"One of the great blind spots of a philosophy that attempts to disavow God
is its unwillingness to look into the face of the monster it has begotten
and own up to being its creator. It is here that living without God meets
its first insurmountable obstacle, the inability to escape the infinite
reach of a moral law. Across scores of campuses in our world I have seen
outraged students or faculty members waiting with predatorial glee to
pounce upon religion, eager to make the oft-repeated but ill-understood
charge: What about the thousands who have been killed in the name of religion?
"This emotion-laden question is not nearly as troublesome to answer if the
questioner first explains all the killing that has resulted from those who
have lived without God, such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, et al. The
antitheist is quick to excoriate all religious belief by generically laying
the blame at the door of all who claim to be religious, without
distinction. By the same measure, why is there not an equal enthusiasm to
distribute blame for violence engendered by some of the irreligious?
"But the rub goes even deeper than that. >>>*The attackers of religion
have forgotten that these large-scale slaughters at the hands of
antitheists were the logical outworking of their God-denying philosophy.
Contrastingly the violence spawned by those who killed in the name of
Christ would never have been sanctioned by the Christ of the Scriptures.
Those who killed in the name of God were clearly self-serving politicizers
of religion, an amalgam Christ ever resisted in his life and teaching.
Their means and their message were in contradiction to the gospel. Atheism,
on the other hand, provides the logical basis for an autonomous,
domineering will, expelling morality.*<<< Darwin himself predicted this
slippery slope of violence if evolutionary theory were translated into a
philosophy of life. Nietzsche talked of the enshrouding darkness that had
fallen over mankind - he saw its ramifications. The Russian novelist Fyodor
Dostoevski repeatedly wrote of the hell that is let loose when man comes
adrift from his Creator's moorings and himself becomes god - he understood
the consequences. Now, as proof positive, we witness our culture as a whole
in a mindless drift toward lawlessness - we live with the inexorable result
of autonomies in collision." (Zacharias, Ravi, Can Man Live Without God,
Word, pp. 22-23) (Emphasis mine - CW)
Chuck
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Chuck Warman
cwarman@wf.net (Wichita Falls, TX)
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"The abdication of Belief / makes the Behavior small."
----Emily Dickinson