The Two Kinds of People

 

There are, in this world, two kinds of people: those who accept the existence of God, and those who try to deny it. Never the twain shall meet; these are perfectly incompatible views, like humans and zombies. The instant you accept the existence of the absolute, it is necessarily of absolute importance. Those who do not see it are, at charitable best, insane. They are not in the conversation.

Deniers, similarly, cannot tolerate believers. Ultimately, the existence of God is certain and accessible to reason. To deny God is therefore to turn from God, to dodge the truth. 

People turn from God because they are conscious of doing wrong, or want to do wrong. They don’t want to accept the existence of divine justice. They want to get away with it; like Adam and Eve hiding in the bushes. Religion is a “religious dictatorship.” Anyone who asserts the existence of God, genuinely claims to believe it, is a threat to them, and must be shut down. Churches burned, Christmas markets attacked.

The most obvious tactic is to infiltrate any convenient religious body themselves, and seek to subvert it. This is the Pharisee gambit; they are common in every religion. I became all too familiar with them studying religion in grad school. Within the department, you gained approval by saying the most outrageously skeptical and irreligious thing.  The sincerely religious were mocked as ignorant.

I thank God I escaped that. But it was not easy. Most higher education is cult-like.