kingdomready.org

There seems to be a huge clash that is about to happen. Recently Rowan Williams (the head of the Anglican church) gave a lecture focused on the area of law. It was really about how a better pluralistic society could work to satisfy everyone in it. The lecture was entirely misunderstood by the media, and because he talks about sharia law, the coverage and reactions were completely over the top. NT Wright even had a recent lecture on the same topic in light of the massive misunderstanding.

The fact that people of faith want a platform to discuss real issues that impact their lives is notable. The Enlightenment, as a movement in history, was about opening discussion for other alternatives. For people who did not want to live under the authority of a faith-based institution. It is notable that many philosophers of tolerance, Hume for one, were actually Christians. However, now we have swung to the opposite. We, as people of faith, do not want to live under the authority of a secular state. This is something that Wright’s lecture addresses primarily.

The clash that I think is about to happen is between a faith that is refusing to be silenced in the public sphere, and a secularism that has forgotten that faith deserves a place in the public sphere. And this article brings up exactly these points in the context of the “new athiesm” movement that is generating a lot of hot air recently. Aikman in the article points out four chief authors that seem to be the heralds for this movement: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. And these are their basic claims:

1. Religion is bad because it makes people do bad things;
2. Religion cannot be true because science has explanations,

or sooner or later will have explanations, of all the issues upon which religions claim authority;

3. Complaints about the wickedness of atheistic leaders or regimes in the twentieth century are invalid; there is no evidence that atheism influences people to do bad things (Dawkins), or else the apparent wickedness of the atheists is all the fault of the religious people whom the atheists replaced when they took over (Hitchens);

I find it incredible that any rational person could not see through these three points for the incredible faulty logic contained there. Athiests can claim as their own every communist dictator there has been, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, are just a few. And these leaders have killed more people in their wars and genocides than all the other wars and conflicts between peoples of faith combined.

On the other hand at least some Athiests get it:

In a column in, of all places, Britain’s The Guardian newspaper in 2005, Hattersley admitted what to many people is rather obvious. “We atheists have to accept that most believers are better human beings,” the subhed to the column said. Hattersley’s column was written after visiting the flood-ravaged city of New Orleans in 2005. “Almost all” the aid groups that stayed on in the devastated city after the first wave of relief workers had left, he said, had “a religious origin and character.” He said that notable by their absence were “teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers’ clubs, and atheists’ associations – the sort of people who not only scoff at religions’ intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force of evil.” Hattersley said he had observed the Salvation Army and other Christian groups at work in New Orleans as well as in his own English constituency. “The only possible conclusion,” he wrote, “is that faith comes with a packet of moral imperatives that, while they do not condition the attitude of all believers, influence enough of them to make them morally superior to atheists like me. The truth may make us free. But it has not made us as admirable as the average captain in the Salvation Army.” Spoken like a true atheist.

This “new athiesm” doesn’t want us to have a public voice, a public voice of faith.  They truly believe that faith has no place in the public world.  But we have to realize that God’s new creation stands entirely in opposition to that idea.   The first generation of Christians led an entirely counter-culture example of how society should really be.  Paul went into the public spheres of life, the very center in Athens at the areopogas, to talk about what God did in and through Jesus and what that meant for each person.  This thing called Christianity is not a private, do-it-at-home, faith.