The angry atheists I have met…the really angry ones, are not atheists because they hate the idea of the existence of God. Most of them, no matter how nice I am or how reasonable, quickly descend from haughty comments of condescension to childish attacks such as, “You probably believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Clause.”
No. Actually, I never did even as a kid.
“Liar!” They deride.
(Um? Okay. This line of reasoning is not the most sound.)I ask, “So, why are you so angry at God? Who hurt you?”
Usually it was a parent or relative who went to church and then verbally or physically abused abused them at home. Or maybe a church that showed zero grace or love or allowed sin in the leadership to be covered up.
A pastor or priest who abused them or approached them in a sinful way….
And these things are an abomination, for sure! Do these things happen? Yes! Sadly, very sadly…yes. And these things make God angry, too. More angry than it ever made an atheist angry.
Do they just really want to live how they want with no accountability and the only way to do that is to harden themselves to God and explain away their conscience?
People everywhere are discounting the existence of God because of the sin of man, while I contend that the existence of Sin proves the existence of God. Sin is against God, even the sin of hypocrisy that claims to know God and turns and devours people.
“If God exists, he should prove himself to me.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this one. God has proven himself to you over and over, even through Creation and so many other times he has revealed himself, but you have hardened yourself. You chose feelings over facts.
In the book of Peter, there is a prophecy that in the end times people will deliberately forget that God created the Earth. Here is an example of choosing feelings over facts. It is foolishness.
Once, I was having a discussion with a man who had at one time been a Catholic. Now, he is an atheist. I shared miracle after miracle with him, which he denied happening in my life. He resorted to calling me a liar, instead of choosing to walk in truth.
What about the time when no one knew we desperately needed $257, as newly weds? Not a soul knew. We prayed and the church spontaneously collected an offering for us the next day that totaled $257. He wouldn’t believe that at all.
What about the cancer patients who have been healed? What about the transformed lives? What about the time $1000 in cash showed up in my door the same day I desperately cried out to God over a financial situation?
None of that apparently happened. Because, if one were to acknowledge it did happen, one would have to move into the realm of truth and out of the lie that sustains the kingdoms of sin and rebellion in one’s life.
Very intelligent people can make very foolish decisions to avoid things they don’t want to face.
But, here is the truth. No matter what evil people have committed against you, God does not approve of sin. Sin is against him and proof for his existence. If there were no God there would be no right and wrong.
So we come to our prayer of David in the Psalms. Psalm 14:
“The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds; There is no one who does good. The LORD has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men To see if there are any who understand, Who seek after God. They have all turned aside, together they have become corrupt; There is no one who does good, not even one. Do all the workers of wickedness not know, Who eat up my people as they eat bread, And do not call upon the Lord? There they are in great dread, For God is with the righteous generation. You would put to shame the counsel of the afflicted, But the LORD is his refuge. Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion! When the LORD restores His captive people, Jacob will rejoice, Israel will be glad.”Psalms 14:1-7 NASB
Prayer Time:
For the atheist, agnostic or unbeliever. (Hey, what do you have to lose?)
“God, if you are real, I have a lot of questions. Please show yourself to me. Open my eyes to see the truth. If Jesus is your Son and I need to serve him, please open my eyes and forgive my hard heart and my sins. Make this clear to me, please. Help me not to blame you for the evil other people have done, but to see you are here to deliver me. Amen”
For those wanting deeper prayer:
“Lord God, Your Word says that the fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” I pray that you give me understanding, so that I will not walk in foolishness and in my feelings for what other people have done to me.
I cry out to you Lord, for the world is full of foolishness and truthlessness.i know people who have turned away from you. My heart is burdened by their names Today, I unburden myself to you before your throne, in the name of Jesus. These people, They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds; in fact, There is no one who does good.
Lord, when I pray for others, I am reminded that I fall short of your glory. I am a sinner and I need saved by Jesus.
Oh LORD, you looked down from heaven upon the sons of men To see if there are any who understand, Who seek after God. They have all turned aside, together they have become corrupt; There is no one who does good, not even one. Do all the workers of wickedness not know, Who eat up my people as they eat bread, And do not call upon the Lord?
God, there are so many who just want to get money and things from the people of God, but do not want to draw near to you. They are always seeking but never learning truth. I put these people in your hands, in Jesus name. I know people will abuse me and persecute me for your names sake.
There they are in great dread, For God, you are with the righteous generation. You work no matter what the world chooses to believe. Be with me, so I can be full of you, part of your righteous remnant and not deceived by this world.
Lord, the world laughs and mocks your people. They try to create fear in us so we will be embarrassed about knowing you. They would put to shame the counsel of the afflicted, But you, Oh LORD are our refuge. I hide in you, in Jesus name.
Open the eyes of my heart to see and walk in your truth. May I not compromise to avoid mockery. May I be a light set upon a hill. May I be filled with your Spirit to testify to the world.
Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion! God move and bring salvation for the nation of Israel and also all your believes all over the world. Shine forward and pierce the darkness, Lord. When the LORD restores His captive people, Jacob will rejoice, Israel will be glad. God, there are many held captive by the empty philosophies of this world.
Set people free in Jesus name! Guatd my heart, i give it to you. Amen. Psalms 14:1-7 NASB
Revealed Ministries 
I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with atheists who have been that harsh towards you as a believer. I know many, and suggesting another adult believes in the Easter Bunny and accusing them of lying is pretty condescending, and not something I’d tolerate coming from the atheists in my own friend group. With that being said, I personally am often frustrated when I read posts like yours because of what it implies about why people like me left religion. I realize you were talking specifically about angry atheists, but I’d still like to open a dialogue with you about that if you’re willing because I find that a lot of the misconceptions about atheists (and maybe some of our incorrect ideas about religious people) come from people not listening to each other and instead trying to guess what makes the other group tick.
I can’t speak for other people, but I can at least speak for myself and my experiences. You asked, “why are you so angry at God? Who hurt you?” which indicates that you believe atheists are angry with God specifically. My dad actually accused me of that, thinking it was why I left. I’ll admit that I was pretty angry at first right after I left organized religion, and you seem to have some understanding that this might be the case based on what you said next, but I was mad at organized religion specifically. The corruption. The hate, bigotry, and covering up of pretty serious crimes. You’re right that people can be mad at their pastor, or at the church hierarchy, but for someone who truly lacks a belief in God, being angry with God isn’t even a possibility, which can be hard to grasp from a perspective of belief. I simply did not (and still do not) believe in him. For me, the idea of being mad at God is like being mad at a fictional character, though I imagine for a believer it would be different. I’m physically incapable of being mad at God the way I can be mad at a friend or a political figure, because while they’re both real to me, he’s not. And leaving my faith wasn’t a choice I made by ignoring evidence. It was actually a conclusion I came to after seeking evidence and being profoundly disappointed at every turn.
Having said that, the reasons people leave religion vary a lot from person to person, and often when people first leave, they haven’t even quite sorted it out in their own heads, and they can be very angry towards religion in general. (I went through a hostile phase myself) but even knowing that, that doesn’t excuse being condescending to someone just because they have different beliefs. I hope you meet friendlier atheists (and people of a variety of faiths) in the future.
LikeLike
Nancy, Thank you so much for your very thoughtful reply to my blog. You are absolutely correct that this is specifically speaking of hostile atheists. I completely understand how frustrating it must be to feel like you have been stereotyped. I did not intend to do that in this blog, but to reveal some of the interactions I have had with people I have known who walked away from God to the point of declaring they have rejected the idea of God altogether. 99% of the people I have interacted personally with have had a disillusionment with religion or religious people. 1% wanted to live in sin and didn’t want accountability to God. Maybe there is a bit of a mixture in those percentages. I completely understand the sentiment of having trouble with religious people, because I myself have been hurt by people who go to church or claim to be religious.
I think there are many ways that pain in a church, family or religious setting can cause people to doubt the existence of God. On top of that, there is very little exposure in society to solid scientists who believe in God/a creator. So, when these people I know went looking for answers, they were met with a very secular anti-God view of scientific evidence. This helped to reinforce their view that there really must not be a God, because the evidence they are finding seem to discredit things that are held to be strong foundational beliefs by God-fearing people. (We can talk science later…if you want.)
I imagine that no one who considers themselves religious takes that decision to not believe in God lightly. So, I am sure that it is with a lot of emotion, anger and pain. I understand your point that your anger was directed towards religious people and organized religion. There is a reason why Jesus said, “They will know you are Christians by your love.” It is important for believers in Jesus to have a culture of real love, acceptance and forgiveness. The scripture also talks about knowing a tree by it’s fruit. Most people who claim to know Christ look more like the world looks than Christ. Where is the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control? The conundrum about Christianity is that it is a place where broken people come to Jesus for healing and forgiveness. So, in the church we will meet people. We will meet broken people. Sometimes we will meet people who don’t know they are broken. We will find stubborn people or people who do not know how to relate to people the way God wants us to. But, the church should be a safe place for people who love God to grow in Christ. Again…the problem that remains is there are people in the church… 😉 But, God commands those of us in leadership to create an environment where people are encouraged to repent of sin and to live in grace and forgiveness with one another.
I could go on rambling forever… but I would like to hear from you. Again…this is pretty free flow thought.
What in particular about organized religion made you so angry? I am curious.
LikeLike
Thanks for your reply! It was very thoughtful. 🙂
To answer your question, I had a list of grievances that was growing over time. I was raised in a strict Roman Catholic household and homeschooled in a fairly homogeneous Catholic community. I have trouble pinpointing when my first concerns started, but religion was a huge part of my life for a very long time. Most of my friends were Catholic until I went to college. 100% were Christian of some sort.
The first issue may have been the sexism I encountered as part of the Tridentine Catholic homeschooling community I was part of. (To sum them up: ultra strict Catholic, Latin Mass, reject major parts of Vatican II and act like it never happened). They were very judgmental of my family, which despite our strict adherence to Catholicism, wasn’t strict enough for them. I’m not going to lie, they were a bit cult-ish. They still believe women should cover their heads in church. The only other denomination I’m aware of that does that is Jehovah’s Witnesses. This was right around the time that the FLDS was getting raided and it was all over the news. I specifically remember looking at the footage of them and noticing that their clothes reminded me of the homeschoolers in my community: the men looked like they belonged in the 21st century, and the women looked completely lost in the past. Some of my homeschooled peers had never worn pants outside of their homes. Then I realized that every week, when we met for our classes, a boy would be chosen to lead the Angeles (a prayer) even though at that time of day most of the boys had left to do an auto shop class with one of the homeschooling dads (interesting how none of the girls took auto…) and so the only boys left were too little to really lead a prayer without constant coaching from their mothers. I realized suddenly that to these women, it mattered that the person leading prayer had a penis, which I knew was a stupid way to choose a leader for anything. (another issue I eventually had with Catholicism and the priesthood). I told my mom I felt this prayer thing at co op was a sexist practice, and she mentioned it to some of the other mothers, who suddenly let me lead the prayer one day, then went right back to having their three year old sons do it every week. I didn’t want to be in charge. I just wanted to see them let some of the girls–many of whom were middle or high school aged–have a chance to lead. Then I realized something scary: most of them didn’t even want to. They’d been raised to be complacent in this sexism. Because I hadn’t been raised quite as strictly as they were, I saw the gender imbalance and was disturbed by it.
Then I became best friends with someone who to put it simply is bisexual, and I had to come to terms with that. I wrestled with it for years, and finally concluded that I could not in good conscience be against my best friend finding happiness if he chose to date a man. Right when I was in the process of figuring out where I stood on that issue, my church (and my family, and my Catholic friends at church) tried to pressure me to sign a petition asking my state’s governor to prevent gay marriage from being legalized, and staring at that document, I realized I didn’t agree with it, and was angry that at my age–I was only in high school–I was being pressured to do something political based on someone else’s opinions.
And that was how religion had been treated my entire life. It wasn’t my own. It was my parents’ religion, and I wanted it to be mine very badly. I just didn’t have a reason for it to be mine. I looked for a reason too–but that searching happened much later, in college.
I watched as my parents denied the widespread molestation of children by Catholic priests, and continue to deny that it is as widespread as it is, ignoring the way that the church hierarchy has been caught moving priests around to different churches instead of reporting them to authorities to face justice.
My beef was initially with Catholicism, but I did some fishing and began to see how widespread the corruption is. Other faiths have a similar issue with sexual abuse. Many of them also preach a similar purity gospel to the ideas that led to many of my homeschooling peers getting pregnant early in life, getting in the way of their education, ideas that led to me getting sexually assaulted and not understanding that had even happened to me until a year later.
Furthermore, as I began to realize my religion was only my parents’, I started to think about the relationship between the many religions in the world. Different religions conflict with each other. They can’t all be correct, so assuming a single one is, and narrowing it down to a single interpretation (a single denomination or sub-category of whatever that religion is), that leaves the majority of religious leaders leading their congregations astray in some way. Thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that though most of them mean well, religious leaders are precisely the last people one should look to for guidance because statistically, either most or all of them must be wrong, either knowingly or without knowing it. This leaves the lay person to find his or her own path, and that’s where that left me. I had to stop looking within my own religion for answers and start looking at the world around me. There had to be proof somewhere that a specific God was real. I never found any, and believe me, I searched.
I’m curious too, were you raised religious or did you have more of a journey that led you to where you are today?
LikeLike
Nancy, thank you so much for taking the time to tell me your story. I am very grateful to hear it from you, as I know people who were raised in a cult-like atmosphere like this. It really gave them VERY similar feelings and conclusions and challenged them to ask the exact same questions you asked and maybe are still asking and seeking the answers for in some shape or form. I have a GREAT deal of sympathy for you, as it does upset me to see this kind of situation happen where leaders and teachers of the church become so obsessed with the rules and structures of their society they completely miss the heart of the law of Christ. I agree with much of what you say, but of course, I come to a different conclusion.
That being said, I had a very different upbringing. It was in the church and I was born into a first generation Christian home. Both of my parents were saved by Jesus from lives of sin and hopelessness. They were married very young, at 19, and I was their first born.
From a very young age, God began to speak to my heart. I have always had a very great awareness of his presence and asked my mother to help me accept Christ as my savior at 4 years old. I still remember the day, not because she told me about it, but because it is a day set apart in my life. I felt a burning desire that I desperately needed Jesus in my life and I still remember asking for to help me. She was brushing her teeth when I asked her to pray and she led me over to sit on her bed. She answered my questions and I prayed to accept Jesus into my heart. I had a sudden awareness that something very important had occurred in my life..I knew it was more important than anything else in the world. (I genuinely remember this all…even though I was so young.) We left that day or the next..I can’t remember the timing, for an 8 hour trip to my grandparents home. I even remember the overwhelming sense of urgency and excitement to tell my grandparents. My Pap was lying on the sofa watching sports when I told him. He just said, “That’s nice honey.” I remember feeling and thinking, “WHAT?!!! Does he NOT KNOW how important this is?!!! How can he just lie there and say that’s nice?!!!”
Even after that, at a young age, I had a hunger for God. I felt him speak to me. I wanted to talk to him and I wanted to see miracles at work in my life. In 2nd grade I had an experience in my public school classroom that was a bit of a freeze frame in class, where I believe God showed me how close we were to the end of time. I know that may sound crazy, but anyways…it happened.
In 5th grade, I received the Holy Spirit through speaking in tongues while praying by myself in my room. It wasn’t forced on me and my church didn’t even exercise the gifts of the Spirit in public services or elsewhere. My mother had prayed for me once with her tongues language before and I wanted God to work through me that way. I have many other friends with this spiritual gift, again…not that our church emphasizes this at all. One of my friends in high school thought her tongues language sounded like Spanish (she didn’t know Spanish). She went to the high school Spanish teacher and asked her to listen to tell her if it was Spanish. When she said yes, my friend spoke. The Spanish and French teacher were both there, standing with jaws hanging open. The Spanish teacher said, “You just spoke in Ancient Spanish. You said, ‘America, everything will change.” (This was 1993) So, my friend gave a prophecy to the Spanish and French teacher without even knowing ancient Spanish.
I am listing some of these more private things that are miraculous to reveal that I have experienced the power of God in my life and have seen it in other people’s lives. Of course, this is just a blog comment, so you are free to not believe me, but I am telling the truth.
Another miraculous thing that I saw in my life was the transformation of lives as they submitted to Jesus Christ. My dad and mom both changed before my eyes over the years. I watched them mature in Christ, grow out of sin, admit their short comings and when they were wrong. They taught me to love the Lord my God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind and all my strength. My father is a pastor and has a counseling ministry where God uses him mightily in helping people overcome major issues that they tell me no amount of psychiatric treatment helped them with. One of my best friends had cancer, and multiple other diseases. She was suicidal, on lots of meds and spent lots of time in psych wards. She was told she could never have children. She began to learn about who God really is…that he is a good father and that he is faithful, loving and forgiving. She began to release the unforgiveness and rejection in her life and her emotional healing began to come. Later she was at a worship service several hours from here when the Holy Spirit came over her and she passed out. When she woke up, she was healed. She was healed from cancer and is now the happy mother of 4 children, 2 of those are a set of twins. Jesus healed her. He continues to work through her as now she helps very broken people who need to know the power of the living God in their lives.
Even though I have grown up in the church, it is not the church that makes me. It is Jesus himself who makes me. He has healed my marriage, healed the marriages of friends who were on the brink. In the past year I have prayed for several people who were healed instantly of very serious forms of cancer.
Jesus is real. I do not have an ideology or a religion. I have a relationship with the living God which is available to everyone who repents and trusts in Jesus Christ to remove their sins. I love Jesus so much and he loves me. He sets people free. Any type of religion that is void of the power of God is very dangerous because it just produces rules without love and is useless. God sent Jesus to die for our sins because he loves us so very much. When he ascended, he sent the Holy Spirit to work in our lives and bring us power, love and a sound mind. (2 Timothy) Jesus himself said that in the end times there would be people who considered themselves to be religious. They would have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof. He said, “Have nothing to do with them.”
The power of God is the power for a transformed life. The power of God is the power for repentance and a changed heart and a spirit that is raised up from the death of sin and hell. The power of God is the power to work miracles. This is the same power that raised Jesus from the dead and the power that worked in the early church and still works today in those who follow Jesus with a pure heart.
There is a ton of church abuse out there. But that does not mean that God does not exist. God is so very much upset with the leaders who do not lead by the Spirit, but by just rules and regulations. There are scriptures that specifically say things like, “Not all of you should assume to be teachers, my brothers. Teachers will be judged more harshly.” AND, “If judgement starts in the church, how will it be for the world?” The bible says that judgement starts in the church. God WILL judge those who claim responsibility for leading and who do damage. Jesus called such leaders blind guides.
God is so harsh with sin, because sin hurts people and separates us from God. God is all about relationships with his beloved people. He loves us so much he sent his only Son to die on the cross to take away the sin that keeps us from God. There is an answer and a balance to everything. If things are not done in love, there is much damage to the kingdom and work of God.
Well…..this is just a very small peek into my life. I have so many more stories…so many more works of God and miracles. They are just constant. I just don’t have time to write them all in a comment.
I have seen many people hurt by backwards or cult-like churches. I am very sorry this happened to you. God is still alive and well. I can assure you. I look forward to hearing back from you. I put myself out there in a pretty vulnerable way. I hope it helps understand where I am coming from. 🙂
LikeLike