If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.
G.K. Chesterton
The horrific murders which occurred in Newtown, Connecticut a few weeks ago have generated many different conversations in this country. We have heard a lot of discussion about gun control and mental illness, and for those of us on the pro life side, a lot of talk about the killing of children in general. There have also been discussions about how a good God could let such a terrible thing happen. I find it a little incongruous that people are always questioning God when evil happens, but they never think about him when good things happen, such as the births and lives of all those beautiful young children.
The New York Times this past weekend published an editorial by an atheist who offers her means of solace without belief in God and in an afterlife.
No, this is not a joke. An atheist is telling us why disbelief in God can be very consoling when we lose someone we love. Believing in nothing, we are told, can be very liberating.
The author, Susan Jacoby, argues that first of all, an atheist can provide understanding support to those who have religious doubts. There is nothing like helping a person believe in nothing to really bring comfort when we have suffered a tremendous loss. The author explains that her descent into atheism was triggered by a childhood friend's suffering and death from polio and her mother's inability to explain why God would allow this to happen.
The first time I told this story to a class, I was deeply gratified when one student confided that his religious doubts arose from the struggles of a severely disabled sibling, and that he had never been able to discuss the subject candidly with his fundamentalist parents. One of the most positive things any atheist can do is provide a willing ear for a doubter — even if the doubter remains a religious believer.Ms. Jacoby tells us that atheism really shows its strength "in the face of suffering." When an atheist sees suffering, he never has to trouble himself to ask why.
It is primarily in the face of suffering, whether the tragedy is individual or collective, that I am forcefully reminded of what atheism has to offer. When I try to help a loved one losing his mind to Alzheimer’s, when I see homeless people shivering in the wake of a deadly storm, when the news media bring me almost obscenely close to the raw grief of bereft parents, I do not have to ask, as all people of faith must, why an all-powerful, all-good God allows such things to happen.
Credit: haretranslation.blogspot.com |
It is a positive blessing, not a negation of belief, to be free of what is known as the theodicy problem. Human “free will” is Western monotheism’s answer to the question of why God does not use his power to prevent the slaughter of innocents, and many people throughout history (some murdered as heretics) have not been able to let God off the hook in that fashion.
The atheist is free to concentrate on the fate of this world — whether that means visiting a friend in a hospital or advocating for tougher gun control laws — without trying to square things with an unseen overlord in the next.
The problem with her reasoning is this. It is because of suffering that we ask questions, and it is because we ask question that we find the answers. Atheists have no answers because they have no questions. All they do is attack those who do have questions and even worse, actually find answers.
A billboard in Times Square that was paid for by Atheists,org |
This lawsuit may lead you to think that the atheists are against religion in general, but all of their attacks are specifically against Christianity, as can be seen in the billboard in Times Square. They didn't attack Hanukkah or even Kwanzaa. I have never once heard an atheist complain about Ramadan. They say they don't believe in God, but it seems the only God with whom they really have a problem is the Christian God. As GK Chesterton said: "They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith."
Below is another billboard put up by this same atheist group:
Sorry, Susan, but I'm not buying your line that atheists don't want to change anyone. To quote again the great GK Chesterton: “Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”
Now Ms. Jacoby makes a completely contradictory statement.
We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.How does believing that nothing has meaning and we are all headed for eternal oblivion lend any kind of importance to anything? If we are all just an accident of nature and our lives have no meaning, then nothing that we do has any meaning. Ms. Jacoby's statement is one of the most nonsensical statements I have ever read.
Today’s atheists would do well to emulate some of the great 19th-century American freethinkers, who insisted that reason and emotion were not opposed but complementary.
Robert Green Ingersoll, who died in 1899 and was one of the most famous orators of his generation, personified this combination of passion and rationality. Called “The Great Agnostic,” Ingersoll insisted that there was no difference between atheism and agnosticism because it was impossible for anyone to “know” whether God existed or not. He used his secular pulpit to advocate for social causes like justice for African-Americans, women’s rights, prison reform and the elimination of cruelty to animals.
He also frequently delivered secular eulogies at funerals and offered consolation that he clearly considered an important part of his mission. In 1882, at the graveside of a friend’s child, he declared: “They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest ... The dead do not suffer.”
Credit: fancythought.blogspot.com
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The horror of Newtown, Connecticut has led the whole country to search for a reason for such blatant evil. C.S. Lewis gives a profound glimpse into the answer:
“The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.”Also from C.S. Lewis:
“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”If we are to follow the atheist line of reasoning, we should just accept everything that happens and never question, because questioning makes us uncomfortable. I cannot disagree more. We do not honor the victims of evil by comforting ourselves with the knowledge, "Well, they're not suffering anymore." That is the lazy way out. We need to ask why the innocent die.
The last thing our Enemy wants us to do is to question evil. The Evil One doesn't want anyone to ask questions because he doesn't want anyone to find answers. We need to be disturbed by the shootings in Newtown. That is the very least that we owe to these victims. It is not about how we can comfort ourselves. It is about searching for answers as to why this happened.
And I, for one, am sick and tired of hearing that guns are to blame. We have had guns in our society since it was founded almost 250 years ago. But it is only in the last few decades that we have seen such horrendous evil as we witnessed in Newtown, Connecticut or Aurora, Colorado.
John Paul II said, "A nation that kills its own children has no future." We have just been informed that Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in the nation, received $542 million in taxpayer money in 2012. They also killed 334,000 babies in 2011. Newtown, Connecticut was a wake up call to our nation. If we can't see the connection between killing our children in the womb and killing them in the classroom, then we truly are doomed and no one and nothing can save us.
One thing, but atheism, in terms of Big Bang theory, does not hold that in the beginning there was nothing which then exploded. Big Bang theory just holds that as far as we can tell, about 13.6 billion Earth years ago, the universe was compressed into a very tiny state, a singularity, which then very rapidly expanded outward and which is still expanding outward. Who or what put all the matter there Big Bang theory does not address.
ReplyDeleteDid you know that the Big Bang Theory came from a Catholic priest: From Wikipedia:
Delete"Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. He proposed the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble. He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the 'Cosmic Egg'."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
So I think that if you went to the real originator of the Big Bang Theory - a Catholic priest - he would address the origin of "all the matter" in the Big Bang Theory.