Free-Thinker Resists Secular Altar Call
Atheists: Remove God From Fight Against Terror
By Rick Pearcey
Evangelistic atheists continue their campaign to save Americans from "God."
If I thought their case held water intellectually, I'd join them.
But I don't. Therefore, I demur.
The latest altar call for imposed, court-dictated secularism occurs in Kentucky, where a "group of atheists filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to remove part of a state anti-terrorism law that requires Kentucky's Office of Homeland Security to acknowledge it can't keep the state safe without God's help," reports the AP.
Leader of the pack is Ed Buckner, chief elder over at American Atheists.
Says Buckner: "I'm not aware of any other state or commonwealth that is attempting to dump their clear responsibility for protecting their citizens onto God or any other mythological creature."
Some may find Buckner's position offensive. I do not.
Rather, it is uneducated. It is itself steeped in myth.
Much can be said along these lines. But here, just a couple of points.
First, God is not a mythological figure, and the embrace by the Judeo-Christian worldview of the free-thinking individual who appeals to reason and evidence and not to blind faith reduced to personal feelings might give those of an independent mindset reason to reconsider.
Second, the American experiment in freedom is centered on the objective existence of a real Creator, and nothing in the U.S. Constitution prohibits a free people under God from arranging their lives without a Washington-centric Congress trying to impose its secularized will on their individual and corporate choices.
Now, about that question of relying on the Creator in the fight against terror.
It's not an either/or situation, is it?
Actually, one can argue that living in community with our true Creator provides the only adequate intellectual and moral basis for defending a humane community among our fellow man: Love God, protect your neighbor. It's a liberating and logical unity.
On the other hand, it may be that atheism is part of the problem, not part of the salvation.
Consider, if human beings really are merely complex particles of space junk birthed accidentally in a meaningless, impersonal cosmos, as materialism requires, what's the point?
Of course, you can make a leap of faith and cultishly proclaim the significance of man, but let's call this what it is: Blind religion, a crutch, an opiate, a myth.
There is nothing like that in what we have in the Biblical information from the Creator.
In a merely materialistic and impersonal cosmos, however, moral evil does not exist and moral man is an alien being, a cosmic misfit condemned to consciousness. "Terror" may be real in such a setting, but there's no adequate ethical or intellectual basis for calling it "evil," and apart from a mindless drive for base survival, there's no reason to fight it.
Go ahead. Affirm yourself, votaries of atheism. But don't think your creed or effort changes anything, if we take the implications of your worldview seriously.
Your fight is swallowed up not by death, but by something worse. Emptiness. Vanity.
The priests may not know it yet, but the church of atheism is dead.
"Let the dead bury their dead," says the Chief of the Resistance (Luke 9:60).
Meanwhile, the living can fight the terror.
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Rick Pearcey is editor and publisher of The Pearcey Report (archives).
