An Atheist Reads the Book of Proverbs.
There was a time not long ago, when any reasonable Christian would have called me an atheist.
Then, one day, a pastor said something to me that I had never heard before. He said something like this from the pulpit, “If you are having faith issues, do these eight things.”
My ears perked up. I think faith issues pretty well described the problem I was having.
I wanted to understand God. I wanted to have faith. I just couldn’t turn my brain off long enough to stop asking irrelevant questions: What happened at the Council of Nicaea? What was the role of Constantine in the forming of Christianity? Why is the King James Bible, the Bible authorized by the British Crown, the trusted Bible? What happened to all those books that the Catholics consider part of the Bible, that Luther said were good for Christians to read in his 1534 translation, that were included in the 1611 King James Version, but have since just disappeared?
Well, my forlorn and tired ears were perked up as this wizened preacher spoke about his eight things for people with face issues to do. I could not tell you what the other seven items on the list were. But I could tell you one of them was “spend more time in the Word.”
Well, I opened up the back of my Bible and looked at a checklist I had previously noticed. It described how to read the Bible in a year. You can get that same checklist at 55hours.org — so named because it only takes about 55 hours to read the Bible front-to-back, or less than 15 minutes a day to read it in a year. I have read through the Bible some 8 or 9 times now since I heard that sermon.
Though I heard many sermons, studied the Bible for years, descended into atheism and worse — through all that, the Bible did not start to come together for me until I was reading through it front-to-back for the third time. I would consider that a minimum investment for attempting to understand the Bible.
In time, I learned that no matter how many disputes I had with the King James Version, in its pages, I could find God.
I started that same day with Galatians, the appointed reading for the day. A handful of weeks into this process, I said to myself something like this, “I really don’t believe any of this crap. I mean, what am I really doing here?”
And then an idea came to mind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poet, mystic, and literary critic, a man whose writing I loved, and arguably not one of my better influences in life had a term, “temporary suspension of disbelief.”
I have long loved movies. It was my practice to sit down for a movie and allow the ne’er-do-wells of Hollywood to “run” through my head for two or three hours at a time unchecked.
While reading the wisest of wise books, I had my defense
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
