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From Radical Atheist To Catholic (My Story) · Mahon McCann

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  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
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  SPEAKER_00: My name is Matt and today I'm going to give you my story.
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  SPEAKER_00: By all rights, I shouldn't be here.
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  SPEAKER_00: I was born as an atheist, was never baptized or made communion.
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  I was a particularly vicious atheist and delighted in telling
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  my friends that God
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  SPEAKER_00: isn't real and that religion is all made up nonsense.
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  SPEAKER_00: As a teenager,
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  I listened to the new atheists like Richard Dawkins and
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  Christopher Hitchens and
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  SPEAKER_00: parroted their arguments to anyone who would listen.
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  I remember sitting very smugly in religion class in school when
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  the Gideons came up
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  SPEAKER_00: Bibles and I was the only one in the class who refused to take one.
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  I was an evangelist for atheism and yet here I am at the age of
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  30 becoming a Catholic.
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  SPEAKER_00: What happened?
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  I was pretty happy in my assumed atheism probably until college
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  when I met
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  SPEAKER_00: Friedrich Nietzsche,
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  SPEAKER_00: the German philosopher who famously proclaimed that God is dead.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nietzsche worried about the problem of nihilism after the death of God,
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  that life would be meaningless and morality impossible because
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  all would be permitted.
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  SPEAKER_00: Certainly in my college life,
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  SPEAKER_00: it took on that shape,
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  SPEAKER_00: drinking every weekend to escape the despair and alienation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nietzsche's solution to the death of God was to become the Ubermensch,
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  SPEAKER_00: a being that was capable of creating their own values and laws.
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  I tried that briefly,
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  but ended up chronically hungover and kind of destroyed by partying.
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  SPEAKER_00: I learned you can proclaim to be a moral relativist,
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  SPEAKER_00: but you can't ignore the consequences of your actions forever.
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  SPEAKER_00: So Nietzsche's solution didn't work.
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  SPEAKER_00: Modern philosophy,
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  SPEAKER_00: it seemed to only make my problems worse,
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  SPEAKER_00: so after college,
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  SPEAKER_00: I turned to modern psychology in hopes of something better,
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  SPEAKER_00: particularly the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jung had a story about what happened in the West after the death of God.
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  He said that the scientific revolution had split the world in
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  two and that the
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  SPEAKER_00: split manifested in the minds of Western people like me and you.
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  SPEAKER_00: That we all had become scientifically minded in a way.
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  That we still acted out of morality and rituals that we could
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  no longer justify or understand.
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  SPEAKER_00: We had fallen into a profound cognitive dissonance in the West.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I could feel that in my own struggling journey.
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  SPEAKER_00: Unable to believe in God but not doing so well without him either.
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  It was one insight from Jung in particular that destroyed my
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  lingering atheism for good.
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  He described the Greek gods as personifications of emotions
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  that could possess our minds.
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  SPEAKER_00: For example,
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  SPEAKER_00: Ares,
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  SPEAKER_00: the god of war,
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  SPEAKER_00: was a personification of anger,
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  a powerful sub-personality that could become activated and
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  drive you to do terrible things.
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  SPEAKER_00: For some reason, it was just like a key turning in my mind.
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  And suddenly I could see the meaning of stories and myths more
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  clearly and I could
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  translate them into things that I understood and which I knew
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  were real and which
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  SPEAKER_00: were problems for myself even today.
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  I wondered if I could understand Greek polytheism in this way,
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  then what about monotheism?
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  And maybe one monotheism in particular,
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  which I'd said such terrible things about.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think if I have one virtue, it's the ability to admit when I'm wrong.
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  And the more I studied monotheism,
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  the more I realized I was really wrong.
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  The way I was taught it was that there was a big guy with a
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  beard in the sky and he
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  SPEAKER_00: gave out if you didn't eat your dinner.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he was a kind of adult Santa Claus.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the more I studied monotheism through the Greeks and Plato,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Hebrews and the Old Testament,
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  SPEAKER_00: and finally,
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  SPEAKER_00: begrudgingly,
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  SPEAKER_00: the church fathers like Saint Augustine and Aquinas,
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  the more I became convinced this was the greatest philosophy
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  humanity had ever come
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  SPEAKER_00: up with.
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  SPEAKER_00: And ironically, it was the philosophy of life I was searching for.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the last place I wanted to look, the Christian tradition.
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  SPEAKER_00: The thought dawned on me, oh no,
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I'm becoming a Christian.
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  SPEAKER_00: But I still wasn't willing to convert,
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  SPEAKER_00: even though I could intellectually justify monotheism now.
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  SPEAKER_00: There was still more to Christianity,
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  SPEAKER_00: like the church and tradition,
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  SPEAKER_00: and of course,
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  SPEAKER_00: Christ himself.
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  How could I reconcile myself to Christ after all the terrible
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  things I said about him?
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  SPEAKER_00: During that time when I was trying to avoid these thoughts,
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  SPEAKER_00: a certain global pandemic came along,
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  SPEAKER_00: which didn't leave much room to avoid things anymore.
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  I've heard of our confinement in COVID described as being
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  trapped in the involuntary monastery.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I took that quite literally.
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  SPEAKER_00: I quit drinking and it felt like a kind of death,
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  SPEAKER_00: a loss of an old self and clearing away for something new.
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  SPEAKER_00: For the first time,
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  SPEAKER_00: I started to read the Bible,
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  which I'd rejected all those years ago and finally started to
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  feel connected to the
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  SPEAKER_00: characters like Moses and Job and Christ himself.
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  SPEAKER_00: I could finally feel these stories weren't something foreign to me,
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  SPEAKER_00: but relatable,
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  SPEAKER_00: that they were my own story in a way.
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  SPEAKER_00: After COVID,
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  SPEAKER_00: myself and my fiancee decided to do the Camino de Santiago,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is an 800 kilometer walk from France across Spain.
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  Me because I was wrestling with this spiritual journey and her
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  because she really
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  SPEAKER_00: likes walking.
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  So I guess in some ways in that journey,
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  I first started pretending to be a Christian.
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  SPEAKER_00: I listened to the New Testament.
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  SPEAKER_00: I went to mass and blessings.
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  SPEAKER_00: and was finally moved by Christianity and Christians.
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  SPEAKER_00: That resistance that I had,
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  SPEAKER_00: this critical voice in my head,
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  SPEAKER_00: got quieter and quieter until it was gone.
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  SPEAKER_00: And all that was left was this feeling of joy and peace.
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  SPEAKER_00: I could feel love again, a love that I didn't know existed.
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  SPEAKER_00: A love that came like a friendly hand from the sky,
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  SPEAKER_00: one which I definitely didn't deserve,
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  SPEAKER_00: but which came anyway.
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  SPEAKER_00: As we walked on the Camino, I imagined Christ in front of us,
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  SPEAKER_00: moving between the trees, and I'd catch glimpses of him.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think I wanted to see him face to face always.
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  That's the atheist dream,
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  to see God face to face and say,
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  okay,
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  I'll sign the contract.
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  SPEAKER_00: But recently I read St.
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  SPEAKER_00: Gregory of Nias' book,
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  SPEAKER_00: The Life of Moses,
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  SPEAKER_00: and he talks about Moses in Exodus 33,
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  SPEAKER_00: 18,
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  SPEAKER_00: when he wants to see God's face,
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  SPEAKER_00: but God will only allow him to see his back.
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  SPEAKER_00: St.
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  Gregory said the reason we see God's back and not his face is
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  because we're meant to follow him.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I decided that I would follow him, and he brought me here
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  to become a Catholic,
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  and to tell people my story,
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  to help them return home like he did for me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.