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Blaming God Philip V. Brennan A couple of devout atheists have created something of a stir among intellectuals and members of the media elite who more or less share their antipathy towards anything that even smacks of religion, by blaming all the worlds ills on belief in God. Mr. Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith" has written a new screed "Letter to a Christian Nation" while fellow militant disbeliever Richard Dawkins has given us his latest book "The God Delusion." Both rant that history shows that belief in God — religion — is bad if not fatal for the health of the world, being a stumbling block to human progress and the principal source of global warfare, intolerance, the oppression of children, woman, and science and probably offensive underarm perspiration and unwanted facial hair. According to both savants, the world would be a paradise were it not for the evils foisted upon mankind by religious faith. Religion, they tell us, has caused such atrocities as the Holocaust, death, and unrest in Darfur, and the slaughter provoked by Islamic jihads among other horrors. Those are pretty bold charges coming from a pair of atheists given that their fellow unbelievers, acting under the openly proclaimed atheistic regimes of Nazism and communism, managed to butcher a couple of hundred million people in the last century. So much for atheism as a mechanism for the promotion of peace, tranquility, and universal love and respect among men. It's more adept at slaughtering humans. Atheists scoff at the notion that creation required a creator, but have no problem with accepting the absurdity that absent a creator the universe must have created itself and everything in it. I may be mistaken, but wasn't Christianity born with the angelic declaration of "Peace on earth and peace to men of good will"? (For the sake of an early example of political correctness, that last line has been altered to "good will to men" by the angelic herald's would-be script writers, totally distorting its meaning.) All of the evils blamed on religion by the two authors are actually the result of men who eschew "good will" and that is not God's fault. If you are looking for the villain responsible for the lack of peace and stability in this world the last place to look is to those who deny that there is a divine being — all you'll get from them is the Gulag, the abortuaries and Auschwitz. Look at godless men. "Man without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness," Whittaker Chambers told us in "Witness," echoing Albert Camus who wrote "A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world," and "I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is." Ethics are the children of morality, and morality is the child of God. Ask yourself this: If there is no God how can there be a moral order? And without a moral order to guide us and keep us in line and from despoiling and killing each other on whims and caprices, how can there be peace on earth and good will among men? Morality is the consequence of faith in a creator who gives us the rules by which we can live with each other in peace and good order — the Ten Commandments. Junk them and anything goes, including Auschwitz, wanton killing of the unborn and the elderly, genocide, ethnic cleansing, 9/11s, terrorism and the unlimited satisfaction of all carnal desires, which we are advised, are perfectly natural no matter how bizarre and destructive the forms they take, along with all the other marvelous signs of our enlightened times. Atheists tell us that we can achieve peace and pursue happiness simply by using our minds. It makes sense after all to establish rules that guide our behavior toward one another. Who they ask, needs God to achieve order among men? We need only to be pragmatic to recognize that intelligent beings are capable of running things themselves without the help of a loving God who doesn't exist anyway. The problem is that this idea may make sense to them, but it doesn't to the likes of Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and Charles Manson, and there are hordes of such monsters out there. They will not volunteer to subscribe to any man-made commandments that stand in their way. They just laugh and brush them aside. Such rules are for fools. Take what you can get while the getting is good. Don't tell Willie Sutton that robbing banks is wrong. After all, that's where the money is, so why shouldn't he? Where else would he go? And what, he'd ask, does "wrong" mean anyway? It might be anathema to you, to him it's all relative. Relativism, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us, is the poisonous fruit of these Godless times. It has torn asunder the ancient fabric of once Christian Western Europe, the birthplace of Western civilization from which America's founding fathers drew their inspiration, and has cast us loose to wander rootless in a world where nothing is sacred and nothing is certain and everything is up for grabs.
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These are the fruits of the atheism which has afflicted the West's self-appointed intellectual class. They adopt the belief once expressed by a philosopher whose name I can't recall when he said that if it could be mathematically proven that God exists he would still resist believing that he does because it put a limit on the reach and capacity of the human mind. The thought that there is a higher being than their own self-exalted intellects is a concept they cannot accept. If there is a God, they believe, it is their own minds. Intellectuals are fond of quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, as saying "God is dead." It's instructive, however, to read what he saw as the consequences that arose from the death of God. Noting that the character he called the "madman" had proclaimed "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I," he laid out the grim consequences of a world without God: "All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? "How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: Who will wipe this blood off us? "What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us — for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887). As some wag added to the line "God is Dad, Nietzsche" the words "Nietzsche is dead, God." And despite the desires of those who would have God dead, there is still an up and a down and we do not yet have to light lanterns in the morning. Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association For Intelligence Officers.
He can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com.
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