An Atheist Makes an Accurate Observation…

…though I think he draws the wrong conclusion:

I think he’s right, as far as it goes. Some form of theism is natural for the vast majority of the human race and the idea that it is “indoctrination” does not account for 99% of human history.

Naturally, I think the reason for this is that we are made in the image of God and that “Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and they are restless till they rest in thee.”

Atheists tend to see secularity (which is itself a Christian concept) as a kind of “Childhood’s End” (to cite a famous atheist). Ironically, as Tom Holland has pointed out, this notion of an Evangelical obligation to spread the Good News that there is no God and to bring light to those living in the darkness of theism and, ‘ow you say?, indoctrinate them with the Word of Atheistic Truth, is itself owed entirely to the Christian tradition and the Hebrew prophets. The God who emphatically Does Not Exist is always the God of Israel and not Thor.

Since I am convinced in my marrow that humans are so constructed that we can never escape our hunger for God any more than we can escape our hunger for food, I think atheism will always be a tiny minority opinion and that even most atheists are simply treating with God under other names (The Universe, Destiny, Common Sense) and other such titles for things they hold to be granite Truths for which there is no empirical basis at all such as Respect for Human Dignity, Our Obligation to be Just, and so forth. I think we are already living in an evolving post-atheist world

Recent polling showed that 20% of self-described atheists believe in God. And in Iceland, 80% of the population call themselves atheists but also believe in elves.

But we also live in a world where a lot of Christians are experimenting with a nihilist post-Christian atheism that has, as one pundit put it, “Jesus on its lips but Nietzsche in its heart.”

Lots of atheists strike me as deeply disposed to Jesus and his Spirit. They often beg Christians to show him to them. And the Cult usually responds “Screw you!”

One of the things Holland notes is that Christianity has exported itself to the world in two forms: missionaries and secularism.

American Christians are stunned to hear this, but it is perfectly true. Secularity is an entirely Christian concept. And when non-Christian cultures throw off western secularity (as in Turkey, India, or Iran) they don’t embrace indigenous secularity. They embrace their old religious traditions.

Meanwhile, Jesus has his own plans and, as ever, neither simply affirms our fallen, muddled religious instincts nor simply rejects them.

Me: I think C.S Lewis was right:

If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.