet engines and other machines, showing how they work. I had a children's encyclopedia, and I loved to look at the volume on science and nature. One of my favorite cartoons was "Jonny Quest." I wanted to grow up to be either an astronaut or a scientist like Dr. Quest.

I do remember that both of my grandmothers were regular church goers, and that one of them spoke to me once about Jesus. She said that if I believed that he died for my sins on the cross, I would go to heaven. I think up to that time I associated heaven and hell as the places good and bad people went to when they died. I knew that I wasn't always good, so this idea of believing in Jesus seemed like a good thing to do in case all of this was true, and I wasn't good enough to get to heaven otherwise. However, it seemed like some kind of loophole, and I wondered if I was doing the belief thing correctly enough to qualify.

Why So Religious?

I post a lot of religious material, whether on my blog, Facebook, or Twitter. I'm also working on a degree in Theology. I'm sure there are people who wonder why I'm so focused on religion? I will give a short answer in this post, and then I plan to write a series of posts giving the story of how I got here.

I believe in the existence of God, as he is described in the Christian faith, or more specifically the Catholic faith. This God is characterized by love, and it is out of love that he created the universe and us humans in it. The purpose of human existence is to receive God's love, and to respond back with love. Since God gives us freedom, he does not force us to receive his love, but allows us to reject it if we want to. This is the most important choice we can make in our lives because it not only determines the quality of our life in this world, but by receiving God's love, we enter into a life that extends beyond the grave to a relationship of love with him that lasts forever. Those who reject God's love, reject the very source of their life.

Over the last 31 years, I have been on a journey seeking the love of God, and have been richly blessed in doing so. It has been a dynamic process where my knowledge and belief about God has developed over the years. Some aspects of my belief, such as the Bible being God's Word, and Jesus being the Son of God, have been there from the beginning. Other aspects, such as the nature of salvation and the Church, have changed over the years. I have made many mistakes and wrong turns, but even when I willfully do the wrong thing, God is ready to forgive me and turn even the wrong turns into good. I plan to write about this journey to show how I went from not believing in God at all, to eventually becoming Catholic.

My desire in writing about these things is not to show off what I know or what I have done, but to tell others about something that has been good for me, and I want them to have too. Jesus tells his followers to freely give away what they have freely received. My hope is that if you are not interested in God, you will see something that interests you. If you are already a believer, I hope that I can share something that might help you in your journey. I expect that I will learn some things as I go through the process of writing. I also hope that I may learn from readers' comments, whether they be affirmations, questions, or objections, so feel free to comment.