Last week I called your attention to a new online business called Rapture Orphan Rescue. Like Eternal Earthbound Pets but with kids, it promises to care for children who potentially get left behind should their parents get “caught up in the air.” The proprietors expect to be left behind themselves because they are atheists. (They suspect, however, that if the rapture DOES happen, that’ll be good enough reason to convert to Christianity.)

We had some good discussion about the ethics of such a service, and I thought it would be interesting to go right to the source: I asked the owner of Rapture Orphan Rescue for an interview, and he graciously complied. His name is Justin and he lives in Texas, but I’ve promised not to reveal any more than that. (Not because he doesn’t stand behind the business, but because of a few other quite legitimate reasons.)

In the interview, I’ll call him ROR.

I’ll split the interview into two parts. Look for Part 2 tomorrow.

——————

JB: What’s your religious background/story? Have you
always been a nontheist or did you “de-convert” from a religious
tradition?

ROR: I grew up in the
Texas-shaped buckle on the Bible-belt. However, I’d say that my parents
were divided on their degree of religiosity. I fell in line with my
mother’s creationist, born-again version of Christianity with
an inerrant Bible, while my father had a more liberal view but typically
stayed out of the discussions. I was pretty evangelical even in my day-to-day life, attempting to ‘witness’ to all of my friends. I was so scared
that they were going to hell, that it consumed me.

By the age of 12 I
had made it my mission to save as many people as possible. Despite my
youth, my enthusiasm and an eye for detail actually yielded a moderate
amount of success. By 13, I had read many of the 90’s-era creationist
and Intelligent Design creationist books — even read the whole Bible — and
was all fired up and ready to debate. Once again, I met with moderate
success. I kept refining my technique, and growing my subject-matter
expertise. Probably
about a year or two later I finally decided to see just exactly what
those pesky atheists were trying to say with all of their flawed
arguments. I felt bulletproof, but even more than that, I felt like I
was the bullet and the atheists needed the proofing.

I spent weeks
culling the internet, library, and even a book or two that had been
recommended to me. My plan backfired. I was taken aback at the logical
and philosophical arguments, but those didn’t sway me yet because I had
faith that I would find adequate answers and rebuttals later (I didn’t).
What really made me snap was an article on the Talk.Origins archive
about “problems with flood geology” (it’s
still there). That article was not attacking the existence of God, or
using philosophical arguments that I could wiggle out of, or any vague
concepts at all. It was attacking something very specific that I
happened to believe in: that Noah’s ark was real, that the world was less than
10,000 years old, and that these two concepts were proof that evolution was a
lie.

Now I know that your readers may have all sorts of different
perspectives on this (and really every issue within Christianity), but if
you take an honest look at that article, how could you not conclude
that my beliefs were wrong? It was page after page of science, logic,
and empirical data that directly contradicted my beliefs so thoroughly
that I actually began to cry. 
I cried for three days. I went back to my Bible, my
parents, my creationist websites, and my notes. I found nothing there
that hadn’t also just been utterly decimated by the facts presented in
just that one article, amongst the hundreds I also read there.

So I just
shelved it all — all of my doubts. I still identified as Christian for a
few more years, but never really brought it up with other people like I
used to. Over the next few years, I was exposed to more science and how
the scientific method actually works, and secular humor from people
like Bill Hicks, and even George Carlin. All of the self-defense
mechanisms that I had set up for my cultural identity began to crumble,
and I finally was able to look at the questions again.