Putting ourselves in the mind of an atheist is hard for most of us. Honestly, have many of us really tried to think how reality might be perceived from the opposite side of the theological spectrum? For me, I began thinking about what life would look like through the paradigm of a non-believer. My mind immediately gravitated towards the notion that the universe would be void of cosmic justice. The idea of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Lenin, and innumerable other evil dictators being morally blameless for their crimes gave me a sense of discomfort. Many atheists make the objection that the Christian God is evil because He called for the extermination of the Canaanites but dismiss the idea of cosmic justice to rectify mass evil when it comes to the evils perpetrated by the wicked dictators over the last century. Obviously, the ponderings about the existence of cosmic justice doesn’t provide us with a conclusion of whether a God truly exists or not. However, this dismissive attitude towards truly evil wrongdoers while being supercritical over their misperceived evil conducted by the Old Testament God is worth noting.
So, if you’re an atheist, you must find a way to reconcile the notion of ‘evil’ in order to live consistently with an atheist worldview. If you truly reject the existence of God, you would have to reject the existence of an objective moral standard that would serve to measure the morality of our actions. For instance, Hitler and Mother Teresa would be morally indifferent because there is no objective standard to measure their actions. If the atheist would develop a standard of morality, it would be a subjective standard that would not be authoritative among humanity. An atheist could judge the moral actions of someone else however they could not judge them on any moral foundation other than the one they’ve personally constructed for themselves. If I was an atheist that would really take the wind out of my sails. Maybe that is why you see a lot of atheists supporting pro-choice and same-sex marriage laws. In a world with no objective moral standard, why would these two behaviors (or any behavior for that matter) be considered immoral?
Humanity is purposeless. You have no value. You’re a meaningless product of a random evolutionary process that initially developed from the spawn of a single-celled organism. The relationships you derive are also meaningless. Everything that you do in this life has no objective value. You’re living day-to-day only to accomplish the goal of mere survival. The simple fact that you’re a human provides you with the advantage of being cognitively advanced, however that provides you with no additional worth than that of bacteria. Humanity and bacteria are equally worthless in the grand scheme of things in this universe. We live on a speck of cosmic dust among hundreds of billions of other galaxies.
Curiously enough, atheists don’t seem to live like they’re meaningless. When they speak, they perpetrate a sense of ‘equality’ when it comes to same-sex marriage and women’s ‘rights’ when it comes to pro-choice matters. The reality is that neither equality nor rights would exist under an atheist worldview. There is no transcendent Being to grant the existence of rights or equality, as these are qualities that are God-given. The illusion of rights and equality would have to be a product of humanity. In this case, since humanity creatively produced them out of nothing, we can logically assume that humanity could take them away just as fast as they brought them into existence. If equality and rights do not have a foundation in anything transcendent, then they are merely subjective.
Atheists would be miserable folks if they lived according to the logical and inescapable conclusions of their atheism. As Christians, we see that meaning, purpose, objective morality, equality, and rights are all products of Christian theism. Without theism, these are convenient delusions that help us live life with the illusion of meaning and purpose and all that goes along with it. In our current culture, it almost seems like being an atheist is cool or that you’re a ‘free-thinker’ if you subscribe to this ideology. Is that a good enough reason to disregard these atheistic implications? Or are atheists merely borrowing from God in order to live a pleasant life while simultaneously denying the existence of Him?
Obviously, these atheistic implications are not arguments for theism. It is merely playing out the logical conclusions of the atheistic worldview. For me, I believe in Christianity because of the cumulative case that can be made for it along with having a personal relationship with Christ that is completely outside of what any argument can provide. If you’re an atheist, the unintuitive nature of atheism should be the first sign on your path towards the inquisitive doubting of your worldview.
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