By PETER MUNRO - THEAGE.COM.AU
Added: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Crapsquire for the link.
Original link

IN THE beginning, Dan Barker found God and saw that he was good. He was a teenage evangelist at 15, spouting sermons on street corners in southern California. At 16, he worked for a faith healer in Los Angeles and spoke in tongues. When he prayed, he felt at peace.

"I watched people throwing away their crutches, and I remember thinking 'Who would be so blind to deny the power of God'," he says. "If you had come up to me to challenge my faith, I would have just smiled and said: 'But you don't know, I have this real thing.' I loved Jesus and I was born again."

God is gone from Mr Barker's life now. His conversion from evangelical preacher to non-believer, the topic of his talk at today's Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, is extraordinary for how far he has come.

Mr Barker, now wearing a scarlet letter "A" on his left lapel, compares losing his religion to putting away childish things. For 19 years he was a God-fearing man and travelling preacher. He spent two years in Mexico as a Protestant missionary.

In the late 1970s, he wrote two popular children's Christian musicals. He still receives royalties from their performance in schools. ''I still enjoy the music but I cringe at the lyrics,'' he says. Atheism came slowly to him, more a ''migration'' than a lightning strike of reason.
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Scientist Richard Dawkins has called Mr Barker ''the most eloquent witness of internal delusion I know''
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TAGGED: ATHEISM, RELIGION