A Throne For King Nothing

Atheists Unveil "First" Monument On Government Property

STARKE, FLA.  // A monument to atheism now sits near a granite slab that lists the Ten Commandments outside a courthouse in a conservative north Florida town. The New Jersey-based group American Atheists unveiled the 1,500-bound granite bench Saturday as a counter to the religious monument in what's called a free speech zone. Group leaders say they believe it's the first such atheist monument on government property. (Read Full Article Here)

Andy's Commentary: 

I just posted on atheist churches a week ago. Since many militant atheists are becoming, well, militant, it is not surprisingly I find another article pertaining to atheism floating in the news less than a week a later that warrants comment and commentary. Please note I am directing my comments primarily at militant atheism here. As our country is continuing to turn increasingly godless and certain sects of atheism becomes more militant, the push-back from these quarters becomes more pronounced. The ad-hominem attacks become more frequent and the straw man arguments from atheists about Christianity become more hostile and convoluted. All the while a friendly form of atheism is promoted but in truth the monuments in the article mentioned above are nothing more than rabid attacks on Christianity which is evident by the mischaracterization and misapplication of Old Testament Scripture of the punishments for disobeying the Ten Commandments. 

Any Christian understands that the punishments have been absorbed by Christ’s work on the Cross and a Christian needs only to accept Christ's atoning work on the Cross (not stone people). This is a straw man argument from the designers of this throne for godlessness. Good grief atheists, do you really view us as animals? Those punishments are under a different dispensation.Please people, get a grip. This is just another absolute and utter failure to understand what Scripture really says and an overt willingness to impose the wrong meaning on the text and then attack it. If anything this monument should've been an emphasis on an ungod or godlessness or a belief in no God (a monument to nothing...or humans which is the moral equivalent). Instead it is exactly what you would expect from militant atheism...a direct attack on Christianity. 

As for the comment on the monument that state things like hospitals should be built instead of churches...lets back up a few centuries. Who do the atheists suppose ran with the idea of hospitals during the middle ages for the old, started orphanages for children, began scholasticism and universities that train professionals such as doctors? Please people, learn history better. The comment that deed should be done instead of prayer is again another mischaracterization of true Christianity by the creators of the monument. The Bible one-ups on this fallacious comment. The Bible is clear about deeds in relation to true faith in addition to prayer.

James 2:18 ~ "Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds.
James 2:26 ~ "For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also."

In defense of some atheists....it would be arrogant and disingenuous for me to say that all atheists or other non-Christian people are totally incapable of producing “positive” outcomes (in theology this is considered efficacious grace), but to say they are actually morally “good” though is a moral absolute truth statement and would be wrong from a philosophical logic standpoint. Most atheists say that what they are doing promoting a world without God is a good thing. Only a person(s) or being with a claim to absolute truth source would be on logically solid ground to be able say that. No one is good w/o this absolute metric, even Christ alludes to this in the Gospel of Mark.

Mark 10:18 ~ “Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good--except God  alone.”

This means only those who would base their truths in the God like the one that Jesus speaks of would have a basis for true “goodness." A "good" example of this is a Christian who defers to God since it is Christ that said this and all Christians are in Christ spiritually. Sadly, this is a concept which an atheist is incapable of comprehending because of their self-limiting worldview.

The very fact that atheists come from an anti-theist / anti-supernatural viewpoint prevents them and Christians from examining reality in exactly the same way. Atheists literally limit the sources from which they are willing to glean facts and truth from thereby cutting into a fraction what is possible for them to accept as real. Their criteria for gleaning those truths are then also limited. The key word is “limit”.  Atheists rely solely on “a posteriori” evidences, empiricism and they seem to cling tenaciously to a reality that is rooted in existentialism and/or methodological naturalism. Militant atheism actually seems to have regressed or got stuck in the mud of the past in what was once called Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism states that knowledge or information of what is real can only be derived from logical and mathematical treatments and reports of sensory experience. This is literally a mental relic of the late 19th century later overturned by the likes of Anti-Positivism and the sub-atomic quantum phenomena in the 20th century. If humanity tries to prove the existence of God solely by “a posteriori” methods rather than "a posteriori" in conjunction with “a priori”, then we could never finish listing the events in the natural order to arrive at a conclusion or proof. It would still require some form of leap of faith. Thus, the proof would be incomplete--we would be anxiously awaiting future events. Therefore atheist belief systems are not based in bedrock foundationalism or self-evident truth as many will claim. This cripples their argument from a philosophical standpoint because their appeal to authority is something less than absolute … flawed humanity.

By doing this they preclude the possibility of a super-mundane Being (God). To me this is irreconcilable with my worldview or any other Christian. By not having this super-mundane Being as an absolute anchor of morality and ethics, you then have no absolute gauge or source of moral authority other than your own opinions or other people’s opinions. Atheist then have no absolute source of truth for their truth claim that a God does not exist. It becomes merely an opinion and a poorly reasoned one at that. It is at this point that the debate slips into moral relativism or worse postmodernism where all truths become true which is not logically possible. Even most rational atheists can admit that human authority and opinion is flawed, even when it is by consensus (plurality). Atheist source of truth is then subjective and relativistic.

Because of these factors atheists and Christians will have virtually nothing that we can agree on in terms of reality, morality or ontology (state of being). Atheists are looking for empirical evidences to prove a spiritual or supernatural being. Even a men as brilliant as Rene Descartes and Soren Kierkegaard knew that to deny God was absurd so Rene gave his proofs through his ontological argument and Soren never even tried to prove it directly per se, he inferred God’s existence (or assumed it through a syllogistic train of thought), hence his “leap of faith”. He argued “from” our existence, not “towards” God’s existence. The "leap" he speaks of is the point of see something by inference. In a word, God's existence does not hinge on our ability to see the point of an argument or evidence so much as it is the comprehending of an inference that is the actual "the leap." As long as people insist on scientific evidences (which is the only “fact” or “truth” our current culture accepts), we will never get to God from where we are at…which is lost. Because of this atheists are incapable of thinking outside of their philosophically restrictive box they have boarded themselves inside of. They claim truth by making absolute truth statement that God does not exist and they do not even have the philosophical basis nor sound logical basis to back their leap of faith and religion of "no God". In other words they are too intellectually arrogant to realize they are too arrogant and do not have proper underpinnings for their claim.

As I said before in other posts, I will say it again. Atheism is a religion. Sadly, it is the only one now allowed on government property most of the time without argument. In this way atheism and atheist have an unfair religious advantage in civil government. Atheism is a religion or is a belief system or a religion of no God. A religion being defined as a set of beliefs that dictate a person’s worldview that can include the following characteristics: A material dimension/aspect, ritual/rituals, ethics/virtue, doctrinal beliefs of philosophies, a social dimension, a logical basis and a narrative or meta-narrative.

As I’ve also written in the past, modern atheism has been inexorably predisposed and manipulated by the writings of Marx, Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. All of these saw Judeo-Christian religion/values as a socio-cultural human creation. For the most part they saw the religions as being created out of necessity. In the end they all saw religions as holding humanity back from advancing, hence the comments on this atheist monument to nothing. Marx believed religion functioned like a drug to keep most people enslaved to the ruling class and called it the “Opium/Opiate of the Masses”. Freud more boldly called religion an illusion, and Nietzsche ignorantly asserted that God was dead.  All of them believed atheism and a focus on the self or humanity itself in some form were necessary to overcome human suffering and to reach a climax of human potential.

Along with Darwinism and the religion of evolution we essentially get the nihilistic and godless barren landscape of the 20th Century that spawned among other things, two World Wars and numerous other atrocities such as the Holocaust, China’ Great Leap Forward and Khmer Rouge--all in the name of Humanism, Communism, Socialism, Social Darwinism and Atheism. Atheism or the New Atheism has now turned aggressively anti-religion (mostly towards Christianity). They are nearly rabid and militant in the forms of Christopher Hitchens (now dead), Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins (the Four Horseman of Atheism) These men and their ilk actively attack religions and theists in general. They seek to actively discredit theism of any kind but seem to take an especially sadistic pleasure in maligning and bashing Christianity as we can see on the monument to humanistic relativism.

I will actually quote something from this monument to prove my earlier point. The highest authority that atheist could appeal to for this monument was an obscure reference to a treaty signed by a human government to still the fears of another human government in 1797. It was the Treaty of Tripoli and it was to calm the fears of a Muslim nation (Tripoli) that a Christian one (United States) was going to impose their religion on them. This of course is ludicrous as the US 1st Amendment was about not, “making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion…” To say, based on this treaty that America is in no way a Christian nation flies directly in the face of the fact that there are clear references by inference to natural law (inalienable rights and therefore God indirectly) in the founding documents. The Declaration of Independence is clear: “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Like I said, atheists can only appeal to flawed humanity. Even the founding fathers in their desire to allow for religious freedom had enough sense to admit the fact that all men are created and are endowed with certain qualities by that Creator. I will also concede that under US  law they have a right to build this monument to humanism (or attacking religion). It will be a lasting reminder that will immortalize their flawed philosophical arguments. The flawed intellectual arrogance it takes to deny God and make a monument essentially to the self is staggering. To do so with flawed philosophical underpinnings is intellectually absurd.

To give all this perspective I will say this. Even if we exploded every nuclear weapon ever created by man they would not produce even a fraction of the energy that our sun puts out in a minute. Our sun produces energy so much greater in orders of magnitude than puny man could ever create. We are inconsequential on the astronomical scale. It is estimated that there are at least 100,000 suns in our galaxy (The Milky Way) alone. Multiply this time the estimated total of 176 billion galaxies thought to be in the observable universe and we arrive at a stagger sum of energy and matter. Now let us go from the interstellar to the infinitesimal. It is estimated that there are 1 billion trillion atoms in a single teaspoon of water. A majority of atom is just empty space and the stuff that is not (matter) is nothing more than compressed light (more energy). It is strong and weak nuclear forces (energy) that hold this mostly empty matter in place without it blowing apart in fission or fusing in fusion. How many atoms construct the 176 billion galaxies? Each and every atom containing unimaginable energy and power. Mind-boggling power as evidenced by our nuclear weapons. Enter into this the fact that atheist will have us believe that all this energy and matter either always existed which it couldn't (entropy precludes this) or that it all came out of nothing and caused by nothing. They will have you believe that all this complexity and pattern in the vast expanse of the heavens and the exact same structures in the infinitesimal that follow the same exact physical rules came from nothing. They either existed or came into existence with no intended impetus or purposeful cause (Aristotle's Un-caused Cause). They want us all to believe that existence and the universe is nothing more than mere chance and circumstance. The fact is it either took an unimaginable amount of creative energy to bring all this energy and matter into existence or it all came from nowhere. Which is more plausible to a rational mind? Seriously...answer the question.

This is an unbridgeable chasm folks philosophically or logically yet the atheist will have you believe you are absolutely stupid for thinking otherwise. I have given you a philosophically and logically sound argument for asserting otherwise. Not only is it statistically improbable (which means its impossible), it actually begins to make more sense to believe and have faith in the simpler and obvious existence of God (Romans 1 and Occam's Razor).  You can't get what we have from nothing...unless of course there was something else beforehand capable of initiating it. Something or Someone with infinite or limitless unimaginable power--that just by the power of speaking things into existence...they became. Would you rather believe that existence is all from something/Someone or that all that ever was came from nothing or just always was? Which makes more sense? In the end...the choice is definitely yours.

Romans 1: 20 ~ For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Colossians 1:15 ~ 'For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.'

Hebrews 1:3 ~The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. 

Hebrews 1:10 ~ "And, “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth in the beginning, and the heavens are the work of your hands..."