Tag Archives: messianic Jew

‘I looked at the sky and declared my atheism…but who was I announcing it to?’

Rory White

By Mark Ellis

He absorbed the complicated rhythms of the Sixties, which left him drug-dependent and filled with emptiness and pain. But then he encountered God’s glory in a blaze of light so powerful he couldn’t stand — and his life changed unalterably forever.

“When I first heard about the holocaust it was incomprehensible,” says Rory White, who grew up in a Jewish family in Los Angeles. He spent his earliest years in post-war Germany, due to his father’s work as a radiation researcher. He recalls that he played in bomb pits that covered the fields as far as he could see. “They filled with water and we caught pollywogs at the bottom,” he says.

After the family’s return to the U.S. and White’s bar mitzvah at age 13, he quickly fell into agnosticism and atheism. A voracious reader ahead of his peers, he devoured Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell, whose book, “Why I am not a Christian,” left a deep mark.

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