From Eric Metaxas:
No matter what your atheist friends or relatives tell you, they’ve got deep spiritual longings. And Jesus is the answer to those longings.
Nat Case calls himself an atheist. He says that he doesn’t believe that God, in the sense of a “living presence, with voice and face and will and command,” exists.
Yet, as he recently wrote in the online journal Aeon, he regularly attends Quaker meeting services. The “why?” behind this contradiction says a lot about how impoverished the modern world’s alternatives to Christian faith are.
Case’s contradiction can be traced to his childhood. A “voracious reader,” he was “moved to tears” by magical stories. Even as an adult, those stories and the magic they portrayed stayed in his heart and despite knowing they’re fiction, he still “believes in them.”
Most of all, they didn’t bore him, which atheism does because it tells him what he isn’t, and like all of us he yearns to know what he is.
Fifteen years ago, Case started attending Quaker meetings after being turned off by what he calls the “mushiness [he had] found in the liberal spiritual communities that admit non-believers.”
He says that “[B]inding oneself to specific patterns, habits, and language” provided what he calls a “spine” that was missing in other groups.
Still for all its subjectivity and theological imprecision, a Quaker meeting is still, as Case acknowledges, “a religious service, expectant waiting upon the presence of God.” And to put it mildly, that places someone who doesn’t believe in God in a difficult position: How do you submit, in the way that believers are supposed to, to something you don’t believe exists?
