No one has seemed to address the question that is the title of this thread, but I'd like to.
I believe, because I can't not believe. I was raised Catholic, dropped it because it didn't help me know God, picked up New Age beliefs from testimonies based on work in hypnosis by Richard Sutphen (back in the 70's), and finally became an atheist in 1982, but only for about a month.
After such a short time as an atheist, in my ignorance I decided it was impossible that a bunch of molecules could bump into each other and become me. (I now believe it is quite possible, and most certainly happened.) I had a co-worker who argued with me every day about Christianity. I won all the arguments, leaving him with stumpers he couldn't answer almost every day. He would laugh and say, "You'll make a great Christian some day."
I started reading the Bible in order to find the contradictions, so I could show them to him. The Gospels captivated me, and I began to be quite intrigued with this Jesus Christ character. One day, out of being nice to my co-worker, I went to his church to hear him preach. I had a really weird experience there involving voices telling me to leave the church, followed by "seeing" something so weird it would take me a while to explain it.
A few days later, a little shaken from that experience, I visited another church with another friend, and I ended up in an argument with a total stranger about the Bible and hell. He said, "It's not the Bible that matters, or hell, but whether Jesus Christ is the Son of God." I thought about that several minutes and decided I did believe Jesus was the Son of God. When I told him I believed that, it seemed like the whole world changed. I was filled with joy, I knew God was in the room; in fact, everything around me looked different. Actually, it felt a lot like I was stoned, except my mind was completely clear. I asked God what he did to me, and I heard a voice inside say, "I just baptized you with the Holy Spirit."
Now, that's probably not much proof for anyone else, but it had a pretty strong effect on me. I quit being Catholic when I was a teenager, because no matter how much I prayed or how hard I tried, I couldn't keep my mind on God. I got busy with daily life, doing whatever I wanted, and by the time I thought about what God wanted, most of my day would be over. It was frustrating, and after months of praying, I quit even trying.
After this experience, however, I've had God at the forefront of my mind for twenty-one years now. It's completely natural to check inside myself for his approval or disapproval on most everything I do. (Not that I don't sometimes ignore it out of what I just want to do.)
That inner voice has been trustworthy. So trustworthy, in fact, that when I started realizing I'd never find Christians united, like Jesus spoke about in John 17, I sat down and thought about the things I was confident were important to God. Those things--a united people, full of love, not based on doctrine, not even based on the Bible, but based on the Spirit, and hearing the same things from the Spirit--I couldn't find in any group, anywhere. I looked for twelve years for those things, and was on the verge of giving up, believing that I was fooling myself, that none of it was true, and I ran into a group of people, already together, who not only held the same things important as I did, but who seemed to be following the same Spirit I was following, based on what they were hearing and how they were living.
I have joined that group, and I've posted a couple of the small, but not insignificant, things that I experience on a very regular basis in another thread (http://
EvC Forum: Ever lasting life with or without God. -->
EvC Forum: Ever lasting life with or without God.).
We brought dancers to a music festival in Jonesborough, TN a couple weeks ago, and some of the things people said about us were, "How in the world do you do it? You have more people here than last year. I watched them and they all have done nothing but good." One person asked, "What do you do to make your kids behave like this." Our answer was, "We teach them that a good conscience equals a good day." One of the workers at the festival told us, "Often people with talent come a couple of times to a festival like this and then we move them on, to bring in fresh talent, but I want to make sure you all come back every year! You all brought life! You're so spunky!
We live together on one piece of land, nearly 200 of us, and we make people nervous just by existing. However, the most common reaction of anyone who actually has the guts to come visit us and ask us questions is, "It's so peaceful here, and your kids are the happiest kids I've ever seen. This is how everyone ought to live."
One last thing. The Department of Child Services came to visit us with fifteen hand-picked agents, because scared people had called repeating some of the rumors they'd heard about us. They spent all day with our children, literally interviewing all the children, nearly a hundred of them from toddlers to teens, and they said exactly the same thing. "Everyone ought to live like this. The only children we're thinking about taking from you are the one we want to take home to be with us!"
I'm not suggesting that any of the above will prove anything to anyone else. However, the above is the answer to my question of why I believe. I believe that Christ has been able to take some 35 families, many of us formerly strong, Bible-believing (and therefore Bible-arguing and Bible-thumping) Christians and make us drop all our pre-conceived Bible ideas and follow his Spirit into a way of life that is completely free, almost without rules at all (pretty unusual for any intentional community), but nonetheless knit us together as best friends, a large family.
We are, by the way, almost across the board, evolutionists. We have maybe five people who are holding on to the young earth creation view (as well as a few others who aren't much interested in the topic), and we even had our teenagers debate some of the adults (after I taught the teenagers a class on evolution).
Anyway, that's why I believe.
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