I recently acquired the new Megadeth CD, "United Abominations" from a call-in contest on a local heavy metal radio station. I've never been a big Megadeth fan, but in thumbing through the pages of the booklet, I came to a startling revelation: Art is imitating Life, and Art is becoming Destructive. In the record, Megadeth explores the nuances of our post-9/11 world, and their conclusions are terrifying: The world has entered what they call the "end game" and it's time to start fighting for "our side" to win.
My God, could this be true? Maybe. The evidence is everywhere. The most glaring evidence is in the growing battle between religions - atheists are battling Christians (and, it seems, only Christians), Christians are battling non-Christians, Muslims are battling non-Muslims, and Jews are battling ... every country on every side of theirs. It seems we live in a world that is constantly at war. Alliances are made and broken, unions forged and destroyed, and we are slowly moving toward an age of worldwide totalitarianism, universal corporatism, and religious relativism on a never-before-seen scale.
What does this mean? It means that what we believe is becoming more important, not less, in a time when our beliefs are starting to create wars and violence. In the modern world, there is a cry for the end of definition, which some believe is the key to attaining peace - if we have nothing to believe in, then there is nothing to kill each other over! This is a dangerous path to tread, but let's explore it.
Atheism's modern goal is to secularize the world - to believe in nothing but what science can know for sure (and what is that, exactly?) Islam's modern goal is to rule by the sword (or, by the IED.) What's the difference? The main difference here is in the way that different religions go about spreading their world-view, and I fail to see a difference between many of these tactics. Each has the goal of homogenizing everyone to their specific Dogma, either by humiliation, cohesion, or, most rarely, reason.
It is, I'm sad to say, a hard time to be a Christian. It seems that we have inherited a world where the default position is that all religions (but mainly Christianity, right?) are based on superstition, fear, and fairy-tale beliefs. And the hardest part is there is no arguing this point, because since it is based on nothing more than caricaturization and half-truths, the only way to argue against it is with the same tactics, in which case we are labeled as hateful. If we counter with reason, we are being apologists. If we counter with compassion, we're being bleeding-hearts. If we counter with our own experience or wisdom from the bible, we are being weak-minded, brain-washed victims of religion.
So the time has come to ask of the world: What do you want from us? Christians live, many of us, with our backs in the corner. No argument is valid, no excuse good enough for the rising Atheist agenda against our beliefs - it seems that Atheism has become just another religion bent on acquiring more members. Uh, oh ... I may have stumbled onto something here. Atheism, that ultra-secular, cynical world-view has become a full-fledged religion, complete with Dogmas, coercion tactics, and an intolerance for any world-view that isn't theirs.
But we can't judge too harshly, can we? What evils have been done in the name of God before? C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst", and gosh, isn't he right? They love to remind us of the Inquisition with all its evils, the Crusades, the countless acts of pure evil done under the counterfeit banner of heaven ... but what of the good things to come of the Christian religion? They don't like to talk about those, and if they do, the argument comes out something like this: "Yes, but the people who did good things have little to do with their religion, and more to do with them being good people anyway." And yet, the evil things men do are because of their religion? That's a terrible double-standard!
So I ask, then, what is the alternative to a religion? Secularism, the absence of guidance by a moral law (unless you choose ethics, which serves no master but whoever has the sharpest wit ... a dangerous proposition!), and hedonism, to which C.S. Lewis responds: "We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism--the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good." Isn't this what we're asked to accept from the Atheism alternative - that the only good (not, as Christ said, "none but God is good") is what our instincts lead us to do? And what will that yield - a life led for self-gratification, in giving ourselves over to our animal nature?
Maybe Huxley was onto something when he made the case for Atheism. Aldous Huxley said, to summarize, "I want this world to be natural, because that frees me to explore my erotic desires". Typical, coming from a man who once said, "Maybe this world is another planet's hell." If you examine the Atheist Dogma, you will eventually come to the conclusion that life is both based on pleasure-appeasement, miserable, and inherently meaninglessness. This is the basis of the religion, no matter whose perspective you use - the biological Atheist Richard Dawkins once said, "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."
Ouch. And we are the hateful ones? The truth is, you can't argue the "science" question when it comes to Religion vs. Atheism - what science would you use? Biological science? Physics? Quantum Theory? Which perspective would you use? Which age of science? Science, like secularism and pure reason, serves whichever master makes the most compelling argument, so if we use that paradigm, our parameters will constantly be changing with the latest Dogma-shift. It used to be Relativity, but now it's Strings! Burn the Relativist!
You understand my point, I have to assume. Science has entered that realm of a religion as it begins to splinter and refocus its Dogmas, to the point where contesting viewpoints and alternative conclusions are no longer acceptable and must be squashed. Science is undergoing its own (less violent) inquisition - but no longer are witches burned or heretics drawn and quartered. No, in the new inquisition, competing view-points are humiliated to death, stripped of their right to express, and left to rot in the discard pile of the Scientific Majority.
Now, more than ever, I find it important to understand not only what I believe, but that I have a belief. The world demands that I believe in nothing, and it is becoming more and more difficult to resist. I am told that I'm a "bad Christian" because, from time to time, I fall short of perfection (duh) and don't live the image of a "good Christian". But, as the great Ravi Zacharias once said, "Jesus didn't come to make bad men good, he came to make dead men live." This is the heart of my religion, and it is the most important to me - any regular study of the Christian religion will render the understanding that it is not in existence to perfect people (at least not in this life) but to enable them to be forgiven for not being perfect. What, then, can Atheism offer in contrast to that? While Christianity recognizes sin and imperfection, it allows for a way out, a plan for redemption. Atheism, on the other hand, removes sin by giving it a glossy goat of paint and calling it "nature" - it gives up the search for a cure for the disease and called the disease "health".
So, perhaps Megadeth is right - the world is changing. Battle-lines are being formed. I have chosen which side I will remain on, and I believe it's the right one. And if I'm wrong? Who cares ... we're all dead men in the end. Unless I'm right, in which case only some of us are dead men.
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