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Quick Answers to Common Atheist Objections, Part 2

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose
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Quick Answers to Common Atheist Objections, Part 2

September 10, 2022
Knight & Rose Show
Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss how to respond to common atheist objections to Christianity, in a minute or two. We cover these topics: eternal punishment, Old Testament conquests, the appropriateness of worship, forcing beliefs on others, hypocrisy in the church, religious wars, and LGBT rights. This is the second of a three-part series.

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Show notes: https://winteryknight.com/2022/09/10/knight-and-rose-show-episode-22-quick-answers-to-common-atheist-objections-part-2

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Transcript

Welcome to The Knight and Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. Today's topic is "Quick Answers to Common Atheist Objections, Part 2." I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.
Last week we talked about several challenges
that atheists often raise to oppose Christianity. Again, these aren't well-thought-out challenges resulting from years of research, but more like quick "gotcha" phrases used to silence Christians. But we can't afford to respond to ignorance with silence.
So we want to continue
talking about how to respond briefly to these kinds of objections. We're not looking to tell people everything we know right now, but we do want to give them something to think about. So let's get started.
Okay, last week we did see some objections. Those were related to the evidence for God's existence and also objections to the Bible. So this week we're going to be hearing some objections that are related to God's character.
Yeah, in fact, objections related to God's character do seem to be more and more common. In fact, maybe the most common type of objections lately that I've been hearing, especially as our culture has become so feelings-oriented. People tend to hear something they don't like and they declare it to be evil.
Although actually atheists have no basis for declaring
anything to be objectively evil or good or right or just, but we talked about that in episode 13. Yeah, so in this episode, I'll once again be taking the role of skeptics. So let's start with objection number one.
What kind of God would only save those who worship Him? To
use the words of Richard Dawkins, "What a narcissistic egomaniac." Well, how would you respond to that? Yeah. Well, I think I'd reply by pointing out that everyone worships something or someone. We can worship God who deserves our worship or we can worship something else, which is detrimental to ourselves and to others.
Anyone who chooses to worship something else is rejecting
God. They're putting something else in the place that God deserves to be in. They're rejecting God's ways to go their own way and God lets them.
God allows people to reject
Him. It's not about God's ego. This is about God telling us what is right and what is good and just and respecting people's free decision to reject Him.
I mean, I would say, what do
you want God to do? Force everyone to be in His presence forever? I mean, that's what heaven is. It's living in the presence of the perfect, loving God. If someone hated you or ignored you, would you force that person to live in your presence, like in your home forever? No, of course not.
And neither does God. So, you know, I would say you can accept
God's offer of forgiveness to you for being a punk who has dismissed God in the past, or you can go your own way and God will respect that. Yeah.
Do you think that God is worthy of worship?
Yeah, obviously. I mean, He's the one who created and designed the universe, and He created us as well. So, if we deny Him respect for His creation, His design, His creating us and everything in the universe, then we are denying Him the respect that He deserves.
It's a huge insult. Right. It's like, you know, He does the work of providing us, you know, with our existence and sustaining us in our existence.
And then we kind of turn
around and say, you're not the one who's responsible for doing this. When you ascribe worth to someone, it should be because they've done something that's worthy. And that's what, in this case, God has done things that are worthy.
God even makes a way to remedy the
situation of people who have kind of avoided, you know, looking for Him, investigating Him and believing in Him and being obedient to Him. He sent His only Son to live a sinless life and die in our place so that we would have our rebellion atoned for so that we could be reconciled with God. Yeah, exactly.
And for those who hate God or reject Him, there's also a way for them
to be separated from God. And we call that hell. Hell is a real place for those who prefer separation from God over a relationship with God in His kingdom under His leadership.
Yeah, I've actually had conversations with atheists about what they would do if they were presented with personal evidence that Christianity was true. Like, suppose we went out to a restaurant and I was having dinner with this atheist and then Jesus showed up and started eating food off of the atheist plate and said, "Yeah, he's right. I really am here and you really should look into following me as your leader.
Okay, gotta go." And he
just disappeared like through a wall or something. I say, "What would you do if you're confronted with that?" And the funny thing is, is that in about half the cases, the person will say, "Well, I would hope that I would have the strength to continue living as if God wasn't there because I cannot have..." My cousin said this to me. She said, "I won't allow anyone to interfere with my pursuit of happiness on my own terms.
And so I would kind of have
to pretend that that never happened so that I could keep going." And the pretending that that never happened is kind of on the same spectrum as saying, "I don't want to look into the evidence for God's existence." You know? Yeah, I don't want to know the truth. I don't even want to seek it out. Yeah.
Right. You know, atheists listening may be thinking, "That's not me." But if I sit down with you and I say, "What books have you read from academic presses on the origin of the universe?" Like I literally just bought a book from Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis about the Big Bang cosmology talking about what would it take to deny that the universe had a beginning out of nothing. And this book is Cambridge University Press, you know? Or about the fine tuning argument we have, same two authors, A Fortunate Universe, which is talking about the fine tuning.
And I sometimes look on our YouTube channel and I see people
saying there is no fine tuning, literally. Like, look up part one of this episode and you'll see a comment from a guy who said there's no fine tuning, denying the information, biological information in our DNA. Yeah.
And simply by making an assertion. He didn't provide any evidence or anything like
that. Oh, no.
He wouldn't be able to find the evidence for this, right? He wouldn't be able to cite
an academic book. But, you know, this is the way that they kind of keep God at a distance. And the problem is, is for anybody with self-awareness, we could look at them and say, oh, you haven't done any research on this.
You're not reading Cambridge University Press or Oxford University
Press. But for them, that's the plan. They do that on purpose so that then they can say, there's no evidence or I don't have to do this.
It's deliberate. Okay. It's like shutting
your eyes and then, you know, saying it's not my fault.
Anyway, here's another objection. A loving God would never send people to hell. There should be some other alternative for people who don't want to believe in God.
Yeah. Well, people who ignore the evidence for God's existence so that they can live however they please cannot spend eternity face to face with God. They don't want it and it isn't forced upon them.
So let me tell you what it's like to be sure of your salvation.
I've spent the last 25 years seeking God, learning the evidence for truth and making daily decisions that result in discipline, in character growth and self sacrificial obedience. There's a real two way relationship here.
And, you know, as someone who seeks truth
by God's grace, I am happy that God separates people who don't want to seek Him and who don't want to submit to Him from those who want to know Him and His wisdom and His goodness. I don't want evil and suffering for all eternity. I endure it now so that everyone has an opportunity to hear the truth and to study the evidence and to come to the right conclusion.
But I'm
thankful that God isn't going to allow evil and suffering to go on forever. I mean, just as I'm thankful for good judges who put violent criminals in jail, I'm also thankful for our good God who quarantines those who refuse to submit to Him away from those who desire to follow Him. So I have no apologies, no embarrassment or shame over the doctrine of hell.
In fact, the more lawless our society becomes, the more thankful I am for a God
who is compassionate toward those who want to do good and who want to follow Him and a God who is just toward those who don't. Yeah. Yeah, that's my answer to that question.
Objection. I'm with you. I also have, as someone who has had to sacrifice in order to be a Christian, to become unpopular with certain people, to face consequences in the workplace or consequences in the friend group, this is very personal to me.
Like, I've had to reorder my life and
make decisions between the things that made me feel good and the things that made me popular and having a Christian life. So what I would say about this is I kind of want to talk about some guys who are in my office who are raised in Christian homes and even more so what I've seen when I present Christianity to people who I work with. So I'm coming to this from the position of my own life where I'm saying, okay, well, when I was young, I met a youth pastor.
I had already read the New Testament and he was asking me what I liked. And his
name was Grant. I told him that I was in our family, we like to argue a lot about different things and he said, you know, let me give you some apologetics books.
And when he brought
those to me, that was like God knocking on the door. So I went ahead and read those and then from there, I haven't looked back. At that time, I would have said I was already a Christian prior to him giving me those based on reading the New Testament and accepting it.
But this was more like saying this is going to be your way of life. I feel that
I was open to Christianity because I was already asking the big questions. How do we know the moral law that we sense is real? What happens when following the moral law sets me back? How did the universe begin? How could it begin by itself? These were questions I was asking at a young age and I actually wanted the answers.
I actually was willing to investigate this.
So when I went to work, I did some internships, you know, as an undergrad, I was rubbing shoulders with people like foreign workers from places like India and China. We had Muslim workers, we had people who had been raised in Christian homes who became atheists as soon as they hit college.
I would say to them, how much work have you put into exploring the evidence
for an origin of the universe? How much work have you put into exploring the evidence for the fine tuning? Because at that time, I had been watching a lot of William Lane Craig debates and I was aware of these arguments. And what I noticed is these guys often went to really good schools. They would get recruited by Microsoft and IBM and Amazon out of college, you know, and yet when it came to looking for evidence of miracles at the beginning of the universe, like either creation or fine tuning, they knew nothing about it.
Many of
them would admit that this was self-serving because if they found out that there was someone responsible for this, then they would lose their ability to seek happiness in their own way. So we're talking about hell and my experience of this is going to be so different from what atheists think. They think, well, you have to be unhappy that your family's not there if they reject God.
You have to be unhappy that the good people in your office aren't
there. And my experience is more like, no, I don't know how to explain this to you, but my understanding of non-Christians is that they deliberately keep God at a distance. They use their brains to get married, to get a good girlfriend or boyfriend, to get a good career, to invest, to make a lot of money, to buy a house, buy a car, get their kids into MIT.
I've talked to a lot of people who are going on this kind of success treadmill
and they've never used that brainpower to investigate the big questions in life. So if they find themselves 80 years old and they don't know the first thing about how the universe began or whether the New Testament is reliable or whether Jesus rose from the dead because they're just stating the conclusion, right? That's what the people on the YouTube comments do. They kind of say there's no coding in DNA, which no one believes who is in that field, but they say that, you know? There's no such thing as fine tuning.
And I mean,
I'm thinking I can cite you a book right now, Just Six Numbers by an atheist, the astronomer Royale of the UK, Martin Rees, who's written a book called Just Six Numbers, where he explains the fine tuning of the six numbers and he's an atheist. His answer is a multiverse, which he cannot test for. But the point is that the fine tuning is undeniable, but the person says they deny it because whatever the brainpower they have, that's for their benefit.
It's
not for seeking out God. Yeah. As we talked about last week, a lot of atheists think that if there is any evidence that God should just put it right in front of their face in an undeniable way so that they don't have to go even a little bit out of their way to seek out the truth.
So they
can seek out, they can put all their effort and energy and resources into making more money and getting people to like them and all these sorts of things, but they don't have to put in anything into discovering the answers to the big questions. Right. But yeah, I mean, with this question regarding hell, if you don't want to be with the source of all goodness, then the only logical alternative is to be separated from the source of all goodness.
I mean, logically, those are the options. So, you know, we don't get to make
up our own alternatives. That's what we've been given.
Let me give you a third objection. How about this one? I could never worship a God who could command genocide. Yeah, I've heard this several times.
People like to bring this up to me all the time.
And my response is usually along the lines of, do you know what the Canaanites were doing that brought God's judgment upon them? Who are the Canaanites? Why did you pick them? Because when people are referring to God's genocide, this is the event that they're usually referring to. This is in the Old Testament.
Yeah, exactly. God commands the Israelites to fight against Canaanites completely, you know, total war against them. Yeah, exactly.
So you could ask people, you know, where did God command genocide? Where
are you getting this from? But when I've asked that question, people always point to the same thing in my experience. Okay. So the Canaanites were practicing incest.
They were practicing adultery, polygamy, bestiality,
witchcraft, child sacrifice. These people were creating these metal idols, huge metal idols of, you know, false gods and heating the metal up to searing, burning temperatures. And then they would put their babies on the metal and watch them essentially get fried to death while screaming in agony.
That's awful. Yeah, these are not good people. And this is like an attempt to like get the false gods' favor or something? Yes, exactly.
Right.
Okay. Right, exactly, for themselves.
So they're willing to make their children suffer horrifically
in order to gain some sort of favor for themselves. Wow. And they were selfish, horrible people.
Yeah. And we're told, you know, that they were engaging
in other quote, abominable customs. So you can read more about those in Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 18.
But God gave these people 400 years to repent. And yet they just grew
increasingly more wicked. I sympathize more with the argument that why did God give them 400 years before He commanded somebody to wipe them out? Yeah.
And Muslims have asked me that. But atheists are always like, "Oh my goodness, God wiped them out. Oh, it's so horrible." So, you know, I like to ask people, what would you have God do to people who refuse to stop their evil ways and in fact, who grow more wicked as time goes by despite warnings of all kinds, both ordinary and miraculous, which we have evidence that they did receive both ordinary and miraculous evidence that God, the God of the Jews was the one true God and that He was going to judge them if they didn't stop the horrific things they were doing.
Right. You know, I find that the same people who condemn God when He brings judgment upon those who do evil and cause suffering also condemn God when He allows evil and suffering. So He can't win.
Exactly. Yeah. It's very convenient for them.
You know, they rebel against God and then
however God responds, whether by bringing judgment or allowing them to go on in their evil that causes suffering a little longer, they object. And so whatever God does, it's objectionable to atheists to, you know, who I've talked to. I had an experience once debating on a pretty famous, on the show of a pretty famous atheist.
He had a podcast and he also had video of this. He actually pressed this objection. He said, well, what about the Canaanite children? Why can't God just command the Israelites to attack and destroy the adults? Why the children too? So I was going to respond to him, you know, with some stuff out of that Paul Copan book, is God a moral monster or something like that.
There's, you know, that there are good books from Christians that
you can read about this and provide an answer. But the first thing I did is I said, it sounds like you care a lot about children. And he said, oh, yes.
And I said, well, are you pro-life then? And is pro-life activism something that
you're involved in? And he said, no. He said that he was actually strongly pro-abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. So, and as soon as he said that, he immediately moved on to his next objection.
Yeah. I mean, I mean, if he was putting two and two together, yeah, he had no ground to stand on impressing that objection about the poor Canaanite children. Right.
I think what's going on here is that atheists will sometimes say, oh my goodness,
what about slavery? Oh my goodness, look at what the Germans are doing in World War II. Oh my goodness, you know, look at the poor Canaanite children. And then when you ask them, you know, questions about whether they actually do care about children or, you know, Christians being enslaved in the Middle East or whatever, they don't lift a finger for this.
What they're concerned about is their own rights, you know, here in America and
having freedom to commit infanticide, mutilate their kids, you know, whatever, you know, they're all in favor of adult selfishness. These kinds of objections are just raised to kind of, it's because they don't like the idea of God punishing anyone, I think. And so even the Canaanites, how could you punish them? You know, anyway, we're, we're done with our objections about God's character.
So I just want to encourage people who would
like to see these kinds of arguments presented in a debate to please check out the William Lane Craig versus Christopher Hitchens debate. A lot of atheists, the people who say there's no fine tuning and, you know, dumb stuff, they are very, very high on Christopher Hitchens. They read his books and they think this is great.
Look at him attacking God for his character.
This is so wonderful. Well, there's actually a debate that you can watch where Christopher Hitchens makes his case.
And that is the debate between William Lane Craig and Christopher
Hitchens, which you can find on YouTube. So I would really recommend that people watch that video if they think that these arguments work. Yeah, Christopher Hitchens is, was very witty.
He's passed away now, but he, he was very
sarcastic and humorous and entertaining. But yeah, in this debate with William Lane Craig, he was kind of up against actual evidence and Yeah, it sounded like for the first time ever. Yeah, this was like the first time he'd ever encountered a Christian who had arguments and evidence.
Exactly. I recommend that, that
debate as well. Very good.
Okay. So let's go on to some other objections. These ones
based on the behavior of Christians.
So here's my objection for you. It's wrong for Christians
to force their beliefs on others. How would you respond to that? Yeah, I actually heard this just about a month ago.
And so first of all, sharing what I believe
and why I believe it with someone is not forcing my beliefs on them. Persuasion is designed to make you think not to compel actions. And secondly, I would say to the atheist, you are doing the very thing that you're condemning me for doing.
You are trying to force me to
accept your view of persuasion, which is that persuasion is morally wrong. That's your belief though, and you're trying to force it upon me. So, you know, those are probably the primary two ways I would reply.
I think with both of your objections, the assumption is that choosing a religion is kind of like choosing ice cream. You know, like you choose, I should be able to choose what I like. I should be able to choose the beliefs I like.
I should be able to choose
the community that I like. And so why, you know, for you to say the universe had a beginning, so we have to choose a religion that's compatible with that. For you to say that is, for them, that's mistaken.
You know, let me choose the flavor I like. But that's not what people
are doing when they recommend Christianity to you. They're recommending Christianity to you the same way that a medical doctor might diagnose you and recommend a treatment to you.
So, let me tell a story about this. When I was a young man, I was going through high school and I was getting interested in careers like being an English teacher or a prosecuting attorney. Those are my two favorites.
And I would always tell people that's what I wanted
to be when I grew up. So, my dad started to get concerned about this and he decided to embark on a procedure or process where he would kind of try to get me to change my mind by providing me with evidence, by letting me go in the direction I wanted to go and then talking to me about it. He encouraged me to take this English Literature Night class at a local university when I was still in high school.
And they let you take two credits,
you know, up to two courses of a casual student. So, I registered for that, I took it and I found out that the professor was woke, really, really leftist and that all the books that she chose had nothing to do with learning wisdom from the classics. See, I was falling in love with this because I wanted Shakespeare and British and French classics.
And he was trying, my dad was like, "You see, that's not what you're going to
study there. They don't look to those books." So, I thought, "Okay, well, it's going to be criminal law. It's going to be criminal law and I'm going to become a prosecuting attorney." And my dad said, "Okay, here's an opportunity that you can take a two-week mini course at another local university." So, I enrolled in that and what I found out when I got there was that all the professors were leftist and lawyers are generally far on the secular left end of the spectrum.
And I thought, "I'm not going to be able to survive in a
place like this. This is going to be difficult, really difficult to get through." So, I was starting to lean away from those two. And right at that point, my dad started to say, "Hey, look at all these comparisons of salaries on unemployment rate for different job types.
Can you see that computer science pays a lot and they have really low unemployment?" And so, he won me over with all this evidence and I decided to major in computer science. I've never been unemployed. I've always had a good income now north of six figures and I was even able to use these skills to immigrate legally to the United States by merit.
So,
you can imagine, what if I had turned to my dad and said, "Why are you trying to force your beliefs on me?" Acting as if the task of getting a career that allows you to keep your values while still earning a good income is a matter of ice cream. Yeah, exactly. Your dad was showing you evidence and talking to you about it.
He wasn't forcing
his beliefs on you by doing that. He did have an agenda, but he wanted the best for you and so he wanted to present the evidence. I mean, that's excellent.
I think that this
view that persuading other people with evidence is wrong is actually a big reason why so many young people today are so easily offended. So many of them are unable to persuade anyone of their own views. And so, when they encounter someone who disagrees with them, they don't know what to do.
They resort to threats to end their own lives. They resort to rioting
and arson, even primal screaming and appeal. I've seen that.
Yes, I bet. Yeah, so have I. They resort to appeals to authority to punish those who disagree with them, get their professors kicked out of the university. Yeah, get speakers canceled who want to come to the campus.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think this has a lot to do with them thinking that every view on every matter is like choosing a flavor of ice cream. Like you said, it's just a matter of personal preference.
That's it. And so, they think, even when it comes to how the
universe got here and who created us or how did we arrive here? You don't look through a telescope or a microscope to decide what to believe when it comes to religion. You look in your heart and your heart tells you what religion to believe and who cares about telescopes and microscopes.
Right, right, right. But the problem is, obviously, that if you want to know the truth, if you want to get these big questions right, you have to look at the evidence and getting it right has very serious consequences. It has eternal consequences.
So, this is not a matter
of feelings. This is not, "What do I like better?" This is not Christians saying, "You need to like chocolate because I like chocolate." This is a matter of what is true, what is reality and if we can discover what is, in fact, true, then we can actually live far better and thrive far more overall within the confines of what is real. Yeah, it may be surprising for people who are listening to hear us explain Christianity that way, but this is actually how Christianity is viewed by the people who understand it.
It's a worldview. It is not a community or a church building or a set of values alone. It is more a set of beliefs that accurately describe and reflect reality.
Anyway, along
these lines about the people believing whatever they feel like they like, this is my favorite flavor of ice cream. Here's a quote from Professor John Searle at the University of California at Berkeley. He actually wrote an entire book about people who think that every belief is just based on personal preferences.
He says this, "I have to confess, however, that I think there
is a much deeper reason for the persistent appeal of all forms of anti-realism, and this has become obvious in the 20th century. It satisfies a basic urge to power. It just seems too disgusting somehow that we should have to be at the mercy of the 'real world.'" It seems too awful that our representations should have to be answerable to anything but us.
This is why people who hold contemporary versions of anti-realism and reject the correspondence theory of truth typically sneer at the opposing view." That's the end of the quote. Excellent. Excellent.
Yeah. I think the problem with people who reject Christianity is that
they're rejecting reality. They're rejecting truth.
I think of John 1837 from the Gospel
of John when Jesus said to Pontius Pilate, he said, "In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me." Right. So, yeah, people who love the truth will eventually find out that Jesus is the king and they should submit to him.
Atheism is a refusal to seek the truth in order to be the king themselves.
Right. But you're not the king.
Atheists are not the king. I'm not the king. You're not the
king.
Jesus is the king. And to deny that is a denial of reality.
Right.
So, the better analogy for what Christians are doing would be like, "Rose, you've spent
a pack of time reading Stephen Meyer. You spent a pack of time reading Gary Habermas. You've watched a billion debates with all of the best atheists." And so, when someone comes to you and says, "What are your beliefs?" you're reporting things that are compatible with what we know from science, history, and philosophy.
So, you're more like a medical
doctor and the person says, "How do I know what's right?" or "Is there anything that's right?" And you say, "Sit down and I'll tell you what we know from our investigations." This is not a situation where you're just saying, "Well, I like chocolate. You should like chocolate too." That's not what's going on here. And so, you're not forcing your beliefs.
You're really recommending the truth to people. Now, that doesn't mean that people can't challenge what you think you've learned. But the point is that you've actually done the work and what you're presenting is your work.
Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. I think you said earlier that it's more like a medical doctor
who I think of having... I had an infection several months ago and I think of going to the doctor and saying, "What's going on and what do I do?" And the doctor giving me the proper antibiotics and the infection went away. And that's kind of what we're saying here is that there's a problem, there's a disease, there's something wrong, and here is the truth and here is the way to respond to it.
And this is what is, in fact, reality,
not just my preference. Right. How about this objection? I can never be a Christian.
Those people are the worst
hypocrites. How would you respond to that one? Yeah. I would tell people, "Do not make your decision about whether Christianity is true or false based on the behavior of Christ's followers.
You need to base your decision
on the evidence for the truth claims of Christ himself." Of course, there are hypocrites who claim to be Christians. I mean, some people only claim to be Christians because it's culturally acceptable and they want to fit in or to impress others or to attain a position of status that's especially been true in the U.S. for the last several generations. It seems to become less and less so all the time.
But others really are trying to be like Christ and yet they
mess up. We fall short and that's exactly why we need a Savior. I would point out that Jesus compared his followers to sheep.
Sheep are the dumbest, dirtiest, most clueless animals.
They need to be directed and rescued and cleaned up constantly. I saw this funny video not too long ago that was going around social media of these boys tending to their sheep.
I think it was in the Middle East and this one sheep jumped into this crevice and it would have just died if it had been left there. But the boys worked really hard to get the sheep out of the crevice and free him so that he wouldn't just die from the cold at night or starvation. And like within seconds, literally seconds of being freed, the stupid sheep jumped right back into the same crevice.
That was hilarious.
That's, don't judge the truth of the Christian worldview based on the guy next to you and the pew. And particularly his personal behavior, his smell, what he's wearing, this doesn't affect whether the universe has a beginning.
What the evidence is for the bodily resurrection
of Jesus, don't be dumb. You can't know something by looking at it. You have to dig deeper than that if you're interested in hitting the right one.
I mean, Christianity is not a social club. It's not a country club. I think a lot of people are confused about what Christianity is and what it means.
I think people think
they have the right to decide whether that club, this club of Christianity is entertaining or whether they like it, whether it's a good fit for them. But that's not what it is at all. Like you said earlier, Christianity is a worldview and we're trying to present an accurate description about who God is, how the world works, how to live within the world, whether you like it or not.
That just doesn't matter. It is not a social enterprise. It
is a truth enterprise.
And what you do with Christian truth claims is up to you, but it's
out there. The evidence is there. Yeah, I would have stopped doing computer science in second year because I had a Middle Eastern calculus professor and I couldn't understand anything he was saying and I failed.
I think it was my second or first test in his class. You know, if I had said, "I don't like him and that's the basis for me dropping out," I would never be where I am today. So don't let people, your opinion of people decide what's true.
You have to decide that a different
way. Yeah. And that would be, I think a good analogy would be if you didn't like the professor and you didn't just drop out, but you decided calculus is not true.
You know, it can't be
true because I didn't like the professor and that's ridiculous. That's just dumb. Don't do things like that.
Don't approach religion that way. Okay, here's
another objection. Religions are responsible for most of the world's wars, suffering and atrocities.
How would you respond to that one?
That's simply untrue. I would probably point out that Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zedong are responsible for about a hundred million deaths in just a few decades of the 20th century. That's more deaths than all the people who were killed by people of all religions together over the past 500 years.
So yeah, whenever this comes up, I always like to point people to this book published by Harvard University Press called the Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, and Repression. Yeah, excellent book. In that book, they argue or show that communism was responsible for between 85 million and a hundred million deaths in the last century.
Yes, and communism is an atheistic worldview. The founder of communism and all of the leading communist thinkers argue that atheism is central to communist ideology. I would also point out to people who make this argument that all religions are not the same.
For example,
communism actually commands the murder of all non-Muslims. Now, not every Muslim you know is aware of that or believes that, but the Quran does teach that and their prophet Muhammad did model that. So while Islam commands the murder of all non-Muslims, Christianity forbids murder.
You can't put these in the same category and say, "Oh, religion is the
problem. Which religion are you talking about?" So there have certainly been some unjust murders by those who claim to be Christians in the 2000 years of its existence. But again, I said before, there have been times and places when people claim to be Christians or maybe even thought that they were Christians because they didn't understand Christianity.
But the fact is that taking the lives of others who
are innocent and have done no wrong deserving of death, that's in direct conflict with the teachings of the Christian scriptures as well as the example and the teachings of Jesus. Yeah, I think a lot of militant atheists would say, "Wow, I wish I could live in a country where Bibles were illegal." Well, you can't. You can just move to North Korea and you can find out what it's like for atheists to be in power with none of the vapors of Christianity still remaining from some sort of a Christian past.
So I would say, "Yeah, your Disneyland
does exist somewhere on the planet. It's in North Korea, so check it out and find out what it's like to find a state where atheism is the official religion and Christians are persecuted. It's not a nice place." Last objection.
You might have heard this one. Why do Christians hate homosexuals so
much? Yeah, I hear this a lot as well and especially lately. But my response is, first of all, disagreeing with someone is not the same thing as hating them.
I do not know where this has come from,
but this seems to be popular nowadays that if you disagree with someone, you're rejecting them and hating them as a person. That is not the case. If there is a creator and sustainer of all the universe, then that creator decides what is right and good, not you, not me.
And
so the real questions that we need to be asking and investigating are, what is the evidence for God's existence? What is the evidence for the truth of Christianity? And this is the direction I went with somebody recently who I was talking to at the gym who said this was her biggest problem with Christianity. Interesting. Okay, I hope you were nice.
I was. Of course. Yes, it went really well.
I told her just that. Look, if God is real,
then he gets to decide the rules. He knows what's good for us.
So we need to look at
the evidence. So let's look at the evidence for God's existence. Something else that went well, actually she asked if I wanted to hang out the next day and go for a walk and we still have a very good relationship.
But another thing that I point out is that the homosexual
lifestyle is actually quite terrible for people overall. Evidence from studies show that people who engage in the homosexual lifestyle tend to have far greater incidents of depression, disease, early death, unstable relationships, domestic violence, infidelity, a very high number of lifetime partners, which leads to a lot of these other problems. They have children who struggle in a whole bunch of different areas.
They struggle with thoughts of ending
their own lives and with actually doing it. And so this is not a life that I want people I care about to engage in. I want people to know what is good and good for them and to pursue that, even if that means denying a sexual urge right now.
You would do the same thing, I guess, if somebody was going to take up smoking, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
And people will often say, well, but that's not fair because
shouldn't they be able to love whoever they want? Well, yeah, you can love whoever you want. I'm just saying that not to have sex with them. So there are a couple books that I would recommend on this topic.
One is called Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth. It's
by Dr. Jeffrey Satinover. It's an older book, but really excellent.
And he talks about a
lot of those factors that I just mentioned. And then a newer book is by Katie Faust called Them Before Us. And in her book, she shows that when you deprive children of the right to their biological mom and/or their biological dad, this causes tremendous negative consequences for the children in virtually every area, including their physical health, their mental health, their education, their career, their relationships.
And so if we're going to put
them, the children above us, the adults and just our desires, then we are going to commit to either singleness and not having children or a marriage with a mom and a dad who naturally or by adoption have children. But we're going to avoid surrogacy, which involves paying third world women to bear children for gay couples. And it involves intentionally and purposely depriving children of the biological mom or dad, again, for the desires of the adults.
It is about what the adults want in those cases, not about what the children need,
whereas adoption is about what the children need. And having the biological mom and dad raising children in a committed relationship for a lifetime is what children need. Yeah.
So there's one other thing I want to raise. So this is significant to me personally,
because I really care a lot about religious liberty. This is like my core value.
I really
feel that it's very wrong for people to discourage Christians from exploring Christianity and living authentic Christian lives. And yet one of the biggest challenges that Christians face today is from LGBT activists who aren't sort of willing to extend that kind of tolerance to Christians who just want to disagree with them. So there are sometimes cases I read about in the news where Christians are kind of declining to participate in same sex marriage ceremonies, and yet they draw the ire of gay activists and sometimes even people in government.
Here's a case of a florist from Washington state named Baronel Stutzman. She employs homosexual people and she also sells flowers to them, but she just didn't want to send her flowers to a wedding ceremony that she disagreed with because she's a Christian. So this is what she wrote in this Fox News editorial.
She says Washington Attorney General
Bob Ferguson heard about this after Rob's partner posted something on social media. Ever since the Attorney General has relentlessly and on his own initiative come after me in ways he's never come after anyone else. He certainly hasn't done the same to a Seattle coffee shop owner who profanely braided and openly discriminated against Christian customers.
The Attorney General doesn't just want to punish me in my role as a business owner. He sued me in my "personal capacity," meaning that my husband and I are now at risk of losing everything we own. I've written the Attorney General a letter urging him to drop the personal claims that risk stripping away my home, business, and other assets.
He won't. For him, this
case has been about making an example of me, crushing me, all because he disapproves of what I believe about marriage. Yeah, it really seems as though most of the hatred between Christians and homosexuals is coming from the left.
Yeah, yeah, I would say me disagreeing with someone and saying, "I can't come to your wedding because I just disagree with what you're doing." That doesn't seem to me to be too mean. You can go next door and get flowers, right? This is Seattle, Washington. There's a lot of flower vendors who will do this.
Here's another case about a baker in
Colorado and I don't think he's writing this. I think this is just a news article from Daily Wire. It says, "After fighting a grueling seven-year legal battle for respectfully declining to create a cake for a same-sex wedding, openly Christian baker Jack Phillips landed a 7-2 ruling in his favor at the Supreme Court." This is the Supreme Court of the United States.
The win was not enough, however. The same Colorado agency that went after Phillips over the same-sex wedding cake then sued the cake artist for refusing to create a gender-transitioned celebration cake. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) the religious liberty legal organization representing Phillips got the case dismissed, but the targeting did not stop even there.
"The individual who requested the gender-transition cake and who also happens to be an attorney wasn't satisfied and decided to sue Jack in state court." ADF announced in a press release issued Wednesday. The baker could now be forced to shell out $100,000 in damages, fines, and attorney's fees reported the Christian Post. Wow.
So it really seems like whatever people mean by hate and forcing your beliefs, it doesn't seem like Christians are the ones who are doing it, not in today's society. I think what we were hoping for was just to be left alone and live out our lives in peace and in faithfulness to our beliefs. Alright, so that seems like a good place for us to end this episode.
I'm sure that we could
list out a lot more challenges that we hear from atheists, but that's all the time we have for today. So we'll do another episode on this topic soon. That will be part three.
That should be the last episode in the series. For now, though, if you enjoyed the episode, please consider helping us out by sharing this podcast with your friends, writing a five-star review on Apple or Spotify, subscribing and commenting on YouTube, and hitting the like button wherever you listen to this podcast. We appreciate you taking the time to listen, and we'll see you again in the next one.
[Music]

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