A few minutes ago a friend emailed me a link to a horrific news story about a murder-suicide. A 43-year-old college professor murdered his 39-year-old wife, called 911 to report it, and while the dispatcher was still on the line, the man went into his basement and fatally shot himself in the chest. The couple had two school-aged children:
The news of this tragedy was all the more disturbing to me because it all happened on the same road I lived on for three years prior to last summer. Nine months ago, my family and I lived only a couple of miles from where this heinous event has taken place.
This kind of news (which is so disgustingly frequent) always calls attention to one blazingly conspicuous fact: atheists are not honest. The idea that God does not exist has waxed and waned in popularity over the past three hundred years or so. And through the last decade, there has been a wave of prolific writers whose consistent complaint against belief in God and the willful naivety that makes belief possible have put new wheels on the atheist bandwagon. They’ve come to be called the “New Atheists,” though there’s not much new in what they have to say. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, among several others, have gained quite a following writing and speaking about the absurdity of religious belief. They deride anyone who believes in God and his moral authority as asinine, superstitious, and willfully ignorant. As Dawkins laments, religious believers in the modern, scientifically enlightened world must be either stupid or wicked.
But the problem with such luminaries is that they cannot stomach the conclusions of their own ideas. As C.S. Lewis says, they don’t remember their philosophy outside school. As bad as I believe most atheists to be, I don’t believe they are fully bad, at least not yet. I would bet that the vast majority of those who identify as atheists would read about this tragedy and respond by saying something like, “What a shame” or “How tragic” or “That’s just wrong.” And like the noonday sun on a shard of mirror, their wretched inconsistency comes to light.
If there is no God and no moral accountability beyond the grave, if we truly cease to exist after our last breath, and if all of reality is made up only of physical elements, then morality itself is an illusion. We don't watch mixed chemicals react in a vat and say, “That’s just wrong!” And yet, if the New Atheists are right, all of life is simply the product of a series of extremely complex, though mindless, chemical reactions. If this is so, words like shame and tragedy, wrong and right, good and evil, have no meaning. Morality is, at best, a social convention like shaking hands or wearing neck ties. It’s taught and expected but has no real meaning in and of itself. There are many who are working hard to convince themselves and others of this, but they still instinctively realize (despite their philosophy) that tragedies really are tragic. Thus atheists are not honest. But as long as their are atheists we should hope they remain dishonest; we would not call an honest atheist honest. We would call him a sociopath.
Even across the country I can't help but respond to your blogs. Not to disagree on this account but to say "right on". A few months ago our class discussed the book "Mortality" by Christopher Hitchens. I thought it would be interesting to see how an atheist approaches death. He specifically told his friends and family that if he suddenly tried to convert, it was not him speaking but the medications, etc. I found it interesting however, just how much he still talked of religion, was comforted by religious people and music. I also found his story incredibly sad. It was almost as if he refused to believe just to prove a point. Prior to reading this book, we had just finished Rob Bell's book, "Love Wins", which brought up a lot of interesting, discussion worthy ideas. We did feel that if Rob Bell is right, maybe God is still working on Christopher Hitchens, even after his death. Or maybe, since has you pointed out, atheists are not honest, Mr. Hitchens made peace with the God he spent his life denying, but was unable at that point to write down or otherwise convey his discovery. Either way, yes, atheists are not honest. They too seem to have a moral compass which they really cannot deny unless as you said, they are a sociopath.
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