The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
Michael Hamar points toward a piece taking-up Congressman Randy Forbes’ belief that there is a dark conspiracy to eliminate religion from the world.
During his sermon, Forbes told the congregation that the government has grown increasingly hostile to religion in America in an effort to systematically expunge it from the “marketplace of ideas” and that this development has not come about by accident or naturally; rather, it has all been orchestrated by a vast, well-funded conspiracy.
“Let me just tell you one of the myths that’s out there,” he said. “It’s easy for us to somehow just think that all of this just evolved because people on the internet, they’re reading more and they’re getting more intellectual and somehow or the other, it’s like they’ve discovered the world isn’t flat anymore and therefore we don’t believe in God and we don’t believe in faith.”
“If I had the time, which I don’t have,” he continued, “I could put up on this screen or on this screen or on both of them the proof that would show you this isn’t some natural evolution, this is artificially driven. I can show you organization after organization after organization to a network that would frighten you because it would be vast that you couldn’t get it on that screen, of organizations that are funded and paid with a systematic approach to killing and destroying faith in America today.”
No, no conspiracy; Christianity is merely dying its long overdue death. That’s what happens to untrue nonsense.
Whether one approaches the question “Is Christianity true?” from the perspective of science, or Biblical scholarship, the answer is dispositive and not susceptible of educated, intellectually serious dispute: the traditional Christian narrative is false. There was no Adam and Eve, there is no such thing as Original Sin, and Jesus doesn’t save us from an eternity of deserved torture — case closed. You may believe that you’re worthless dung and deserve eternal torture (and I’m not here to tell you that you’re wrong), but that is merely your private psychological problem — and people like me have simply had enough of you and aren’t going to hold our noses and politely defer to your rat’s-nest of fantasies and psychoses any longer.
No conspiracy. Merely widespread disgust with the blatant evil of unreasoning belief.