Atheists Want To Destroy Christianity

Seven Things Many Christians Believe About Atheists and Why They're Not Necessarily True

3. Atheists want to destroy Christianity.

Maybe some do, but in my experience most atheists simply want Christianity kept out of our public spaces. There’s a big difference between that and stamping out religion. The brave men and women who founded the United States knew all too well the problems inherent when government and religion are one. Religious freedom was probably the single biggest factor in motivating our ancestors to start anew here. I think we can all agree on that. Unfortunately some people just won’t give up on making the US officially Christian. I suppose if I believed that the Creator of the universe wanted me to enact His laws in my country, that would trump any kind of government philosophy and I’d be right there with them. Hopefully I would be able to see that there would never be any way of passing law based on religion that would satisfy everyone’s faith – there are just too many varieties of religion – and isn’t that a great thing? If we pass laws based on the Judeo-Christian religion simply because most Americans believe in that God, then we are missing the point in a major way. If you truly value your freedom of religion then you will fight any attempt to marry church and state. You may worship where you please, when you please, and how you please. There won’t be a government censor sitting in the pews taking notes on the sermon to present to the higher-up’s to see if what is being said is acceptable. But if you feel that being prevented from having your minister speak to a class of children at a public school about his faith is an infringement on your freedom of religion, well, you need to just find a quiet room and think about that one for a bit. We are a country of diversity. Don’t throw out the rule book when it comes to the rules you don’t like.

What about the bigger picture? If it were even possible to destroy religion entirely, would that be something that atheists would want? Speaking only for myself, I think that would be a wonderful thing, but I value personal freedoms too much to put any effort into that. The real cure for religion is education, and, given time, knowledge has a way of making itself known. The church fought Galileo. It fought Darwin. But given enough time we now have plenty of evidence to know that the earth does, in fact, revolve around the sun and not vice versa, and that people did descend from an ancestor common to the apes and, if you go back far enough, every other life form on our planet. Religion tends to operate from the perspective that we already know all that we need to know about the world from the Bible. New information can be threatening to that worldview. Honest inquiry examines the world without preconceived ideas and draws conclusions from what is observed. You can’t keep people in the dark forever. Religion will gradually die out. There might always be some fringe groups, just as, although racism is dying out, there are still some white supremacists, but among the educated populace religion is becoming obsolete. Any legislative effort on the part of atheists to hasten that would, I believe, backfire in a big way. All we need is time.

Part 4 - Atheists Are Arrogant