Atheist Arrogance

I wrote about it over a year ago, but I encountered it again just a couple days ago. This time it was described using the word “Disgust.” Specifically, an atheist said, “Religious people who think they have all the answers disgust me.”

In their ignorance, atheists think that a Christians’s confidence comes from, "Because God told us." Well, I suppose that's part of the answer. The other part though, the main part of our confidence is based on experience, resolved doubt, resolved exploration, questioning and searching and searching and searching for answers.

It seems more than just a little arrogant to me for an atheist to say, “I find it galling that some people don’t live in a perpetual state of doubt, like I do.” The lack of humility involved in such thoughts does nothing to raise the profile of atheists in the eyes of those who already find the atheist’s pompous strutting difficult to tolerate.

The difference between atheists and Christians in this case is:
- Christians say, “Because I’ve found Truth - so can you.”
- Christians say, “The Truth that I have is something that was revealed to me, so there is no room for me to boast.”
- Christians say, “The Truth that matters in life can be found, not just by the intelligent, but even by those of limited intellectual ability, by those with little education and even by children. It’s simple. It’s easy. It can be yours.
- The Atheist says, “That’s insulting, demeaning, embarrassing and disgusting. I’ll have none of it!”

Jesus said that finding the kingdom of Heaven is like a man who discovered a treasure in a field. That man sold everything he had in order to buy the field and gain the treasure. He was so confident that he’d found a treasure that giving up everything else was worth the risk. In reality and in hindsight, it wasn’t a risk at all because the treasure was real, it wasn’t a figment of his imagination. That seems to be the problem for atheists. Actually I know it’s the problem because all of us, before we gave our lives to Jesus saw moving in that direction as a huge risk; too big a risk for most. And because atheists don’t know that there truly is a treasure on the other side, they think we’re fools for saying that we’ve found it. They find our confidence frustrating in the extreme. Look at it this way.

We were in Hawaii for a couple weeks at the beginning of March. The last time we were there was 35 years ago when we got married. Things have changed, like a million more people, changed. Anyhow, our plane landed close to midnight local time. Our destination lay about an hour from the airport. By the time we got our luggage, cleared customs and found our rental car it was really late. The rental car didn’t have any type of GPS so we were forced to use the old kind of map, in the dark, on a twelve lane highway with signs pointing every which way. Luckily Wendy and I have been through this scenario many times, with her the navigator and me the driver. We trust each other’s ability. Nevertheless there were many questions on our journey. 'Did that sign mean we should be in this lane or that lane? Was that last exit the one we should have taken? Are we getting closer to our destination or is this road taking us further away?' Finally, as the road got narrower and narrower, there, straight ahead, at the end of the valley was our Resort. The sign proclaimed it. The front desk confirmed it. The guy on the cart drove us to our room. We lay down in OUR bed.

Now, here’s where the atheists come in. They, like us at one time, were on the same journey. Call it the quest for truth, or whatever. We were all filled with questions. Is this the right way or the wrong way? Have we arrived or not? Some of us have made many and varied stops along the way thinking that we’d found our destination. I certainly did that on my spiritual journey. At first, the thought that there was no God seemed the right answer. Actually, I had so much hatred toward the Church and all things religious that I purposely ignored signs that pointed me in that direction. Then I made stops at money and sex and drugs and relationships and of course I made a long, long stop at "fun." None of these destinations lived up to the advertising in the brochure. People that I’d hung out with said we’d arrived but something deep down inside me told me that this wasn’t the place. Actually, out of fear, more than a few people settle for where they're at. "Ya,” they say, “I know we were planning to find a Five Star Hotel but I'm not going any further. I'd rather sleep in the ditch by the side of the road. Besides I can't even see the hotel. I've absolutely no proof that it'd be any better than this ditch." Some even took pride at sleeping in a ditch rather than being weak like those who “needed the crutch” of a Five Star Hotel.

Not until I took the risk of taking Jesus’ claims about Himself seriously did I find my true home. That experience is described by Christians in a variety of ways. Like Blaise Pascal said, "We all have a God shaped hole in our souls and nothing but God can fill it." Well, once that hole is filled with what it was meant for, nothing and no one is going to convince you that you should keep looking. Is a person confident when that happens? Absolutely! And there's nothing wrong with that.

If someone had come up to me a few days after we’d arrived and told us that we were at the wrong Resort; that the Resort we were supposed to be at was on the other side of the island or half an hour in the other direction, even if they’d said that they had scientific proof that we were at the wrong Resort, nothing they said could have convinced me they were right. If they got upset because I was so confident that I was at the correct Resort, well, they’d just have to live with that frustration because "I know where I am and it’s the right place."

Actually I think that’s one reason why people from other religions don’t evangelize or witness the way Christians do. Samuel Clemens once said, “Twenty years from now the things you didn’t do will be more disappointing for you than the things you did do,” or something like that. I believe that for a genuine Hindu, or genuine Buddhist or even a genuine atheist, twenty years from now they won’t care one way or another about the people they never talked to about their beliefs. They don’t have any good news that’s worth sharing. They don’t have any critically important news that’s needs to be told. They don't have the kind of confidence in what they believe that compels them to say, “Listen to this. It’s important.” True believers in those faiths don’t have a truth to pass on because deep down they know that ‘this isn’t quite the right place.’ That is simply not the case for genuine Christians. If what we believe is true, then we would have to disobey the final command of the one whom we worship to “Go into all the world and tell others about Me.”

I remember a dream that I had. I was standing before the Judgement Seat of Christ and there, all around me was the mass of humanity that had come and gone from time immemorial. All were gray in colour except for those that had come in contact with me during my life, particularly those who were not saved. They were dressed in red and they were pointing their fingers at me. In voices that betrayed anger, hurt and disgust, those people were saying, “You knew about this! You knew that this was going to happen and you didn’t say anything to me about this. I thought you cared about me but I was wrong!” The Christian’s passion for telling others about Jesus is derived from h/her concern for the eternal well-being of others. When you open the door to Jesus’ place you know you’ve arrived at your final destination. How can we not tell others?

If you think you're on the wrong road, what have you got to lose by turning around and trying the road to Jesus, the narrow road, the road of adventure? Don’t be fooled by atheists who try to make you and others believe that they hold to their world-view because of evidence.

The writer of the atheist blog "whispersessions" nailed it perfectly.
"It’s imperative to understand that not all atheists are advocates of reason. We are all born atheists, therefore it is our default state. Many atheists don’t believe in a god because they simply never gave it a thought. They could very well be dishonest, angry people who have no moral code whatsoever. Some are atheists out of rebellion to their family. They may have never given a thought to philosophy or science, let alone ethics and morality. Some are atheists simply because they despise religion. Their “lack of belief” is actually a vicious anti-belief, and when asked about what they do believe, they’ll generally have nothing more to say than how badly they hate someone else’s beliefs. They will tell you that religion is wrong, but they’ll have nothing to say about what is right. They’ll say theism is false, but they will have nothing to say about what is true. To be sure, many atheists’ atheism rests upon nothing at all. They are not advocates of reason. They are advocates of nothing. They are atheist, non-rational, amoral, and anti-reason all at the same time."

While he was certain that none of these reasons applied to him (he was an atheist because he was so logical and reasoned in his thinking) he explained the situation very well.