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GUEST ARTICLE
The San Francisco
Atheist Convention
How
would you like to throw a party and have nobody show up?
Well, almost nobody—relatively speaking. That’s
what happened when the atheists had their recent West-Coast
convention.
The
Freedom From Religion Foundation (with headquarters in
Madison, WI) convened a “mini-convention”—and I do mean mini.
The grand event took place on the weekend of July 30-31
in San Francisco. Atheists from all across the nation-all
one hundred fifty of them—converged at the Holiday Inn
near the city’s Civic Center. (Hundreds of churches can
muster more than this for an ordinary mid-week Bible class.)
According
to newspaper accounts, it was a festive occasion. A newspaper
columnist described the scene:
A
former Episcopal priest leaped with the fervor of a Pentecostal
preacher. Other atheists juggled bowling pins, howled or
simply waved arms non-halleujah style, a sort of hedonistic
air punching (Boudreau 1999).
They
sang hymns—“Nothing fails like prayer”—and gave testimonies
of non-conversions. Book tables offered atheistic wares,
like Dan Barker’s 1992 book, Losing Faith In Faith,
in which the former Pentecostal preacher spews his venom
against God, Christ, and the Bible. Barker even divorces
himself from the more respectable skeptics by denying that
Jesus of Nazareth ever lived.
Do
you get the feeling, with Shakespeare: “Methinks they doth
protest too much”?
As
the atheists huddled together in their microscopic convention,
they consoled one another, complaining of how persecuted
they are “in a society where religion is rubbed in their
noses.” Their goal is to make society “free from religion.”
Several
years ago, Madalyn O’Hair rudely said, “I’d like to destroy
every G-d d—n church in this country.” So much for their
pitiful complaint about persecution. Madalyn, the patron “ain’t” of
atheism—who’s been missing for more than a year and is
presumed dead—couldn’t even cuss without recourse to God!
It’s
little wonder that few want to throw in with the atheists.
What do they have to offer? Not a thing. It’s a “religion” of
nothingness.
Atheists
know nothing of their origin. They
know they are here, and they suspect they came from somewhere,
but they haven’t a clue as to the cause. When a friendly
critic once asked Madalyn O’Hair where she came from,
she sharply quipped, “My mother and daddy went to bed
together!”—which led someone to pen this ditty that appeared
in Time magazine:
Oh Madalyn dear, we’d be relieved;
With all our heart and soul.
If on the night you were conceived;
Your folks had known of birth control.
Atheists
have no idea of any purpose for life. The
late George G. Simpson of Harvard, one of America’s leading
advocates of evolutionism, wrote:
Discovery
that the universe apart from man or before his coming lacks
and lacked any purpose or plan has the inevitable
corollary that the workings of the universe cannot provide
any automatic, universal, eternal, or absolute ethical
criteria of right and wrong (1951, 180; emphasis added).
Atheists
are in a distressing fog as to the nature of human destiny. They can offer nothing but
nothingness. When Pierre Curie was killed in a tragic
accident, his widow, the famous Madame Marie Curie, who
had abandoned her earlier faith, wrote in her diary:
Your
coffin was closed and I could see you no more. . . . We
saw you go down into the deep, big hole. . . . They filled
the grave and put sheaves of flowers on it, everything
is over. Pierre is sleeping his last sleep beneath the
earth; it is the end of everything, everything, everything
(Curie 1937, 249).
What
is there in atheism to attract anyone? Nothing. It is a
philosophy of despair and doom.
“The
fool hath said in his heart: There is no God” (Psalm 14:1).
--Wayne
Jackson
Sources/Footnotes
Boudreau,
John. 1999. Nonbelievers keep their faith alive. Contra
Costa Times, August 1.
Curie,
Eve. 1937. Madame Curie: A Biography. Garden City,
NY: Doubleday.
Simpson,
George G. 1951. The Meaning of Evolution. New York,
NY: Mentor.
http://www.christiancourier.com/articles/
108-the-san-francisco-atheist-convention
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