God Haters
Your mind is naturally hostile to God. Mine too. So said the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:7.
“This does not necessarily mean that all unconverted human minds are actively, intentionally, maliciously hostile,” wrote Herbert W. Armstrong in Mystery of the Ages about that scripture. “Most humans are passively hostile against God. They simply do not normally think about God. If God is mentioned they become embarrassed and often try to change the subject.”
That was written over 20 years ago. How times have changed.
It seems every few days another example appears of active, intentional, malicious hostility against God. Many people are thinking quite a lot about God—specifically, how to force Him into retreat.
We are witnessing something of a crusade. It’s not just an effort to clear space for non-believers to practice their non-belief. They already have plenty of that. This is a movement to systematically eliminate God from public life—to establish godlessness as the state religion.
God a “Mythological Creature”
Take the story that emerged in early December about an antiterrorism law in Kentucky acknowledging that the state’s security “cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.” A plaque in the state’s emergency operations center quotes Psalm 127: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”
American Atheists Inc. is hopping mad about it. As far as it is concerned, this is tantamount to establishing a state religion, expressly forbidden by the First Amendment. It filed suit against the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security in an effort to strike the offensive references. American Atheists president Ed Buckner justifies the action with this reasoning: “I’m not aware of any other state or commonwealth that is attempting to dump their clear responsibility for protecting their citizens onto God or any other mythological creature.”
Not only is God not mythological or even a creature, Kentucky isn’t dumping any responsibility on Him. It isn’t dialing back its operations or trimming its budget out of faith that God will protect. Its policies are 100 percent the same as they would be if it didn’t afford God this passing acknowledgment. Still, this clause and this plaque pose enough of a threat to unbelievers that they are moved to fight.
Ed Buckner probably wouldn’t find anything to threaten his unbelief in Washington d.c.’s new Capitol Visitors’ Center, built for over $600 million right next to the Capitol building. In telling the story of America, it is full of voids where God once was.
America’s strongly religious history has been sanitized for atheistic consumption. The fact that church services in the Capitol building were an official congressional function for most of America’s history has been substituted with the lie that the community was simply permitted to use the building, even for church, when Congress wasn’t in session. The visitors’ center version of Article vii of the Constitution omits the phrase “in the year of our Lord.” From Article iii of the Northwest Ordinance, the italicized words in this excerpt have been stricken: “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” In a display showing the inside of the House chamber, the “In God We Trust” etched in stone above the speaker’s head has been scrubbed out.
These are creepy, Orwellian omissions. The officials making them are more concerned about abiding by godless orthodoxy than they are about factual accuracy.
If the idea is to avoid offending someone who has a different religious belief than that of America’s founders who lived that history, authored those documents and chiseled that stone, then why should that take precedence over offending those who do believe in God? A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life poll in 2008 found that 92 percent of Americans say they believe in God. The other 8 percent are doing a remarkable job of making 92 percent a minority.
Britain recently offered a comparable example. There, if ignorant schoolchildren want to know what a disciple or a minister is, they’ll have to look somewhere other than Oxford’s new Junior Dictionary. The book’s publishers, in order to reflect the modern, multicultural, multifaith Britain, have removed those words, along with most all others having anything to do with religion. Altar, psalm, pulpit and saint are gone. The devil is no more. Sin has been scrubbed. The book can only include so many words, and space apparently had to be cleared for entries such as blog, celebrity, chatroom,mp3player,tolerant and bilingual.
“Why Believe in a God?”
Back in America’s capital city, thanks to the American Humanist Association, on public buses there are signs reading, “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.” The campaign matches one that the British Humanist Association brought to Britain’s capital. In January, London’s city buses began displaying ads saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
These ads, the latter supported by The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins, highlight atheism’s new aggressiveness. Christopher Hitchens, whose latest book is called God Is Not Great, describes himself not as an atheist but an “antitheist.” He is a spokesman for many who believe that religion is at the root of the world’s problems. Imagine how peaceful the world would be, they say, if only people would give up religion.
Another entry in this genre is the Bill Maher documentary Religulous, released last October. The comedian lured religious people of all types—most quite kooky, judging from the movie trailer—in front of a camera in order to poke holes in their flimsy faith. The film was proudly marketed on its irreverence; it was the highest grossing documentary in America in 2008.
As the Apostle Peter prophesied, “there shall come in the last days scoffers”—people who brazenly mock God (2 Peter 3:3).
Filling a Void
The Apostle Paul also foretold that “in the last days” we would witness a rise in “boasters, proud, blasphemers … unholy … fierce, despisers of those that are good”—and that such evils will “wax worse and worse” (2 Timothy 3:1-3, 13).
But in the same prophecy, Paul also pinpointed one of the primary reasons for the trend: that even those who are religious, those who have “a form of godliness,” would be guilty of “denying the power thereof” (verse 5). Truly, the fact that God haters are advancing is a measure of the weakness and vapidity of Christianity in the Western world today. There is much to poke fun at. There is an emptiness to fill.
Some religious people point with pride at the swelling numbers filling the megachurches. But numbers have never meant much to God. “[S]trait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it,” Christ said.
Many of the criticisms and attacks on religion find their mark because most religion is false religion—dreamed up by the mind of man. Rather than recognizing that we are made in God’s image, and for a transcendent reason that illuminates God’s sovereignty over us, people create false gods in their own image.
The root cause of these problems, however, lies beyond the physical realm. It lies in the very real and active existence of a devil that hates God and influences mankind to hate Him too. The growing fervor among some to stamp God out of existence is not borne of cool, rational logic, as some would have you believe. That natural hostility to God in all of us? The Bible shows that Satan put it there (e.g. Ephesians 2:2; more scriptural proof can be found in our free booklet Human Nature: What Is It?).
The preponderance of conflicting beliefs, of shallow, emotion-based religion, even of violent and destructive religious ideas that have caused a great many of mankind’s problems, also trace back to this evil being who is doing all he can to keep people from finding that narrow way that leads to life. The Bible plainly says he has deceived the “whole world” (Revelation 12:9).
What Fools Say
“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God,” the psalmist of Israel once wrote (Psalm 53:1). Let’s look at a case in point.
In December, Discover magazine featured “Science’s Alternative to an Intelligent Creator”—an article that described scientists’ latest attempt to explain the truly limitless number of factors that make our universe and Earth “perfectly tailored for life.” Possibly, perhaps, “Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.” There are infinitely many universes, and—lucky us—we just happened to be born into the one where everything is perfect.
This is absolute fiction—a fairy tale in a lab coat. It cannot be corroborated by even a microparticle of evidence. Yet Discover said it “may well be the only viable nonreligious explanation” for how “the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.” The article contained this brilliant quote from Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at Queen Mary University of London: “If there is only one universe, you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.”
What a devastatingly revealing statement. If you don’t want God, you pretty much have to accept a fable as reality. You need to put your faith—which drives your understanding of why the universe is and what our place in it may be—in the imagination of some scientist who is himself deeply prejudiced against the idea of God.
But if you simply accept the observable data regarding our material world, and acknowledge the basic, elementary truth that the universe we see is the only one there is, then you really must allow that there is a “fine-tuner,” a Designer, a magnificent Creator behind it all!
Look again at the Apostle Paul and the book of Romans. Read the first chapter, beginning around verse 18. The material creation simply could not be a more finely tuned, well-designed, intricate, beautiful, awesome work, the pinnacle of all that both art and science prize and strive for. It’s as if God purposefully saturated it with elegant perfectness in order to ensure we didn’t overlook Him in it.
And yet, in our arrogance and obstinacy, overlook Him we have. Our minds, under Satan’s sway, are naturally hostile to Him. And thus, having rejected Him as the lawgiver of all the material realm, people reject Him as the moral lawgiver as well, and cast themselves adrift in a surging sea of human reasoning and moral relativity.
If you see the folly in the notion that a religion-free world would be utopia—if you chafe at someone referring to God as a “mythological creature”—if you recognize the self-evident truth that there is a “fine tuner” behind this custom-tailored universe—if, further, you can see that natural hostility to God within yourself and desire to be free of it—if you are tired of the surging sea and want to latch hold of something firm—then ask us for a free copy of Mr. Armstrong’s book Mystery of the Ages. In one volume, intended to be read alongside your own Bible, you will find solid answers to life’s most plaguing questions. And you’ll come to see the vivid, powerful proof that God is, and in Him is so much to love.
