Here's his autobiography, Why I Left Atheism:
http://www.doesgodexist.org/AboutClayton/PastLife.htmlLike most of these things, it suffers from resume inflation. It's never enough to have been an unbeliever, you have to have been thoroughly wicked and get worse with each retelling. Clayton doesn't have much to work with, having grown up with a cheerful, pleasant family (though his Mom gets a little crass and sinister whenever religion comes up), so he parcels out improbable moments of high drama from stories supposedly too terrible to tell. Riiiight.
Vignette: In his sophomore year, he reads the Bible 4 times(!!), looking for inconsistencies and scientific innaccuracies for his opus,
All the Stupidity of the Bible. Can't do it, the Bible has no contradictions and aligns with facts. Gobsmacked.
Another: Argumentative atheist friend gets sick and has to go to the hospital. He catches his friend in his room praying. He
screams "you dirty hypocrite!" at him until he's removed from the hospital.
Another: Judge Roy Moore (hey, we know that idiot!) once remarked to him that druggies never go long without taking their lives. On cue, an episode where he has a rifle between his legs, waiting for the courage to pull the trigger. Of course, the implication is that he'd bottomed out on drugs, but he doesn't say he used drugs. In fact, he never admits to much of anything, apart from some petty thievery, selfishness, and willful disobedience of his parents (whom, though "marvellous", are to blame for his behavior. No God in the home, natch).
Tired-ass trope: His professors are haughty, openly disdainful of religion. They're also brilliant, well-known in their fields. They're ripe for exposure as hypocrites and need some schooling in Biblical facts. Our man Clayton is up to the job...
...and he's
still an atheist in this part of the story. He's an atheist when he investigates other religions to see if they have the integrity and truth of Christianity (nope!). He's an atheist when he goes church shopping, looking for one with fidelity to real Christian principles (nope again). He's an atheist when he has "contact with death" for the first time in the military and sees Christianity beats the pants off atheism when it comes to death. He's never not an atheist until the happy ending at the bottom of the story (and this exciting stuff happens between his sophomore and junior year, including the military stint).
What contrived, inauthentic bullshit.
Here's the clincher -- he introduces himself to a letter writer in 1984:
...I am a high school science teacher in South Bend, Indiana, and have been teaching physics, earth science, chemistry and astronomy for some twenty-four years. Before that time I was an atheist and worked actively with Madalyn O'Hair. I was involved in presenting lectures attempting to prove from a scientific standpoint that a person cannot logically and intelligently believe in God.
There was so much nonsense portrayed in the name of religion about evolution, origin of life, and related topics that I felt a person could not intelligently believe in God.
When I began to really try to put lecture material together to prove that there is no God, and to intelligently portray science in a realistic sense in such a way that it would make the choices obvious, it became clear to me that what religionists teach, and particularly what members of the Church teach is not compatible with what the Bible says, and that in fact, from a scientific standpoint, one can prove that God exists and can demonstrate the credibility of the Bible...
http://www.outersystem.us/creationism/clayton/cg01.html
Oh? He worked for the Mighty O'Hair? Was a lecturer in her Satanic service?
And this WASN'T WORTH MENTIONING in his 1969 tale of redemption?
See what I mean? RESUME. INFLATION. Disingenuous bullshit.
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