Charles Lewis: Atheism leaves only an empty feeling

It all started innocently enough when I used the expression “children of God” in a recent column. Apparently in this secularized age it is an expression that some find insulting. 

One woman I have known for many years felt that I was putting her in a category that I had no right to put her in. This person is well educated, has raised three daughters and is a trained scientist. She has also volunteered at hospices. But writing “children of God,” to her mind, was pushing my ideas on those who did not want them. She is an ardent atheist.

To her, saying she was a child of God was akin to claiming she was the love child of Kim Kardashian and rapper Kanye West, though DNA tests could easily prove this was not true. Proving God is not the Father of us all is trickier.

I tried to explain that such great men as Martin Luther King often used the expression as a way to express the idea we are all worthy of dignity and have the same value despite superficial differences like colour or ethnicity. 

I do not think Dr. King meant that all those people were Christian or even believers. He was noting a common bond that was meant to bring people together. How can you hate the people who are your brothers and sisters?

I sent a letter to this woman explaining that I believe in God. He is as real to me as the ground I walk on and the sky above me. It is not a philosophy or a vague idea but an absolute reality. I also believe He not only created all, but sustains all. Every moment we have is because God makes it so.

Therefore, to believe all that is also to believe that we are all children of God. It would be illogical for me to think otherwise.

Many atheists will say their cosmic view is also real. Though while we believe in something, atheists believe in the absence of something. Science explains all.

There are about nine million atheists in the United States and about two million in Canada. Atheism is not the majority view, but it is certainly strong and in Canada very influential. What else would explain the mixture of pro-death policies that our esteemed prime minister declares as Canadian values? Oh, I forgot, Justin Trudeau is a Catholic. 

To be clear, not all atheists are the same. That would be grossly unfair. But atheism as a movement, as a national way of life, is dangerous. 

No one knows this better than Cardinal Robert Sarah of Guinea, who kept the faith alive under an oppressive communistic and atheistic regime. 

In his book God Or Nothing, which I just finished reading, he offers a sharp analysis of living under a government that despises God and elevates man. It was not pretty.

He writes that atheism is a “decision to ignore reason.” An atheist would necessarily find this insulting. But a believer gets it completely. If not God, then man. And the history of those places — Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China and so on — where men became God is the stuff of nightmares.

Sarah writes: “Atheism has its principal origin in the heightened individualism of Western man. The individual-king who aspires more and more to a sort of absolute autonomy or independence tends to forget God. On the moral level, this search for absolute liberty implies the gradual, indiscriminate rejection of ethical rules and principles.”

All this happens when the children of God decide they no longer need guidance from their Father. They believe in the material but not the spiritual. It is creating a world of emptiness. Where no one is a child of God. 

(Lewis is a Toronto writer and regular contributor to The Register.)