Anglican Samizdat

From here:

Ricky Gervais has become a target for Christian outraged by his views on religion.

The unapologetic atheist is being targeted on Twitter by a host of believers who have taken offence at his view.

The Office creator, 50, has often spoken of his lack of faith, but his appearance on the cover of New Humanist magazine in a Jesus Christ-style pose has pushed a few over the edge.

For the shot, he uses a microphone stand for his cross, dons a crown of thorns and has the word ‘atheist’ daubed across his chest in blood red.

Like most atheists, Ricky Gervais is arrogant, egocentric, not as rational as he would like us to think and not particularly original or outrageous. If he were, he would have dressed up as Mohammed eating a pork chop swilled down with Johnny Walker.

It would be better for Christians to ignore the little twerp than be offended by him.

First of all, though, here are a couple – selected from thousands – of Christian charities that flourish at Christmas:

Angel Tree:
Angel Tree is a ministry of Prison Fellowship, delivering love in the form of Christmas gifts and a message of hope to children of prisoners. Angel Tree Christmas connects the parents in prison with their children through the delivery of Christmas gifts by local church volunteers who purchase and deliver these gifts and the gospel to children.
Operation Christmas Child:
Operation Christmas Child invites you to pack a shoe box with small toys, school supplies, other gifts, and a personal note to introduce a hurting child to God’s love. The small gifts of love and messages of hope through Jesus Christ are delivered to needy children overseas.

Here are a couple of examples of the good works over which atheists have laboured for Christmas:

Atheist Nativity sign:
The [atheist] group wants to place a sign that reads:
“At this season of the Winter Solstice, let reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

Atheists Attempt to Ruin Christmas:
For the first time in the history of Christmas at Palisades Park there were 13 individuals that entered the race for the 21 spaces available rather than the usual three. The unusually high demand for spots, especially by atheists, has sparked Santa Monica’s City Hall to implement a random lottery system to determine who would have access to the spots.

That process left the Santa Monica Nativity Committee with only two spaces on which they can put up only three of the usual 14 scenes. The lottery system that was used gave atheists a majority of the available spaces.

Notice any difference?

Christopher Hitchens, God hater, died of complications from oesophageal cancer last night; he is the first of the atheist Four Horsemen to meet his maker.

God’s mercy is greater than Hitchens’ hate: may Hitchens at last be willing to receive it.

From here:

I have one consistency, which is [being] against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes. And the origins of that are theocratic, obviously. The beginning of that is the idea that there is a supreme leader, or infallible pope, or a chief rabbi, or whatever, who can ventriloquise the divine and tell us what to do.

I think Hitchens is correct in defining totalitarianism as the enemy – although, “political enemy” would be more accurate. Where he misses the mark is identifying God as the supreme totalitarian.

In practice, the most evil totalitarians have been godless individuals who, without the restraints that fear of the Divine engenders, cavalierly visited murder and mayhem on their own people.

If the Triune God exists, as I believe he does, far from being a celestial tyrant, he is the creator of human freedom, a freedom which allowed humanity the choice of rebelling against its Creator to the cost of God himself in his atoning sacrifice on the cross.

If God does not exist, if the natural is all there is, the true tyrant is our genetic makeup and the molecules in our brains: they guarantee that no choice we make can ever be free of what they compel us to do.

According to Peter Mullen here:

Richard Dawkins says that David Cameron is “not really a Christian”. The fact is that it is only God to whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid. So Dawkins has no means of telling whether Cameron is a genuine Christian or not.

We can, however, know that Dawkins is not a proper atheist – that is an intelligent atheist – from his own puerile writing and pathetic attempts at philosophical theology. For example, he writes: “Either God exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question. The existence of God is a scientific question, like any other.”

This is idiotic. Science investigates material phenomena, observable entities in the universe. No competent theologians or philosophers – not even the atheist ones – have ever declared that God (if he exists) is an object in his own universe. Perhaps there is no God, and intelligent Christians readily admit that there may be some legitimate doubt. But if the Judaeo-Christian God exists, then he is the maker of the universe and not an entity within it.

That is why science can make legitimate pronouncements on whether bigfoot, fairies, flying spaghetti monsters – and even Greek gods who were believed to be a part of the natural universe – exist, but not God the Creator, whose actuality is independent of his creation.

From here:

A national atheist foundation plans to seek permission to hoist its own banner to join secular and religious Christmas displays on an East Texas courthouse square.

The display surrounding the Henderson County Courthouse in Athens includes a traditional Nativity scene, as well as multiple Santa Clauses, elves, wreathes, garland, trumpeters, dwarfs, snowmen, reindeer and Christmas trees, the Athens Daily Review reported.

[…]

However, county officials received a letter Monday from the Madison, Wis.-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, which argued the seasonal display on courthouse grounds amounts to an unconstitutional endorsement of the Christian faith.

In Elmwood City, Pa., the foundation has proposed hoisting a banner that reads: “At this season of the Winter Solstice, LET REASON PREVAIL. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

It is clear that atheists hate Christmas – the real Christmas – and are prepared to go to considerable lengths to try to make everyone hate it as much as they do. What is less clear is why, after strenuous efforts to make their case, they couldn’t come up with a statement of their position that at least makes sense.

If in your first sentence you trumpet that reason is to prevail, why, in your third, would you make a statement that is unprovable by reason – i.e. “There is only our natural world”?

Perhaps atheists are so smug in the certainty of their assumptions, that they have become incapable of examining them.

From here:

Atheists are almost universally perceived as untrustworthy, and only rapists rate as low, a new study has found.

“Where there are religious majorities — that is, in most of the world — atheists are among the least trusted people,” said lead author Will Gervais, a doctoral student in psychology at the University of British Columbia. “With more than half a billion atheists worldwide, this prejudice has the potential to affect a substantial number of people.”

The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, combines information collected from six different surveys.

This should not come as a surprise.

After all, if atheists are correct and there is no God, then trustworthiness is merely a genetic accident which would generally be overridden by the callous self-interest that inevitably results from natural selection – and who better to indulge callous self-interest than those who wholeheartedly embrace this view.

If atheists are not correct and there is a God, why trust a group of people who base their entire lives and behaviour on a monumental error of judgement?

In this audio clip, Dawkins is cornered into admitting that, without God, morality is arbitrary. Dawkins’ reluctance is born of that fact that, just like everybody else, he really doesn’t believe that morality is arbitrary. If he were as reasonable as he would like us to think, he should acknowledge that humanity’s innate belief in non-arbitrary morality is evidence for God’s existence.

But he’s not that reasonable.

From here:

This month, the final Harry Potter film had the most successful opening weekend of any movie ever. Among the fans who lined up for the opening midnight showing were Christians, many of whom see striking similarities between the story of Jesus — with its sacrificial death, burial and resurrection — and the story of Harry Potter.

But at least one atheist has also noticed these similarities, and he’s written a book about it. In the newly-released (and blasphemously-titled) Jesus Potter Harry Christ, Derek Murphy makes the case that J. K. Rowling — the author of the Harry Potter series — achieved her success by tapping into some of the deepest and most ancient longings of the human heart. These same longings, Murphy argues, compelled first-century pagans to construct what he calls “the Jesus myth.”

Surprising: Jesus Potter, Harry Christ but no Jesus Murphy.

As Chuck Colson notes, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien recognised that the truth of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross and subsequent resurrection is so powerful that it permeates the entire universe and ends up finding expression in unexpected places – like Harry Potter:

Well, Murphy is certainly right in recognizing a common thread through pagan religious beliefs. As C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, the heathen religions are full of “…those queer stories…about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”

But what Murphy misses — and Lewis got — is the fact that the human longings for sacrifice, resurrection and redemption are stamped on our hearts for a reason: They point us straight to the God who stepped into history to fulfill them!

In a letter to a friend, Lewis recounts a conversation he had with J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings — and a close colleague of Lewis.

“The story of Christ,” said Tolkien, “is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened…The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

 

From here:

Wisconsin officials are reviewing a complaint that the official state website links to an anti-abortion group with religious ties.

The organization is called Care Net, a faith-based group that caters to pregnant women.

The Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation says by linking to the site, the state is advertising evangelical ideals. Group president Annie Laurie Gaylor wants the link removed.

The link in question can be found here, and it points to this site, whose aim is:

As the largest network of pregnancy centers in North America, Care Net is committed to expanding access to the life-saving services and support provided by our local centers and to reaching the hurting and broken with the hope of Jesus Christ.

We work to accomplish this goal by promoting our network of centers and the Option Line call center, preparing our local centers to effectively serve their communities, and partnering with existing centers or like-minded ministries to plant new pregnancy centers in underserved areas.

As you can see, pretty sinister.

I have little doubt that if today’s coterie of benighted God haters had lived in the 19^th Century, they would have vigorously canvassed to prevent William Wilberforce end slavery – because he was an evangelical Christian who had no right imposing his Christian perspectives on a secular parliament.