Mr. Cooper,
I am a staff worker with the Jews for Jesus organization. What you claim as the “unfortunate truth” about us is completely untrue: that we target the children at Orthodox day schools! The truth is that we have an official policy that we will not interact with anyone under the age of 18 without parental consent.
If you want to be an atheist, that’s your choice.
But please get your facts straight before you write something so that you will be an honest atheist!
Atheists attacking people who believe in God
Regarding atheism, I see it the other way around. Many atheists these days are attacking people who believe in God. It seems to me that the New Atheism is the same as the old atheism just more belligerent.
The atheist says that no reasonable person can believe in the Bible. For example, in the movie Religulous, Bill Maher says that Moses is “cuckoo” because, according to the Bible, he spoke with God in the burning bush. But the most critical “nonsense” the atheist dismisses is the very first line of the Hebrew Scriptures, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). If the atheist could just believe that one sentence, everything else would fall in place. The other supernatural events he discounts pale in comparison to the miracle of creation. The Hebrew Scriptures teach that “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7)not ignorance. Those same Scriptures also declare, “The fool says in his heart, There is no God'” (Psalm 14:1). As the late biblical scholar, Louis Goldberg wrote, “Today’s worldly-wise generation can calculate the path of a missile but cannot point the empty heart toward the path to the knowledge of God.” We suffer from information overload and spiritual deprivation.
Could it be that the Bible makes us uncomfortable because it reminds us of our faults before a holy and just God? Psychologist Pauline Holmes writes:
“The law God gave to Moses is written in the first five books of the Bible, otherwise known as the Torah. It articulates what humans already know at an unconscious level, although not at the same level of specificity. Reading the law shows us why we have always felt uncomfortable about certain thoughts and actions. This knowledge is not acquired through Bible study. Rather, the Bible brings this innate knowledge up to the level of consciousness.”
The Golden Rule
How else can we explain the fact that the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” appears not only in the New Testament but also in the Talmud, with its almost identical counterparts in Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Brahmanism, Confucianism, and Zoroastrianism? The reason is that God has put the moral law in our hearts.
Theology professor William Lane Craig notes that objective moral values exist only if God exists.
“Actions like rape, cruelty and child abuse aren’t just socially unacceptable behavior,” says Craig. “They’re moral abominations. . . . I think that we all know that objective values do exist. But then it follows logically and inescapably that therefore God exists.”
