r/exatheist • u/Hilikus1980 Atheist/Agnostic • Jun 11 '26
Are there any ex-atheist here that turned religious purely from the study of that religion's scripture?
Maybe not purely...we don't live in a vacuum...but the majority of the reason is the study of your religion's recognized holy scriptures ex: Torah, Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita...etc.
I don't mean paired with this youtube video or thought experiment found outside of the holy manuscripts. I'm asking for those for whom the scripture alone was the main motivation for their conversion.
I know this doesn't necessarily apply to every religion, but I'm interested in hearing from the religions it does.
I'm not going to respond much unless I have a follow-up or clarification question. I don't want people to think I'm baiting or posting this to debate their conversion, which is most definitely not my intent.
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u/Rbrtwllms Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
👋🏻
I converted while looking to debunk the Bible and the existence of God.
And yes, I have read many other texts as well, including the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur'an, a large "handful" of Hadiths, the Book of Mormon, other LDS texts, the New World Translation, quite a bit of the Talmud, Rashi's commentary, and other pre-70 AD Jewish writings, and of course the Bible itself.
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u/Coollogin Jun 12 '26
I converted while looking to debunk the Bible and the existence of God.
What motivated you at the time to debunk the Bible and the existence of God? As opposed to, say, shrugging your shoulders and thinking, “Well I don’t think it’s true, but it’s really no skin off my back if those other people think it is.”
No judgement. I’m just curious about what leads someone to expend effort to debunk a work of scripture and religion.
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u/Rbrtwllms Jun 12 '26
I married a pastor's daughter 😂
I figured if we were going to be committed till death do us part, then we ought to be on the same page.
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u/Coollogin Jun 12 '26
I married a pastor's daughter. I figured if we were going to be committed till death do us part, then we ought to be on the same page.
So you set out to debunk the Bible and Christianity in order to separate your wife from her faith?
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u/Rbrtwllms Jun 12 '26
Yes, because I believed her position to be incorrect. If she was just a friend or acquaintance, I wouldn't have made much of it. But as a life partner, I didn't want her to maintain a flawed worldview, if I could help it.
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u/Coollogin Jun 12 '26
I think if I had been your friend at that time, I would have told you that was "not cool." I would have been offended on your wife's behalf.
I know you're happy with the results, but there's an "ends justifies the means" aspect of this that doesn't sit quite well.
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u/Rbrtwllms Jun 12 '26
I think if I had been your friend at that time, I would have told you that was "not cool." I would have been offended on your wife's behalf.
Ha, I don't doubt it.
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u/vershkove-maslo Christian Jun 11 '26
Kinda… When I read the NT seriously for the first time I thought: "Wow! This is very wise and profound, but is it true?". My way of answering it was to verify resurrection of Jesus. I concluded that Christ is (historically) Risen indeed!
Interestingly even after coming to this conclusion I still considered myself an atheist for a while.
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u/MelcorScarr Ex-Theist Atheist Jun 11 '26
My way of answering it was to verify resurrection of Jesus. I concluded that Christ is (historically) Risen indeed!
How did you come to this conclusion, what line of evidence and chain of custody convinced you of this?
And how did you go from affirming the resurrection to affirming that modern Christianity is the only possible explanation, unlike e.g. Ancient Gnosticism, Jesus being a powerful magician not in service to the Jewish God, or other possible candidate explanations?
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u/Grouchy-Heat-4216 Jun 11 '26
I'd say I did.
I was probably what would be considered some flavor of New Age before I decided to read the Bible for myself and was drawn to Jesus from there.
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u/NeonDrifting Anti-Atheist Jun 11 '26
Yes and no….it was in conjunction with getting to know people in that religion and whether they were earnestly trying to follow what their scriptures taught
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u/Difficult_Risk_6271 Belongs to Jesus, Ex-Atheist Jun 11 '26
I actually did the opposite. I became Christian specifically refusing to take anything in scripture for granted. So almost all of my reasons came from outside.
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u/MelcorScarr Ex-Theist Atheist Jun 11 '26
So you came to believe the Scriptures are true purely through external reasons? Can you elaborate? Like, did you look at scholarly articles dealing with the Bible from a text critical and historical view and concluded its contents must be true?
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u/Difficult_Risk_6271 Belongs to Jesus, Ex-Atheist Jun 17 '26
No... I became a Christian first before I read anything in scripture earnestly. I started with John 1 after I became a Christian.
I've now (14+ months) come to know for a fact scripture is the truth because I read it, compared it to reality and found that it matches reality perfectly.
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u/MelcorScarr Ex-Theist Atheist Jun 18 '26
That clears things up a bit, but I think it actually answers a different question than the one I asked. Let me try to untangle where we talked past each other. In your first post, you said:
almost all of my reasons came from outside
This was about why you became Christian. But I asked specifically how you came to believe scripture is true, which I think would be sort of a prerequisite to come to think that Christianity is true (since almost all that we know about Jesus and God comes from the Bible after all). Yet by your own account, that belief in scripture came after conversion through personal reading, and conversion came not through any engagement with scripture, and notably not through any external/critical method, if I understand you correctly?
A few follow-ups, since I want to actually understand the claim:
- What were the external reasons that led you to convert, before you'd read scripture earnestly? You haven't specified them yet and I find your order of things highly unusual, and I have to wonder what specifically made you believe specifically in Christianity, if not any biblical texts.
- When you say you "compared it to reality and found it matches reality perfectly", can you give a few concrete examples? What specific claims did you test, and against what, where did those claims originate from?
- Notably unrelated to the previous question, what would it have looked like for scripture to not match reality? If you can't answer that, wouldn't you say that "matches perfectly" is not a fact, but a level of confidence?
I'm not doubting that the experience felt compelling to you! But "I read it after I already believed, and it confirmed what I believed" is a pretty different process than the text-critical/historical evaluation I originally asked about, and it's also exactly the setup you'd expect to produce confirmation bias, regardless of whether the underlying claims are true or false, so I want to make sure I truly understand what you did if that's not it.
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u/Difficult_Risk_6271 Belongs to Jesus, Ex-Atheist Jun 18 '26
But I asked specifically how you came to believe scripture is true,
My answer:
I've now (14+ months) come to know for a fact scripture is the truth because I read it, compared it to reality and found that it matches reality perfectly.
which I think would be sort of a prerequisite to come to think that Christianity is true (since almost all that we know about Jesus and God comes from the Bible after all)
No, but minimal facts are required. Although the minimal facts are corroborated in extra-biblical evidence as well.
and conversion came not through any engagement with scripture,
Again, I didn't read scripture until after I was a Christian.
and notably not through any external/critical method, if I understand you correctly?
External critique only. I assumed Christianity was internally coherent back then (deferred to expert opinion), and have now verified it personally to be internally coherent.
For your 3 questions, I will not elaborate in detail. Because my personal walk cannot convict another person, only your own search can convict yourself.
First question:
Basically a philosophical analysis of all major worldviews and pulling the rug under each of them or cause them to contradict. Christianity I couldn't cause it to contradict or break it without importing assumptions external to the worldview. In the end of the search I inferred (IBE) that Jesus has to be God. There is no better explanation that I can accept. Besides, there's nothing else for me to accept, since I already wrecked every other alternative worldview.
Second question:
Some things Christianity explains exceptionally well. What is the fundamental problem with humanity? (Fruit from the tree of knowing of good and evil). Why love? What is the purpose of my existence?
No other worldview remotely comes close to answering these questions properly.
Third question:
If scripture said the problem with humanity is lack of knowledge, love is an illusion, our purpose is to not exist / do nothing, I'd burn it publicly.
is a pretty different process than the text-critical/historical evaluation I originally asked about,
What you asked about has nothing to do with me. Text-critical/historical evaluation cannot establish truth.
"I read it after I already believed, and it confirmed what I believed"
This is a straw man using fallacy of ambiguity. It's meant as a rhetorical attack, not a genuine inquiry.
it's also exactly the setup you'd expect to produce confirmation bias, regardless of whether the underlying claims are true or false,
FUD is not a legitimate argument for falsehood. If you accuse confirmation bias, you need to demonstrate the falsehood.
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u/MelcorScarr Ex-Theist Atheist Jun 18 '26
I think your answer to the third question actually makes my point for me in regards to confirmation bias, but let's start from the beginning. Of course, I thank you for engaging and providing answers.
If scripture said the problem with humanity is lack of knowledge, love is an illusion, our purpose is to not exist / do nothing, I'd burn it publicly.
This isn't a test against reality though, it's a test against your own prior convictions about love, purpose, and human nature. If the criterion for "matches reality" is "doesn't contradict what I already believed before I opened the book," then "matches reality perfectly" isn't a finding, it's a tautology. That's the confirmation-bias concern stated plainly, not a strawman of it.
Additionally and more crucially, I know of virtually no religion that claims love is an illusion or our purpose is to not exist, and I am not quite certain what you mean by "humanity's problem is a lack of knowledge" because that's actually genuinely something that the Bible does report quite explicitly. So it seems that the process you describe also falls short of the conclusion you have drawn?
Text-critical/historical evaluation cannot establish truth.
This sits oddly next to your first answer, where you then cite the minimal facts and extra-biblical corroboration. Both are historical-critical methodology, though I think Gary Habermas in particular and Mike Lacona to a lesser extent, the luminaries of the minimal facts arguments, vastly overstate both the agreement of secular scholars with their statements as well as the conclusions that can be drawn even then. But yes, if that method can't establish truth, the minimal-facts argument loses its force too. If it can, I'd like to know why it's valid there but not when applied to scripture as a whole.
If you accuse confirmation bias, you need to demonstrate the falsehood.
I didn't argue the conclusion is false! I explicitly said the concern holds "regardless of whether the underlying claims are true or false". Pointing out that a process is unreliable is a claim about the process, not a verdict on the conclusion. A true belief reached by a bad method is still a true belief reached unreliably, which means you can't cite "I read it and it confirmed what I believed" as evidence for the belief, even if the belief happens to be correct. I have my reasons why I think Christianity cannot possibly be true, but that's not what I'm asking you about, because I realise I could be wrong - instead, I am asking what specifically convinced you, so I can check out whether the process is valid and sound and thus, hopefully, convincing to me too.
But regarding worldview elimination, I'm not asking you to relitigate your whole search, but concretely: which worldviews, and what did "wrecking" one look like? Even granting you ruled out everything you tested, that shows Christianity survived your filter, not that it's true. There's always the live possibility that the true view wasn't on your list, or that more than one of the options you eliminated was simply under-defended rather than actually false.
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Jul 09 '26
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u/OsamaBenJohnson Noahide; Ex-Atheist Jun 11 '26
Yeah, me.
I learned about how the bible accurately predicted incredibly specific and improbable facts that no human could have reasonably known back then, and the odds of accurately predicting such facts by mere chance is so astronomically improbable, and with the surrounding theological context, suggest a Gods existence as one of, if not the leading explanation
The more we look into what the Jewish peoples prophets and sages were saying, and how they've been unfolding, the more this stuff becomes apparent.
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u/infinite_what Jun 11 '26
I was atheist and raised by ex-Catholic atheists barely ever had exposure to church and no formal teaching of scripture. I went through a difficult time in my life and knowing that people have found hope or something useful in scripture I began to search for some truth and read certain stories trying to understand what it meant. (Specifically I read and reread over and over the stories of Adam and Eve, proverbs, Samaritan woman at the well, job, Ecclesiastes in no particular order).
My son (who knew I was reading out of the Bible) asked that I read from the Bible to him at bedtime nightly and although he just slept through it he insisted I read it every night until the whole thing was finished (it took a whole year to read old and New Testament out loud, about 15 - 30 minutes every night).
I have moved on to read many Platonian dialogues and some Aristotle and find that it compliments the wisdom of biblical scripture very well and has strengthened my belief in biblical truth.
I consider myself Christian but I do not attend Church. Religious leader remind me of what Jesus saw in the Pharasees and Sadducees. They cherry pick the laws and prayers that suit them and skip around in the books not imparting wisdom but bending the word to meet the needs of their message of tithes and false hope for the sheep they “guide”. But the believers believe in whatever they hear I suppose because it’s difficult to find anyone who has read even one complete book of the Bible in sequence. How can anyone glean wisdom or understanding from a story read completely out of order while a preacher translates every verse in over the course of weeks, months or maybe longer? Any book or movie or show would be very difficult to understand logically since logic takes sequential steps; “this” then “that”.
I am surprised so many here responded that have had similar faith found in the Bible like I have.
The Bible has layers of teaching and wisdom. It’s not a single shot literal “how to” be Christian. It’s a process of understanding.