ATHEISM

An atheist said, "If there is a God, may he prove himself by striking me dead right now." Nothing happened. "You see, there is not God." Another responded, "You've only proved that He is a gracious God." Unknown As Vice President, George Bush represented the U.S. at the funeral of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved by a silent protest carried out by Brezhnev's widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid, Brezhnev's wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely rank as one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience ever committed: She reached down and made the sign of the cross on her husband's chest. There in the citadel of secular, atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all hoped that her husband was wrong. She hoped that there was another life, and that that life was best represented by Jesus who died on the cross, and that the same Jesus might yet have mercy on her husband. Gary Thomas, Christianity Today, October 3, 1994, p. 26. George Bernard Shaw is perhaps most renowned as a free thinker and liberal philosopher. In his last writings we read, "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now they look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith." Nobody talks so constantly about God as those who insist that there is no God. Heywood Broun. Some years ago, when the news broke out that Joseph Stalin's daughter had defected from Communism and Russia, many people were startled. Her statement given to reporters who met her plane in New York, told why she defected: "I found it impossible to exist without God in one's heart. I came to that conclusion myself, without anybody's help or preaching. That was a great change because since that moment the main dogmas of Communism lost their significance for me. I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia." That woman's struggle was a terrible one. To leave Russia, she had to leave two children in Moscow and realize that it would be, as she said, "Impossible to go back." Source Unknown. Pascal said there is within every person a "God-shaped vacuum." He's right. Historians Will and Ariel Durant observed in their summery volume, The Lessons of History, that There never has been a significant example of morality apart from belief in God."  Morning Glory, February 5, 1994.  Near the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre told Pierre Victor: "I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God. Protested fellow philosopher and long-time companion Simone de Beauvoir: "How should one explain the senile act of a turncoat?"  HIS Magazine, April, 1983. Have you not heard of the madman who lit a lamp in the bright morning and went to the marketplace crying ceaselessly, "I seek God! I seek God!" There were many among those standing there who didn't believe in God so he made them laugh. "Is God lost?" one of them said. "Has he gone astray like a child?" said another. "Or is he hiding? Has he gone on board ship and emigrated?" So they laughed and shouted to one another. The man sprang into their midst and looked daggers at them. "Where is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I We are all his killers! But how have we done this? How could we swallow up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon? What will we do as the earth is set loose from its sun?"  Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889 Nietzsche's point was not that God does not exist, but that God has become irrelevant. Men and women may assert that God exists or that He does not, but it makes little difference either way. God is dead not because He doesn't exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He doesn't.  C. Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict, p. 181. STATISTICS AND STUFF According to the teaching of our Lord, what is wrong with the world is precisely that it does not believe in God. Yet it is clear that the unbelief which he so bitterly deplored was not an intellectual persuasion of God's non-existence. Those whom he rebuked for their lack of faith were not men who denied God with the top of their minds, but men who, while apparently incapable of doubting him with the top of their minds, lived as though he did not exist.  John Baillie, in Our Knowledge of God. Of course, like the wary schoolboy who scoffs at ghosts yet whistles while passing a graveyard, some atheists would seem to protest too much. The publications of an organization called Freedom from Religion Foundation, Inc. include The Born-Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible; The Pillars of Religion: Ignorance, Inadequacy, Indoctrination; Why I Am an Atheist; and its bestseller Atheism, The Case Against God, promoted as an excellent manual for beginners.   From Thinking and Acting Like a Christian, D. Bruce Lockerbie, p. 27. POEMS In the book Gaily The Troubadour, published in 1936, Arthur Guiterman wrote the following poem. Reading his observations, you wouldn't guess it was written 60+ years ago. First dentistry was painless; Then bicycles were chainless And carriages were horseless And many laws, enforceless. Next, cookery was fireless, Telegraphy was wireless, Cigars were nicotineless And coffee, caffeinless. Soon oranges were seedless, The putting green was weedless, The college boy hatless, The proper diet, fatless, Now motor roads are dustless, The latest steel is rustless, Our tennis courts are sodless, Our new religions, godless.   Arthur Guiterman, Gaily The Troubadour.