Posted on 09/07/2017 8:39:38 AM PDT by Perseverando
The director of the National Institutes of Health revealed Wednesday that confronting death sparked his journey from atheism to Christianity.
Dr. Francis Collins, NIH director and leader of the Human Genome Project, recounted to Bloomberg’s David Rubenstein how facing the reality of death and the questions it posed during his third year at medical school led him to become a Christian. The conversation, published Wednesday, revealed that Collins initially settled on agnosticism and then shifted toward atheism before ultimately placing his faith in Jesus Christ.
Collins said that his spiritual journey began in college where he first confronted differing ideas about the possibilities of a spiritual reality.
“Got to college, you know, those conversations in the dorm about ‘what do people believe,’ and I didn’t think I believed in any of it,” he told Rubenstein. “So I was an agnostic, but by the time I got to graduate school, I was shifting even more to being an atheist. And I would not be too comfortable keeping quiet if somebody was talking about the supernatural, ’cause it was all about nature and how you study it and how you describe it,” Collins said.
Collins’ experience in medical school, however, challenged his ideas about life and death and the possibility of the existence of the supernatural.
“And then I went to medical school. And that third year of medical school where you’re thrust out onto the wards and you’re sitting at the bedside of wonderful people whose lives are under threat and many of whom are not going to survive, and you really start to realize that your own thinking about life and death has been pretty unsophisticated compared to the reality of what these people are facing,” Collins said.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
Good read.
C.S. Lewis.
The Einstein of Literature.
+++++++++
“I’d never really heard much about C.S. Lewis, but picking up some of the things he wrote, particularly ‘Mere Christianity,’ made it clear to me – oh my gosh, there’s an incredibly compelling intellectual, rational basis for faith, which I had totally missed and assumed didn’t exist. It took me a couple of years of fighting against that, of trying to prove that this was all wrong and that I could stick with my agnosticism. But ultimately, I realized I couldn’t, that it was so compelling,” Collins told Rubenstein.
Francis Collins, “The Language of God” (2007)
C.S. Lewis was and is one of my favorite authors and helped to really expand my ideas of Christianity after I got saved.
You forgot, have relationships with family and friends and spouses, procreate, experience life’s major and minor events (both good and bad), then the afterlife (for those of us who believe in it).
There is a move to claim that all faiths are equal; all paths lead to the same place.
One other thing that is unique to Christianity and is at the core of our belief —
The selfless act of a “person” who suffered horrible torturous pain that, in the end resulted in his death, was tortured and ridiculed by the same people that he sacrificed his life for.
Total selflessness.
Each of the major religions have different beliefs but none (that I know of) have this core belief. Christ was a savior and example to us. It also shows us that there is more to this existence on Earth and this give us Hope. Hope can motivate people; Hope can move mountains.
Thank you for the great post!
At minimum, they’d be agnostic. That I can believe in.
However, many atheists have a vendetta which makes them angry and “militant” and therefor cannot be agnostic. It is a religion to them.
Interestingly, many agnostics and even atheists seek the truth but for whatever reason chose not to believe.
Faith is not an easy thing... it requires a “Leap.” A Leap towards Faith and a Leap away from Faith.
‘
Many people believe that if they ignore God or don’t believe He exists, that they also get to decide what happens after they die, never considering that they may not be the boss of it.
After all, they will be dead. Someone else may be in charge.
Universalism. Another attempt to replace Christ and create a global political false religion of which elite financiers will be the priesthood.
Exactly.
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