The God Haters

And there were no doubt excesses and innocents killed but most historians would put the total number at around 1,000,000

The next thing the God Haters bring up is the Inquisition, like nobody expected that. And they will talk about the tens of millions of deaths that happened as a result of the inquisition. The inquisition wasn’t so much an event as a series of ongoing events covering a 350 year period of church history.

And the inquisition wasn’t directed at Jews or Muslims as much as it was heretics within the church. There weren’t millions of deaths. Scholars range in their estimates as low as 3,000 to a high of 50,000 killed over the 350-year period. Still a blot on the church, not so much on God.

“And what about the Salem Witch trials?” They ask, “and the thousands of innocent people killed in those?” Actually, it was only 20 who died. Which if you or one of your loved one was one of the 20 , would have been 20 too many. But it wasn’t thousands.

So in the big three that the God haters bring up we have a little over a million people killed. Let’s double it and call it 2,000,000 killed over the past 2,000 years by misguided Christians. And there is no way to excuse that, as C. S. Lewis wrote "When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world."

But, what about the other side? The ungodly? The God Haters? Well we all know that Hitler was responsible for the death of 17 million civilians. And one of his goals was to de-Christianize the Third Reich.

But really Hitler was just a beginner, it was estimated the atheist Joseph Stalin was responsible for the death of 23 million civilians through various purges including some of my family in Estonia.

And then there was God Hater Mao Zedong who conservatively was guilty of 60 million deaths.

So in 2,0000 years of Christianity we come up with 2 million deaths which is obviously very wrong, and in the last 100 years just three God Haters have been responsible for over 100 million deaths.

Wow, and the God haters blame God for the excesses of His followers. Their team seems to be in the lead in that one.

And while their misbehaviour doesn’t justify our misbehaviour, what is the old saying about people who live in Glass Houses?

And we really need to look at the The Problem with the God Hater Philosophy

The main problem isn’t that the God Haters don’t agree with us, it’s that they don’t believe in God. And they don’t want anyone else to believe in God either.

And there are problems with not believing in God. The first is when you don’t believe in God then there are no absolutes. There can’t be. So the question becomes, who decides what’s right and what’s wrong? Who’s right and who’s wrong?

Atheist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre expressed it like this: “Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. . . Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behaviour.”