My Passion
Passion is something you love doing. Unlike a job, where you need to be paid for you to do it, a passion is something you would pay to do, if necessary. Needless to say, you would do it, gladly, and for free. It might not look like it, but my true passion is studying, preaching and teaching the Bible. Now, before you all fall off your chairs, let me share a screenshot from an old blog of mine circa 2007:
All my prior rantings have been about my issues with growing up illegitimate, my struggles through the different schools, my own rebellion against practically all manifestations of legitimate authority, but I've never really said what else happened.
I entered UP as a wide-eyed, Bible-quoting believer, but left it an angry atheist. It would take 6 more years before a turnaround happened.
The year was 2004, and I was newly married, jobless and penniless. Granted, many people fall into depths of despair and there have an encounter with the Divine, but that was not something I wanted. I left my faith in 2003 because of two main reasons: I felt that those who were supposed to be my "brothers and sisters in Christ" were nothing more than goody two-shoes hypocrites whose commitment were good only on Sunday morning, and I felt that Christianity was intellectually indefensible. During that time, it was a sort of hobby for me to debate with self-professed Christians, and that often ended up with me poking holes at their faith and ridiculing them for lack of a coherent response, except to say that "in their hearts, they believed." That was ridiculous: one could sincerely believe in a Santa Claus in the North Pole, complete with reindeer and a flying sleigh, but sincerity does not turn wishful thinking into reality. Thus, despite the emotional tug, I wanted to make sure I wasn't rushing back into some childish default mode. I wanted to know if the Bible, Jesus and God were for real, and if I would not become the butt of jokes among my atheist friends for worshiping some myth.
Thankfully, I found an old volume of Josh McDowell's EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT in an second-hand bookstore in Cebu. Josh was a former atheist who studied Christianity in order to disprove it, only to end up becoming not only a committed Christian but also a dedicated apologist and itinerant preacher.
The book contained the argument of how the resurrection could be proven by historical-legal argument, much in the same manner that we now do not dispute that someone named Plato or Julius Caesar once existed. There was ample evidence that "something" happened, causing a committed band of Jews to risk life and limb, expulsion from their families, culture and religion and, eventually, face martyrdom in the name of some carpenter's son who claimed to be the Messiah the Jewish Scriptures hinted on.
