Tonight I got sidetracked viewing YouTube postings of Richard Dawkins snappy responses to stupid questions and I discovered something. There is a huge discrepancy between the number of people looking for comfort from the Christian Evangelical viewpoint and the Christians looking for a way to dispute and embarrass Atheists. Search for 'Dawkins' and look at the view counts of some of his snippets of videos answering questions about God. One for a speech he gave at a women's college near Liberty University had well over a million views! The question an audience member posed was "What if you are wrong?". By contrast the number of views of Christian originated videos refuting atheism were lucky to earn 25,000 views!
What does this say? It says that Christians are making a huge difference because if their arrows weren't hitting their mark in day to day life the atheists would never need to seek the balm of videos of Dawkins making smartypants, shallow, Biblically illiterate comedy answers. Answers always followed with tons of laughter from audiences with itching ears.
The sad part is if the scene was traded; if the audience were filled with Christians and Dawkins or another leading atheist were at the podium there would be sincere concern for souls to be won and that's serious business. We wouldn't laugh at atheists and make fun of them and minimize them and trivialize them and marginalize them.
The issue in our society was well defined in a recent newsletter from the Ravi Zacharias International ministry:
"In fact, long before theology was ushered out of the public square, out of politics, economics, and the sciences, it was considered to be the highest science, the study of the rational Mind behind our own rational minds. It was the discipline that made sense of every other discipline, the subject that united every subject. Such a perspective is inherently foreign to the contemporary mindset. But it cannot be shooed away like a meddling religion or deferred like an unwanted question without dismissing some sense of cohesion—and without dismissing Christ himself. His very life is a refutation of compartmentalized thought, belief, and action. His cross was neither public nor private; it spanned both, and every century following its own." (Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia. )
The real answer that Mr. Richard Dawkins should have given the student is "If I'm wrong then I will be eternally separated from the creator I thought didn't exist. I will be sent to a place where my sins will be played back to me forever and I will be tormented forever and long for a single drop of water and I will want to warn everyone of this place." That would've been the braver more intellectual more scholarly researched answer but he's a naughty little smart-mouthed boy. He gets paid to help fellow atheists feel good about themselves and make Christians appear like foolish half-wits. Check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmskXXetcg
Probably his most embarrassing remark is his statement that because the questioner is American she is Christian and that if she were from India she would be Hindu. I felt sorry for his ignorance and I wish there was something I could do for him.
YouTube is all about entertainment and the true intellectual thermometer of our country and our world is read by just scanning down a few comments. Vocabularies are so limited that very soon you find yourself descending into a middle school toilet stall range of intellect. I say this because of view counts. They are like an unofficial poll of what interests our students, what interests our public, and where their focus is.
Richard Dawkins is afraid to read the book of Ecclesiastes because it would be too threatening so how could he ever make it to Acts Chapter 9? God only knows because to Him all things are possible.
Here is another intellectually embarassing video. When people produce dialogue like this I just can't bear to hear it all because it reveals so much ignorance. It takes a lifetime to clear up those questions with real answers that God gave us thousands of years ago and this poor fellow doesn't have a lifetime left. But look it earned 5 million views! Compare that to videos from the evangelical point of view. Lucky to get 2,000 views.
It isn't circular logic to go to ancient scriptures to look for answers to modern questions. If I were asked for the phone number of the nearest Dominoes Pizza I might go to Superpages.com. You ask me "How do you know that number is for Dominoes Pizza?" I tell you "Because Superpages.com told me so."
There are a few things atheists can't explain away and Nick Vujicic is one of them. I don't think the Randolph-Macon Women's college would ever invite him to speak. There just isn't enough intellectual bravery there.
5 comments:
By athiests I've been called a moron for what I've posted. I've been 'hoped' that I would die soon. I have been told to go a read a science book once in a while. I've been told that I'm hateful, closed minded, narrow, stupid, uneducated and cursed at. The comments ahead of this one are my responses that I posted on YouTube to the love letters I've received so far.
Dear Mr. VonWolfenStein88,
I'm a committed lifelong Christian and to be quit honest you are more judgmental than I am. But I know what you mean some of us can be a bit irritating. Okay maybe really really irritating. We are, after all, people like yourself who aren't perfect. I hope this doesn't surprise you. Nor do we think we are perfect. I apologize if we come off as thinking we are perfect. The truth is we are supposed to believe that we aren't perfect only forgiven. That's when you have adequate to superior church teaching. Some of our churches umm they ain't so good probably. Hopefully they are a minority.
There is not a person on the face of the earth that I am afraid of not even Richard Dorkins. There is nothing that anyone could ever say or do that could be superior to what I've read in the Bible. The Bible is perfect and without error and I believe this with my whole heart because, like you, I've tested that line of thought.
Your error is that you are guided by VonWolf's conscience. That isn't much of a standard anyone can agree on for an orderly society...and neither is my standard which is why I don't use my standard. I use God's standards of morality. One thing that atheists fail at is recognizing that when they state that people shouldn't murder it isn't the first time its been stated.
Let me point out one last huge big not so silly problem atheists and agnostics have. In your previous comments, which I removed by mistake because I kept getting an error with my posting, you seemed really comfortable insulting God and stuff. I don't mind if you insult me because the Bible warned me that you would. But when you say inflammatory insults about a god you don't believe exists it is foolish. Here's why- Satan the fallen archangel believes in God and shudders. Okay you know how the supercollider at CERN is going to crank up to 14 TEV and take a beam of protons, collide them in 3 meters of plastic to look for monopoles? By faith in math they believe to find them. By faith alone I know there is an unseen spirit world of good fighting evil and sir you are losing the battle, you are completely unarmed. If for only literary content read 2 Kings 6:14-23 in biblegateway.com
Before I quit here I just wanted to in some way confirm some of your prejudices. I believe that God hates sodomy. He despises what gays do with their bodies because it is not the plan for their lives. Sodomy is so wrong and so obviously wrong that God didn't even bother to include it in the Ten Commandments he just led by example and destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gemorrah. Their sins are documented in the Bible and the physical evidence is there. I think gays are really creepy people and I hate working with them if I can help it. As faulty as the members of Westboro Baptist Church are I agree with them on sodomites, abortion, priests raping boys and a host of other things. Don't you? Gays should not be serving openly in the military, our government has no business endorsing that lifestyle and sodomites are clustered most often by the ocean so that God can deal with 'em easily. Good day.
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