Godlessness unmasked: How atheism is being sold to America

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

*Perilous Times

Godlessness unmasked: How atheism is being sold to America*

David Kupelian explains spiritual battlefield between faith and denial

Posted: October 11, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Religion – including Christianity and Judaism – is "violent, irrational,
intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in
ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and
coercive toward children." At least that's according to the No. 1 New
York Times bestseller "God is Not Great: Why Religion Poisons
Everything" by journalist Christopher Hitchens.

In the news business, we often cite a nation's current top-selling books
– for example, the popularity of anti-Semitic titles in Arab countries –
as evidence of the mindset of the people.

Well, in the United States of America right now, some of the
most-bought, most-read and most-discussed books are angry, in-your-face
atheist manifestos.

Besides Hitchens' book, which has dominated nonfiction bestseller charts
for months, there's the popular "Letter to a Christian Nation" by
atheist author Sam Harris, sequel to his earlier tome "The End of
Faith," and Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" – all
New York Times bestsellers.

Then there are other hot titles: "God: The Failed Hypothesis: How
Science Shows That God Does Not Exist" by Victor J. Stenger. "Breaking
the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" by Daniel C. Dennett.
"Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian
Fundamentalism" by David Mills. And so on.

"This is atheism's moment," crowed David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus
Books in a Wall Street Journal interview. "Mr. Hitchens has written the
category killer, and we're excited about having the next book." That's
right – this fall the publishing world will further cash in on the
anti-God juggernaut with "The Pocket Atheist," featuring the writings of
famous atheists, edited by Hitchens.

"How can this be?," you might wonder. "Hasn't America always been a
Christian nation?"

No question about it. America was founded by Christians. Its very
purpose for being was the furtherance of biblical Christianity,
according to the Pilgrims and succeeding generations. Our first school
system was created expressly to propagate the Christian faith. Almost
all the Founding Fathers who drafted and signed the Constitution were
believers. Even Supreme Court Justice David Josiah Brewer, in the high
court's 1892 "Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States" decision,
proclaimed the obvious: "This is a Christian nation."

Today, however, many of us are infatuated with outright, outraged,
full-bore atheism. Almost half of Americans – 45 percent according to a
recent Gallup poll – say they'd be willing to vote for an atheist for
president of the United States. Dawkins, the charismatic
evolutionist-author, is even selling young people "Scarlet Letter"
tee-shirts with a giant "A" – for "Atheist" – on his website (and bumper
stickers too). Somehow, atheism – just like homosexuality, which used to
be considered shameful and something to hide – is now becoming hip,
sophisticated, even a badge of honor.

What is responsible for this blooming of atheism in America today?

Dennis Prager, the brilliant Jewish radio talker and columnist, ferrets
out some key reasons.

"First and most significant," he points out, "is the amount of evil
coming from within Islam." He explains:

Whether Islamists (or jihadists, Islamo-fascists or whatever else
Muslims who slaughter innocents in the name of Islam are called)
represent a small sliver of Muslims or considerably more than that, they
have brought religious faith into terrible disrepute.

How could they not? The one recognized genocide in the world today is
being carried out by religious Muslims in Sudan; liberty is exceedingly
rare in any of the dozens of nations with Muslim majorities; treatment
of women is frequently awful; and tolerance of people with different
religious beliefs is largely nonexistent when Muslims dominate a society.

If the same were true of vegetarians – if mass murder and violent
intolerance were carried out by vegetarians – there would be a backlash
against vegetarianism even among people who previously had no strong
feelings about the doctrine.

Remember, to atheists, Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all pretty
much the same – dangerous monotheistic fairy tales that induce people to
oppress and kill each other – the only difference being the particular
myths, superstitions and rules they impose on followers based on each
religion's traditions and supposed "holy books."

Thus, the pathological fanaticism and hair-trigger violence exhibited by
brainwashed jihadists around the world today are easily associated by
atheists with all religions, especially when they call to mind abuses
committed in past centuries – say, the Inquisition or the Salem witch
trials – in the name of Christianity.

Another major, if more long-term, factor contributing to the popularity
of atheist books, Prager notes, is the "secular indoctrination of a
generation," thanks to our de facto atheistic public school system:

Unless one receives a strong religious grounding in a religious school
and/or religious home, the average young person in the Western world is
immersed in a secular cocoon. From elementary school through graduate
school, only one way of looking at the world – the secular – is
presented. The typical individual in the Western world receives as
secular an indoctrination as the typical European received a religious
one in the Middle Ages. I have taught college students and have found
that their ignorance not only of the Bible but of the most elementary
religious arguments and concepts – such as the truism that if there is
no God, morality is subjective – is total.

So the generation that has been secularly brainwashed is now buying
books that reconfirm that brainwash – especially now, given the evil
coming from religious people.

Finally, observes Prager, Christianity and Judaism have, with some
notable exceptions, failed to effectively counter the ever-rising tide
of atheistic secularism in the Western world. Pointing out that "it is
virtually impossible to distinguish between a liberal Christian or Jew
and a liberal secularist," he notes that all three "regard the human
fetus as morally worthless; regard the man-woman definition of marriage
as a form of bigotry; and come close to holding pacifist beliefs, to
cite but a few examples."

Thus, with religious evil increasing in the world – thanks to Islam –
and fewer and fewer people willing and able to confront it, Prager
concludes "the case for atheism will seem even more compelling."

'Feigned knowing and a sneer'

Well, not that compelling. Even secular media bastion the Washington
Post couldn't miss the fatal flaws in "God Is Not Great."

"Hitchens claims that some of his best friends are believers," says Post
reviewer and confessed Hitchens fan Stephen Prothero. "If so, he doesn't
know much about his best friends. He writes about religious people the
way northern racists used to talk about 'Negroes' – with feigned knowing
and a sneer. 'God Is Not Great' assumes a childish definition of
religion and then criticizes religious people for believing such foolery."

Noting that Hitchens "is a brilliant man" and even that "there is no
living journalist I more enjoy reading," the Post reviewer nevertheless
goes for the throat: "But I have never encountered a book whose author
is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject. In the end, this
maddeningly dogmatic book does little more than illustrate one of
Hitchens's pet themes – the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep."

So, why then is Hitchens' book so mesmerizing to so many?

Partly because he has a huge intellect, and most of us are impressed and
frankly intimidated by superior intellect and knowledge – even if the
bearer of those gifts is profoundly misguided. And partly because he's a
superb writer, and inherent in skilled and passionate writing is the
power to persuade, to shake up, even convert. It's a bit of magic, the
way words strung together perfectly can play and dance on the brain,
stimulating emotions and pulling on the strings of the mind in one
direction or another.

And yet, upon close examination, what first appear to be powerfully
logical atheist arguments turn out to be dust.

For instance, Hitchens boasts in Vanity Fair that on his nationwide book
tour he says to his audiences: "My challenge: Name an ethical statement
or action, made or performed by a person of faith, that could not have
been made or performed by a nonbeliever. I have since asked this
question at every stop and haven't had a reply yet."

Sam Harris makes the same argument, forcefully pointing out that human
beings are born with an ethical sense of right and wrong – even if they
don't believe in God. And the atheist standard-bearers cite this as
evidence no God exists.

Do they never pause to wonder whether God puts this moral sense, or
conscience, into each person whether or not that person is aware of his
Creator?

A little child innately knows it's wrong to steal even though he's too
young to have any knowledge or belief about God. For most people, their
inborn sense of justice and injustice operates as intended – just as
their arms and legs and heart and lungs do – even if they're not mindful
of their Creator's existence. When atheists see an old woman fall down
in the middle of a street, they stop to help her as readily as anyone
else. It's called common decency.

Thus the very evidence of God – in the form of a mysterious moral sense
of right and wrong that transcends time, place, culture and
conditioning, a trait shared by no other animal – becomes for the
atheist proof of just the opposite, that there is no God.

Here's a funny one: If atheism is inherently so progressive and
tolerant, and religion so ignorant and violent, as we're told, how then
do our atheist Pied Pipers explain the 100 million-plus innocent men,
women and children slaughtered by their own atheist governments during
communism's 20th century reign of terror?

Simple. Hitchens simply declares atheistic communist dictatorships to be
"religious." Quoting his hero George Orwell, Hitchens says "a
totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy," thus making Stalin's mass
murders of tens of millions of his countrymen not the work of an
atheist, but of religion! In North Korea today, the problem is not
communism, but out-of-control Confucianism, insists Hitchens.

Uh-huh. And what about Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whom Hitchens
admires? How does he square the leader of the '60s historic Civil Rights
Movement with his having been a Christian minister? Well you see,
explains Hitchens, whatever good King accomplished was due to his
humanism, not Christianity. "In fact," notes the Post, "King was not
actually a Christian at all, argues Hitchens, since he rejected the
sadism that characterizes the teachings of Jesus."

So, the millions of innocents murdered by atheistic communists during
the last century don't count against atheism in Hitchens' book, since
communism isn't really atheistic – its atheist leaders being so
delusional that they're sort of, you know, religious. But Rev. King,
whom Hitchens likes, wasn't really a Christian at all, since he didn't
embrace the "sadism" of the most compassionate, virtuous and
self-sacrificial being ever to walk the earth.

And this passes for brilliant analysis?

Evolution, of course, is a key battleground for all of atheism's
champions. Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist often nicknamed
"Darwin's Rottweiler," condemns people who believe in creationism as
"evil." (Strong, absolutist words for someone who doesn't believe in
God.) Hitchens mockingly catalogues various parts of the human body,
taking witty pot shots at their "poor design." And Harris – with
stunning chutzpah – writes in "Letter to a Christian Nation" that
"nature offers no compelling evidence for an intelligent designer and
countless examples of unintelligent design."

Sam, what are you thinking?

A single dandelion, considered from a strictly scientific, analytical
perspective, contains more unimaginable complexity and spellbinding
design brilliance – from its atomic and molecular design to its cellular
and plant structure – than all the manmade supercomputers in the entire
world combined.

"No compelling evidence for an intelligent designer"? Sounds like Harris
has uncritically accepted a religious teaching that doesn't square with
reality.

That's right, evolution is a religion, full of incredible and unproven
beliefs about man's origin, and by logical extension his destiny, and
even his very nature. Any theory/philosophy – especially an unprovable
one – having to do with explaining the origin, destiny and nature of man
is, by definition, religious. If you don't get that, you're not thinking.

Ironically, many of the same human weaknesses and pressures that induce
people to accept their religion unthinkingly also lead atheists to
embrace evolution's belief system just as mindlessly. Within the current
science establishment there are overwhelming academic and professional
pressures to embrace evolution – and persecution if one does not. No
room for honest inquiry or, Heaven forbid, a good-faith challenge to
current orthodoxy.

When Harris and other atheist-evolutionists protest there's just no
evidence of intelligent design, one has to laugh – just as history's
greatest scientists, from Galileo to Newton, would also laugh
incredulously at today's atheists for their conceit, arrogance and
monumental blindness. In "The Marketing of Evil" I briefly explore this
point:

From the beginning of human life until Darwin came along in the
mid-19th century, human beings would step outside their homes and survey
with their eyes and minds the wonders of nature. They'd see majestic
400-year-old redwood trees, hummingbirds that were able to hover, and
honeybees that somehow knew how to do a special figure-eight dance that
would communicate to all of the other worker bees the precise location
of the dancer's newly discovered nectar source.

Looking in every direction, we humans beheld not only fantastic
complexity, diversity and order, but also the supreme intelligence
behind creation, as brashly evident as the noonday sun.

This ubiquitous natural wonderland caused man to acknowledge and honor
the Creator of creation, as Copernicus did when he wrote, "[The world]
has been built for us by the Best and Most Orderly Workman of all." Or
as Galileo wrote, "God is known ... by Nature in His works and by
doctrine in His revealed word." Or as Pasteur confessed, "The more I
study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator." Or
Isaac Newton: "When I look at the solar system, I see the earth at the
right distance from the sun to receive the proper amounts of heat and
light. This did not happen by chance."

Did not happen by chance?

Ever since Darwin and his successors succeeded in selling us on
evolution – a fantastic theory for which there is no proof, and many
serious problems – when we now walk outside and look at the created
universe, what do many of us see? Chance!

Although our eyes survey the same wonders of God's creation that
inspired faith in our predecessors, in our minds today we see only the
meaningless result of millions of years of random, chance mutation.
That's what our minds "see" – the eternal dance of purposeless
recombination of ever-more-complex forms, but all without meaning,
without spirit, without love. And by direct implication we also "see"
that man is not a fallen being needful of God's saving grace, but merely
the cleverest, most evolved animal of all. Since evolution by definition
always results in improvement and advancement, man and all of his
violent and lustful and selfish drives are perfectly normal and natural
and … advanced. There is no good and evil, no Heaven and Hell – and man,
as a highly evolved monkey, has no sin and no guilt – as these are
logical impossibilities from the evolutionary point of view.

In short, whatever else evolution may be, the driving force behind it
today is the same as it has always been – a way to deny God's existence.

I conducted a little thought experiment a while back, while looking out
over the Pacific from the Oregon coast. Drinking in the vast expanse of
the ocean, the pounding surf, the seagulls, the salt air – ultimate
serenity and ultimate power all in one timeless moment – I asked myself:
How can one experience all this magnificence without believing in a Creator?

So I tried, just as an experiment mind you, to conceptualize the
existence of the fantastic creation I was beholding, yet without a
Creator. I consciously tried to adopt an atheistic worldview, even for
just a minute, to see what it was like.

What I got was a headache, a psychic shock, a momentary taste of another
realm – an empty, prideful, appalling dimension of hell-on-earth,
masquerading as enlightenment and freedom.

That's why the conflict between theism and atheism is not just a
philosophical topic for polite debate over tea. It's a spiritual war of
the worlds. That high anxiety I felt momentarily, as I tasted the "other
dimension" that animates those who reject the very idea of God, was
minor and passing. But I'm quite sure hard-core atheists feel agony when
the opposite happens to them – that is, when they chance to experience a
fleeting moment of realization that God exists, and that they are
accountable ultimately to Him.

This would account for the near-explosive emotion that always seems to
surround this "objective, scientific" subject. Underneath all the
scientific pretension, it's all about man being master of his own
destiny, about freedom from accountability to God, about being released
from Judeo-Christian sexual morality, about making up your own rules,
about sustaining the life of pride and individual will.

In a very real sense, it's about being your own god.

Rebelling against father

Another giant flaw in atheist thinking is plastered right on the cover
of Hitchens' book. His title is "God Is Not Great," with the subtitle
"How Religion Poisons Everything." Hitchens is equating "God" with
"religion." Big mistake! God is God, but even true religion is full of
imperfect people – often confused, and sometimes corrupt or even crazy.

So, are atheists rebelling against God – or against religion? Good question.

If genuinely against God, they have an unsolvable problem – unless they
come to realize their error, as many do at some point in their lives.
But if they're rebelling against religion, then clearly they deserve a
little sympathy.

After all, religion in the modern world is a mess. And I'm not talking
just about the cancerous jihad movement metastasizing within Islam. Even
within Christianity – an authentic "religion of peace" – you have major
scandals like the Roman Catholic Church's 10,000-plus cases (since 1950)
of alleged child sexual abuse at the hands of predatory priests, as well
as the Protestant world's abundance of high-profile scandals, sexual and
otherwise. Then you have the absurdly unbiblical, leftist agenda of many
so-called "mainline" Protestant denominations, including their idiotic
attacks on Israel, the ordination of homosexuals and lesbians as church
leaders and so on.

But even more troubling than all of this is the shallowness and
superficiality in far too much of the modern Christian church.

On a recent Saturday afternoon I was channel-surfing and ended up
watching the notorious 2004 film "Saved," a satire that mercilessly
skewers evangelical Christianity and features in the lead role a vain,
duplicitous and occasionally downright mean adolescent Christian girl.
The movie has been understandably condemned by many Christians.

Just for a lark, during commercials I flipped over to some of the
Christian television networks to catch a little "real" Christian
programming. It was eerie, almost surreal, how similar the "real"
Christian preachers, fund-raisers and sidekicks were to the
"caricatures" of the same types portrayed mockingly in the film.

Nothing in this world will more readily turn even decent people away
from God (at least for a time) than religious leaders who are phonies.
Unfortunately, it's easy for guilty, denial-steeped people, those who
aren't yet ready to genuinely face themselves, to clothe themselves with
the appearance of religiosity, while secretly – perhaps unconsciously –
preserving their selfish, sinful nature. This is what we call hypocrisy.
And it's very confusing to people who are looking up to such prideful
leaders for guidance and example.

In the same way, when parents are religious hypocrites, or emotionally
"high" on their religion, or pretentious, or impatient and willful, or
just confidently parroting "truth" they've heard but don't really
understand – their kids can sense something wrong, at first anyway. But
because children are not yet mature and are easily influenced, they
almost always end up either conforming (out of intimidation) to their
parents' mold and becoming just like them, or (eventually) rejecting
religion altogether. Of course, the more such confusing parents try to
"help" their rebel children, the more their kids resent them and become
even more rebellious.

I know these are tough words, but if we're ever going to understand why
so many people are turning not only to atheism, but to Wicca and
paganism and New Age religions and myriad other strange spiritual
philosophies and practices – then we need to face the sad state of the
modern church. Many thoughtful analysts say the church today is more in
need of overhaul than it was at the time of the Protestant Reformation.

Yelling at God

Let's move on now and focus on the No. 1 argument, not only today but
throughout history, against the existence of God: "If there's a loving
and all-powerful God, how can He allow the human race – His children,
made in His image – to suffer so terribly?" This question has often been
called "the rock of atheism."

In "Letter to a Christian Nation," atheist scientist Sam Harris hammers
this point into the ground:

"At this very moment," he writes, "millions of sentient people are
suffering unimaginable physical and mental afflictions, in circumstances
where the compassion of God is nowhere to be seen, and the compassion of
human beings is often hobbled by preposterous ideas about sin and
salvation."

Attempting to rub the reader's nose in the age-old mystery of suffering,
Harris goes on: "Somewhere in the world, a man has abducted a little
girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this
kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few
hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the
statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The
same statistics also suggest that this girl's parents believe – as you
believe – that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them
and their family. Are they right to believe this. Is it good that they
believe this?"

"No," answers Harris, who adds, cryptically: "The entirety of atheism is
contained in this response."

From the day's news, Harris calls forth still more examples of great
suffering as evidence that God doesn't exist: "The city of New Orleans,
for instance, was recently destroyed by a hurricane. More than a
thousand people died; tens of thousands lost all their earthly
possessions; and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that
almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurricane
Katrina struck shared your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and
compassionate God. But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to
their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women
who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be
slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men
and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Do you have the courage
to admit the obvious? These poor people died talking to an imaginary
friend."

Mankind has grappled for millennia with the mystery of suffering, and
how it can possibly be compatible with an all-powerful and benevolent
God. Let's explore this question together for a few minutes and see if
perhaps we can catch a glimpse of a greater reality.

To begin with, let's consider one more famous voice angrily condemning
God as cruel and sadistic. See if you can guess who the speaker is:

What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that
God is, by any standard we can conceive, "good"? Doesn't all the prima
facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? …

If God's goodness is inconsistent with hurting us, then either God is
not good or there is no God: for in the only life we know He hurts us
beyond our worst fears and beyond all we can imagine.

So, who do you think this is ranting and raving against God? The
ever-fuming journalist Christopher Hitchens? The haughty Oxford
professor Richard Dawkins?

No, actually it's another Oxford professor, far more famous than
Dawkins, and whose intellect and writing ability dwarf Hitchens'. It's
C.S. Lewis, one of the 20th century's most influential defenders of the
Christian faith.

As you may know, Lewis was an atheist for the first part of his life.
Through a gradual spiritual awakening during his early 30s, he first
became convinced of the existence of God, and later – with the help of
"Lord of the Rings" author J.R.R. Tolkien and another colleague –
embraced the Christian faith. Through his books, like "Mere
Christianity" (voted the best Christian book of the 20th century by
Christianity Today in 2000), "The Screwtape Letters" (now being made
into a feature film for 2008 release) and many others – including of
course his beloved "Chronicles of Narnia" series – he helped, and
continues to help, countless people in their journey toward God.

"So," you must be thinking, "these angry anti-God words from the great
C.S. Lewis must have come from his early, whacked-out atheist years –
right?"

Wrong.

They were written after "Narnia," after "Mere Christianity," after all
the acclaim of an appreciative Christian world. They were written, to be
precise, after the 1960 death of Lewis's wife, Joy, in his book "A Grief
Observed."

For most of his life, well into his 50s, Lewis the author, literature
professor at Oxford and Cambridge and celebrated Christian apologist,
had been a bachelor. Then he met Helen Joy Davidman, an unusually gifted
American writer and poet of Jewish background who had converted from
atheistic communism to Christianity, in part due to Lewis's writings.
After they corresponded for several years, she moved to England and they
married in 1956, when Lewis was 57.

Both of them knew Joy had bone cancer. In fact, they were married at
Joy's hospital bedside.

Amazingly, Joy experienced a dramatic remission, during which time the
couple lived together happily, traveled and enjoyed each other to the
fullest. But this blissful period was short-lived, and Joy died when her
cancer returned with a vengeance in 1960.

In his 1961 book, "A Grief Observed," Lewis records for posterity his
intense bereavement – including his very real angers and doubts about
everything he had written and taught about God for decades – and does it
in such a raw and uncensored manner that he originally released the book
under the pseudonym of N.W. Clerk, so readers wouldn't associate it with
him.

But let's see how Lewis responded to this severe personal suffering –
and what conclusions he ultimately came to about God. He begins,
understandably enough, poignantly grieving the loss of his beloved (whom
he referred to in the book as "H," for Helen):

... The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant
impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time
unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real. Is all that work to be
undone? Is what I shall still call [Helen] to sink back horribly into
being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipedreams? Oh my dear,
my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away.
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of
its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back – to be sucked back – into
it? ...

... What pitiable cant to say, "She will live forever in my memory!"
Live? That is exactly what she won't do. You might as well think like
the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them. Will
nothing persuade us that they are gone? What's left? A corpse, a memory,
and (in some versions) a ghost. All mockeries or horrors. Three more
ways of spelling the word dead. It was H. I loved. As if I wanted to
fall in love with my memory of her, an image in my own mind! It would be
a sort of incest. ...

Meanwhile, asks Lewis, where on earth is God?

This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so
happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are
tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember
yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so
it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is
desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door
slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the
inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you
wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in
the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It
seemed so once. …

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The
real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The
conclusion I dread is not "So there's no God after all," but "So this is
what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer."

Now Lewis zeroes in on the key question:

… Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What
reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is,
by any standard we can conceive, "good"? Doesn't all the prima facie
evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it?

We set Christ against it. But how if He were mistaken? Almost His last
words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He
called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had
supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited,
was at last sprung, on the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded.

In his despair, Lewis goes on to speculate darkly about the "vile
practical joke" played on him and his beloved.

What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers
H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely
by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by
false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one
temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we
were "led up the garden path." Time after time, when He seemed most
gracious He was really preparing the next torture.

The next morning, Lewis thinks better of his agonized rant.

I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought. Let me try
it over again. Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God
so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?

And coming to his senses, he asks:

Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope
that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren't
all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won't accept the
fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?
Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which
will make pain not to be pain. It doesn't really matter whether you grip
the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The
drill drills on.

'Knocked silly'

Eventually, after fully expressing his anger, inconsolable grief and
doubts about God, Lewis starts to turn a major corner.

... Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early.
For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was
lighter than it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am
recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion. ... And
suddenly, at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I
remembered her best. Indeed, it was something (almost) better than
memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a
meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts
one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a
barrier.

... How far have I got? Just as far, I think, as a widower of another
sort who would stop, leaning on his spade, and say in answer to the
inquiry, "Thank'ee. Mustn't grumble. I do miss her something dreadful.
But they say these things are sent to try us." We have come to the same
point; he with his spade, and I, who am not now much good at digging,
with my own instrument. But of course, one must take "sent to try us" in
the right way. God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love
in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who
didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box and
the bench all at once.

Lewis finally admits a shattering but also liberating personal truth …

He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of
making me realize that fact was to knock it down. ...

… And he offers a useful metaphor to explain the powerfully redemptive
use God makes of human suffering.

… Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game, "or
else people won't take it seriously." Apparently it's like that. Your
bid – for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for
eternal life or nonentity – will not be serious if nothing much is
staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the
stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not
for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.

Nothing less will shake a man – or at any rate a man like me – out of
his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be
knocked silly before he comes to his senses.

In the afterglow of this profound realization, Lewis, in a moment of
story-telling brilliance, confides in God:

Sometimes, Lord, one is tempted to say that if you wanted us to behave
like the lilies of the field you might have given us an organization
more like theirs. But that, I suppose, is just your grand experiment. Or
no; not an experiment, for you have no need to find things out. Rather
your grand enterprise. To make an organism which is also spirit; to make
that terrible oxymoron, a "spiritual animal." To take a poor primate, a
beast with nerve-endings all over it, a creature with a stomach that
wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, "Now
get on with it. Become a god."

Why do you suppose one person who suffers a tremendous personal loss
also loses his belief in God, while another goes through the same
experience and – despite all his transient doubts and angers – emerges
with his faith intact, and stronger than ever?

Why did some people survive the Nazi Holocaust only to conclude there is
no God – or no God worth knowing if He would allow such suffering –
while other Holocaust survivors emerged from that ordeal with a far
deeper faith in the Almighty?

What words can describe this mysterious quality? Humility, faith,
blessedness, grace? It's actually beyond words – perhaps some secret
mystical connection between our soul and God, some back-channel that
enables us to keep attuned to a proper perspective regardless of
difficult circumstances.

That special quality – C.S. Lewis had it – is the secret ingredient that
makes the good things that happen to us truly good, and the bad things
that happen to us also good, because God uses them to perfect our
character. In the same way, for people who live from the energy and
motivation of pride (which in turn is connected to the invisible realm
of evil), the bad things that happen remain bad (non-redemptive), but
even the "good" things (success, wealth, fame) aren't good either,
because they just build pride, in ever-increasing conflict with God.

Our life is a gift – including the suffering. It's time we stopped
spitting at the gift-Giver. Atheists who rant pompously against God are
a little like ants, muttering and sputtering furiously against man,
believing themselves superior to him (if he even exists!).

Life is not only a gift from God, but it's supposed to be magical – or
maybe "miraculous" is a better word – and full of adventure and
discovery. I'm not referring to our outer journey of life, which may or
may not be particularly exciting, but to the inner adventure we're meant
to experience – a journey of discovery whereby through progressive
realization and repentance our character is gradually perfected for the
Creator's purpose. The enchantment of such a life is subtle and private
– no one else will know about it – but it's more magical than anything
in "Harry Potter" or "The Lord of the Rings" or "The Narnia Chronicles"
or any other fantasy from the mind of man. Because we are living
characters, set in a story not from the mind of man, but from the mind
of God. And that story is full of wonder.

An acorn falls to the ground, dies to itself, and effortlessly grows
into a towering oak tree – a transformation which, if it occurred in a
few seconds, we'd consider pure magic. But, since that same magic
unfolds in slow motion over the course of 50 years, we think nothing of
it. We walk past such marvels constantly and shrug, just as we bypass
the potential miracles of character growth within each of us – dying and
being reborn – because we don't understand God's methods. Sometimes
there is miraculous transformation in suffering – but only if we endure
it with patience and dignity, and not with resentment.

God works miracles through the things we suffer. Even Christ, the
perfect Son of God, learned obedience that way, Scripture tells us.

"Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he
suffered; And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal
salvation unto all them that obey him." (Hebrews 5:8-9 KJV)

So, even if we suffer, even if we need to be "knocked silly" like C.S.
Lewis, even if we lose everything like Job, what of it? The magic of
redemption is in the air when we suffer with patience and humility and
without anger – and allow God to transform us at our core, into the
giant oak. This is a great mystery.

And what of the atheist? He also breathes a kind of magic air, but of a
very different variety. He is his own god, or so it seems. That kind of
freedom has a sort of sweet stench – a little like those green
Christmas-tree-shaped air fresheners that people hang from their car's
rear-view mirror, meant to make the car smell better but which actually
emit an offensive odor. Just so, the "sweetness" of pride, of being your
own god and master of your destiny, has a spiritual scent that is
noxious to sincere seekers of truth.

Meanwhile, as atheist authors write books and lecture and travel to and
fro persuading as many of us as possible to abandon our faith, lift up
your gaze: The enemy is amassing and heading for the city's gates. The
global Islamic jihad movement, which is single-mindedly focused on
spreading Islam over the world at the point of a sword – or a gun or a
bomb or a suitcase nuke – has awakened after centuries of relative
dormancy and is on the prowl again, seeking whom it may devour. The
waning of genuine Christian faith in America is like a pheromone, a
sweet scent this predator can't resist. And yet – just as God brought
ancient Israel back to life over and over, don't count us out.

It's been said it takes a religion to fight a religion. Thus, however
many angry and clever books atheists write expounding their arguments,
they'll never make any headway in countering radical Islam. You see,
genuine belief in God – the God Who inspired the Holy Bible and
sustained America's soldiers throughout all the righteous wars we have
fought for freedom, not just for ourselves but for others too – is what
has given strength and muscle and sinew to America up until now. And
without genuine faith in God, we will never be able to defeat the
Islamists in the coming battle. Why? Because their belief – and
therefore their determination, persistence and willingness to suffer for
the sake of obedience to their god – will be more powerful than ours.