Would You Trust This Man For Spiritual Guidance?

You know that old rule about how you shouldn’t discuss religion, politics, or sex in polite company? Well thank God the Internet is hardly what you’d call polite company, or I wouldn’t have much to talk about. For awhile now, I’ve found myself a little irritated by some of the more rabid atheists in the public eye (at least one of whom seemingly can’t be mentioned without mentioning his excessive drinking). I’ve always been aware that one of the reasons for my joy in goading atheists into a debate was that if they truly held that the foundations of their belief were logic, their side of the argument was doomed at the outset. Agnosticism is one of the predictable results of applying reason to the topic of God, but to attempt to proclaim the absolute non-existence of something is absurd. Much like saying humans have never been to the moon simply because you haven’t. This idea gets summed up nicely in the compelling book Cosmos and Psyche in a few passages where the author points out that in the final attempt to remove all projected beliefs about the universe, one is ironically forced into what is perhaps the ultimate expression of the very anthropocentric approaches that one is attempting to destroy by proclaiming that in a theoretically infinite and largely unexplored universe, rational human thought is the only thing that matters. Chris Hedges also sums it up well when he points out how much atheists have in common with religious fundamentalists, and how their common ground is really an emotional immaturity that renders them incapable of accepting the ambiguity and complexity of life, which forces them to retreat into a personally safe, inflexible, and defensible world view. To the self-aggrandizing Four Horsemen (c’mon, can’t you guys even come up with your own iconography?) I say: “Where is your lack of God now, ignorant atheist!?!?” Heh.