Anyway,
Jones wasn't what anyone would call a model Christian character. He
was married four times. His early career was marred by alcoholism
and later he became involved in cocaine. I'm not trying to disparage
the man, mind you, I'm just trying to say that Jones is not usually
the kind of person we would turn to for spiritual advice.
Stay
with me, because I'm going somewhere with this.
So,
I'm watching some George Jones videos on YouTube – He Stopped
Loving Her Today is probably my favorite – when a thought occurred
to me. One of Jones' biggest hits was, She Thinks I Still Care. If
you haven't seen it, you owe it to yourself to watch it.
Here's the first stanza of the song:
Just
because I asked a friend about her
Just because I spoke her name somewhere
Just because I spoke her name somewhere
Just
because I saw her then went all to pieces
She
thinks I still care
Excuse the gross alliteration but the
story in the song is simple: the man has lost the woman he loves – a typical country
theme – and he begins doing little things like asking friends how
she's doing, “accidentally” calling her number, going to the same
places they used to go together, etc. He denies that these things
mean he still cares about her but as you hear all the things he does,
you know that he obviously still does.
What,
then, can George Jones teach us about atheists? Let me give you a
theory. People may deny feeling or believing certain things. But when they obsess over that thing they deny, it belies
their denials. Have you ever noticed that? Maybe so. I know I
certainly have.
I
believe in God. I believe the Bible. I believe in creation. I'm
not coy about my beliefs and spend a great deal of time defending
them. If you've ever read my blog, you'll see that I'm sincere.
Conversely, I don't believe in Big Foot, I don't believe professional
wrestling is real, and I don't believe in alien abductions. These
things aren't important to me. If other people want to believe in
them, I don't care. I think it's foolish but I guess people have the
right to be foolish. I'm not going to waste a lot of my time trying
to talk them out of it.
I
think a lot of people feel the same way that I do. How many websites
have you visited that are dedicated to disproving Big Foot? People
might mention it, as I've done here, but they don't dedicate a blog to
it. They don't write books about their non-belief. They don't visit college campuses and lay out their arguments against Big Foot for impressionable, young students. In other words, they don't obsess about it.
You
probably see where I'm going with this but let me spell it out.
Atheists claim they don't believe in God. I get it. To them, my
belief in God is about as rational as a belief in alien abductions.
However, atheists don't “not believe” in God the same way that I
don't believe in Big Foot. They don't passively disbelieve but
rather, they actively promote their disbelief. They blog about how
foolish it is to believe in God. They wax on and on about how
science has disproved the Bible and Jesus wasn't a real person. They write books and make speeches about why they don't believe... yadda, yadda, yadda. They want to not believe and they also want
everyone else to not believe. Atheists obsess about the idea of God.
Isn't that curious? I mean, if I were an unbeliever, why should it bother me if
someone else believed in God? I'm sure it also wouldn't bother me even if someone tried to persuade me to believe in God. It doesn't bother me now, for example,
when people try to convince me there's a Big Foot. I listen politely
but later I put it out of my mind. It's not so with atheists. They
militantly brandish their unbelief and would bludgeon Christians with
it if they could.
I
think I know the reason why they speak so. They deny there's a God
but their continued obsession belies their denial. They act like they don't care about the existence of God but, as George Jones said, I think they still care.
3 comments:
I would agree that many atheists are like this. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks."
Like I said before: Love those types of post. Atheists can be really annoying sometimes...
Where's the tolerance towards others people beliefs? Faith has always been part of human nature.
I visit your blog every day.
God Bless!
On your own insistence, it matters considerably more whether God exists than whether Bigfoot, or even intelligent extraterrestrials, exist. Surely, on that ground alone, theism would be more worth arguing over than the existence and distribution of yetis.
And then there are the political consequences of beliefs. For example, creationists want as much pseudoscience favoring their theology taught in science classes as they can get away with, for example; surely you can understand why we would wish to dissuade you from trying and others from cooperating with such attempts?
It would be almost trivial to adduce further examples. You can believe in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, and this has pretty much no implications at all for your views on blasphemy laws, marriage laws, etc. Now, if a large number of people shared David Icke's belief that, e.g. Queen Elizabeth II and the Bush family are reptilian space aliens, that would presumably have important political consequences, so I suppose it is also relevant how widely a belief is shared to how reasonable it is to make a point of opposing it. I think we can agree that young-earth creationism is more widely-held than belief in an alien lizard conspiracy.
Post a Comment