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Christian atheism is a form of cultural Christianity and ethics system drawing its beliefs and practices from Jesus' life and teachings as recorded in the New Testament Gospels and other sources, whilst rejecting supernatural claims of Christianity.Cultural Christian · Jesuism · Thomas JJ Altizer · William Hamilton.
Table of contents
- 10 facts about atheists
- A Convincing Explanation of the Origin of Evil
- Christian atheism
- The World's Newest Major Religion: No Religion
Self-identified atheists also tend to be aligned with the Democratic Party and with political liberalism. At the same time, many do not see a contradiction between atheism and pondering their place in the world. In fact, the Religious Landscape Study shows that atheists are more likely than U. To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
Atheists also were more likely than Americans overall to describe finances and money, creative pursuits, travel, and leisure activities as meaningful. Not surprisingly, very few U. For example, seven-in-ten U.
10 facts about atheists
Fewer than one-in-five U. Atheists were at least as knowledgeable as Christians on Christianity-related questions — roughly eight-in-ten in both groups, for example, know that Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus — and they were also twice as likely as Americans overall to know that the U. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.
It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Lack of belief in God is still too often taken to mean the absence of any other meaningful moral beliefs, and that has made atheists an easy minority to revile. As that remark suggests, the one wall the current Administration does not want to build is the one between church and state.
The most evident manifestation of this resurgence of Christian nationalism has been animosity toward Muslims and Jews, but the group most literally excluded from any godly vision of America is, of course, atheists. Yet the national prejudice against them long predates Daniel Seeger and his draft board. It has its roots both in the intellectual history of the country and in a persistent anti-intellectual impulse: the widespread failure to consider what it is that unbelievers actually believe. American antipathy for atheism is as old as America.
Although many colonists came to this country seeking to practice their own faith freely, they brought with them a notion of religious liberty that extended only to other religions—often only to other denominations of Christianity. True religious liberty was rare in the colonies: dissenters were fined, flogged, jailed, and sometimes hanged.
Yet, surprisingly, no atheist was ever executed. According to the Cornell professors R. Nonbelievers were either few and far between in Colonial America or understandably cautious about making themselves known; clergy and magistrates rarely bothered to mention them, even derisively.
Still, his argument was audacious for an era when most colonies had established churches and collected ecclesiastical taxes to support them. It was striking, then, after the Revolutionary War, when the men who gathered for the Constitutional Convention banned religious tests for office holders, in Article VI.
A Convincing Explanation of the Origin of Evil
But, while neither was a creedal Christian, both men were monotheists, and, like John Locke, their ideas about tolerance generally extended only to those who believed in a higher power. It was another one of the revolutionaries who became a hero for the nonreligious. Both atheists and their critics often make a hopeless muddle of the category, sometimes because it is genuinely complicated to assess belief, but often for other reasons.
Some believers, meanwhile, use atheism to discredit anyone with whom they do not agree. For atheists, at least, this definitional elasticity provided a kind of safety in numbers, however inflated: as their ranks grew, so did their willingness to make their controversial beliefs public. William Lane Craig and Bill Nye vs.
Christian atheism
Ken Ham do today. With nonbelievers starting to assert themselves, believers began more aggressively protecting their faith from offense or scrutiny. All but three states passed Sabbatarian laws, which were imposed on everyone, including religious observers whose Sabbath did not fall on Sunday. Such prohibitions linger in blue laws, which now mostly restrict the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism.
That presumption became both more popular and more potent during the Cold War.
The World's Newest Major Religion: No Religion
The Founders had already chosen a motto, of course, but E pluribus unum proved too secular for the times. Is it not also significant that many ancient peoples and cultures, including the Chinese, have some tradition of a lost Paradise in the dim and distant past? Speaking for myself, I find this evidence convincing, but what has really persuaded me of the truthfulness of the Christian explanation of the origin of evil and suffering, is its inherent philosophical credibility.
Lewis points out, true love is a voluntary union of free individuals giving themselves to each other for their mutual delight and for the mutual enjoyment of life and all its blessings. Consequently, when God created the first human beings, He gave them the gift of free will.
He did so in order that they and all their descendants might share His life, His love, His joy and His beauty, with Him and with each other. As part of this gift of free will, God also gave human beings creativity and intelligence in order that they might be good stewards of the world in which he had placed them, sharing its joys and adding to its wonders and beauty. But the problem with free will is that it can be corrupted and misused. Our inner freedom to relate to God and other people in harmony and love, can be turned on its head.
We can choose, instead, to reject our Creator and live only for ourselves. And that, sadly, is what has happened to the human race. A creature rebelling against its Creator, Lewis argues, is like a plant refusing to grow towards the sunlight. It results in a broken relationship which separates that creature from the eternal source of all life, love, truth and well-being, including its own. It was therefore inevitable that when the human race separated itself from God through that original act of disobedience long ago, hatred, disease and death came into the world.
But whatever you may think about all this, one thing seems crystal clear and made perfect sense to me: separation from our Creator is inevitably self-destructive. It is inevitably self-destructive not only because it results in death, but also because it is destructive of freedom. Apart from God, we lack the inner strength to resist the downward pull of our fallen natures. Without His help, we cannot overcome all the temptations we face to give in to our lowest impulses and pursue our own interests at the expense of others.
And if, in addition, this diminution of our inner freedom is accompanied, as in so many lives, by positive disbelief in God, a new danger arises. We lose our sense of accountability and belief in moral absolutes because we no longer believe that there is a Divine Judge to whom we are ultimately responsible.
That is one of the reasons why militantly atheistic socialist regimes have produced the bloodiest tyrannies in history, slaughtering million people in internal repression during the 20 th century. It also helps to explain the growth of crime, delinquency and sexual immorality in post-Christian secularised Western societies. Has he abandoned us, and all His creation, to corruption and death? On the contrary. And at the heart of that rescue plan is the greatest and most extraordinary event in history: the incredible but true story of God coming down into our world to live and walk among us as a human being — as a first century Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, called Jesus.
Before I started reading C. Lewis, I dismissed this whole idea as an absurd fable. Even if Jesus had really existed, how could one believe that he had performed all those miracles recorded of Him in the New Testament? And how could one believe that Jesus had once turned several jars of water into wine at a wedding feast, or fed five thousand people with only five loaves of bread and two fish?
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You could only believe such stories, I thought, if you were scientifically illiterate, as everyone clearly was in ancient times. No-one had ever explained this mystery to me! Atheism denies the supernatural by definition, but if atheism is false and God exists, who is to say that God is not able to intervene in His creation?
In any case, argues Lewis, the whole idea that it is somehow unscientific to believe in God and therefore in the possibility of miracles, is both historically and philosophically mistaken. Modern science owes its very origin to monotheistic religion. To quote Lewis:. Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver. That is why most of the great founding fathers of modern science believed in God and were Christians who took the Bible seriously.
To mention just a few of them and the scientific disciplines they helped to establish, they include: Galileo and Kepler astronomy , Pascal hydrostatics , Boyle chemistry , Newton calculus , Linnaeus systematic biology , Faraday electromagnetics , Cuvier comparative anatomy , Kelvin thermodynamics , Lister antiseptic surgery , and Mendel genetics. All these men believed in an ordered universe and in the possibility of discovering how it functioned because they were convinced that the evidence of intelligent design in Nature indicated the existence of an Intelligent Creator.
As Kepler put it, writing in the 17 th century:. The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics. Lewis not only persuaded me that there is no reason to disbelieve in miracles and the supernatural on scientific grounds; he also pointed out the absurdity of attributing all belief in miracles to ignorance of the natural laws revealed by science.
It is therefore irrational to dismiss all reports of miracles as the unreliable testimony of credulous witnesses. You must examine the evidence for them with an open mind. If, responding to this challenge, we look with an open mind at the accounts in the New Testament of the miracles of Jesus, Lewis argues, we are brought face to face with an interesting and significant fact.