Another journeyman finds his way from the truths of our time to the TRUTH of all of time:
Several of my fellow brothers in Christ have noted this good news – and it is good news, the very best of news, even for those who previously excoriated Dave Cullen for being dumb enough to sell out on his principles from time to time.
As perhaps the greatest living sci-fi and fantasy writer remarked when he heard the news – “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition”.
Amen.
His journey is an interesting one to me, because in many ways it parallels my own to the Christian faith.
There are differences, to be sure. Dave Cullen comes from a family with strong faith; I do not. He was born into the Catholic faith; I was not. He returned to his roots, so to speak; I did not.
But, like me, Dave rejected religion and faith in his early teen years, and like me, he embraced full-blown atheism, secular materialism, and empiricism.
And, like me, he eventually came to realise that this approach led to despair, hopelessness, nihilism, and soul-death.
The reason for this is simple. Atheism doesn’t offer any solutions, and in many ways is in total denial of the nature of the world around us.
A philosophy that denies many of the realities of existence and doesn’t offer any solutions to its problems, which are readily apparent to anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention, is doomed to fail.
It is undeniable by anyone that there is evil in this world. It is real, it is terrible, and it exists in the heart of all men, everywhere. Some of that evil is mundane – of the sort where someone tells you a little white lie to your face that you later discover and get mad about. And some of that evil is truly horrifying – the kind of evil that sees millions led to their deaths in slaughter-pens, and sometimes even sees some of them eaten by those left behind.
The problem for most atheists is that they have no way to acknowledge evil – because they have no way to appeal to a founding moral code. After all, their morality is not built upon immutable, timeless laws beyond the reach of men, but on what they think “just works” – which changes over time and between cultures. If there is no objective, fixed standard of morality, then by definition, there is no such thing as an objective, fixed definition of evil.
This isn’t difficult to figure out. Evil stands opposed, completely, to morality. If you can define what is moral, you can define what is evil. Conversely, you cannot define what is evil if you cannot define what is moral.
The better atheists, and there are a few of them, acknowledge that there is evil in the world, for they accept the need for some kind of fixed moral standard – but they cannot adequately explain evil. Oh, sure, they might say that evil happens because men are free to act as they will – but then they get stuck, because in order to solve the problem of evil, they have only a few options.
The first option is to remove all free will from men and reduce us all to mindless automatons in service to a biological program of some sort. Some of the more ridiculous atheist arguments do exactly this; witness what happened when J. F. Gariepy took on Jay Dyer and was forced into a corner to claim that he was nothing more than a purely deterministic biological meat-machine, acting entirely according to programmed impulses without any free will whatsoever.
The second option is to permit all men to do whatever they please, and hope that evil kind of just sorts itself out. I will not waste further time in exploring what a plainly idiotic notion that is.
The third option is to say that, because evil exists, and it exists because of men, the only way to stop evil is to control and contain men. Now, that is a good start – but there is a terrible danger here. If you insist that only the rules of men can bind other men, then you have to come up with a rule set that is created by men – mere men. And because those rules are created by mere men, at some point they will cease to be enforced. They will be broken. They will be challenged – because, after all, if merely human intelligence came up with those rules, why should any one man’s rules be better than any other man’s?
That is where you get socialism, Communism, and fascism. That is how evil becomes even worse. And that is precisely how hundreds of millions were slaughtered in the 20th Century – because men decided to act as though they were gods, but were still nothing more than men.
The fourth option is the “black pill” – the route of hopelessness, nihilism, despondency, and soul-destroying despair.
It’s a horrible place to be. It comes down to a belief that the world is irreparably broken – but someone who rejects a higher Power has no way out of that pit, because that is the logical conclusion of a belief system that says that evil happens because of other people, and there is nothing above those people, nothing that they are answerable to.
So, atheists have only a few ways of dealing with the world: either control it completely (and massacre anyone who steps out of line even slightly), or let anyone do whatever the hell he wants (and damn the consequences), or check out completely and refuse to engage in any way whatsoever.
What kind of pathetic, delusional, hope-destroying message is that?!?!?
What is the point of fighting for anything? What is the point of trying to find a good woman, love her, care for her, strive to give her a good life, and marry her? What is the point of bringing children into the world, if it is so corrupt and broken and evil? Isn’t that just child abuse?
Eventually, atheists have to make a choice. Either they continue to refuse to embrace reality, or they embrace that reality and understand that they have no solutions to speak of.
There is only one way out of this trap. You have to introduce something greater and higher than men. And that is where faith – not religion, but faith – comes in.
Faith in a higher Power, of whatever form. Faith in something vastly bigger than men. Faith in a system and process that goes on and on regardless of whether we understand it.
Some of these methods of faith make more sense than others. Many, if not most, polytheistic pagan faiths ascribe events and actions to the whims of gods, and in order to do good in the world, these gods or spirits or whatever must be propitiated with sacrifices.
The major monotheistic faiths, specifically Judaism and Islam, reject this idea and say that there is one God, above all others, who created everything we see around us. But even these faiths cannot quite figure out where evil comes from.
Judaism comes pretty darned close, that’s for sure; it points out that evil comes from the works of men, but still argues consistently that the Lord must be appeased with various sacrifices to erase the sins of men.
The less said about Islam, the better. As far as I’m concerned, it is evil, at its very core. It elevates everything that the rest of us call sin, and denigrates almost everything that we call holy.
But, before Islam, and after Judaism, along came Christianity, and the world changed, forever.
All of a sudden, Mankind had a framework to explain exactly what it is to be evil, and why evil exists, and how to defeat it. It exists, of course, because men have the gift of free will, given to us by a benevolent and loving God who wants us to be free. But we abuse that gift, quite horribly, and commit terrible sins against each other and against God.
At the core of the Christian approach to evil is a solution – the only possible solution – to a massive logical and moral problem.
We accept that God is portrayed as always-benevolent, always-loving, always-truthful, and always-forgiving in the Old Testament – even if He doesn’t really come across that way in the Pentateuch. But how can a God who permits the existence of evil possibly be always-benevolent, and how can a God who refuses to destroy evil claim to have the power to change the hearts of men whenever He chooses?
Either God can destroy evil at any time, but refuses to do so – and therefore He is not a loving God, not even slightly, because of the sheer magnitude of suffering and evil in this world. Indeed, if that is the case, then He is an appallingly cruel and whimsical tyrant – and as such is unfit to insist that He is Lord.
Or God is unable to destroy evil – and therefore He is not as powerful as He claims to be, and so is not truthful. In which case He is also unfit to call Himself Lord.
In either case, He is not the Creator. He is, in fact, guilty of blaspheming against Himself, and against His Creation.
Those are the only logical conclusions possible. It is just that simple – and that terrible.
Now enter Jesus Christ.
We know, as a matter of historical record that is beyond dispute even by the most secular and militantly atheistic historians, that a man named Yeshua was born in contemporary Roman-occupied Palestine. We know that He was a mighty prophet in His time. We know that He died at the hands of His tormentors.
We have it on exceptionally good authority that He was of the bloodline of King David, and that He was a rabbi (teacher) Himself, and that His command of the Law was exceptional even by the standards of the day.
These are facts. They cannot be argued against given the sheer weight of the evidence in their favour.
It is at this point that fact has to give way to faith.
We Christians believe that Christ Jesus rose from the dead, that He was and is the Son of the Living God, and that He took all of our sins – past, present, and future – upon Himself, died for them, and in so doing washed away those sins through His precious blood.
All of this cannot possibly make sense – unless you look at the Bible as a series of internally and externally consistent logical arguments leading to a very powerful and staggering conclusion.
I won’t go into explaining all of that here, simply for the sake of brevity – otherwise this post would turn into a thesis. But the fact is that the only way in which the sacrifice of Jesus makes any sense whatsoever is if you start with the Book of Genesis, and what God said about sin and sacrifice and the Fallen nature of Man, and end with the Book of Revelation, where a number of prophecies are made about the future that sound flat-out crazy if the life of Christ is not true.
And through the life and death and resurrection of Christ, we now have a complete explanation and solution for all of the problems of evil.
We have a moral code that stands far above men, that cannot be challenged by the authority of men, and that has been found to be absolutely reliable, infallible, and unbreakable every single time it has been tested.
We have a way out of nihilism and despair.
We have a way forward.
And all we have to do, all that is asked of us, is to bend the knee to Christ Jesus and His Father, and repent our sins.
This sounds easy.
It is unbelievably difficult.
To me, the most remarkable and amazing aspect of the Christian faith lies in the way that forgiveness works. I cannot imagine how it is possible for the Lord to look down upon His Creation, with all of its evil and wickedness and brokenness, and still find it within Himself to forgive His children, time and again, whenever we sin.
Not only that, but He explicitly told us that if we ask for forgiveness and are genuinely humble and repent, He will forget our sins as if they never happened.
This literally infinite capacity for forgiveness is simply not possible for a merely human intelligence to understand. All of us have forgiven people who have sinned against us – but we remember their sins. Personally, I find it extremely difficult to forgive those who have lied to me – and it is impossible for me to forget those who do, or why they did it, or when they did.
Truly, indeed, “to err is human, to forgive, divine”. Simply to consider the idea is humbling in the extreme.
And yet that is the gift that the Lord gives us – forgiveness, whenever we ask for it, as long as we genuinely believe that we have sinned and truly want to be forgiven.
There is always a price to pay to get forgiveness, to be sure. If you have hurt someone else, you have to ask that person’s forgiveness. Whether that person forgives you or not is his problem, not yours – but you have to ask for forgiveness from others, and you have to forgive others when they hurt you.
This is insanely hard to do.
But when you do it, you automatically become better.
And that is where taking the God Pill becomes so profoundly transformative.
The Christian view of the world is perhaps the darkest and blackest of them all. We accept that Man is broken and Fallen. We accept that evil is all around us, and that the world is controlled by an immortal, prideful, lying psychopath who gains great power from our sins and rejoices whenever we do something bad. And we accept that we, individually, can do very little of anything to fix the world.
And yet… Christianity, alone, among all of the religions, explains evil and solves it, and provides hope for a better future – because it promises that evil can be defeated.
There is hope. There is a way out from despondency and despair. There is a better tomorrow ahead. And all you have to do is have faith, in something far greater and more powerful than you.
Because of this, we know that fighting for what we believe in, marrying, settling down, and having children is not abuse. It is an act of pure defiance against the evil that rules this world.
Let us rejoice, then, brothers, for another of us has found his way back into the fold. There is great rejoicing in Heaven every time one of us lost sheep returns to the Lord’s flock, and does his level best to turn his back on wickedness and sin.
Embrace the truths of our time, and eventually the TRUTH will embrace you.
Remember that your soul was bought with a price – an enormous one, where Our Lord literally became a man and died in the most horrible way possible for you, personally, even though you never actually met him in the flesh.
Take the God Pill, and gain hope.
Take the God Pill, and gain peace.
Take the God Pill, and gain forgiveness.
Take the God Pill, and above all, become who you were always meant to be.
1 Comment
My Biggest problem with Atheism is not that it doesn't offer any solutions… I don't want solutions. I can come up with my own solutions.
The problem is that it stops asking questions. It stops lively debate. It offers no interesting questions, no REASONS, No Hope, No future, and no past…. and then it expects humans to remain Moral despite stripping people of the REASONS to be moral.
Islam is Evil, Buddhism is arrogant, Confuscionism is self-serving, Shintoism is illogical, Hinduism is pornographic and greedy… but Atheism has them all beat out for pure selfish nihilism.