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Real Answers™
tf46
Copyright: © 2007 Tom Flannery
700 words

ATHEISTS' UNTENABLE ARGUMENTS

By: Tom Flannery

When an atheist conference features as guest speakers no less than four prominent authors of recent best-selling books attacking God (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett), you might think that the evidence and arguments presented would be enough to make even a devout believer rethink his religious orientation.
 
Well, guess again.  The Atheist Alliance International 2007 conference (AAI 07) in September was, in fact, little more than "more of the same" -- the same tired old tirades we've been hearing from skeptics for ages.  They sounded like a bunch of broken records.
 
We heard, for instance, how religion has been a source of bloodshed throughout human history.  This is an argument that resonates particularly powerfully today because the world is engaged in a battle for survival against Islamo-fascism, a deranged death cult rooted in religious fervor.  Compounding the problem is the devious media campaign designed to lump Christian and Jewish adherents into the same bloody barrel with Islamic terrorists (as we saw recently with CNN's specious three-part series "God's Warriors").
 
The truth is that the vast majority of Christians who have lived from the time of Christ until the present day have not engaged in any single act of violence either in the name of Christ or for the advancement of the Christian faith, and it is undeniable that those relatively few who ever have were acting in direct opposition to the clear teachings of Christ.
 
After all, Jesus taught His followers to "love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you" (Matt. 5:44).
 
Somehow the atheists among us are able to blithely dismiss the fact that a handful of godless monsters of the 20th century like Stalin and Mao slaughtered far many more millions than the religiously-motivated have throughout all centuries of human history combined.  At AAI 07, Dawkins asserted (with a straight face no less) that the massacres of the anti-theistic tyrants of the 20th century cannot be laid at atheism's doorstep because their heinous crimes against humanity were not committed "in the name of atheism."
 
Huh?
 
Well, no, the tens of millions of innocents they massacred were not killed in the name of atheism, but they were most certainly slaughtered as a result of atheism.  The atheistic impulses behind the crimes of these great monsters of history and their respective regimes were evidenced by their unquenchable hostility toward and tireless persecution of people of faith.
 
Some other oft-repeated assaults against religion dragged out yet again at AAI 07 included:
 
"There is no credible evidence whatsoever for belief in God."  Interestingly, in a debate last month with Dinesh D'Souza, Hitchens recounted a conversation he had with Dawkins in which Dawkins opined that the best proof for theism is the extraordinary evidence for design we find in the universe.  For instance, the sun is positioned in the precise place it needs to be in the solar system to give our planet the proper amounts of heat and light.  As Newton observed, rather elementarily:  "This did not happen by chance."  And that's only one of dozens of such examples of an astonishingly fine-tuned universe.  So obviously there is, even by atheists' own standards, evidence for God. 
 
"Religion inspires hatred and intolerance."  This was, strangely enough, a prominent theme at a conference where religion was denigrated as "the disease," where analogies were drawn between religious faith and the scourge of racism, where actress Julia Sweeney talked about how easy it is to hate Christian fundamentalists, where Dennett derided believers as being unworthy of admiration or respect, and where various other hateful and decidedly less-than-tolerant views were espoused.
 
"Hitler was a Christian."  D'Souza debunks this diabolical myth in his new book "What's So Great About Christianity," showing how Hitler used the church as a tool in his self-serving quest for power.  Suffice it to say that the idea Adolph Hitler, the world's greatest Jew-hater, worshipped at the feet of a distinctly Jewish Messiah and King is too bizarre to even take seriously.
 
Except for devout atheists, who will believe the unbelievable in order to reject the irrefutable.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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