Most atheists I've known are more interested in telling people what they do or do not believe- usually in a rude or condescending manner- than to maintain those relationships. At that time, I had a fairly broad knowledge and was able to 'speak' the same language or jargon of someone whether they are into UFOs and crop circles or Christianity or psychology or folklore. I believed that my personal beliefs were none of anybody elses business. What I held was private and not for public consumption. When asked what I believed, I often told the person that I believed what he/she wanted to hear. I believed that there was really no such thing as Truth. Rather the notion of truth was manufactured by the individual and society. This reflected my idea that there was nothing above humanity. However, after a while, it became artificial and mundane to have to 'create' new truths over and over again. It is like the rat on the treadmill. He runs and runs and runs only to become exhausted. He then starts it all over again only to get back to this same feeling. So, if this 'truth' is not grounded in anything beyond my finite and imperfect self, it is nothing more than an illusion. Like a cute one-liner (such as Henny Youngman's "Take my wife...please")the first, second and third time you hear it, it might be funny or cute, but by the 500th time, it becomes quite annoying and irritating. If there is nothing beyond myself, then to continue this facade is useless. As I began to devote more and more of my readings to Humanist Existentialists, it became clearer that suicide is the only way out of this meaninglessness. However I was in for another setback. In my existentialist readings, I was informed that suicide was the 'coward's way out'- that we had to put up with our present despair.
At this time, I wanted a change and had decided to give Christianity another hearing. I would allow one of their own to give the case for Christianity. Wondering into a Christian bookstore, I found a book with the author pictured on the back cover which piqued my curiosity. This grey-haired old man with a goattee was dressed in a Swiss hiker's outfit. Well, sometimes it is the eccentric people who have something profound to bring to the table. I was not disappointed. After finishing The God who Is There by Francis Schaeffer, I was like a thirsty person who had just discovered a waterhole. Many Christians who I had asked about Schaeffer had never heard of him, but it was the so-called Jesus People who were familiar (some had learned from him personally) with him and suggested other authors such as C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Boenhoeffer and Saint Augustine.
Though at that time I was not yet a Christian, I did believe that Christianity was a far more coherent and able system than what I had previously held. I was a theist intelllectually. It wasn't untill I picked up Dietrich Boenhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship that it slapped me in the face. To be a follower of Christ was not just an iltellectual assent. Boenhoeffer wrote that when Jesus said to take up our cross and follow Him, He was bidding us to come and die. Die to past which I was still holding onto. Die to the lifestyle to which I was still clinging. Is it easy to be a Christian? Not at all. It is not something that can be humanly done, but God gives us the ability to do so. It is as if we have become new persons in Him. Also when we make that decision to follow Him, we become a deserter to the rank & file on the side of death to which we had previously shakled. You have now become their enemy and they will not stop at anything necessary to drag you down. But don't fear, you are now on the side of Life and all the powers in heaven are on your side. Though Satan and his minions of death may hurl trials at you, and thwartyou at times, in the end, you win! It took God Himself coming as a erson to die, taking upon Himself the sin of each person who would ask Him, and thus my eternal punishment was satisfied. It was only through this death of Jesus, that you can live! Are there ever times that we want to just 'give' it up? Of course there are, but such thoughts are just as much flighting, superficial notions as are the majority of occasional ideas of suicide as a solution to our problems in life. The book of James (New Testament) teaches us that the reason for the 'trials and temptations' are one of two sources and purposes: either God is using the seemingly unnecessary event(s) that we consider undesireable, to shape us into the desired likeness of what kind of person He had originally intended for us to be in the garden. Secondly, it could be that God is allowing Satan to strike out at us (within God's pre-set perimeters) in order that his intended destruction or harm of us, can turn on him and develop the resolve and maturity in us to stand against future schemes that Satan may try to throw at us later.