The Godless Delusion

Robert Lee Coeyman Jr.

What if we do not really fear death? I am not asking about all of us. There is very little that actually applies to each and every one of us. My question really is, what if we fear the lack of death more than the presence of death. Is there comfort to be found in the belief that death is the end of all things?

You see, I was writing a story in which I was tempted to write that a character has his father’s eyes. It was not a literal remark any more than you could say that any child really has his father’s physical eyes. In this case, I was talking about the character having the vision of Satan. The character was not a blood relative of the devil. My remark was meant to say that fallen Man sees things the same way that Satan does.

This got me to thinking and I know how dangerous of an idea that is. Truly, what if we created the void because it is a reality that we wish to be real? Death in these terms is the ultimate escape. To die is to escape justice, guilt, responsibility and even loss. If what has died has ceased to be, then we are free of it. There is no loss in such a passing any more than we hold back the turning pages of the calendar for want of the month that has slipped into the past.

Reincarnation never appealed to me because I do not want to have to do this all again. It is my personality type to make the most of each action and leave myself no way back to where I came from. When I leave this mortal coil, I am going somewhere else. I do not hold this place so dear that I will miss it when I am called to relinquish it all. Is that what Man was thinking when he invented atheism?

In a world where nothing matters in any concrete terms, nothing gets far enough into your heart to hurt you. To have never felt is to have never felt pain. The apostle wrote that, if death is our end, then we would be foolish not to take all that we can from this world. Job cautions us that the pleasures of this world will never be enough to really satisfy our appetites. If atheism was true, then we could take anything that we wanted from this world without conscience.

My biggest problem with universalism is that the absence of judgment justifies all actions. There would be no difference between killing my neighbors and feeding the homeless. Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin are no worse than Mother Theresa. Given this choice, in a world where atheism is the true religion, you know which side I would model my life on. What kind of a world would that give us?

Atheism allows me to walk out on my wife and children because I saw something better walking down the road. Better yet, why worry with the kind of sex where I could be saddled with the responsibility of a family in the first place? It would be all about the way I feel and not about what I do to anybody around me. Why should the concept of love bind what atheism has unleashed? Belief, aside from atheism, is a chain on the beast that is Man.

I have read that Islam allows adherents to lie if it furthers the cause of Islam. Atheism allows me to lie because I feel like it. The most libertine theistic faith in the world has limits on behavior. With atheism it is all about me. What do you suppose is Satan’s religion?

Have you ever asked yourself why believing evolutionists are so opposed to survival of the fittest in practice? It does not really make sense. Atheism has no scale upon which justice is measured. Extinction is part of the cycle of life. No part of this world lives forever.

It has been said that atheists can be good people. Have you ever seen interviews with the neighbors of serial killers? When atheists are being good, their goodness is being measured on the scale of other religions. We impose our practices onto atheists and then call their behavior good. Atheism is the religion of getting away with anything.

Maybe it is not atheism that makes us evil. We crucified Christ, knowing that he was innocent, and we would do it again in a heartbeat. Did secular Rome have a reason to worry about a single Jew? Christ told us that the brutality of our fallen nature is breaking God’s heart and breaking God’s law. Our nature acts as though atheism is true.

Brutality is nothing new to us. We are good at killing. As you spend your hours on the roads, observe all the people who pull to the side of the road to look over the scene of a collision. Do we not turn into the same news broadcasts that are produced with the motto that it leads if it bleeds? God never told us to enjoy the suffering of others.

What Christ gives us is a convicting conscience for all the time that we spend acting like atheists. We need a positive force to pull us away from our secular nature for the good of all that has blood and draws breath. Atheism does not make us evil but it dismisses as myth the laws that make us anything better than evil. Knowing God did not make Satan back into an angel of light. Knowledge of God gives us guidance and, if we ask for it in faith, the strength to turn from the secular nature that we were born with.

Atheism takes away our chains. In atheism, we have no shame in anything that we do. It appears that atheism makes us evil because atheism removes the restraints that contain the evil that is always present within us. With atheism, there is no such thing as evil because there is nobody with the authority to judge actions. Evil is always in the heart and never in the hands.

So maybe it is not death that we fear. There is a perverse high in the feeling of being your own god. The reign of death gives us a world in which Man can be his own god. In the absence of death, there is a creator God to whom we are all accountable. Atheism is never having to be sorry.