RELIGION IN THE NEWS
A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item if from CNS News.Com October 3, 2007, with a headline: “Religion Must Be Destroyed,” Atheist Alliance Declares, the following are excerpts. Science must ultimately destroy organized religion, according to the some of the leading atheist writers and intellectuals who spoke at a recent atheist conference in Northern Virginia. “God is a myth and children must not be schooled in any faith,” they said, at the Crystal Clear Atheism Event sponsored by the Atheist Alliance International. Some of the luminaries who spoke at the conference included Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, author Sam Harris and journalist Christopher Hitchins. In his speech, Dawkins denounced the preposterous nonsense of religious customs and compared religion to racism. Dawkins was particularly critical of parents who raise their children as a Catholic child or Protestant child. Children should be allowed to examine the evidence and determine their beliefs for themselves. Many of the attendees seemed to have developed an aversion to religion from conservative Protestant Christians. Several complained of living under fundamentalist parents who frowned upon any questioning of the Bible, or any activity condemned in scripture. It wasn’t easy telling my parents I was an atheist, one said, I still haven’t entirely told them, I just say, I’m a humanist, which they don’t seem to mind. But they are a proudly elitist and self-certain minority. When asked what the main difference between believers and atheists was, Dawkins had a quick answer. "Well we're bright."
Tom:
It seems to me that there’s a militancy that’s taking place today that we haven’t seen before.
Dave:
That’s why they call themselves, “the new atheists.”
Tom:
The new atheists, right. And Dave, it’s like they read the Psalm that says, “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.”
Dave:
Well, Tom, if they read that you would think they would be careful—they don’t care, they are defying that verse.
Tom:
Right, right, so they’ve come out swinging, Dave, and by the grace of God, hopefully the book that you are working on is going to address these things.
Dave:
Well it will: Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny. Yes, well, I don’t know if we should even mention the “God That Wasn’t There” that’s a DVD they put out. They’re aggressive and it’s just a put down on God, and I won’t go into the details about it. And then they challenged young people to stand in front of a video camera and just denounce God. Jesus said, “Well, you blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, you’re going straight to hell. You just tell the Holy Spirit you’re denouncing Him and you don’t care if you’re going to go to hell because you don’t believe in it. Send that to us, and then we’ll send you a free copy of, “The God Who Wasn’t There.”
Tom:
I don’t want folks to think that we’re going to send them—you’re talking about this organization.
Dave:
Right, I’m talking about, “The New Atheists” who are out to destroy all belief in God. Because, Tom, they say, “Belief in God is not only foolish it is evil,” and they are on an evangelistic crusade— I mean, this is their language they’re going to evangelize the world in atheism. That’s why they call themselves, the new atheists, because the old atheists wouldn’t do that, they just kind of kept to themselves.
Tom:
Well, Dave, what do they have that’s so new? I mean, what are they basing their thrust, this is it, this is what’s going to solve the problem, is it just all talk?
Dave:
Well, of course, they call themselves, “the brights,” the brights, we are bright, they say, which is absurd, because we can name plenty of Nobel Prize winners who are—and Dawkins hasn’t gotten the Nobel Prize yet, Sam Harris is just finishing his Ph.D. but we can quote— well, the brightest in history, at least this is what the scientists themselves say, Sir Isaac Newton. You know, he wrote more about the Bible than he did about physics and science. The founders of science were Christians. So these guys think they are bright, but they’re not so bright. But anyway, they are fools because; I’m only going by the Bible. They are determined that there is no God. And Tom, we’ve got another minute or so, let me quote a Nobel Prize winner George Wald. George Wald is a—well, he was a HarvardUniversity professor, he’s a Nobel Prize winner, but an atheist, and he says, “Oh, we know that the law of biogenesis life only comes from life. Oh, we know that that’s true, you can’t argue with that. And we know that spontaneous generation, we know that that’s a myth, I mean, Pasteur, he laid that one to rest, but if you don’t believe in spontaneous generation, I mean, you don’t believe that life just comes, spontaneously rises, you’re going to have to believe in a creative act by a supernatural God, and we will not allow that.” So, here we are, I guess, by an act of spontaneous generation. Now can you imagine—this is why the Psalmist said, long before these men came along, “the fool has said in his heart there is no God.” because they give you all the reasons why God must exist. But they say we will not believe in this God. I could quote another one who says, “We will not allow a divine foot inside the door.” So I would have to say they really qualify, “the fool has said in his heart, there is no God.”
Tom:
Yeah, and it’s just utter rebellion, it’s saying, If there is a Creator God, then I would probably have to be accountable to him, stand before him, and I don’t want any part of that. It’s rebellion!
Dave:
That’s exactly it, Tom.