Mike S Adams Testimony to Jesus

I've got the consent of Mike's brother David to share Professor Mike Adams testimony here. He used to be a progressive democrats and an atheist. He then became Christ follower after a trip to Quito, Ecuador.

Michael Scott Adams (October 30, 1964 – July 23, 2020) was an American conservative political columnist, writer and professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

"When I (David) was clearing out Mike’s house I came across various mementos of his trip to Ecuador in 1996, such as this picture he took, which are evidence that the trip was a significant life experience for him. But if you followed him long enough you would already know that, because he has written and spoken several times of how this was a crucial first step in his journey back to God. The story is well told in his last book, “Letters To A Young Progressive (How To Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don’t Understand)” - and here is an excerpt:

As I write, the clouds are descending Pikes Peak and making their way toward my little cabin at the base of the mountain. It is so much like that afternoon in March of 1996 – March 7th to be exact – when I walked inside the gates of a prison in the Andes Mountains just outside of Quito, Ecuador. The weather was the same that day, but everything else in my life was different.

I was an atheist trying to save the world. I was also a criminologist and an aspiring journalist hoping to change what was going on inside those prison walls. I did not know that what was going on inside those walls would forever change me. The existence of God, the fallen nature of man, and the source of our inalienable rights would all come into focus in a few short hours.

That prison was the closest thing to hell I had ever seen.

First I made a brief visit inside a 36 square meter cell packed with 45 inmates. There was the unbelievable stench of rotting meat being thrown into vats of boiling water to make it barely edible for the inmates. There were puddles of urine mixed with fecal matter sitting near broken and rotting pipes. There was the young man I saw being beaten badly by baton-wielding guards. I still remember the sound that club made as it struck against his young bones. He was probably no more than 18 years old.

At the end of the prison visit, I met a man who was awaiting trial for petty larceny. Even though the punishment for the offense was usually only a couple of months, he had been in prison for two years awaiting his trial. I spoke to him about his plight. He told me he missed his wife and his little girl. But there was a peace about him that still haunts me to this day.

Inside that man’s bunk was a Bible and a picture of Jesus. The man’s eyes teared up as he thanked me for coming to talk to him that day. “No one knows we are here,” he insisted. “No one cares that we exist,” he added as he smiled and shook my hand.

There is a statue of the Virgin Mary that sits atop a hill overlooking that small prison. It was the first thing I saw after the guard shut the prison gate behind me. I stood there in the light drizzling rain and stared up at that statue. “I was wrong” were the only words that came to me. As I was looking upward I spoke them audibly.

What I meant to say was that I had been wrong about atheism and the path I had been following for years – a path toward a worldview based on moral relativism. This path led me nowhere. No honest person can witness the things I saw and heard about in that prison and flippantly dismiss them as cultural conventions.

The clubbing of the boy was simply wrong. Serving rotten meat to prisoners is simply wrong. Shocking confessions out of prisoners by wiring their genitals to car batteries is simply wrong. Telling prisoners they are free to go, shooting them in the back as they are walking out of the prison gates, and then reporting the incident as a thwarted escape attempt is simply wrong.

And, of course, it does not matter where or when such things take place. They are wrong everywhere you go. And they will still be wrong long after you and I are dead. The moral law is not contingent upon our feelings or our perceptions. It stands outside of us and is eternal.

Think about the following question for a moment: If you suddenly decide the law of gravity is untrue, will you go floating off into space? Of course you won’t. It is the same with the moral law. You cannot escape it. It is written on your heart, but it is not bound by the thoughts or feelings of any man.

That afternoon in Ecuador, I came to understand that the source of that moral law is God. And I believe that God is seen most clearly when we cast our eyes upon abject evil. C.S. Lewis said that the shadow proves the sunshine. The shadow simply cannot exist without the sunshine.

That day at the prison is also the point at which my progressive political beliefs began to unravel."