Mere Reflections

By the way I considered replacing the word “tick” with a different word, but decided against it.

So, yeah. Confident, self-professed Atheists really tick me off. Now, I know that they feel the exact same way about Christians who are confident in their beliefs. And yes, their eyes are blinded. And their hearts are hardened. But sometimes, it just gets annoying.

A guy from my school posted this on his Facebook status:

Christianity is the belief that a two-thousand-year-old jewish zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat an apple off a magical tree in a wonderland.

(via a random website called “a sudden moment of clarity)

I was like, “wheeaahhhtt?” I was so, so very close to posting a rebuttle but the Holy Spirit kind of got a hold of me and reminded me to be broken over his blindness and not arrogant about my new life. So I didn’t. But I want to express my feelings about that statement and concurrently the attitude of ‘superior atheism.’

So, here are the thoughts that went through my head when I read it.

1. First of all, good job hijacking the English language. Your fairytale emphatic writing can be used to make anything sound ridiculous. “What is making a sandwich? Making a sandwich is the belief that if you first cut small, paperthin slices of choice meat from an animal and combine them with slices of the coagulation of the milk protein casein, adding a somehow ‘just-right’ amount of a fanciful yellowish-white emulsion of oil, salt, and vinegar, placing all of these items together in line between two strangely similar pieces of bread, you will somehow magically have created a delicious food that is not only healthy and nutritious, but amazingly good to taste as well. Oh, and, also, somehow this sandwich is broken down within the human body into little, itty-bitty elements that seem to work together and communicate with your body to amazingly help give it power.” This kind of logical argumentation is kind of hysterical.
2. Second of all, even if fairytale hyperboles are accepted as logical arguments, the statements he makes don’t even describe Christianity right. Okay, I’ll give you 2,000 years old, and I’ll give you Jewish. But Zombie isn’t even relevant. Symbolically eating his flesh isn’t relevant to salvation. If you call prayer ‘telepathy,’ I guess I can let that one slide, but good job choosing a poor descriptive word. I’m actually a little proud of “remove an evil force that is present in all humanity.” Kudos on trying to make fun, you actually are right there! Though ‘force’ sounds a little more mystic than I’d describe it, at least you kind of understand the doctrine of total depravity. Rib-woman? Seriously? Talking snake… I’ll give you that one. Magical tree in a wonderland… try Earth. Come on, dude. Do a little more research….
3. Third of all, even if fairytale hyperboles are accepted as logical arguments, and even if your statements somewhat accurately described the Christian religion, even if those things were true, I could make an equally if not more absurd statement about atheism. Here goes. “Atheism if the non-belief belief (already got em) that millions of years ago, there was a giant cosmic fart that blew all of reality into existence, getting bigger and bigger as some planets popped up here and there and this one life-sustaining world with it’s own wonderlands everywhere blew up from a giant rock-thing, where a whole bunch of little cells grew and grew and grew until they turned from a whole bunch of animals like fish to monkeys to humans until they magically became self-aware, intelligent and innovative, and they are also somehow the source of their own meaning, even if they weren’t the source of their own existence, and became enlightened to think that they must know everything about their poof-y origins.”

I really do try to have a heart for the atheists who are terribly arrogant. And I need to. Christ’s gospel is for them, too, and my mission is for them, too. But sometimes I can’t help but think “if you’d just realize that you don’t know everything and that atheism is not an ‘intellectually superior’ option to the ‘blind, fairytale faith’ of theists, you might be able to see that there’s more!” I say that in my head with passion and with pain and with what I pray is righteous frustration with the pride of the flesh.

I pray I may be burdened for these people and heartbroken more than I am. I also Pray that God would raise up strong intellectual minds within the Christian worldview to combat the works of the evil one (who seeks to continually convince them that theism is intellectually inferior) in the lives of the unsaved.

Soli Deo Gloria

-Riley