The Many Faces, and Causes, of Unbelief - Apologetics Press

was present. So profound was his grief and disappointment
at the failure of God to cure him overnight that from that point
forward he pledged never to believe in God again.
In the mid-1960s, a devoutly religious young man from
Chattanooga, Tennessee, was a role model for all of his classmates.
He led a prayer group, and planned to become a foreign
missionary—until his sister died of leukemia and his father
committed suicide. The boy’s belief in God collapsed,
and he subsequently became one of America’s most outspoken
unbelievers, humanists, and pro-abortion advocates. That
boy’s name?—Ted Turner, founder of world-famous CNN, the
Turner Broadcasting System, and other well-known media
enterprises.
But, of course, it is not just the famous who abandon their
belief in God because of evil, pain, and suffering in their lives.
The “man (or woman, as the case may be) on the street” is no
less affected. A case in point is that of Judith Hayes, a senior
writer for The American Rationalist. In 1996, Mrs. Hayes
authored an acrimonious tirade titled, In God We Trust: But
Which One?, in which she explained why she left the Lutheran
Church (Missouri Synod) and became an atheist. First, as a
youngster she had a good friend named Susan who was a devout
Buddhist. Judith, however, simply could not accept the
teachings of Scripture that Susan would be lost if she did not
obey the biblical scheme of redemption set forth so plainly in
God’s Word. Thus she made, not a rational decision based
upon the evidence, but an emotional decision based on her
own “inner desires.” Neither Christianity, she said, nor its
God, could be accepted as true.
Second, Judith eventually married. But the relationship
soured and disintegrated due to the fact, Mrs. Hayes reported,
that her husband became verbally abusive. Instead of considering
the possibility that she had made a poor choice of
mates, or that her husband had misused his own personal
freedom of choice, Judith blamed God. “[H]ow could I possibly
have wound up married to a tyrant?,” she wrote. “Why
had God forsaken me?” (1996, p. 15).
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