On Atheism, hopelessness and hope...

I am really crabby tonight. Not for any particular reason, and definitely not for any good reason. Just crabby.

And so I saw Mark Driscoll (or his assistant?) posted this link on facebook:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jv3TFg9SJb4

It's a video explaining the "hope of life" of atheists. Basically, he quotes an atheist as saying the foundation for life is "unyielding despair". From an atheist's point of view, there is no God, there is nothing after this life, there is no meaning to this life, there is nothing but nature and survival of the fittest. He goes on to say that that ideology is utterly depressing and that is why so many teenagers are cutters, why people commit suicide, why the highest selling group of drugs is anti-depressants.

But if the majority of Americans classify themselves as Christian in some way (right?) then who is buying all these anti-depressants? Is Driscoll implying that if we know the gospel we can't get depressed?

In theory, that's true, because we should rely on God and be satisfied in God, etc etc, but in reality, the first humans in the Bible failed miserably at that. What makes us better? What makes us more able to love God in such a whole way when we are surrounded by way more stuff than Adam and Eve were. They just had a snake. We've got explicit sex everywhere, ostentatious entertainment, endless material lures and so on and so on. Our world is just as broken as its always been and humans have been failing at being satisfied in God enough to let the glitz of this world go since the "always" of humanity began.

So yeah, even Christians end up in the hopeless clutches of depression. *shrug* It's not just an atheist thing.

But I digress...

Driscoll (or his assistant) captioned the video on facebook as, "A Video for Dawkins".

My reply was this:
I can kinda predict the response of the atheists I know though... "Of course the world is a darker place when you discover that Santa Claus isn't real, that your dad isn't perfect and that you really are all alone, but just because they're hard truths to accept doesn't make any of them any less true."

So how will that video bring atheists any closer to Jesus? I just don't see it.

Maybe it's my crabbiness or maybe I feel this way on a regular day, but it seems like Christians believe that hardcore atheists will just "click" one day and love Jesus. Like, they'll press play on this Driscoll video because some Bible-thumpy Christian acquaintance will trick them into thinking it's about Dawkins, and they'll endure the seven minutes of it and at the end, when the video carousel shows up, they'll be all looking up at the heavens crying, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry."

Yeah, that's not gonna happen. And if it does, if you know somebody to which that has happened, it's likely that deep down they believed anyway.

Why am I so cynical about this? Because as Driscoll points out, it IS a depressing doctrine. It is hopeless. Really. And when you adopt that hopelessness as your fundamental truth of the universe, the implications are that you are so cynical about God and religion that you cannot be moved by "inside" words or by "inside" thoughts. By inside, I mean stuff that stems from Christian religiosity- the terminology.

If you tell an atheist they are hopeless, what does that mean? That this life is meaningless and they'll die and that'll be it? Well... yeah... They know that already.

If you tell an atheist the only way they'll be saved is through our savior Jesus Christ, what does that mean to them? It means the only way to go through life with permanent rose-colored glasses on is if you adopt a delusion of being loved by an imaginary friend. It's meaningless.

In my experience, everything Christian is meaningless to an atheist except Jesus Himself. You can't preach hope or salvation or sanctification or hellfire. None of that means a thing. And if you preach repentance? Well, now you're just a self-righteous religious person that they've already encountered time and time again. It's not going to work.

But the soul things do work. The things we all feel. Like when a relationship ends. Up here, it's likely that that relationship involved sex. And so, talking about what God intends for sex in those moments, how sex is a way of bonding the souls of two people, in order to explain why it hurts so much when those souls rip apart, hits the soul a little bit. Why? Because it's true and because that particular kind of pain is really a soul pain rather than a superficial, every day life kind of pain. We feel it. We know it's something deeper than other hurts we experience. Why do we call it a broken heart? Why do we imply even trivially that we're shattered in our core? And from a Christian standpoint, that is one of the reasons why God wants us to wait. He doesn't want us to feel this soul-rippage. He wants to protect us from that.

Another thing that gets in is forgiveness. Active, open forgiveness. Letting go of grudges. Seeing past the brokenness and the hurt and loving them anyway. It's something that Jesus taught and it's something that goes completely against our basic human instincts. But in our hearts, we long for the ability to let go. We long for the ability to understand that love is more important than anything else. We long for it not because we do it but because we wish for others to embrace it towards us. We wish to be forgiven. We wished to be loved unconditionally and eternally.

Love. It gets in too. Active loving. Sacrifice and enduring profound friendship.

Being humble. Passing off the glory, letting go of selfishness, lifting those around you up- that gets in.

Justice does too. Fighting for those who need us to fight for them. Fighting for the basic needs and rights of individuals.

Caring.

Loving those who are hardest to love. Loving your enemy.

Honesty- being a prideful person takes any mission out of you. Be honest about who you are and what your stumblings are. Be honest about your failures. Be honest. You're not perfect. You're probably farther from perfect than the person you're evangelizing. Never forget that. You might think you're saved, but sanctification is a lifelong process.

And most of all, practicing more than preaching. What good is God's word coming out of your mouth if you don't know what it means? What good is it if you don't live it? What good is it if you don't know it well enough to explain it to somebody who isn't a Christian? What good is it if the only way you know how to explain it is in Bibley terms?

Teach it from the heart. Live it from the heart. And love with it. That is the hope we're trying to get people to understand and that, to me, is the only way to get an atheist's attention. Don't just say the words. If Jesus is in your heart, show them your heart.

Otherwise, it's all just hopeless.


And not to let the atheists off the hook here (even though if there are any reading this post, they'd probably have quit by now, right?), in my comment on Driscoll's wall, I mentioned Santa, imperfect dads and being utterly alone. And when I didn't know God, I did seem to base my ideology on the worst case scenario.

The world is a hard place. Survival of the fittest is brutal. The only person who will ever truly look out for you is you. When you look at ideas like those, which are sort of true really, it makes sense that we're only here by chance and that there's no deeper underlying meaning to all this.

But why do we choose those things on which to base our philosophies?

Why not look at opposite things?

Survival of the fittest might be brutal and unforgiving, but look at what it has produced. Look at the awesomeness of survival. Look at the miraculous adaptations creatures around us have developed to edge out the competition, to protect themselves and even to procreate. It's incredible and so precise.

The only person who will ever truly look out for you is you, but you know those rare times when a friend completely blows you away with kindness? They just show up out of nowhere and just leave you in awe. They might not have even appeared to care about you and then suddenly, there they were, helping you up when nobody else even knew you were down or nobody else knew how you needed to be picked up. It brings tears to your eyes to remember it.

The world is such a hard place- natural disasters, suffering, brokenness, poverty, loneliness... But what about beauty? What about love? Why do we have these powerful things to give us a glimmer of hope? Why do we keep going? Something here has to be worth it. The world is a hard place, but somehow, we were born with an attachment to it anyway.

And that dad who isn't perfect? It took you how many years to figure that out? Is there anybody in your life who has sustained perfection as long as that?

My dad kills bees with his bare thumb. Just his thumb. That's just crazy. But that's why he's my dad: it's not because he does these things to protect me and to make my world less scary, it's because I look to him for that. I want him to be that. I want him to play that role in my life. But like all dads, he eventually failed. I started to see his humanity and his mistakes. But when he's here at my house and he kills a bee with his thumb, that feeling in me is revived, even if only for a brief moment. That's God. That feeling.

Let me explain... There are these things we feel innately that there is no reason we should feel if our existence was merely based on survival of the fittest. There's no reason these things help us survive. Like this desire to feel protected. If we're the only ones who can protect ourselves, how does this innate craving of reliance help us survive? And love? If it was just about procreation, we wouldn't fall in love. We'd mate and move on. And beauty? Doesn't it distract us and make us vulnerable to predation or injury? And the example I mentioned above about the hurt we experience in a break up. Lying fetal on your sofa in your pajamas for months because somebody decided they didn't love you is definitely counterproductive to our survival. And yet, we feel it. We feel our soul torn apart. And if there is no God and no eternity, what benefit does it serve to be aware of our soul at all?

There are these things, these heart things, that deep down, no matter how much we stifle them, just don't fit. And as an agnostic, I was fine not knowing the answers. But then stuff started to make sense. And if there's anything a rational person craves, it's to make sense of stuff.

So make sense of it. Or at least try. *shrug*