There are a LOT of militant atheists in the Western world, who not only have convinced themselves that there is no God, but who want to destroy all faith in Him in everyone ELSE. To that end, they have written books railing against God and religion (ESPECIALLY Christianity),and created TV shows and movies that, just a few decades ago, would have been deemed too blasphemous to stage. The ACLU, a well-funded and powerful organization that was founded by a group of Communist atheists, has gone to court, again and again, to DEFEND such “artists” as Mapplethorpe, with his “Piss Christ”, and, on the other hand, to suppress any and all public displays of religion by threatening to take the perpetrators of such things to court. They have won, over and over, too. There are militantly atheistic blogs and websites all over the Internet, more all the time. It is almost as if we were back in imperial Rome, except that Christians haven’t been slaughtered in the Coliseum..yet.
WHY? Why do they work so hard to suppress Christianity and Christians?
It must be because they see in Christianity a threat, a threat of their own massively overwrought imaginings. They were taught about the Crusades , but from the point of view of the Mohammedans, NOT the TRUTH , so they think that the Crusades were nothing more than European knights just going to the Holy Land to slaughter the Mohammedans for fun and profit. They assume that, since the knights called themselves Christians, ALL Christians must be murderously intolerant of other, non-Christian people. They overlook or never learned that the Crusades happened almost a thousand years ago.
The militant atheists look back at the Dark Ages, when the Catholic Church persecuted scientists who taught that the earth went around the sun, when the Spanish Inquisition was going on, when Jews were being persecuted,dispossessed, and outlawed all over Europe, some being forcibly baptized, Jewish children being taken from their own parents to be raised in Christian families as Christians. These horrid things WERE being done, by “Christians”, but NOT because these deeds were justified by any scriptures at ALL. These deeds were done by people, illiterate people, who owned and read NO books, because only the clergy and royalty KNEW how to read, back then. The clergy and royalty were a law unto themselves, and could sway the people any way they wanted to, since the people trusted them not to lie about what the Bible said to do, or NOT do. The mass ignorance came to an end with the invention of the printing press. That made possible the proliferation of Bibles and other books, and as the Bible was translated into people’s personal languages from the Latin, and education became more widespread,the clergy and royalty lost power. The Renaissance flowered, and with it, the arts, literature, science and exploration. Wars still happened, but as time passed, Christian morality began to creep in even there. Whereas in times past, wounded soldiers of the losing side in a battle were slain where they lay by the victors, treaties were signed, and the wounded of the losing side were treated by the victors, and eventually sent home after the war. The evils of the past were PAST.
Anyone who would blame Christianity for the rise of Nazi Germany (“after all, wasn’t Germany a Christian nation?”) would be in error. Nazism was steeped in the occult, and was anti-Christian. Many Christian clergymen and lay people who preached against the evils of Nazism were imprisoned, and many died of abuse, starvation and diseases there. Hitler had all the Bibles removed from the churches and replaced by copies of “Mein Kampf”, and all clergymen had to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler in order to be allowed to keep their posts,otherwise they were not allowed to preach. Hitler said that Christ was the bastard son of a Roman soldier, and railed that Christianity weakened the German people, which is why it was outlawed.
Christianity, along with all major religions EXCEPT Islam, teaches the brotherhood of man, that we should deal fairly,kindly and generously with others, and that we should forgive our enemies and pray for them. The Bible does say that homosexuality is a sin, but also that we should “hate the sin and love the sinner”. Slavery was ended by Christians, who saw that the Bible doesn’t allow for it. The Declaration of Independence says, “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”, and the Christian abolitionists believed that, too. The Civil War was fought in part because people didn’t want to allow the Southern states to cecede and keep their slaves forever. The civil rights era came to be partly because of the efforts of Christian activists, like the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, along with others. Christians saw to the end of children in the workplace, the establishment of the first free public schools and libraries and parks, the suppression of barbaric practices in colonized countries like infanticide,child sacrifice and the forced suicide of the newly widowed, and created organizations galore to aid the sufferings of the poor and disaster victims (the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Goodwill, St. Vincent de Paul, among countless others). The American Humane Association and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals were both founded on Christian principles, as was Boys Town. Also, the YMCA and YWCA, which actually stood for Young Mens Christian Association and Young Womens Christian Association. Almost all of us are acquainted with some Christian or other, whose religious views make him or her enjoyable to be around, who is an inspiration to us, and makes us glad to have him or her as a friend.
My point is, what have the ATHEISTS done to help anyone? What joy have THEY ever inspired in anyone? When’s the last time the ACLU or People for the American Way went to a flood area and aided the suffering there, or when did THEY open and run a soup kitchen, operate a leper colony, bathe and feed an orphan, set up and run a hospital in the wilds in a foreign country to serve people who cannot pay, or fight to defend the helpless with no thought of reward or advantage to be gained?
I pity them.
