From Radical Atheist To Catholic (My Story)

This easter Saturday I will be baptised as a Catholic in Dublin! This baptism is really the fruition of a spiritual journey which has taken my whole thirty years of life thus far, but in this talk I tried to condense that journey into a testimony to share some of the main points along the way.

Essentially, all the work on this Substack and the Youtube has been leading up to this decision: Charting the failure of the mechanistic philosophy, the resulting meaning crisis, and the variety of jigs and reels which vie as a replacement worldview to re-home people in the liminal web and beyond. I did for awhile buy into the idea we were going to make ‘something new’, a “religion that is not a religion”. But when I finally understood Christianity and particularly it’s neoplatonic underpinnings, this project seemed entirely unnecessary and to be honest, foolish. Hopefully this talk might be of some use to you on your own spiritual quest, or offer hope for those who worry about the declining fortunes of Christianity and Catholicism (although these seem to be reversing).

Unfortunately because the talk was only five minutes, I couldn’t really get into the philosophical nitty gritty of my decision and the rational behind the move. However, over the next few months, and throughout the Plato’s Republic course, I will share a few essays explaining the logic behind my conversion and the many, MANY, blocks which I had to overcome to become a Catholic (and coming from an extreme atheism since birth, I probably had a lot more blocks than most of you!)

I’m not advocating a nostalgic return to a perceived christian empire, but rather a taking up of the cross, the profound transformation that is offered by christ, and that this transformation is the way of out of the meaning crisis (or the second fall as the Pageau brothers refer to it). Albeit like me, we all need a lot of explaining and practising and understanding to see how the ancients saw and get over the blocks of the modern mind to re-enter christendom, which I think is the main point of my online platform now - straddling the gap between modernity and christendom with some help from the Greeks.

In entering the church and Catholicism, my personal motto is St Augustine’s Maxim of “faith seeking understanding”. I need enough faith in the tradition to offer the time, attention and sacrifices to learn and transform enough to get the understanding. It’s a bit like going to the gym, you don’t get results immediately but if you have faith in the plan and process then the results will follow. But in my limited experience so far, if you look honestly and humbly, the treasures are there to be found:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)

Talk Transcript:

“Good morning, my name is Mahon and today I’m going to give you my story. By all rights I shouldn’t be here. I was born as an atheist, was never baptised or made communion or anything. I was a particularly vicious atheist and delighted in telling my friends that “God isn’t real” and that religion is all made up nonsense. As a teenager I listened to the new atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and parroted their arguments to anyone who would listen. One time in particular I remember sitting very smugly in religion class in school when the Gideons came with bibles and I was the only one in the class who refused to take one, even though they were free. I was an evangelist for atheism and yet here I am, at the age of thirty, becoming a Catholic? What happened?

I was pretty happy in my assumed atheism probably until college. Where I met Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who famously proclaimed that “God is dead”. Nietzsche worried about the problem of nihilism after the death of God, that life would become meaningless and morality impossible because all would be permitted. Certainly in college my life took on that shape, drinking every weekend to escape the despair and alienation. Nietszche’s solution to the death of god was to become the “ubermensch”, the person who was capable of creating their own values and laws. And I tried that briefly, but quickly ended up totally destroyed from binge-drinking and some life-threatening hangovers. I learned you can proclaim to be a Moral relativist but you can’t ignore the consequences of your actions forever. So Nietszche’s solution didn’t work out for me.

Modern philosophy had seemed to only make my problems worse so after college I turned to modern psychology in the hopes of something better, particularly the work of Swiss Psychologist Carl Jung. And Jung had a story about what happened in the west after the so-called death of God, that the scientific revolution had split the world in two, and that this split manifested in the minds of western people like me and you. That we had all become scientifically minded in a way but still acted out morality and rituals which we could no longer justify or understand. We had fallen into a profound cognitive dissonance in the west, and I could feel that in my own struggling journey - unable to believe in God, but not doing so well without him either?

It was one insight of Jung in particular that destroyed my lingering atheism for good. He described the Greek Polytheistic Gods as personification of emotions that could possess our minds. For example, Ares, the God of war, was a personification of anger, a powerful evolved sub-personality that could become activated and drive you to do terrible things if you weren’t careful. For some reason, it was like a key turning in a lock and suddenly I could see the meaning of these stories and myths clearly, I could translate them into things which I could understand and which I knew were real and which addressed problems which I was struggling with today. I wondered, if I could understand polytheism in this way, then what about Monotheism? And that one monotheism in particular, I’d say such terrible things about…

I like to think if I have one virtue it’s the ability to admit when I’m wrong and the more I studied monotheism, the more I realised I was really wrong. The way I was taught, it was that a big guy with a beard lived in the sky and gave out if you didn’t eat your dinner - a kind of adult santa claus. But the more I studied monotheism through the Greeks in Plato, the Hebrews in the old testament and finally, begrudgingly, the church fathers like Saint Augustine and Aquinas, the more I became convinced this was the greatest philosophy humanity had ever come up with. Ironically, the philosophy of life which I was searching for was in the last place I wanted to look, the Christian tradition…the thought dawned on me, “oh no, maybe I was becoming a Christian…”

But I still wasn’t willing to convert, even though I could intellectually justify monotheism now, there was still more to Christianity, like the church and the tradition and of course, Christ himself? How could I reconcile myself to Christ after all the terrible things I said about him? During the time when I was trying to avoid these thoughts, a certain global pandemic came along which didn’t leave room to avoid things anymore. I’ve heard of our confinement in covid described as being trapped in the “involuntary monastery”, and for me that was quite literal. I quit drinking and it felt like a kind of death, a loss of my old self and a clearing away for something new. For the first time, I started to read the bible, which I’d rejected all those years ago, and finally started to connect to the characters like Moses and Job and Christ himself. I could finally feel these stories weren’t something foreign but relatable. In some way, they were my own story.

After covid myself and my fiance decided to do the Camino De Santiago, the full 800 km from France to the edge of Spain. Me because I was wrestling with this Christian spiritual journey and for her because she really likes walking. I guess in some ways on that journey I first starting to pretend to be a christian, listening to the New Testament, going to mass and blessings but finally being moved by Christianity and christians, that resistance I had, that critical atheistic voice, just got quieter and quieter until it was gone, and all that was left was joy and peace - I could feel love again, a love like I’d never known existed. A love that came like a friendly extended hand from the sky, one which I definitely didn’t deserve, but which came anyway. It was the first time I ever experienced the Grace of God.

As we walked I imagined Christ in front of us, moving between the trees, and I’d catch glimpses of him. I think I wanted to see him face to face always, that’s the atheist dream, to look god in the eye before saying ‘alright I’ll sign the contract!’ But recently I read St Gregory of Nyessa’s book The Life of Moses, and he talks about Moses in Exodus 33:18 when he wants to see God’s face but God will only allow him to see his back. St Gregory said the reason we see God’s back and not his face is because we are meant to follow him. So I decided that I would follow him and he brought me here, to become a Catholic, and to tell people my story, to help them return home, like he did for me.”

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