A world of sociopaths and psychopaths

Today at the American Thinker David Culver Brenner tells secular liberals and atheists to Kindly Stop Stealing My Worldview. Most people who claim atheism haven't really thought it through. Most of them are angry with God, and like little children, turn their backs on him and cross their arms. One expects they will now try to hold their breath until they get what they want. But the truth is that without God, the Creator of everything that is and everything that is not, there is no morality; there is no love. As Dostoyevsky said, “Without God all things are permitted.”  But before you celebrate, you perhaps should read the entire article, and clearly think that through.

One of the more interesting contradictions in our public debate today is the tendency of fully secular folk to speak of the virtues of love and compassion, almost as if they invented them. Political liberals often criticize conservative Christians because they consider their religious and political beliefs woefully lacking in love. The funny thing is that, apart from a loving God, an ethical system based on "love" is as insubstantial as styrofoam peanuts or pixie dust. To reject God is to reject objective morality completely. Secular liberals are simply stealing from Christianity — and thus breaking the Seventh Commandment! — when they insist we love our neighbors and even our enemies.

I'm thinking primarily of secular liberals who dismiss the Christian God as a loving and lawgiving father and who embrace a purely materialistic cosmos. But we might also include religious liberals, who acknowledge God's existence but reject the authority and inspiration of Scripture. Such folk are practical atheists, since although they affirm God, they doubt his ability to communicate unequivocally with fallen humanity, thus leaving them no better off than an ardent atheist — stuck in a mass of moral confusion.

The recent calls by Leftists and liberals to defund the police, to release criminals from jail, and to not prosecute those who commit crimes makes perfect sense for people who believe in a strictly material origin to life on earth.  And, of course, if the the world is really just material, if there is no God, or as Nietzche said, if God is dead, then abortion makes sense, or at least isn't wrong.  But then, anything that one wishes to impose on another because one can, is right.  One finds oneself living in a world of sociopaths and psychopaths.

If the cosmos consists merely of atoms ("materialism" or "naturalism"), and life on Earth is merely the result of a radically improbable string of random events, moral language has zero validity. To assess one kind of behavior (caring for an orphan, for instance) as superior to another kind of behavior (beating an orphan, on the other hand) is nonsensical. In the neo-Darwinian view, each behavior was precipitated by molecular reactions in the brain, governed by the laws of physics.

How can you blame the orphan-beater for acting in ways controlled by chemistry and physics, as opposed to a rational mind and moral conscience that were gifted to him supernaturally? Or why is the one who loves and cares for the orphan deserving of praise if such love is only the product a "lucky" series of chemical events in the brain? In short, materialism eviscerates human blame and credit.

Brenner goes on to smash the idea that humans are capable of love if there is no God. These things, love, morality, the idea that man owes his fellows love, respect, indeed that we are our neighbor's keepers, can only exist when we acknowledge God is, and that we can only love because He first loved us.

Christianity, on the other hand, tells us that love is true, because the God of love is also the God of truth. The three-personal God not only defines and embodies love, but models love relationally — something unique among all religions. Jesus, by His life and especially in His death, showed us what love is, through His own loving obedience to the Father.

Years ago I was debating with a woman who clained that one could be "good" without believing in God. I had not thought through that position myself. But the only reason she had any idea of the "good" was because we live in a country founded as a Christian nation. Our laws are based on the 10 Commandments, as given to mankind by the Finger of God. If not for the love of God, we would live in a world where each seeks his own wants and fulfills his own appetites at the expense of everyone else.  but then, no one would survive long in such a world.