{"id":3452,"date":"2017-11-07T17:35:12","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T14:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3452"},"modified":"2017-11-07T17:35:12","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T14:35:12","slug":"a-challenge-to-believers-and-unbelievers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3452\/a-challenge-to-believers-and-unbelievers\/","title":{"rendered":"A Challenge To Believers And Unbelievers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

CHRISTIANS ARE CALLED UPON <\/strong>to be “contenders” for their faith. This term suggests that they should be ready to stand up for their beliefs, and that they will face opposition. The Christian is told in 1 Peter 3:15, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reasons for the hope that is within you.\u201d But in order to give reasons, you must first know what you believe. You must also know why you believe it. And you must be able to communicate these reasons to those who don’t share your beliefs. In short, you must know what’s so great about Christianity.<\/p>\n

This is the arena in which many Christians have fallen short. Today’s Christians know that they do not, as their ancestors did, live in a society where God’s presence was unavoidable. No longer does Christianity form the moral basis of society. Many of us now reside in secular communities, where arguments drawn from the Bible or Christian revelation carry no weight, and where we hear a different language from that spoken in church.<\/p>\n

Instead of engaging this secular world, most Christians have taken the easy way out. They have retreated into a Christian subculture where they engage Christian concerns. Then they step back into secular society, where their Christianity is kept out of sight until the next church service. Without realizing it Christians have become postmodernists of a sort: they live by the gospel of the two truths. There is religious truth, reserved for Sundays and days of worship, and there is secular truth, which applies the rest of the time.<\/p>\n

This divided lifestyle is opposed to what the Bible teaches. The Bible tells Christians not to be of <\/em>the world, sharing its distorted priorities, but it does call upon believers to be in <\/em>the world, fully engaged. Many Christians have abdicated this mission. They haveinstead sought a workable, comfortable modus vivendi in which they agree to leave the secular world alone if the secular world agrees to leave them alone. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould proposed the terms for the treaty between the secular and religious worlds when he said that secular society relies on reason and decides matters of fact, while religious people rely on faith and decide questions about values.’ Many Christians seized upon this distinction with relief. This way they could stay in their subculture and be nice to everyone.<\/p>\n

But a group of prominent atheists\u2014many of them evolutionary biologists\u2014has launched a powerful public attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular; they have no interest in being nice. A new set of anti-religious books\u2014 The God Delusion, The End of Faith, God Is Not Great, <\/em>and so on\u2014now shapes public debate. These atheists reject the Gould solution. They say that a religious outlook makes specific claims about reality: there is a God, there is life after death, miracles do happen, and so on. If you are agnostic or atheist, you have a very different understanding of reality, one that is formed perhaps by a scientific or rationalist outlook. The argument of the atheists is that both views of reality cannot be simultaneously correct. If one is true, then the other is false.<\/p>\n

The atheists have a point: there are not two truths or multiple truths; there is one truth. Either the universe is a completely closed system and miracles are impossible, or the universe is not a closed system and there is the possibility of divine intervention in it. Either the Big Bang was the product of supernatural creation or it had a purely natural cause. In a larger sense, either the religious view of reality is correct or the secular view is correct. (Or both are wrong.) So far the atheists have been hammering the Christians and the Christians have been running for cover. It’s like one hand clapping. A few pastors have stood up to the atheists’ challenge, but they have not, in general, fared well. Pastors are used to administering to congregations that accept Christian premises. They are not accustomed to dealing with skilled attackers who call the Christian God a murderer and a tyrant and who reject the authority of the Bible to adjudicate anything.<\/p>\n

This is not a time for Christians to turn the other cheek. Rather, it is a time to drive the money-changers out of the temple. The atheists no longer want to be tolerated. They want to monopolize the public square and to expel Christians from it. They want political questions like abortion to be divorced from religious and moral claims. They want to control school curricula so they can promote a secular ideology and undermine Christianity. They want to discredit the factual claims of religion, and they want to convince the rest of society that Christianity is not only mistaken but also evil. They blame religion for the crimes of history and for the ongoing conflicts in the world today. In short, they want to make religion\u2014and especially the Christian religion\u2014disappear from the face of the earth.<\/p>\n

The Bible in Matthew 5:13-14 calls Christians to be the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world.” Christians are called to make the world a better place. Today that means confronting the challenge of modern atheism and secularism. This book provides a kind of tool kit for Christians to meet this challenge. The Christianity defended here is not “fundamentalism” but rather traditional Christianity, what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity,” the common ground of beliefs between Protestants and Catholics. This Christianity is the real target of the secular assault.<\/p>\n

I have written this book not only for believers but also for unbelievers. Many people aregenuine seekers. They sense there is something out there that provides a grounding and an ultimate explanation for their deepest questions, yet that something eludes them. They feel the need for a higher sense of purpose in their lives, but they are unsure where to find it. Even though they have heard about God and Christianity, they cannot reconcile religious belief with reason and science; faith seems unreasonable and therefore untenable. Moreover, they worry that religion has been and can be an unhealthy source of intolerance and fanaticism, as evidenced by the motives of the September 11 terrorists. These are all reasonable concerns, and I address them head-on in this book.<\/p>\n

This is also a book for atheists, or at least for those atheists who welcome a challenge. Precisely because the Christians usually duck and run, the atheists have had it too easy. Their arguments have gone largely unanswered. They have been flogging the carcass of “fundamentalism” without having to encounter the horse kick of a vigorous traditional Christianity. I think that if atheists are genuine rationalists, they should welcome this book. It is an effort to meet the atheist argument on its own terms. Nowhere in this book do I take Christianity for granted. My modus operandi is one of skepticism, to view the claims of religion in the same open-minded way that we would view claims of any other sort. The difference between me and my atheist opponents is that I am skeptical not only of the allegedly irrational claims of religion but also of the irrational claims made in the name of science and of skepticism itself.<\/p>\n

Taking as my foil the anti-religious arguments of prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and the others, in this book I will demonstrate the following:<\/p>\n

1. Christianity is the main foundation of Western civilization, the root of our most cherished values.<\/p>\n

2. The latest discoveries of modern science support the Christian claim that there is a divine being who created the universe.<\/p>\n

3. Darwin’s theory of evolution, far from undermining the evidence for supernatural design, actually strengthens it.<\/p>\n

4. There is nothing in science that makes miracles impossible.<\/p>\n

5. It is reasonable to have faith.<\/p>\n

6. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history.<\/p>\n

7. Atheism is motivated not by reason but by a kind of cowardly moral escapism.<\/p>\n

I end this book by showing what is unique about Christianity and how our lives change if we become Christians.<\/p>\n

If I may address unbelievers directly for a moment, I hope that you will not read this book merely as an intellectual exercise. It seeks to address practical problems that we all face in life. You, like many Christians, live in a split-screen world. You are, I suspect, a Darwinian in your science and an anti-Darwinian in your morals. You revere science and reason but wonder if they give you a full grasp of the world. You are a rationalist at work and a romantic in your personal life. You have been engaged in the pursuit of happiness for a fairly long time; ever wonder why you haven’t found it? How long do you intend to continue this joyless search for joy? Older societies had much less and felt abundant; why do you, in the midst of plenty, continue to feel scarcity pressing down upon you? No doubt you, like the believer, know that every breath you take fends off death. Clearly this is something forwhich you should prepare, but have you? Death forces upon you a choice that you cannot escape. \u03a5ou must choose God or reject Him, because when you die all abstentions are counted as “no” votes. So ifyou are wondering ifthis book is an invitation to convert, it is. \u0399 hope you will read it as if your life depended on it, because, in a way, it might.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon CHRISTIANS ARE CALLED UPON to be “contenders” for their faith. This term suggests that they should be ready to stand up for their beliefs, and that they will face opposition. The Christian is told in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6703],"tags":[7299,7300,7301,166,742,7284,7302,7303,3937,7304,6959,7305,909],"class_list":["post-3452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-literature-thechristcontents","tag-1-peter","tag-christian-concerns","tag-christian-revelation","tag-christianity","tag-christians","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-religious-truth","tag-secular-communities","tag-secular-society","tag-secular-truth","tag-secular-world","tag-subculture","tag-unbelievers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}