Transcript

I was always an atheist.

I have no memories of believing in God or even wondering if God might exist.

I, I never questioned that.

To me, a strict atheist, materialist worldview just It seemed so obvious to me that it was correct.

I think I must have inherited this from my dad.

My dad was an atheist at the time, although he didn't raise me to be an atheist per se, as much as he raised me to seek truth and question assumptions.

No matter who tells you, you know, don't, don't ever accept something as true just because someone says that it's true, even if it's coming from me.

You have to find your own answers.

But to me, atheism, it, it just seemed obvious that it was true, and my dad and I really bonded on that.

And when I was in, I don't know, fourth or fifth grade, my nighttime reading that I would read with my dad, we alternated between Nancy Drew Mysteries and Carl Sagan.

Uh, my experiences were mostly negative.

I grew up in the Bible Belt where Christianity had largely become a cultural thing, and I know there were probably many wonderful true believers out there, but as a, a sensitive little kid who wanted to fit in, it was very hurtful to me when I wasn't invited to the sleepovers, I wasn't invited to certain events because I wasn't a churchgoer.

I was rejected socially because of that.

And, and that's really painful when you're in sixth grade and have the bad hair and, and you just want to fit in.

And, and in fact, one time, I went to a camp where I thought we were just gonna be doing horseback riding and waterskiing.

I mean, the brochures showed kids, you know, roasting marshmallows by the campfire.

And I get there, and this camp counselor corners me and says, You must accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

And I couldn't help but think, Uh, the brochures for this camp didn't say anything about re- religious interrogation.

There were no pictures of inquisitions in, in the glossy brochures.

And what they didn't understand was I didn't know who Jesus Christ was.

Before they pressured me into accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, they never stopped to tell me who Jesus Christ is.

Not that I would have believed it.

Like I mean, it would've been-

It would've been a useless conversation.

It would've been kind of a useless conversation, but they took it very personally when I when they said, Will you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?

and I said, No.

They took it really personally.

Yep.

And I think what they didn't understand is I'd never heard a compelling case for Jesus Christ.

In college, I became just a loudmouth, obnoxious atheist, and I remained that way.

And then after college, I got a job at a high-tech company, and I met the guy who is now my husband.

And it wasn't until we had been dating, like three or four months when I found out not only did he believe in God, but he considered himself a Christian.

And, and this was shocking to me because I thought, He's so smart.

Like, smart people can't be Christians, right?

I mean, that, that never happens.

And, I, I mean, he was so smart, in fact.

He was raised by a single mother, grew up very, very poor.

I mean, his mother often couldn't run the heat in the winter, they were so poor.

But she had heard of schools like Yale and Harvard, and she told him, If you want to get out of poverty, you have to go to one of these schools.

And so, having no connections, knowing nothing about it, he ended up going to Yale undergrad, graduating in three years with honors, Columbia Law School, and Stanford Business School.

Smart guy.

So when I heard that he was a Christian, it was shocking to me.

It was absolutely shocking.

And people are often surprised that we could have been dating that long, four or five months before this came out, but what they don't understand is that even though I was technically an atheist and Joe was technically a kind of lapsed Baptist, he, he didn't pray, he didn't go to church or anything like that, we both essentially had the same god, and that was money and worldly success and, and having the right lifestyle.

Essentially, we had our religion.

We worshiped at the same idol.

And that's why, you know, our religious beliefs honestly didn't come up very often.

I always felt like I'm almost happy, and I will be as soon as I get that next thing.

So we've got the travel, we've got the, the beautiful loft, but I just need to do this one thing in my career, and then I'm going to be completely happy.

It was a never-ending quest for the one last thing that was going to make me happy.

So while I was living the high life, doing the travel, living downtown, all the, you know, all this amazing stuff, in the back of my mind, there was an awareness that there was a certain aspect of my atheistic beliefs that I had never really dealt with.

So when I was in, I think, fourth or fifth grade, I went fossil hunting with my father, that we were amateur paleontologists.

We owned some property where there was a creek and there were all these amazing fossils that you could usually find if, if you looked.

And I'd done that my whole life.

And then one time, I, I can't remember exactly how old I was, but let's say fourth, fifth grade, I found a fossil.

And I had always thought of it like the fossils are the dead things, I'm the alive thing, and that's how it will always be.

This is the permanent state of things.

And I looked at this creature that had once been alive and had now been dead for so long, for millions of years.

And I realized that my fate was no different than its fate, that my fate was the same fate as all the fossils.

And suddenly it occurred to me that all of my memories, all of my emotions, my, my loves, everything that mattered in my life was destined to be extinguished, with nothing left of it, at the moment of my death.

And I, I tried to find meaning in life in, in light of those circumstances.

I knew other atheists who somehow did find meaning in their lives, even in light of that, but I couldn't get there.

I never found a way to find ultimate meaning in life from the, from the atheistic worldview, because people would say something like, Well, you can have an impact on the world.

You can have an impact on future generations.

And I'd say, Okay, but what about when the last human is gone and the sun has become a red giant and has swallowed up the earth, and the earth is a smoldering crisp?

Then does it matter?

I don't think it does.

I mean, there is At, at some point if all And to quote Bertrand Russell, If, if all the heroism, all the labors of the ages are nothing more than the chemical reactions in our brain and are destined to just evaporate into nothingness, then no, I don't see how you get meaning in the human life out of that.

And the way I, I handled that as I In young adulthood and, and through college was not very admirable.

I mean, basically, I just I decided to ignore it.

I mean, there, there was this fatalistic sense of, like, I, I know my life doesn't matter.

And, and honestly, even suicide didn't seem that unreasonable in that worldview.

I mean, my I, I looked at it like, when you die, all the meaning in your life is, is multiplied by zero, and so it doesn't really matter when that happens.

You still get zero in the end.

And so d- I just sort of moved forward with this view of saying, you know, Well, I'm, I'm not gonna commit suicide, so I, I guess I'm just gonna find some way to just have a lot of fun and forget about it.

And it's It's a really shallow, immature answer, but, but that is the state I was in.

When I was doing all the traveling and, and living downtown, somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I had never dealt with that issue.

The big crisis point for atheism came when I had a child.

That was the moment when I realized that atheism did not really have a lexicon to capture the fullness of the human experience.

I looked at my young child and I thought, Okay, so what is he in a strict atheist, materialist worldview?

And I thought, I don't believe that he is just a bunch of randomly evolved chemical reactions that came from nothing and will return to nothing.

I don't believe that the love that I feel for this child, and that has come into my life since I've been married and since I've had a family, is confined to nothing more than the chemical reactions in the human brain.

Now, it's important to note, I knew I was incentivized to think this way.

I was, I was very aware at the time, there was always that atheist voice in the back of my head that, frankly, is still there sometimes, that would say, You just want to believe that your son has a soul.

You just want to believe that th- this little baby is cosmically valuable.

And I thought about that, and, and I measured that, and I thought, Maybe I am incentivized to think that, that this atheistic view of what this child is is false, but I still think it's false, objectively.

I, I just had this sense that, that the love that we encounter in the human experience has a source beyond the chemical reactions in the human brain.

It actually happened a few weeks after my, my baby was born, and I think that's significant because I was at a real low point.

I was exhausted.

I hadn't slept more than a couple hours per night in, in weeks.

And, you know, I'd always heard of religious conversions happening at low points, and I took that to mean that, yeah, people get desperate so they start clinging to fairytales.

But suddenly when I was in a low point and questioning atheism, it, it occurred to me, you know, maybe conversions happen in low points because you're finally a little humble.

All my life I had been so prideful.

I just You know, having good health and a good job and a good education, I was very prideful, and I do think that that prevented me from asking honest questions about my worldview.

One day I walked into a bookstore.

I was not there to find anything religious.

At this point I considered myself agnostic, and I thought that that's how it would always be.

I'd begun dabbling in Buddhism because I live in Austin and it's required by law that we all dabble in Buddhism at some point.

And I, I never expected my religious exploration to go any further than that.

And I saw this book, literally just kinda stumbled across it.

I'd never been in the Christianity section of a bookstore or a library in my life, except for when I was in fourth grade.

Once I went into the Christianity section and I took all the Bibles in, in our school library and I put them in the fiction section 'cause I thought I was so edgy.

So, I'd never been back in the Christianity section since then.

And I saw this book called The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, and it said that this guy was a former atheist.And to me, that was so obviously a joke.

I mean, atheists can't convert to Christianity.

It's impossible.

If you have ever seen the world through the rational, reasonable lens of atheism, you don't go believing in fairy tales.

I mean, that's impossible.

So I picked up the book just to see where he gave the tell that he was never really an atheist.

I'd heard other former atheists' testimonies, and they There was always some giveaway that they were never really an atheist.

They'd say something like, Oh, I felt shackled by sin in my atheistic years, and I'd say like, Oh, atheists don't believe in sin, so you're lying.

So, I thought I would play that game with Strobel's book, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that I believed him and his little intro.

Obviously, I thought his new Christian religion was all false, but I did believe that he was actually an atheist.

And so I decided to give the book a shot.

I, I just scanned through it.

And it's important to note that a few months before, I had actually said a prayer.

I didn't even know how you pray.

I mean, how do you distinguish between talking to yourself and talking to the unknown thing that may or may not be out there?

You don't know You don't even know if it's one thing, many things.

So I'd said this bumbling prayer, just saying, If anyone or anything is out there, I'm, I'm open to it.

So it was in this state of openness that I flipped through The Case for Christ.

I could have found the same book a year before and I would have laughed at it and thrown it away.

But I was in a state of openness, and I read through it.

And, and the author said, Lee Strobel said in the book, he said, I'm not trying to convince you to convert to Christianity on the spot.

He said, I'm just trying to convince you that there is enough evidence for Jesus Christ, that it's worth looking into a little further.

It, it's worth exploring this.

And, uh, at the time, I didn't think the book was perfect.

There were some things that just seemed like his case was weak, but there were a few things that I thought were interesting.

For example, he pointed out that, you know, Christianity spread like wildfire.

Starting in first century Palestine and then beyond, you know, you saw these Jewish people who had held onto their sacred traditions through all sorts of persecution, through thousands of years.

And, and in Strobel's book, he makes the case that you have this kind of lower class guy come from a lower class region.

He's executed along with thousands of other people that year, and yet you see all of these Jews willing to give up these religious and social institutions that they had held onto for thousands of years, through unspeakable persecution.

And then it spreads like wildfire throughout the globe, despite the fact that not only was there not a worldly payoff to converting to Christianity at that time, it, it often meant persecution or even death, not just for you, but for your family if you converted to Christianity.

And Strobel said, How do you explain that?

The And he said, You know, what we as Christians think is that those people saw Jesus risen from the dead.

And I thought, Maybe I should look into this a little more.

The I, I didn't think Christianity was true, but I was intrigued.

So I was intrigued by Christianity, so I bought a Bible.

I grew up in the Bible, but I know you buy Bibles if, if you wanna know about Christianity.

I had no idea which one to get, so I just chose the one that looked least like a Bible.

It had a plain black cover.

Now, you have to understand, I did not go to Sunday school growing up.

I didn't have a Bible.

I'd never read the Bible.

I knew nothing about the Bible.

Even in college, I, I was into this idea that we lived in a post-Christian culture and Christianity was irrelevant, so I intentionally avoided studying the Bible, even from a historical perspective, because I wanted to make the case that Christianity is dead and gone and nobody even needs it anymore.

So I get this Bible.

And it's a book, right?

You start, you start books on page one and Jesus is the main character, so he's got to come in by page 30 or 40.

So I'm in Deuteronomy, reading Deuteronomy like, Where are the fishermen?

Where is Jesus?

What is going on here?

And it was a nightmare.

And I was so confused, and, and Joe told me to skip ahead to the New Testament.

My husband, who'd grown up Baptist, he, he knew, he knew about the Bible, so he said, Skip to the New Testament and it will all make sense.

So I skip to the New Testament.

I expected the New Testament and the Bible as a whole to be kind of all like the Ten Commandments.

I thought there would be some action items, some bullet points.

I thought it would end with a call to action, like, If, if you're convinced by this book, you know, here's what you do next.

But it was all stories.

I was so baffled by this book.

On the one hand, I, I was intrigued by this figure of Jesus Christ.

I was, I was intrigued by this Jesus guy that I was reading about in the Gospels, but I was baffled as to what I was supposed to be doing with this information, and I certainly didn't know how to interpret it.

You know, there, there's, there's this story where the, the rich guy is told that he has to give away everything he owns to follow Christ.

And I'm looking at my laptop thinking like, Really?

Everything?

I mean, Can, can I keep a few things?

And so I would ask Christians online, and they'd say, Oh, ha, no, Jesus was just talking to that one guy.

You can keep your laptop.

It's fine.

But then I'd read the Mary and Martha story and, you know, where, where we learn that you're supposed to put the Lord above, you know, trivial things, and they'd say, Oh, well, no, that story was for everyone.

And I thought, Where is your answer key?

'Cause, 'cause I think I'm missing some sort of interpretation part of the Bible at the back, 'cause I don't know how to interpret these verses.

And I certainly did not see a clear case for the Christian moral code in the Bible.

I had questions like, okay, I hear Christians are opposed to abortion.

I hear that they're opposed to euthanasia.I read the entire New Testament and looked pretty thoroughly through the Old Testament, and I did not see a clear case for the Christian moral code.

And again, I heard these statements like, Well, we Christians can agree to disagree on, on what our moral code says.

And again, I came back to this sentiment, no, you can't, because if you say that this god you worship is the source of all that is good, then you do not have the luxury of disagreeing about what is good.

So, it was very clear to me I had to know what the Christian moral code taught.

And, and so I would say, you know, I'd, I'd, I'd go to these online You know, I, I didn't have any Christian friends .

Being a loudmouth atheist doesn't tend to leave you with a wide Christian social circle.

So I'd go online.

I would ask these Christians questions like, um, You know, you say that your religion doesn't believe in euthanasia.

I don't really see a Biblical case for this either way.

And so they would come back Well, first of all, one Christian would say, Oh, yeah, e- euthanasia is okay sometimes within a Christian worldview, and here are the scripture verses that back up my claim.

The Christian over here would say, Oh, no.

We think that eu- euthanasia's a grave evil, and here are the scripture verses that back up my claim.

I saw this over and over again, Christians constantly disagreeing about what the Bible says, but they would be, both be convinced they were right, and they both had scripture verses to back up their claims.

And, you know, these people, it's l- like when I was a child, they were telling me they wanted me to follow Jesus Christ.

They did not have agreement about who Jesus Christ is.

It seemed to me like all these Christians in modern America were kind of projecting an image of who they wanted Christ to be, selecting some scripture verses to back that up, and worshipping that.

These people were not worshipping the same Jesus Christ.

The other thing that was very concerning to me is when they would tell me, Find out for yourself what Christianity teaches about abortion and about all this stuff.

And they'd say, Just, you know, look at what the scriptures say, but be sure to read the New Testament verses in light of the Old Testament verses so that you can interpret them in context with one another.

And I said, Do you guys not have jobs?

Because , like, when am I going to find the time to read the entire Bible, cover to cover, and understand it so thoroughly that I can be a scripture scholar and know exactly what it says and know how to interpret these verses in context with one another?

The other thing I saw is that this system they were proposing to me requires literacy.

The world literacy rate is only 80%, and that is astronomically higher than it has ever been in the past.

There were many times and places when the vast majority of people did not know how to read.

So, I saw this system that not only does it require an enormous amount of free time, which I didn't have, uh, it requires high reading comprehension skills, literacy, and the printing press.

You know, before the printing press, the it, it was impossible that the average family could own their own Bible, let alone a concordance or a Biblical encyclopedia or, or any documents like that.

I looked around, and I thought, I see this system that, that people are proposing to me.

It doesn't work universally.

I, I see a system here that seems very well-meaning, but I don't see a system that works in all times and places.

At, at that point, it was clear to me Christianity was bunk.

Didn't work out.

I'd given it a shot, and I was, I was surprisingly sad, actually, because I from reading the New Testament, I had felt surprisingly drawn to this figure of Jesus Christ.

And, you know, the old, the old atheist in me kept saying, It, it don't go with how you feel.

It doesn't matter how you feel.

You have to look at evidence.

You have to see if you have a system that works here.

But I couldn't help it.

I just I was so intrigued by this Jesus Christ guy, and I wanted to know more about him, and I wanted to find him.

And, and there was a part of me that thought maybe you could encounter Jesus Christ in a real way.

But I had to admit that this religion was not checking out.

It just didn't make sense.

So, I, uh by this time, I had started a blog.

A- again, you know, uh, being a loudmouth atheist doesn't tend to leave you with a lot of Christian friends .

So I started a blog because I thought maybe there'll be some Christians on the internet .

So, uh, I didn't have any readers to this blog, so I went to some atheist forums where, uh, Christians and atheists would debate, and I hand-picked the Christians who did the most amazing job of defending their faith to atheists.

These people knew more about science than the atheists.

They knew more about history than the atheists.

They knew m- more about philosophy than the atheists.

I mean, they these people could just make mincemeat of atheistic arguments.

What I didn't know at the time, I chose only a few Christians from the group that I saw debating.

To a man, I had chosen all Catholics.

I did not mean to that certainly was not my intention, and I didn't even know that yet at the time.

So I go onto my blog, and I say, Guys, your religion is totally bunk.

I said, I don't know how to tell you this, but you have all of these Christians out there who are worshiping different Jesuses.

They, e- they're I, I try to ask them what the most basic moral code is, and you have all these different propositions of what Christians believe.

Everybody has scripture to back up their claims.

Guys, your religion is a hot mess.

I mean , you even have to admit this.

It doesn't make any sense, and so I'm not I, I can't ever become a Christian.

I'm not gonna be exploring this religion anymore.

I thought the response was going to be, uh, along the lines of them saying- yeah, you're right.

Do you have directions to the nearest Buddhist temple?

But it wasn't.

So all of these people, who I did not realize were Catholic, came back and said, Maybe there's another way.

They said, What if, before Jesus went up to heaven, he founded a church, just one church that he instilled with his own authority?

And just like he did with the writers of the Bible, what if he took imperfect people and used them as tools to convey perfect truth?

You know, what, what he did with the writers of the Bible, what if he didn't stop doing that?

What if he founded a church that to this day he uses, that he, he uses these imperfect people in the church to speak his truth for all times and all places?

And I thought, Yes.

Yes, that makes so much sense because that would explain how people can come to know God who are illiterate or who have poor reading comprehension skills.

That explains how people could find the, the reliable truth about Christianity before the printing press.

They could find it through this church.

It also explains You know, I'd, I'd seen all of these different ideas about who God is, but if there is this one church and it does have his own authority to answer questions about who he is and what he stands for, then yes, you, you can get one answer to that simple question, who is Jesus Christ?

I said, Yes.

This theory, yes, yes, yes.

And they said, That's Catholicism.

And I said, No, no, no.

Like, I can't become Catholic.

What am I, insane?

There's no way.

But, but I was stuck because that was the only viable option within Christianity.

I didn't see another way this religion could work.

So, I had nowhere else to turn.

This All these other theories didn't make sense.

This was the one theory within Christianity that even might make sense.

And so I began exploring the Catholic moral code.

I began looking into the church's explanation for what it is and what it does, and I found the most internally consistent belief system I had ever encountered.

I also found it that it was imminently reasonable.

I, I thought it was gonna be all this fairy tale mumbo jumbo, but it was so reasonable.

And I, I once heard a great analogy where, where this philosopher said that Christianity is like the box top to the puzzle pieces of life, that it, it gives you the box top that helps you put the puzzle pieces together, and that is exactly what I had found.

With, with atheism, it was like I had a box top that was almost right.

It I, I could put together a lot of pieces, but then, you know, you'd try to jam these two together and they're not fitting, and it wasn't quite coming together.

And when I began looking into the Catholic worldview, set aside the atheist box top, bring the Catholic one over, suddenly, all the puzzle pieces started fitting together.

I, I could suddenly make sense of my life, of the human experience.

Every single part of the human experience came together for me when I began looking at the world through this Catholic worldview.

And the thing that intrigued both me and my husband the most was what the Catholic Church taught about abortion and contraception.

I had always been pro-choice.

I thought that access to abortion was the key to women's freedom, and I saw anyone who opposed abortion as opposing women's freedom.

Like most people of my generation, I saw contraception as just a universal good that all people need.

It has no downside.

It, it's just a necessary resource, like air or water.

So when I first heard that the Catholic Church opposed it, honestly, I thought it was an urban legend .

And so I, I cannot even convey what a shock it was when I heard the Catholic Church's explanation for what it teaches about abortion and about contraception, and I realized it's totally reasonable.

It makes sense.

And not only does it make sense, but this is what women's freedom looks like.

So what I realized when I began looking at what Catholics believe on this subject is that the reason I had always understood abortion to be key to women's freedom is because, you know, like everyone else of my generation, I had just taken a pro-contraception worldview for granted.

You know, I went to public school, like, you learn in all the health classes how important contraception is.

I was part of this generation where young women were told that even if you are not ready to have a baby, even if you are positive that you are not ready to become a mother, go ahead and engage in the act that creates babies anyway.

Just use some contraception and hope it works out.

Now, all too often, as, as way too many of my friends would find out the hard way, that contraception doesn't work out so well.

You know, actual use failure rates of contraception are abysmal.

I read in the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood's research on This, this is coming from Planned Parenthood.

I found this amazing stat that a woman taking a contraceptive with a 98% effectiveness rate has a 70% chance of experiencing an unexpected pregnancy if she uses that contraceptive method over 10 years.And this is what, what I saw as a young woman.

I saw so many women who were, know, college-educated, intelligent, responsible young women, they were following everything society told them to do.

They were being responsible sexually, and then, you know, th- by using contraception, and then something goes wrong, something didn't work out, they end up with a positive pregnancy test, and they felt like they had no choice.

I have known many women who ended up in abortion clinics.

Not one of them ever felt like she really had a choice.

And when I thought about what had happened here, it was because they had been sold this lie that you can and should and i- it's a good thing to engage in the act that creates babies even if you feel like you are not ready at all to have a baby.

W- I, I realized, you know, what the Catholic Church teaches, it's difficult, it's inconvenient, but it's true.

And the Catholic Church was the only institution in the world that was willing to tell women the truth.

So I read this encyclical, it's that's a, a document th- that a pope writes, i- by, by Pope Paul VI.

It's called Humanae Vitae, which means on human life.

This was written in the '60s, and he made some fascinating predictions.

First of all, he upheld the church's teaching that the Catholic Church is opposed to contraception.

And one thing that I didn't know is that every single Christian church was opposed to contraception.

This w- was very much a historical Christian stance until around the 1930s.

As public opinion started to change, all the other churches, most of the other churches changed their stance on this issue.

The Catholic Church was the only one that did not go back on this historical Christian teaching.

So, in On Human Life, this, this encyclical by Pope Paul VI, he made some predictions about what would happen if there was widespread acceptance of contraception.

One of the things is that he suggested that the divorce rate would go up.

Everyone laughed at him.

They said, you know, Look at this, look at this pope.

Get with the times.

I mean, obviously, it's going to help marriages if couples can engage in marital intimacy and not have to worry about having too many kids.

Well, sure enough, the divorce rate skyrocketed starting immediately after you started to see the laws and the, the public opinion become in favor of contraception.

The other thing that Pope Paul VI said in, in On Human Life is that it would lead to the objectification of women.

And I had an interesting moment where I, I was sitting on my bed reading this On Human Life encyclical, and I had some women's magazines spread out in front of me, and I realized that every single one had the word sexy somewhere on the cover, sometimes more than once.

All of these articles were how t- how to please men sexually, how to be sexy.

The women were dressed, you know, in unbelievably scantily clad, you know, showing off everything, and I thought, This isn't how my grandmothers dressed.

This isn't how my great-grandmothers dressed.

This is not how women have ever been encouraged to dress in human history.

And I had always bought into these ideas that, oh, that's 'cause women were repressed and, you know, that's it, it was an anti-woman thing that women didn't used to, you know, let it all hang out.

And then I thought, You know, as a woman, I don't think I want to be told that wearing micro mini shorts and a, and a tube top is like how I should be dressing.

Like, I wish the standard of style was frankly a little more forgiving.

I thought, This is actually very anti-woman, this, this new image of women, where we all have to have perfect bodies with not a flaw on them and wear these fashions where e- everything is just hanging out all the time.

And I thought, When did this style of dress change?

When did it go from women dressing in a, a fashionable but dignified manner to having to look like Stripper Barbie all the time?

And I realized it was right around when our society accepted artificial contraception.

And, and in Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI predicted back in the '60s, he said, If we accept artificial contraception, men will start to look at women as objects, women will start to feel pressure to make themselves objects for men.

And I looked from that encyclical to the magazines on my bed, and I realized it happened.

He was right.

So, after I realized that what the Catholic Church teaches about abortion and contraception was not only true but the key to women's freedom, I went to my blog and I was telling everybody, Oh, isn't this amazing?

Oh, it's there's this thing, it's called natural family planning.

You should all use it.

And the Catholic Church has this thing called the theology of the body and you all need to be reading about it.

It's so beautiful.

It's so amazing.

And I think God was up in heaven kind of laughing and saying, Watch what's gonna happen next.

So, I was pregnant with my second child and I ended up being diagnosed with a deep vein thrombosis, which is a blood clot in a major vein.

It turns out that the blood clot was caused by a genetic clotting disorder that I inherited from both parents.

It's very severe and, and it's also very rare that I would have both copies of the gene.

And this, uh, this clotting disorder is exacerbated by pregnancy, and it, it is because I was pregnant that I got the clot.

So I had all of these doctors, all of these medical professionals telling me that I absolutely had to go the route of sterilization or contraception.

So suddenly, the person who had been all rah-rah cheerleader for the church's teaching, uh, against contraception s- just became the poster child for contraception .

And one of my doctors sat down with me.

I wasn't even Catholic yet.

I, I just, I said, I'm not gonna be able to go the route of sterilization or even contraception because I'm reading about Catholicism, which was the weakest proclamation of faith ever.

And, and this doctor looked down at my chart, and he looked at me, and he said, You're insane.

You can't do this.

You're the exception, and if this Church tells you that you can't use artificial contraception, then, then it is oppressive.

It is, it is dangerous to your health.

You are the exception, is what I heard over and over again, and it forced me to face the question, do these rules really matter?

I mean, couldn't I be Catholic and just kind of blow off the ones that I don't like?

And, and it, and it also made me realize, how much do I believe this is true?

Do I believe that this is true enough to turn my whole life upside down?

I had quite a few people say to me, Just become Catholic, but don't follow that one thing.

You know, you're the exception.

But I realized that the whole theory behind this Church is that its teachings are guided by God.

The whole idea is that, just like with the writers of the Bible, God is using imperfect people to convey perfect truth.

And so to say that you know better than the Church on this or any issue is to say that you know better than God.

Uh, so if it turned out that this was, that this teaching is wrong and that it's bad and that it's not from God, then, then that means that this Church isn't guided by God.

And if it's not guided by God, then there's no need to listen to anything it says, starting with its claim that it chose the correct books for the canon of the Bible.

But if it is guided by God, then to say that you know better than the Church is to say that you know better than God.

And so I was put in this position where I had to ask this question.

These rules are going to turn my life upside down.

They're, they're going to be so difficult, but, you know, based on my, this atheist , you know, truth-seeking upbringing, I came back to the fundamental question of my life, which was, but is it true?

And, and what I came to see is that not only was it true, but, but that it was, it was in fact good.

In order to treat the clot that I had, I had to take an FDA category X drug, 90% chance of serious birth defects if you conceive while you're on this medication.

And I had to be on it for months.

And so of course everyone said, You have to use contraception.

You have to.

And I was even beginning to think, Maybe this Church's teachings are bad.

Maybe they do really mess up people's lives.

So I was looking around, Googling things like Catholic and the name of the drug and, and contraception, and I found a forum where a woman who was Catholic was, uh, on the same drug that I was on, and everyone told her, you know, Ignore that bad church.

It's, it's keeping you down.

Don't you know it's anti-woman?

Come on, go use contraception.

Get with the times.

So she did, and there was a post on the, on the forum a few months later.

Her contraception failed, as it so often does, and she found herself facing a positive pregnancy test while she was on this medication that has, again, 90% chance of severe birth defects.

And I realized how close I had come to being in that same situation.

No contraceptive method is 100%, and if you're really in a position where it is severely dangerous to, to your baby or to your health not to have a baby, the only way to avoid that is not to engage in the act that creates babies.

And it's totally inconvenient.

It's, nobody wants to hear that, but it's true, and the Catholic Church was the only institution that was willing to tell people that.

So once I realized that what the Church teaches about contraception and, and openness to life and using natural methods of, of pregnancy spacing was, was good and was true and was the key to women's freedom, when I went back to my doctors, and I said that I was not willing to use artificial contraception, and in fact, I had done my own research and had become convinced that there were ways to safely manage a pregnancy, and I, I might want to have future pregnancies Not, not that I had to as a Catholic.

It's, it's important that people understand you don't have to have a bunch of kids, you know, if, if you're Catholic, but I, I wanted to, and I had done my own research as part of exploring what the Church teaches, and I came to see that there are ways to manage this condition.

And suddenly these same doctors who had said, d- done all this doom and gloom prophesying about what would happen if I were to have another pregnancy, they said, Oh, yeah, you just have to take this medication and, you know, it'll actually probably be fine.

And, and what I found is that there are often many more gray areas in these kind of medical diagnoses than we're told about.

I, I think that my doctors, to their credit, were scared about what may, might happen.

They were worried about risk of liability, and so they were pushing me towards the, from their perspective, cleanest, easiest option.

But when I came to them and said, I don't want to go this route.

I'm not comfortable with it for a lot of reasons, I found that they were actually quite willing to work with me and willing to talk to me about some alternative methods of treatment that I had not been told about before when 'Cause contraception was just the easiest answer.What I found about using natural family planning instead of artificial contraception for child spacing is it's really more of an alternative lifestyle than, than an alternative to contraception.

It is completely effective.

There are these wonderful modern methods that have sometimes an even higher effectiveness rate than artificial contraception, but it's a mistake to see it as an alternative to that, because it requires that you approach human sexuality from an entirely different perspective.

It is a sacrifice-based method of child spacing.

You don't get to do whatever you want, you know, whenever you want, and that is the big difference between natural family planning and contraception.

Sometimes people ask is, Well, if, if natural family planning is so effective, then isn't it just the same thing as contraception?

And my answer to that is always, Well, if it's the exact same thing, then why aren't you using it?

Because it's cheaper.

It, it avoids embarrassment in the grocery store checkout.

And, and I think that when we explore that question of if it's the same thing, why aren't people using it, you see that it's because it requires sacrifice that makes it so different.

And what I saw c- you know, coming from my background, is that a society only respects human life to the extent that it respects the act that creates human life.

And, and that's why this sacrifice-based system makes so much sense, this system that calls for every single person, single or married, no matter who they're attracted to, every single person is called to make sacrifices in the name of respecting human life.

When people ask me, Why would anyone become Catholic?

there are two sides of me that want to answer.

One is the old atheist side that has a very simple answer that just says, Because it's true.

And then there's the other side of me that, the sort of fun-loving side, that says, Because being Catholic is the most full experience of the human life.

Sometimes people ask me if my life is better or worse now that I'm Catholic, and I, I never knew how to answer the question.

And eventually, I came to see that that's because it, it was the wrong question.

It's, it, it's not that my life is better or worse now that I'm Catholic.

My life has started now that I'm Catholic.