Bill tells us he wasn’t raised in a church-going family. But when he became a teenager in the sixties he asked typical teenage questions, like “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” and “Where am I going?” He searched for answers by attending a Christian church, not a Muslim Mosque, nor Jewish Synagogue, nor Hindu Temple, because he was raised in a Christian culture which set the limits of answers he could accept. Of this church, all he saw with his young prudish judgmental eyes were “a pack of hypocrites” who were “pretending to be something they’re not.” Apparently, *ahem* the young Craig could read people’s minds. Usually the person claiming to do this is only revealing his own mind. Regardless, Bill became very bitter and angry toward the people in that church, and arrived at the fallacious hasty generalization that “Nobody is really genuine.” People were “all just a bunch of phonies” he says. So he “grew to despise people” saying “I wanted nothing to do with them.”
Bill goes on to admit that he was just as much a phony as they were. “For here I was, pretending not to need people, when deep down I knew that I really did.” So he became angry at his own hypocrisy, which is a religious guilt trip he placed on himself, that led him to falsely say, “I couldn’t see any purpose to life; nothing really mattered.” This is such an unjustified either/or fallacious conclusion. There can be plenty of purposes and plenty of things that matter in one’s daily life (like family, friends, and meaningful work), without needing one single final absolute unchanging purpose in life.
Then Bill met a girl. Her name was Sandy. She “always seemed so happy it just makes you sick!” he tells us. Upon asking Sandy why she was so happy, she told him “the God of the universe loved him and wanted to live in his heart.” Sandy also introduced him to other Christians. Of them he said, “I had never met people like this! Whatever they said about Jesus, what was undeniable was that they were living life on a plane of reality that I didn’t even dream existed, and it imparted a deep meaning and joy to their lives, which I craved.”