I mentioned in the last post that I am currently reading John Zmirak's book No Second Amendment, No First: Guns and Government. The book presents the Bill of Rights, and in particular the Second Amendment, as grounded in the Christian faith in the God who has created mankind in His image. There is much that then flows from that simple statement.
Yesterday, at the American Thinker Selwyn Duke had an intensely personal piece entitled Without God, There Is No TRUE Respect for Human Life which pursues what a belief in God, the Creator and His creation of us in His image implies. For there can be no true respect for human life without this belief. When someone proposes to reduce the population of the world by some amount, you quickly see that this person has no respect for human life.
Duke writes of his youth so that you can understand the path followed to get where he is today. I can sympathize because, while I was trained in the church, I abandoned those beliefs, believing them to be mere superstitions. It was only late in life that I came to realize that the world described in the Bible is real down to the tiniest detail. People ask how God can condemn people to hell. But God doesn't, we our selves condemn ourselves to hell by not following His instructions for coming to Him. But some might say, wouldn't it be better to simply destroy a person rather than having them eternally tormented? Perhaps, but God has infinitely more respect for us than we do for ourselves, so he cannot simply destroy us. It is why he cannot destroy the Devil, though it might eliminate a lot of problems. He has respect for the Devil, who has no respect for Him.
Since my title is bound to inspire criticism that I’m a “God botherer,” I’ll preface what follows by stating that I wasn’t always the halo-adorned, floating-in-the-ether desert mystic (without the sand or heat) you behold today. I wasn’t raised with faith, and as a 12-year-old was an agnostic who’d say, “I’d never believe or disbelieve in anything there’s no proof of.” Later on I’d be rather dismissive of theists, actually, viewing them as God botherers myself, though we didn’t have that term or as many Richard Dawkins-like secularist warriors back then. I suppose we were, relatively speaking, handicapped in our exercise of supercilious anti-theism.
But that has changed — and I’ve changed. I long ago could’ve moved on to supercilious pro-theism; only, my faith instructs that Pride is the father of all sin, Humility is a virtue and warns that “he who exalts himself will be humbled.” The realization I’ll expound upon today further explains why I’ve changed, and I mention my spiritual evolution not because I’m narcissistic (though that isn’t to say I’m not!) but because maybe, just perhaps, a few non-believers will consider what follows more seriously knowing it doesn’t come from someone “raised to think that way.”
...snip...
That we are mere things under the atheistic world view is an indisputable corollary of it that has been recognized by atheists themselves. I remember a fellow online who said, perhaps lamentably, that we humans are just robots, “really cool robots.” A botanist named Lawrence Trevanion, seeming more clinical about the matter, has defined people as “objects that perceive” (thankfully, he’s responsible for the health of plants, not people. Though were I a fern, I still think I’d rather be in the care of a “God botherer” gushing with deific sentimentality). But the implications of this belief are serious.
It’s often stressed in America that “our rights come from God,” as our Founders insisted, because we know that what God has bestowed only He can rightly revoke. The logic is airtight. People ultimately yield to greater power, authority and wisdom and, unless profoundly devilish, defer completely to the Ultimate Power (upon recognizing it). How compelling it is, the belief that the Creator of the Universe and Inerrant Author of All has decreed something so. And this, by the way, involves not a matter of faith but fact: human psychology. Generally speaking, it’s how people operate, like it or not.
Is it any different with human life? People will, as a rule, respect it when considering man a divinely created being, infused with a soul and deemed sacred by God. If he’s just an organic robot, however, all bets are off.
It is important to realize that all sorts of bad things flow out of the atheistic belief that man is an organic robot: genocide, eugenics, attempts to change man's nature all flow out of this basic disrespect. Another thing that flows out of an atheistic worldview is psychopathy. For that is how a psychopath views other people, as objects. But as Duke points out, most people who embrace atheism do not live as psychopaths because they have not fully examined what that position means.
To reassure my non-believer friends, and remember I once was one of you, yes, I know the vast majority of you are not psychopaths. As I’ve illustrated, however, this is because you don’t truly live your atheism and all its implications. And even insofar as a few of you might have thought matters through and concluded we’re just “really cool robots,” you (thankfully) don’t feel this on an emotional level. You don’t live down to your beliefs.
So, then, what of my article’s title? After all, some who don’t recognize God then do in practice have respect for human life. The answer lies in a twist on a George Washington saying about morality. To wit: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that national morality [respect] for life can be maintained without religion.” (Of course, respect for life is part of morality.) As is said in commercials, “Individual results may vary.” But the national (collective) picture is clear: The more we mainstream godlessness, the more it and its corollaries will permeate not just minds but hearts. This is why a very sober atheist, whose thoughts I read decades ago, expressed concern over his creed’s wider embrace. He grasped its implications.
Watching was is happening in Europe and in England, I fear for what it portends if we, as a nation, do not turn back to God. For He will, out of love, let us go our own way if we insist. But what a miserable place we will bequeath to our children without Him at its center.
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