Lessons Learned from the Village Atheist
(Open with image of Christopher Hitchens)
Can you identify the man on the screen? This is the famous or infamous Christopher Hitchens. He died on December 15th of last year. Hitchens was a gifted writer who notably transitioned from early Marxist leanings to full support of America's war on terror. He is most well-known as one of the leading voices for atheism in America. Hitchens was called one of the "four horsemen of the new atheism." To be more accurate, he considered himself to be not an atheist, but an anti-theist. Let me give you a sample of some of his thoughts:
“Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me.”
“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.”
“Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.”
As you can tell from the quotes, Hitchens was smart, eloquent, and witty. He was one of the best wordsmiths of our generation. Add to this his British accent, disheveled appearance, heavy drinking and smoking with gruff approach you can see why Hitchens thoughts were so compelling to so many aspiring atheists. As a Christian I found his points to be somewhat intimidating at first. But if you take a step back and consider the substance of what he said and wrote, there's little actual reason. What he offered is rhetorical flourish, clever turn of the words, and thinly disguised logical fallacies.
Just think for a minute about the first quote. Hitchens reaches for the tired false dilemma of modern atheism: you must choose between faith and reason. The first problem with his statement is that God never calls us to put aside reason. There are explicit commands throughout the Scriptures to "reason together," think, meditate, and test. When Thomas doubted the resurrected Jesus what was he encouraged to do? Look at the evidence! No one said, "Just have faith." Hitchens, in fact, paints himself into a nasty corner. Why should anyone think that the use of reason or logic will lead them to the truth? You have to trust in reason to take you there. Why should you trust in reason? Faith.
Let me encourage to investigate the claims of the new atheists. Read books like Hitchen's God Is Not Great, Sam Harris' The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, and Richard Dawkin's The God Delusion. At first you'll be unnerved. In the process you will find some legitimate critiques of religion. In the end you'll find their arguments unconvincing. Watch online debates between these guys and Christian apologists and see who makes the most compelling case. (Dawkins has refused to debate top Christian apologist William Lane Craig. he knows that logic is not on his side and he will lose.) For all of their intelligence and eloquence there is little substance in what they are saying.
Please understand that I am not diminishing their intellectual ability. Being an atheist does not mean stupid - far from it. There does seem to be some cognitive inability here, however. It's as if atheists are unable to take in evidence and draw the logical conclusion of God. Even worse, their resistance makes them calloused to prompting of the Holy Spirit in their lives.
Atheists are sad and interesting creatures. Although their reasons leave much to be desired, we can learn a lot from them. Let's investigate. A helpful place to begin is to ask, "What leads a person down the road of atheism in the first place?"
Dr. Paul Vitz studied the psychology of atheists and arrived at an astonishing conclusion. A common pattern among famous atheists was a broken father-figure. When he looked at their family of origin he found that their fathers were either absent or abusive. Here are some examples from Vitz's work Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism:
Atheists Whose Fathers Died:
David Hume—was two years old when his father died
Arthur Schopenhauer—was sixteen when his father died
Friedrich Nietzsche—was four years old when his father died
Bertrand Russell—was four years old when his father died
Jean-Paul Sartre—was fifteen months old when his father died
Albert Camus - was one year old when his father died
Atheists with Abusive or Weak Father:
Thomas Hobbes - was seven years old when his father deserted the family
Voltaire - had a bitter relationship with his father, whose surname (Arouet) he disowned
Baron d'Holbach - was estranged from his father and rejected his surname (Thiry)
Ludwig Feuerbach - was scandalized by his father's public rejection of his family (to live with another woman)
Samuel Butler - was physically and emotionally brutalized by his father
Sigmund Freud - had a contempt for his father as a "sexual pervert" and a weak man
H.G. Wells - despised his father who neglected the family
Madalyn Murray O'Hair - intensely hated her father, probably due to child abuse
Albert Ellis - was neglected by his father, who eventually abandoned the family
James S. Spiegel, The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief
One glaring example is the father of Communism, atheist Karl Marx. He had a good relationship with his father who raised his children as Lutherans, yet Karl rejected God and sought to create his own godless heaven on earth as a young man. If you look at his life you'll find that his father converted from Judaism to Lutheranism in order to practice law in Prussia. Karl was baptized in 1824, but his mother didn't convert until 1825. There was not a single volume on religion or theology in his father's modest library. "On the whole, the family was not committed to either evangelical Protestantism or evangelical Judaism." (http://www.adherents.com/people/pm/Karl_Marx.html)
What can we learn from this? Fathers teach by word and example. Fathers are the first authority in our lives. It is from them that we get our first glimpse of the Heavenly Father of whom they were created in His image. An earthly father who is absent or negligent or abusive stamps an indelible mark on our perspective of God. In other words, hatred toward an earthly father predisposes us to hate our Heavenly Father. In addition, let's not forget that the father's attitude toward God and the things of God affect their children. This must be the reason Paul writes:
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Ephesians 6:4
Look at the two commands. Don't provoke. Why? You're the first example of God to your children. Second, set godly boundaries and teach about the Lord.
Please don't jump to conclusions here. This does not mean the children of good and godly fathers will become theists or that bad and ungodly fathers will always give rise to atheists. Author James S. Spiegel writes:
...When it comes to atheism, an explanation is not an excuse. To identify a cause of a belief or behavior does not imply that the person is not morally responsible for it. So even if we can causally explain why some people reject God, this does not mean that they aren't responsible for doing so. Rather, the lesson seems to be that having a defective father presents special challenges to faith, but that this kind of psychological wound can only predispose one to atheism.
What about our friend Christopher Hitchens? His father was in the British navy, and although Hitchens writes respectfully of his father's bravery during WWII, he appears to have had a distant relationship with him.
"I don't remember a thing about him. It was all her [his mother], for me." Tragically, when Hitchens was twenty-four, his mother killed herself in a suicide pact with a lover. After his mother's death, Hitchens says, "I no longer really had a family," which is an especially sad statement considering his father was still alive.
James S. Spiegel, The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief
In the final analysis atheism is a choice. An example of this is Christopher Hitchens' brother, Peter. He had the same father, opted for atheism for a time, and then made the choice for Christ.
Choice is the reason for unbelief. We know this from the Bible and experience. Another marker on the road to atheism is the choice for rebellion against God - especially sexual rebellion. Romans, chapter 1 brilliantly illustrates this point. Here Paul tells us that God gave us the general revelation of nature to point us to Him. He has equipped us with the cognitive ability to recognize His handiwork in the natural world:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
People who reject God do so in full view of the truth. Paul says they suppress the truth. In other words, they can perceive what nature is telling them, but they willfully push the knowledge away. But he hasn't yet told us why they do this. The next few verses inform us:
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
God gave them over to the "lusts of their hearts" and the sinful, rebellious actions that go with them. In other words, they are given over to their preference for sin. It is the lust of their hearts and the dishonoring of their bodies that led them to suppress the truth about God. Why would they do this? Get rid of the Creator and you can simultaneously dump His standards of conduct. Remove the Law-giver and you are the authority for conduct. Removing God, however, comes at a price. Increasingly warped thinking and warped behavior.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. Romans 1:18-32
Immorality hampers our ability to reason correctly, especially regarding moral and spiritual matters. And the more a person indulges in sin, the more his or her mind is corrupted, sometimes to the point that one’s awareness of God is deadened.
James S. Spiegel, The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief
Think for just a second about what the atheist must give up to hold on to their sin. A real purpose in life must go. If all of this is the result of blind, random chance over long periods of time your life has no meaning or significance. The people you have loved and the legacy you leave behind will all perish and come to nothing when the universe collapses into heat death. There are no morals. How can you have objective right and wrong if there is no moral authority outside ourselves? Ironically, most atheists live according to a moral code, but if there is no God it's really just one's subjective choice. If you think about it, atheists can't even account for numbers. They're real, they're unchanging, and they matter, but they are not physical.
To maintain their rebellion against God, think of what they have to believe: the ludicrous notion that this magnificent universe and the eloquent biological systems of the earth are pure accident. Never mind the fine tuning of the universe...
• The expansion rate of the Big Bang had to be accurate to within one part in 1055. Any slower and the universe would have collapsed. Any faster and there would be no stars planetary systems. In either case, life would not be possible
• The force of gravity had to be accurate to within one part in 1044. Otherwise, stars could not form, and life would be impossible.
• The mass density of the universe had to be accurate to within one part in 1060. otherwise, life-sustaining stars could not have formed.
• Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, calculated the odds of life emerging from nonliving matter to be one in 1040,000. The number of atoms in the known universe is 1080. The odds of higher life forms developing is as likely that "a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."
Clearly, it takes more faith to be an atheist than a theist. Such is delusional power of rebellion.
There is strong evidence that sin distorts our ability to see God and morality. In his book, Intellectuals, Paul Johnson examines, among others, the moral life of leading atheists. His findings reveal self-serving egotist and sexual perversion. Here's a short list: Rousseau - vain, abandoned his 5 illegitimate children to orphanages; Percy Shelly - swindler, violent temper, adulterer, ignored his 7 children by 3 different women; Marx - anti-Semitic, slothful, exploited friends, adulterer, refused to acknowledge his illegitimate child; Tolstoy - megalomaniac, misogynistic, gambler, adulterer; Hemingway - pathological liar, womanizer, alcoholic; Bertrand Russell - misogynist, serial adulterer, seducer of very young women; Sartre - seducer of female students; Margaret Mead - adultery and lesbianism; Alfred Kinsey - bisexual, masochistic, possibly a child molester; John Maynard Keynes - homosexual. In his memoirs, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens describes his own homosexual experience as a young man.
What Atheists Can Teach Us
Take up your proxy for God
Remember that commercial where the guy said, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV"? He then goes on to recommend Vicks 44 cough syrup. You are not God, but you play Him to your children. Fathers, especially, your active involvement in the lives and spiritual formation of your children is critical. You are their first hint at what the Heavenly Father is like. What picture does your example portray? Abandonment, neglect, abuse, failure to value your family send a profoundly negative message about God.
Don't forget to live your faith out in front of them. Let them see you worship and pray. Let them hear your voice reading the Bible. Let them be a part of your family discussions over the things of God. Demonstrate disciple and forgiveness. Humble yourself and ask for forgiveness when you've done wrong.
If God gives you the opportunity, be a father to the fatherless. Kids don't necessarily need a biological father to reveal God. Grandfathers, uncles, coaches, mentors, teachers, family friends all can fill that need. Be open should God present you with the opportunity.
Repentance from "little rebellions"
Do not make the mistake of thinking sin won't interfere with your ability to discern God. If you've been around long enough I bet you can name one or two people who were once "on fire for Jesus," but they indulged in some pet sin and now they are far from Him, maybe even into apostasy. There is a reason why the Bible warns believers again and again not to play around with sin. It is for good reason that the Bible tells Christians to, "Flee sexual immorality, flee youthful passions idolatry, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness." What we chase captures our hearts. Whatever captures our hearts will reveal God or blind us. Let me share with you 5 of the most frightening verses in the Bible. Notice the progression of sin...
Even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him. This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the prophet: “Lord, who has believed our message and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” For this reason they could not believe, because, as Isaiah says elsewhere: “He has blinded their eyes and deadened their hearts, so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts, nor turn—and I would heal them.” John 12:37-40
They would not believe, then they could not believe. Jesus then quotes Isaiah who said God would blind their eyes and deaden their hearts to the Messiah and they would not find salvation. Why is God such a meanie to blind people to Jesus? It was only God's responsibility in that He told them the truth. Our willful rejection of the truth that God sends our way results in our blindness.
Get (and keep) your mind right
We have a part in guarding our souls. Salvation is a gift of God. Forgiveness of sin and eternal life through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ earned your salvation when you came to the Lord by faith. But afterward, you still have freewill. Your thoughts and choices matter. They also still have consequences. Listen to Paul's command to Christians in Romans 12:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:1-2
As dearly loved children of God our only reasonable response to Christ's offer of Himself is to offer ourselves. There's only one thing that can keep us from crawling down off the altar of submission, a mind that hasn't been renewed.
How does that happen? Dan and I have been saying it for at least 11 years now. You should see it coming a mile away: daily time immersed in the word of God; consistent time seeking His face in prayer; radical commitment to a community of believers where you can know and be known; giving yourself to service; wholehearted worship; generous giving. We keep saying it. Who is doing it? These are not efforts to win your salvation like the 5 pillars of Islam. A big reason is to get and keep your mind right. Jesus said, "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." These spiritual disciplines, among other things, are a means to that end.
Be careful what you allow into the windows of your soul. No message or image coming your way is neutral. It will form you positively or negatively. Do you seriously believe that movies or songs or books or internet sites that promote sexual looseness have no effect on you? Flee from them and pursue true beauty. Paul said it best:
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Philippians 4:*
Christopher Hitchens' brother Peter said that he was led to God by contemplating beauty. He couldn't account for his understanding and appreciation of beauty apart from God. Last Sunday before our music rehearsal, Andy gathered us to look out the east facing window of the barn. Before us was a spectacular sunrise of blue, orange, and fluffy pink clouds. That moment of beauty was an opportunity to worship God by contemplating His creation. We need more of that.
Your atheist friends and family members need it too. Enjoy beauty with them, but let them see the beauty of Christ in you. Let them see honor and purity and loveliness and commendable behavior and excellence. Let God use you to help them get their minds right. When your nagging and preaching fail, demonstrate the beauty of Christ with your life.
In December 2008 an article appeared in Time Online with this arresting title: "As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God." The journalist was foreign correspondent and award- winning author Matthew Parris. Having lived in several African countries early in his life, Parris was intimately familiar with the continent and the depth of its problems, both social and economic. So when he returned to his native land after more than four decades away, he was struck by the developmental work being carried on by Christian mission organizations. And he finally allowed himself to admit something he'd been resisting all these years:
"Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
"I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It's a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it."
James S. Spiegel, The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief
The beauty of Christ catches the attention of the atheist. Even the corrupt mind of one far from God can perceive God in you. For all their arguments, accusations, and incoherent bluster the atheist was created in the image of God and eternity set in his heart. Our departed friend Christopher Hitchens said:
"Christianity is a wicked cult, and it's high time we left it behind."
At the end of the movie, Collision, he leaves us with these enigmatic words:
"If I could convert everyone in the world, not convert, if I could convince to be a non-believer and I'd really done brilliantly, and there's only one left. One more, and then it'd be done. There'd be no more religion in the world. No more deism, theism. I wouldn't do it. And Dawkins said, 'What do you mean you wouldn't do it?' I said, 'I don't know why I wouldn't do it. And it's not just because there'd be nothing left to argue with and no one left to argue with. it's not just that. Though it would be that. Somehow if I could drive it out of the world, I wouldn't.' And the incredulity with which he looked at me, stays with me still. I've got to say."
