The Godless Delusion

The following excerpt is from a Bruce Walker article at American Thinker from a few years ago. I’ve bolded the three sentences midway through that I think are key. This notion that only those who adhere to an organized religion are “religious” is silly. Everyone believes something — they just might not call it a “religion” because what they believe is a lot more disorganized. Those who say “I’m not religious” often are — it’s just that what they believe is a mishmash of garbage masquerading as “enlightenment.” (For more on that topic, read A Clash of Orthodoxies by Robert P. George.)

The recent spate of anti-theistic books presents nothing really new. People have been making arguments against the existence of God for a long, long time. Why is there evil in the world? Why do religious people sometimes do bad things? Why do we need God, if science will soon be able to explain everything? These questions reflect the Godless Delusion, an inversion of the book by Dawkins.

There is evil in the world because people choose evil. Each of us has a conscience. We instinctively know what is right and wrong. But knowing and doing are two different things. Often it is easier to do evil than to do good. Often evil appears more alluring than goodness. The source of evil may be identified as the Devil, but it is more precisely a rejection of God. When God is at the center of our lives, then evil is not.

The term “religious people” is meaningless. All people – especially militant anti-theists – are religious. The vital question is what one’s religion believes. What I call “The Great Faith” of the Judeo-Christian heritage believes in a loving, good and just God – a Blessed Creator, as devout Jews might put it.

The history of Judeo-Christians is profoundly different than the history of other religious peoples, including religious anti-theists. The religious people of pre-Columbian American Mexico conquered other tribes simply to sacrifice them to Aztec gods. The religious people of Imperial Japan committed unspeakable crimes against the Chinese in following their national religion. The religious Nazis, who loathed passionately both Christianity and Judaism, committed unspeakable crimes against Jews, Poles and others. The religious anti-theists of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China murdered more than any other religion in history. And, of course, radical Islam murders indiscriminately.

No crimes of Judeo-Christians remotely approaches the holocausts of Aztecs, Japanese, Nazis, atheist Russia or atheist Japan. Why? Because all religions are not the same. Some religions are good and some religions are bad.

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