"Reflections........................."

“Much of what has passed for the Christian message has been nothing more than frothy God-talk – mindless, thoughtless, and in its exploitation of people, heartless; but just as much as anti-theistic thinking, when scrutinized, is found to be impoverished in so far as making any sense, so also can much of our religious verbiage, bereft of reason and seeped in emotional drivel, be tossed at unsuspecting audiences in the name of orthodoxy. The ruinous end of the latter, in its destruction of lives plundered, both materially and spiritually, may be greater than the ideas perpetrated by the openly cynical”….

Ravi Zacharias, like C.S. Lewis, can get into Christian apologetics and have my brain swimming in a thick philosophical soup almost before I can blink. Thankfully, though, the author’s books, for the most part, shift into linguistics much easier for me to contemplate, the three I possess not only a good read, but also a good “feed” again and again. In Chapter Two of “Can a Man Live Without God”, he gives several definitions of atheism, but what struck me on this occasion was a Madalyn Murray O’Hair quote wherein she expressed such “theology” as rational thinking, a belief in the “technical philosophy of materialism”. Asserting that nothing exists but natural phenomena, she concludes that “We atheists believe that nature simply exists. Matter is. Material is.” In other words, she requires no explanation for those things she can see or touch. They just “are” and therefore they, indeed, are….Why, I wonder, do so many in Christianity find fault with such thinking? In truth, the majority of us seem likewise content with founding our faith on similar statements, as if “belief” is all that’s required, a Bible verse sufficient for others to accept the validity of our witness…..