Reasons Greetings

Of course we just can't have those silly Christian theists enjoying themselves around the holiday season. What could these morons from these organizations have been thinking? Something like "Let's rain on their parade and show them how silly their beliefs are at a time of the year reserved for hope and renewal". It's social autism run amok as Jeff Jacoby tells us in his most recent article which mentions that this year, the American Humanist Association is "taking a more combative tone. It is spending $200,000 to “directly challenge biblical morality’’ in advertisements appearing on network and cable TV, as well as in newspapers, magazines, and on public transit". But is all of this vitriol toward Christianity in particular to be considered, well, reasonable?

"Can people be decent and moral without believing in a God who commands us to be good? Sure. There have always been kind and ethical nonbelievers. But how many of them reason their way to kindness and ethics, and how many simply reflect the moral expectations of the society in which they were raised?..

It may seem obvious to us today that human life is precious and that the weakest among us deserve special protection. Would we think so absent a moral tradition stretching back to Sinai? It seemed obvious in classical antiquity that sickly babies should be killed. “We drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal,’’ wrote the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger 2,000 years ago, stressing that “it is not anger but reason’’ that justifies the murder of handicapped children.

Reason is not enough. Only if there is a God who forbids murder is murder definitively evil. Otherwise its wrongfulness is a matter of opinion. Mao and Seneca approved of murder; we disapprove. What makes us think we’re right?

The God who created us created us to be good. Atheists may believe — and spend a small fortune advertising — that we can all be “good without God.’’ History tells a very different story."

Had the gospel not penetrated the hearts of mankind, I shudder to think what the world would be like. It would probably be like the China that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations...



"Marriage is encouraged in China, not by the profitableness of children, but by the liberty of destroying them. In all great towns several are every night exposed in the street, or drowned like puppies in the water. The performance of this horrid office is even said to be the avowed business by which some people earn their subsistence."