Guest Commentary Atheists: Perpetual High School Nerds By Lee Duigon MichNews.com Jan 5, 2007 Every high school class includes at least one nerdy kid who thinks he ought to be recognized as the brightest bulb on the tree, and resents it when everybody else ignores him. To remind them all how smart he is, he insults and belittles them; and it really bugs him that he remains unpopular. This obnoxious little nerd will serve as a symbol for America's atheists in the year of Our Lord 2007. They're in one of their "I demand you pay attention to me!" moods. Their latest caper is a little thing called the Blasphemy Challenge (see http://www.blasphemychallenge.com/). The Blasphemy Challenge recruits idiots to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, mostly young men aged 20-25, going on six. In return for risking eternal damnation, they receive a free DVD in which older idiots like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris insist that God does not exist. The Challenge's sponsor, a posse of perpetual adolescents calling themselves "The Rational Response Squad," claims 21,000 "activist" members, all dedicated to disabusing their fellow citizens of belief in God. What brought this on? Was it a poll that showed that most Americans think very little of atheists, if they ever think of them at all? Taking themselves as seriously as they do, this kind of benign neglect will set them off like Rumpelstiltskin. "Ignore us, eh? Well, let's see you ignore this tantrum!" Well, let's throw down a challenge to the atheists. We declare that atheists believe in things that would embarrass the intellect of a flatworm. The atheists' presuppositions may be summed up briefly: 1. Man is inherently good. You have five minutes to stop laughing. 2. Because we are good inside, any faults must be outside of us, in our environment. These can be remedied by spending money (other people's money is best), passing laws, expanding the size and power of government, psychiatry, psychology, education, and whatnot. When these methods fail to solve the problem, it can only be because more of the same is needed. 3. Perfection of the world, by human efforts, is possible. And don't ask how inherently good human beings ever came up with crime, war, poverty, oppression, or anything else that's bad. 4. Whatever we say we want, that we can achieve--if only we apply ourselves. Or, as Josef Stalin used to say, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs--in his case, tens of millions of them. 5. Nothing exists but the material. But if this is so, how can any action be good or evil? If we are nothing but collections of molecules--like a coffee table, or a clothesline--then our opinion of such matters can only be that: an opinion, nothing more. We challenge atheists to produce evidence, any evidence, that any of these self-evidently preposterous beliefs is true. They're so busy bashing Christianity that they never take the time to examine their own presuppositions. If we're so good, why is the world so full of evil? If throwing money at problems makes them go away, why haven't any of them gone away? If evolution is the law of nature, why are horseshoe crabs still horseshoe crabs, cockroaches still cockroaches, and bacteria still bacteria? If atheists are anything other than overaged high-school humbugs, why do they behave like overaged high-school humbugs? Meanwhile, you can't prove you're smart by putting your baseball cap on backwards and blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. I doubt that impresses even an atheist. Copyright by Lee Duigon --------------------------------------------- Lee Duigon is a Christian free-lance writer whose work can be seen regularly at www.chalcedon.edu. Copyright© MichNews.com. All Rights Reserved.

If we're so good, why is the world so full of evil?