to All Angry Atheists

To All Angry Atheists

Hello,

Since you are passionate about your opposition to Christianity, I don't need to persuade you further that the question of God's existence is important.

As it is important and I assume you are a seeker after truth, I hope you will play along with me when I ask you to perform a thought experiment. First let me narrow the field. We are only interested in God – not churches (no matter how badly they may have behaved) or priests (and unfortunately we do know how evil some of them have been). A person may be quite justified in being angry at any of these, and angry at their misuse of religion and perhaps angry at “religion” in general as a result. But for our present purposes I ask you to hold this in abeyance. It is your passion for the belief that there is no God that is the subject of our thought experiment.

I am going to ask you to do a simple but difficult mental exercise. To try to look inside yourself and determine what makes you passionate about your belief?

Now I believe that UFO's do not exist. But I'm not passionate about it. I can be indulgent towards people who do believe they exist. And I suppose if a real one landed on my lawn I would become a true believer without any angst!

So back to you: can you pinpoint what puts passion behind your belief? Make, if you will, a note of your reasons.

Now am I right thinking that many of you will have put some variation of “If there is a just & loving God then why is there so much suffering in the world” (In a few posts time I think I can satisfy you on that one). That that may be sufficient reason for thinking Christians are a bunch of duffers – but is that reason for you to get worked up about it? Does it not indicate something further is present?

Please bear with me – since we agree this is an important issue – while I suggest two reasons which I expect none of you will have put down.

The first is guilt. No, I'm not suggesting you are a bad person. Don't we all, if we are driving down the road at a safe and legal speed instinctively slow down. But if we are people with a keen sense of justice, we are not only distressed by the injustices in the world, but also conscious that we ourselves have at times contributed to them. It would be natural indeed laudable if – perhaps at a sub-conscious level – one thought along the lines: “Well there had better not be a God – or I'm for it!”

Now what if I say to you that in fact the God who does exist has done something such that “justice” can be fully served even when He forgives people the punishment “justice” would otherwise demand. Details can come later. But if this is the case and if God has offered to forgive any person who rejects evil and commits themselves to a friendship with him, does this de-fuse the anger you had felt?

The second is an inexplicable surge of anger – pain even, whenever God or Christianity comes to mind or is mentioned. If you have or do feel this, I can give you an explanation.

In the Christian world view there is not only God and a host of good spiritual beings loyal to him, but the devil – a defeated enemy but for the moment an active enemy of God and all that is good – and spiritual beings under his control. These beings assault humans in many ways. One way is stirring up anger and causing a mental / spiritual pain that makes us react against other people. There is solid precedent of these evil spiritual beings doing this to make people flee from thinking about God or Christ. So if you have experienced this sort of attack, you have by experience proved at least the existence of evil spirits. The logical next step is to accept the corollary: the existence of God. The wise move then is to find out more about God and to reject evil and chose to align yourself with the all-good God.