Connecticut Valley Atheists have erected a 10-foot tall sign in celebration of the winter solstice that includes a message reminding us that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were done in the name of a particular set of religious beliefs. The message “Imagine no religion,” a line taken from John Lennon’s atheist anthem “Imagine,” is placed over an image of the Twin Towers before they were taken down by two jet airliners. I wonder if the logic applies that since all the terrorists were men, that if we got rid of all men, we would be rid of all terrorism. And since women give birth to all men, and all the terrorists were men, could we get rid of terrorism by getting rid of all women?
There are other lines in “Imagine” that get almost no attention by atheists. How about “Imagine all the people living for today.” Consider what the world would be like if people lived for today with no thought for tomorrow and life and judgment beyond the grave. If you think the sub-prime mortgage crisis is wreaking havoc on our economy, can you imagine the economic effects of credit card debt with no thought of the consequences of tomorrow? Who would lend money to someone “who lived for today”? At death, given atheist assumptions, was there any difference between what happened to Adolf Hitler and the world’s greatest philanthropists? According to the atheist creed, they are nothing more than “dust in the wind.” If this is true, why bother about doing “good” this side of the grave? As the Bible puts it, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (Isa. 22:13; Luke 12:19–21; 1 Cor. 15:32). But why stop with eating and drinking? Fill in the blank: “Let us ______________ for tomorrow we may die.”
How about “imagine no possessions.” Let’s see if atheists are willing to live like paupers, you know, like John Lennon did. At his death in 1980, his estate was worth in excess of $275 million, “not bad for one who referred to himself as an ‘instinctive socialist,’ for one who believed in the abolition of ‘all money, police, and government.’”[1] Let’s call on all atheists to live consistently with their religion and “reason” with them to “imagine no possessions” based on the Lennon Creed of Atheism.
Lennon imagined that the absence of religion would lead to the elimination of all conflict, greed, and selfishness. Where’s the guarantee? If there is no God, there is no right or wrong. Evolution, a basic tenet of atheism, by definition is conflict, greed, and selfishness.[2] Evolution is blind. “It” doesn’t “care” about anything except to perpetuate the species; and “it” doesn’t care how “it’ does it.[3] We live in the moment of the eternal now, and we make our own heaven and hell (figuratively speaking) and our own right and wrong as we go along. When we shake off the superstitions of the past by replacing religion with reason, we will realize the potential of our inherent golden greatness. We’ve heard this clap-trap before.
Every worldview is just as unrelenting, comprehensive, and religious as Christianity even though a personal, transcendent God is not at its center. Communism views the State as god and had no problem eliminating tens of millions of non-compliant citizens to advance its worldview in the name of its god.[4]
A large percentage of the generation that knew Joseph Stalin died as a result of his directives. These were purely political killings, “exterminations,” “liquidations” of “the enemy class” and “undesirable elements.” How many were involved? Solzhenitsyn’s estimates reach as high as sixty million. Robert Conquest, author of The Great Terror, fixed the number at well into the millions. It is doubtful if we well ever know the true total—God alone knows.Connecticut Valley Atheists have erected a 10-foot tall sign in celebration of the winter solstice that includes a message reminding us that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were done in the name of a particular set of religious beliefs.
In The Black Book of Communism, the total number killed by Communist regimes around the world approaches 100 million.[5] Former Communists have described Communism as “the god that failed,”[6] although it did not fail to kill people at such a rate that the statistics are numbing. Even though millions were offered on the altar of atheism, Communism still had its apologists.[7] Comrade Lazar Kaganovitch, Stalin’s go-to guy, said it best, “Why wail over broken eggs when we are trying to make an omelette!”[8] If you want to create a “worker’s paradise,” why lament the death of millions.
James P. Gannon, the author of “Is God dead in Europe (And what might that mean for America?),” writes: “Among the consequences of Europe’s abandonment of its religious roots and the moral code that derives there from is a plunge in its birth rates to below the replacement level. Abortion, birth control, acceptance of gay marriage and casual sex are driving the trend. Europe is ‘committing demographic suicide, systematically depopulating itself,’ according to George Weigel.”[9] Lennon wanted all of us to imagine atheism. Well, the image of atheism has become reality, and it looks rather bleak.
Footnotes:
[1] David A. Noebel, The Legacy of John Lennon: Charming or Harming a Generation? (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982), 11.
[2] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
[3] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986).
[4] Lloyd Billingsly, The Generation that Knew Not Josef: A Critique of Marxism and the Religious Left (Portland, OR: Multnomah Press, 1985), 37.**
[5]** Stéphane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4.**
[6]** Richard H. Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (Chicago, IL: Regnery Gateway, [1949] 1983).
[7] S.J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty—The New York Times’ Man in Moscow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).**
[8]** “Stalin’s Omelette,” Time (October 24, 1932). The phrase was borrowed from the “reason-only regime” of Maximilian Robespierre and the French Revolution. See Lawrence W. Reed, “Where are the Omelettes?”**
[9]** James P. Gannon, “Is God dead in Europe (And what might that mean for America?),” USA Today (January 9, 2006), 11A.