Forward by Bob Barney
It has been thirty years this week that my life changed forever. In November 1978, I finally told God that I believed in Him for the first time and that I wished He would just leave me alone! I started off like most youngsters of my generation believing in God, the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter bunny. By age 12 or 13 I realized that all were fake and began my journey as an atheist, fueled by the knowledge I gained from the various science classes throughout my education. In 1975, in the middle of my sophomore year at UCONN, while taking an evolutionary biology course my faith in no God was challenged by a radio show. The host was a person named Garner Ted Armstrong. Much of his commentary consisted of the fallacy of evolution. The story of my conversion is long and I will not bore you now, but three years later, after much research and struggle, I knew God existed and I knew my life would never be the same again. I didn't like God at first. I was happy in a ready made world that had erased God and now I was shaken into reality. I went away for 1 week, back to Storrs Ct., my old stomping grounds to be alone, pray and read the entire Bible for the first time. Day three of that journey, while watching TV I saw the story about Jonestown and how false religion was actually more dangerous than I had ever conceived….
And the story:
By
David Jones
The
jungle stretches out below our twin-engine plane like some vast,
luxuriant carpet that seems to swallow up everything in its path.
Yet
some events are so heinous that nothing can obliterate them - and the
unspeakable horrors that unfolded here, 30 years ago next week, fall
into that category.
Below us, on the northern tip of South
America, 914 brainwashed men, women and children died in agony after
poisoning themselves on the orders of a power-crazed cult leader who
convinced them he was the Second Coming.
The place where
they fell was Jonestown, a remote commune in north-western Guyana named
after its founder, Jim Jones - the evil architect of this terrible
tragedy.
He promised them it would be Utopia, but it became
a mass graveyard. To Jones, their deaths were an act of 'revolutionary
suicide'. To those few who were fortunate to escape and tell their
story, it was mass murder.
Bodies litter the ground after the mass suicide of Jones's followers
An interesting personal note Bob. I would like to hear more about your conversion someday. Good work.