Some atheists have contended that people like me who convert to Christianity do so because they can’t hack it as an atheist and so turn to the “comfort” of religion “where everything that you need to believe is told to you so you don’t have to think for yourself” and where you know you’ll go to Heaven when you die and not become worm food, which must feel very good.
To which I would reply, “Like hell that’s why I became a Christian.”
It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life to become a Christian. I had to come face to face with the possibility that I was egregiously wrong about everything I believed with respect to the world and human beings. I did face it, disbelieved in God but begged Him for help if He was real, and then waited to see if anything about my horrible situation would change. And it did. Why? Because God did it.
Christianity, then, far from then handing everything to you on a silver platter to believe in, engages your whole intellect, imagination, memory, and will, challenging you to become the person God created you to be, to overcome your sinfulness and become a person who loves others selflessly.
Since becoming a Catholic, I have now had Protestant friends tell me that it must be nice being Catholic, because “everything that you need to believe is told to you so you don’t have to think for yourself”. Sound familiar? It is the same misconception that my atheist friends made, but this time it is within Christianity.
Quite the contrary. Now, more than even when I was a Protestant, I am challenged to believe and to think. And that thinking is not making myself my own authority, but instead to “think with the Church” that Christ established. It is not easy, but it is the way that Christ has ordained things to be. And I can tell you that, having lived life as both an Evangelical Protestant and as a Catholic, it is the best way.
Christ did not want us to have to “think” our way in Christianity by deriving from scratch every truth and doctrine, going by the Bible alone. Christ “knows what is in a man” and knew that that way would lead to chaos and error, and He does not want His children to be led into error. Instead, as He said, He built His Church and has prevented the gates of Hell from prevailing against her, and He gave authority to the apostles, and they to their successors, to preserve the Sacred Tradition and the Sacred Scriptures faithfully.
I did not become a Christian because it comforted me; I became one because it was true. Similarly, I entered full communion with the Catholic Church from being an Evangelical Protestant, not because it comforted me, but because I came to believe it was true.
I’m often puzzled by that comment -which I too hear often. We are ignorant and told what to do. But it seems to me that so many people cut themselves off from wisdom. In the Church we have 2000 years of the greatest minds thinking through the most difficult issues. To not take advantage of that seems ignorant to me.