Is atheism the enemy of freedom? Here's how retreating from faith makes US less free
By: Eric Metaxas
Atheism is the arch enemy of human freedom. It denies the very foundation of America’s founding and the beliefs of most of the founding fathers. Religious liberty is the foundation of all liberty. Atheism and people who are atheists are the greatest domestic threat to freedom, individual rights, and religious liberty.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Is atheism the enemy of freedom? Here's how retreating from faith makes US less free
The American Revolution enabled us to create a nation that enshrined religious liberty in its laws
Eric Metaxas4 hours ago Although no one in America is forced to go to church, we have had more churchgoers in our history than any nation in the world. Religious liberty – meaning we can chose any faith or none – was a wild concept when the Founders decided to try it 250 years ago. But it has made America one of the most religious countries on the planet.
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited in1826 he was astonished to see freedom and faith working together. In his own France – and in most of Europe – the opposite was the case. Each nation’s established church was allied to the powerful state. Consequently faith was not free, which sent so many from that continent to America, seeking freedom of worship.
(Salem Books)
The American Revolution enabled us to create a nation that enshrined religious liberty in its laws. But the French Revolution did the opposite. The Jacobins saw the monarchy and the church as two parts of the same oppressive system. As they shouted their slogan of liberte, egalite, fraternite , they butchered priests, monks and nuns alongside monarchists and aristocrats.
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So it was America’s founders who uniquely understood that religious liberty was the key to all other liberties. Liberty – or self-government – required a virtuous people, which was usually the result of freely held faith. Those who answered to a "higher power" didn’t need government to coerce them into doing the right thing. They did it on their own.
It was a tremendous historical gamble. But we can see nearly 250 years later that it worked, making America the wealthiest and freest nation that ever existed.
In recent years, however, America has lurched toward secularism. The idea of a "separation between church and state" was meant by the Founders to keep the state out of the business of the church, but it has been dramatically recast as a way of keep the state – and culture – virtually free of all religious influence.
Consequently we rarely celebrate the ideas that flow from faith as we once did. Virtue and honor and duty are no longer advocated in our public schools, and in most universities and in popular culture they are often mocked, along with religion itself.
But this retreat from faith has inevitably made us less free.
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When we become less active in governing ourselves we look to the government for solutions. Government thereby grows and our abilities to govern ourselves quickly atrophy.
The Democrats in 2012 even chose to remove mention of God from their political platform, and their decades-long advocacy for big government has since grown into an embrace of socialist and culturally Marxist ideas, such as critical race theory.
If the people in a free nation abandon faith – and virtuous behavior – or even let it erode away slowly, the government will inevitably step into that vacuum.
For examples of where this trend eventually goes, we observe that governments where the state has overwhelming control over its citizenry do not merely lean away from God but become officially atheistic. The former Soviet Union and today China and North Korea are two chilling examples. In such countries those who believe in God become a direct threat to the government’s power.
Christians and Jews were especially brutally persecuted in the former Soviet Union. If your atheist worldview holds that these human beings are not sacred and created in God’s image, what’s to stop you for torturing and murdering them for the "greater good" of the state? Uyghur Muslims in today’s China are enslaved and often murdered for their organs, which fetch a very high price on the international market.
When Hitler and the Nazis forced their socialist atheist views on Germans, the Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew that the church alone had the cultural and moral power to stand against it; but because his pleas to speak out and fight were largely met with indifference by a complacent church, 12 million human beings were murdered in death camps. Will the American church follow the German church and Germany in this, or will we learn from Bonhoeffer’s story?
This, of course, is the great paradox of freedom. A free nation cannot force anyone to believe, or to be virtuous and self-governing. But if the people in a free nation abandon faith – and virtuous behavior – or even let it erode away slowly, the government will inevitably step into that vacuum and will grow to enforce its views with increasing brutality.
And while a free nation cannot and should not try to coerce atheists toward belief, people of faith, while we still have a voice, have an urgent duty to alert our fellow citizens that, although religious freedom protects atheists, atheism itself nonetheless has an inherent and – alas – well-established tendency to work not only against religious freedom, but against all freedoms. Let the reader understand.
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Retreating from faith of what?
Read the seeded article and see what it says.
What a waste of time that would be!
Why are you then commenting on something you admit that you know nothing about?
That's what I think
[deleted]
If you believe the quote above, you probably also believe:
The Earth is flat.
2+2=5
Black is white.
Blue is red.
The sheer stupidity of the theocratic dominionists is clear for all to see.
There is nothing about dominionists or theocracy in the seeded article. The article is about religious liberty, individual rights, and economic freedom and the values that are the source of it all.
The entire underpinning of this seed is obsessive theocratic dominionism as is demonstrated by the quote in my comment above.
Except that the article says exactly the opposite. It says that our system with no one state church and freedom of religion is the best option. It also was exposed to coerced conversion of atheists. Unlike what atheists try to do when they have state power.
My moral standards are way too high to ever even consider being a Jesus freak.
There are no higher moral standards than His.
List God's moral standards.
Prohibiting slavery is clearly not one of them. Neither is genocide. Or maybe, they both are standard for god?
Not to mention gambling with a man's life and his family. How moral is that?
It continues to amaze me that certain people speak of God's moral code yet can never deliver it. If such a moral code exists, would it not stand to reason that one could provide the definitive list / criteria? You know, so that one knows what is moral vs. immoral?
Exactly. That way, they wouldn't be able to make one up which, not coincidentally, would probably reflect their own "moral" code.
Some people give God a free pass on such things, because, god.
Virtuous Behaviour???? Really???
Exodus:
20 “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result,
21 but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.
Or the part about Lot offering his virgin daughters for gang rape.
Or the part about Abraham almost killing his own kid.
Yeah..... that's some serious virtuousness I want nothing to do with.
None of that is Christian. 20 and 21 are paper laws in their Israelite code.
Lot fell away and is not saved and never saw Abraham again after sodom and doing his daughters.
as to Abraham, God never intended he go through with that. It was a test that Abraham passed. God used Israel later to eradicate from the face of the earth some nations in the area that engaged in the sacrifice of children by fire. This was the pre messiah era where animal sacrifices symbolic of Jesus death for sin would happen in the future.
Understood. So you fully do not follow or agree with anything Old Testament, correct? The whole 10 Commandments isn't anything Christian?
You confuse what I said. I never said to disregard all of the Old Testament. Just the parts that were fulfilled at the cross. None of the stuff about sacrificing animals or the various feasts leading up to the cross or the laws for while they were in a camp setting in the wilderness apply now. The rest of it certainly does. The 10 commandments are Gods eternal law and will always apply. Jesus referred to them in the New Testament.
That's some convenient cherry picking. If you believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God, then all of it must apply or God cannot be deemed perfect if parts of the Bible can be ignored.
The parts of the 1st covenant that had to do only with actions and events leading up to the cross are no longer applicable to His followers under the 2nd one. The rest of it is applicable as are all the prophesies that show proof that Jesus was the Messiah and were literally fulfilled.
Irrelevant. It still shows a supposedly "perfect" god changing things up. Clearly god couldn't get things right the first time. Or the second for that matter. Third time's the charm?
Gods law is always the same without change. Our relationship to him in the form of worship and observances changed pre cross and post cross, but His law never changers.
If God says to follow a law, then says its no longer necessary, then that means God changed something. If God is "perfect," then it stands to reason no changes are necessary, as things would be perfect from the get go.
That’s silly. Laws that were applicable to a group camping out in the wilderness are not always so once the population is settled and not moving from place to place. Laws and ceremonies that people observed leading up to Jesus dying for our sins on the cross are no longer needed now that that has been done. Why sacrifice lambs symbolically now when the the Real One that points to has been completed. To love the Lord our God with all our hearts(the first 4 commandments) and our neighbor as ourselves (the last 6 commandments) has always been, is still, and always will apply.
Let's get specific. God condoned slavery in the Bible and has never moved from that position. So if someone were to use the Bible as a guide for morality then they would not have anything that tells them that the owning of another person as property is immoral.
If your god was really perfect, he would not have had to change anything. Everything would be set in place and perfect from the get go. There would be no need for changes.
And yet, we're supposed to believe or accept that god is moral or is the source of morality? That (among many other things in the bible) does not paint god as a moral character. Just the opposite.
Odd how there never seems to be rational explanation for why God (per the Bible) condoned slavery and has never provided any correction of that moral failure.
The obvious explanation is that the God character was written by ancient men where slavery was simply part of their economic system. They thought nothing morally wrong with owning human beings as property thus they wrote their God character to hold the same morality.
Especially on morality. If slavery is objectively immoral today, it would have been objectively immoral when the Bible was written.
The only "explanation" (more of an excuse really) I've heard is that it's god and god can do what he wants.
Obvious explanation is obvious. But apparently not obvious to everyone.
Funny how that point gets ignored when pointed out.
That then means that God condones slavery. Imagine if people actually did use the Bible as a guide for morality (not just the NT, the OT).
That too is also obvious.
It would be the Dark Ages all over again.
Of course. The bible makes it clear God is ok with slavery. God makes it clear we are to love and obey him without question. Otherwise, he punishes us with a 1 way trip to eternal torment. Talk about the ultimate slave master.
Atheism is a lack of belief in a god. Theism is belief in one or more gods. Neither involve actions, they are both conditions. Focus on actions, not on conditions. Atheism, in and of itself, is as harmless as not believing intelligent exolife exists in the universe.
Buy a vowel XX.
An example of the stupidity of this article:
How can the author write this while disregarding the murder and brutality committed in the name of a particular religious belief? Good grief, the Catholics and Protestants were murdering and torturing each other for centuries during the Inquisition. Countless wars in history were conducted based on religious beliefs and in the name of their god.
One must be utterly ignorant of history to not see that religious forces routinely violated this notion of "human beings are sacred and created in God’s image".
Just too stupid for words. Amazing the crap some people will buy.
Amazing the crap they buy, and the crap they spew.
The article is a far more accurate one than yours blaming a declining Christian population for a decline in math and science scores…
Clearly you didn't read the article or studies and probably drew a biased conclusion from the title alone.
State atheism has killed many more even than any other. Even more than the pre reform church of the dark ages whose depths led to a reformation.
Look XX, try to comprehend this basic notion:
This utterly stupid article is arguing that atheism, in and of itself, kills, etc. That the mere condition of not believing in a god means an individual lacks morality to the point of seeing no value in human life.
I pointed out that human beings have been murdering each other for all of recorded history. And one of the predominant reasons has been over gods (and religion). Other reasons include bigotry and greed (conquest for riches and land).
Atheism, in and of itself, does not seek to harm anyone: it does not seek anything; it is a condition. The fact that some atheists in power such as Stalin engaged in murderous campaigns does not change that fact. And I tried to make that clear to you by example but you totally missed the point. So let's try one more time:
Do you consider the Inquisition (centuries of brutal killing and torture because of minor differences in religious beliefs) to mean that theism, in and of itself, supports murder and torture? If not, then it is beyond stupid to ascribe murder and torture to atheism due to the acts of horrible men like Stalin.
State atheism didn't kill the vast majority of Native Americans.
Good point, mother nature did.
A false description of the times.
Think I'll let that comment stand uncontested.
No, it is not. The time period from the fall of Rome to the reformation were the dark ages.
The seeded headline and article are exactly right.
Such an insightful comment.
Another mere claim with no supporting argument.
When religion watched over or controlled every aspect of society. Dark indeed.
The total marriage of state power and a denomination almost never turns out well. The total absence of religion from every aspect of government turns out just as poorly.
If there is a separation of church and state, then religion must be absent from government. Mixing the 2 is what leads to "the total marriage of state power and a denomination."
State atheism didn't kill the vast majority of Native Americans.
Christianity and the US government had their hand in killing large numbers of NA's.
And the claim that "State atheism has killed many more even than any other" is a total unabashed lie. Even if you accept the flawed premise that communist governments are somehow killing "in the name of atheism" they wouldn't total up to the nearly 200 million who have died in religiously motivated wars or the tens of millions who were killed or tortured during forced conversion and purges of supposed heretics and non-believers. And of course it's very debatable to claim that communists killed "in the name of atheism" because atheism is almost certainly NOT their motivation for killing others, it's all about the communist societal structure and the governing power behind it claiming to be in the best interest of the community while fighting to the death to maintain control over the populace. It has very little to do with simply purging religious belief "in the name of atheism".
Lol...
Please list the religiously inspired wars that killed 200 million.
They are probably going to count all the wars of empires and the transition from Babylon to Persia to Greece to Rome as “religious” wars.
I have been free to sleep in every Sunday morning that I did not have to work for years.
I was saved in a drive through getting a crappy chicken sandwich with a pickle.
You should have gone to Chick Fil A to get a great chicken sandwich instead…