Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
I enjoy listening to podcasts. One of my favorites is from a retired, long-time veteran of professional wrestling. I’m not a wrestling fan so much, but this guy is genuinely entertaining and funny. He’s a great, natural story teller. He also happens to be an atheist.
His religious faith, or lack thereof, makes an occasional appearance on the show. He’s decided that everyone who actually believes in God is at best brainwashed, and at worst insane. He also takes long moments at the beginning of shows, depending on the headlines of the day, to comment on all things political and controversial.
That’s fine. Speak your mind. If I don’t like it, I can skip forward or stop listening: no harm done. Let’s have free speech all around, especially as Independence Day approaches.
I only want to bring it up to say this: This atheist podcaster, whom I enjoy greatly, can get on a roll when he’s ranting about things, to the extent that he’s as fervently moralistic in his “preaching” as any tent revival evangelist you ever heard. This I also find entertaining.
How’s an atheist going to get on a huffing, puffing tirade about how evil certain policies or people are? How’s an atheist going to get all red-faced, saliva-slinging, worked-up about what should or shouldn’t be done in society? Everybody listen up! The man who doesn’t believe in any transcendent truth is now going to harangue us about how evil we are.
Maybe you’ve met one of these preachy atheists. They hate religion, and won’t hesitate to talk about how much evil has been done by those who profess it. Hopefully, you see the inconsistency in this.
Richard Dawkins is one of the most famous, popular-level atheist apologists around. He spots the problem in the following quote. “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
That’s the kind of universe the atheist must affirm actually exists. If there is no creator, there can be no ultimate meaning, no purpose, and no good or evil.
For the atheist, good and evil are nothing more than human rules that we’ve managed to place as boundaries around all our activity. There’s no one who can say, ultimately, whether any of those rules are actually representative of the “good.” How could they, since good is a fiction that flows from the original fiction of religious faith? It’s highly contradictory to do away with God, but then assert that some actions are evil. They can’t be either good or evil. They just are.
Don’t tell the atheist preachers that, though. It would spoil all the fun if they suddenly became consistent with their presuppositions, and realized that their own, favorite policies are no more righteous than anyone who disagrees with them.
My podcast favorite would be reduced to having to say, “Well, none of this really matters at all, so I’m not going to get upset about it.”
There wouldn’t be a reason to freak out about school shootings or Supreme Court rulings, or anything at all. That makes for far less interesting programs.
Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at: