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Dear friends
Over the last few years, vocal atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, have prompted a huge amount of media attention. It has sparked a real growth area within the publishing industry (for which not a few Christian companies are supremely grateful).
Go to any internet review site which surveys this type of material and you will find endless comments from readers who engage in passionate (and sometimes abusive) debate. A larger proportion of our population may no longer go to church but God is still a source of endless fascination.
One of the common arguments in the atheist's armoury is the idea that religion has been responsible for many of the evils in human communities, including violence, prejudice and poverty. Any sensible Christian will have to admit that these charges are not without some truth. But as usual there is another side to the issue and other things that can be said.
It has come as a pleasant surprise to read of some of these other things from the journalist Peter Hitchens. I have always found him an interesting and pugnacious debater and he pulls no punches in recounting his turn to Christianity in the book ‘The Rage against God'. The way he turns the argument about religion and its bad consequences on its head is particularly fascinating.
As news correspondent Hitchens, had first hand knowledge of one of the world's foremost atheistic states - the Soviet Union. The picture of squalor, oppression, fear and inhumanity is not what many atheists will want to focus on for very long. Indeed, many of them attempt to make rather pathetic excuses for what happened there. Hitchens is not prepared to let them off the hook and draws attention to the family likeness of all atheistic regimes and their inability to escape the pathogen of abuse and terror. He writes: The Bolsheviks knew all about the French revolutionary terror. But it did not stop them having their own. The Chinese Communists knew all about Stalin's intentional famine and five year plans, but repeated the barbarity with the Great Leap Forward. The Khmer Rouge were not ignorant of their revolutionary forerunners, yet they repeated the evil worse than before. The supposedly enlightened revolution of Fidel Castro resorted swiftly to torture and arbitrary imprisonment and to lawless purging and murder. It appears then that when atheists chastise Christians for their failures they do not start from a position of strength. The often supposed benefits of atheistic morality are a rather fine case of wishful thinking.
If all of the above seems all very well for Christian intellectuals to get their teeth into but remote from your world and mine, consider what a resurgent atheism might mean (and many might say, is already doing) to our nation. Yes, we have a system of law rooted in Christian principles and a deep Christian heritage but how long will it survive with fewer and fewer Christians to support it? The challenge to make disciples is more imperative than ever and not just because of the benefits it brings to the individual.
Stephen
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