Makes Me Want To Carry Around Some Cheese

While eating a supper of sandwiches, the family was gathered in the living room watching a TV preacher raving on and on about his novel version of faith. One of the elderly parents, who was suffering from cognitive decline, could take it no more. She still had the facilities and discernment to recognize that what the preacher was spouting was poppycock. Removing the top slice of bread from her sandwich, she took the slice of cheese, rose, walked to the TV, and smashed the cheese on its screen over the babbling preacher’s face and said, “Now take that.” I didn’t smash cheese on his face. I didn’t want to mess up my iPhone on which I was watching him on YouTube. Instead, I sent a verbal volley at him, “You are such an arrogant dimwit.” I tried to mitigate my bad attitude--the frustrated disdain I felt--with an asterisk, “No, I’m not making an ad hominem attack on you. I’m just making an accurate observation.” My tirade had no more effect on him than the cheese on the preacher’s face. He droned on unaffected. The speaker had abandoned his faith in Christ and become an atheist because “the God in the Bible was such a horrible misogynist, cruel child abuser, despicable racist…” His tirade is easily disputed: First, his assessment of God was based on how he set up his declarations: God condoned slavery so He is racist. God encouraged polygamy, so He is misogynist. God ordered ethnic cleansing, so He is a racist. (These claims are demonstratively false—but there’s no space for that here.) Second, he was using God’s own standard of good and evil to judge God as evil. See, the man is an atheist. As an atheist, he is a naturalist, meaning he believes that everything that consists only of matter and energy. Therefore, there is nothing on which to base absolute morality. An atom cannot tell you whether or not murder is right or wrong. Yet, this atheist wants to declare that God is evil because He is misogynistic (which, of course, He isn’t). Even if God were misogynistic, the man has no basis for saying either God or misogyny is evil. He has no standard. He has no measure. He has only the mass of molecules, not a measure of morality. I really didn’t want to get into all of that but had to in order to get at what is really happening. Of course, the man would never concede he is borrowing God’s standard of morality to judge God. He would insist he originated and developed his own standard of morality, good and evil. He would adamantly proclaim, “I don’t need God to be moral. I don’t need God to be good. I don’t need God to have a standard.” He doesn’t need God because he thinks he has created his own superior code of morality. He has revealed the post-modernity contemporary mindset: “We don’t want or need God to tell us what is good and evil. We are capable of doing that ourselves.” (How’s that working out?) Everything about everything the man said, if traced, goes right back to the Garden and the first sin. Satan began by impugning God’s character. His strategy? Dis the Lawgiver, so you can dismiss His laws. Satan put doubt in Eve’s mind about God’s motives. “God doesn’t want you to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, because He knows when you do you will become like Him. God is trying to keep you subjugated so He can keep this God-thing all to Himself. God is oppressing you for His own selfish purposes to deprive you of your rightful place and pleasure.” In the end, the temptation was this: Why let God set the standard of good and evil? You humans should wrest that prerogative away from God and make it your own. Humanity’s partaking of the forbidden fruit was its declaration that “We will decide for ourselves what is right and wrong, good and evil.” We don’t need or want God. In a moment. It became so clear. The Christian-turned-atheist wanted to impugn God’s character so He could escape accountability to God. His tirade was like a parishioner, who, when confronted for his adultery by his pastor, begins to hurl depravations against the pastor’s character. The parishioner’s maligning of the pastor is his saying that the pastor cannot tell him his adultery is wrong because the pastor himself is morally flawed. With a pastor, being a human, there’s a possibility his character is compromised. With God, not only are the charges not true, they are poorly imagined. As the speaker droned on about what a horrible God Yahweh was, I had a mental picture: This man was standing before a judge’s high bench with God in the judges’ seat. The case had gone against the man, and the Judge was about to declared his guilt and sentence. In a frightful rage, the man climbed the stairs, raced behind the bench, grabbed the Judge, unseated Him, threw him over the front of the bench, and sat down in the Judge’s chair. He had switched places. Of course, this is only an illusionary conjuration. The atheist could not and would not be allowed to do this in the court of man much less the court of God. Yet, in his own deceived imagination, there he was: Behind the bench, sitting in the judge’s seat with God demoted to the low-floor standing before him waiting for the atheist’s condemnation and sentence. He was judging God. What arrogance. Yet, constantly today we see this. Folks everywhere are going on about how bad God is, how awful His laws, how antiquated His morality, how outdated His Word. They sit as judge of God as criminal. They’ve made their own laws, designed their own standards. These who are always hollering about not judging anybody feel they can pass judgment on God. What convoluted arrogance. What unmistakable hypocrisy. What willful deception. I know it’s a rebukeable attitude to have, but it makes me want to carry around some slices of cheese.