Faith
I was reading an article in Wired magazine about activist atheists. That is atheists that don’t want to be merely content with refusing to believe in God themselves, but also believe that it is a crime against humanity and civilization to believe in anything merely by faith. There are a couple of people pushing for atheists to unite and make it embarrassing and shameful to believe in God. They want to work together to essentially undermine and socially persecute any belief in a god but especially Christians.
In the article, the author is interviewing one of these activist atheists and they are discussing what they call “a world without God”, but what they really mean is a world without belief in God. Because even my Junior Churchers could tell you that without God we’d have nothing. Sam Harris, the neuroscientist being interviewed in the article says this,
“There would be a religion of reason. We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it’s in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bulls***.”
It is so sad that these people can’t realize that the only reason we can be rational and even be human is because of God. This is like the story of Nebuchadnezzar who ruled the entire known world, but didn’t respect that it was God who allowed this to happen, and God showed him what he’d be like without his God-given humanity. And for a year the ruler of the world lived like a beast of the fields.
It gets worse, the author goes on to say that he does have a prayer and here is his “prayer”:
[I pray] that our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.
“Evil temptation of faith”? That is horrible. Faith is such an important thing to us.
I Peter 1 7-9 “That the trial of your faith being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ: whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory: receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.”
John 20:29 “Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.”
I know that faith is a wonderful and important thing. It is through faith that I am saved from eternal Hell. But it is sad that some people are so opposed to God that they consider faith to be an evil temptation. This just makes me careful to stay close to God and motivated to share with people the Gospel before some rationalist convinces them that faith is lunacy and the Bible is full of dangerous fairy tales.
-Patrick