Atheism, Part 2

Heart of the Matter: Atheism – Part II

LIVE! From the “Mecca of Mormonism” Salt Lake City, Utah – THIS . . . is Heart of the MatterTGNN’s original show where Shawn McCraney deconstructed religion and developed fulfilled theology. . . . “Where Mormonism Meets Biblical Christianity Face to Face.”

Show 42 Atheism – Part II October 20th, 2009

If you have family or friends who cannot get Heart through television, give them a call and tell them to go to WWW.HOTM.TV And they can watch through streaming video from anywhere in the world!

I was a Born-Again Mormon is available for you to download through a PDF. Go to www.bornagainmormon.com to get it through this avenue. If you don’t have a computer, we are working on getting the hard copy version done.

Weekly Bible Study

What are you doing to learn your Bible? What are you doing on Sunday afternoons in the Salt Lake area and Sunday evenings in Logan? Why not join our weekly verse by verseTGNN’s Bible teaching series—book-by-book, through the lens of fulfillment and spiritual liberty., never-denominational Bible study? We get together with people from all over the place to study the Word and then socialize together. Go to www.calvarycampus.com for more information like directions and times.

New Television Program: The Grey Generation

In eleven days on October 31st at 10:30 pm, we are going to launch our newest television program, The Grey Generation. We hope you will encourage your teens and young adults to tune in as we present an alternative voice to what they are getting from the world. Again, here’s the opener.

It seems, according to a Fox 13 news story that: (READ article)

Now, why do you suppose that that alleged LDS member said: “Just because you are Mormon people don’t like you?” Is this true? If not, why do the general LDS population say it is? And if it is true, why?

LDS, we really want to hear from you on this one: Why do you think that just because you’re Mormon that people don’t like you? Call in and tell us. Please. Share with the world what you think it is that drives people to automatically NOT like Mormons.

Controversial Posthumous Practices

According to a Salt Lake Trib article dated October 13th, the newest Catholic Saint, Father Damien, who was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican two Sundays ago, was posthumously baptized a Mormon, given Mormon temple endowments, and then sealed to his parents on October 22, 1983, in the Los Angeles temple. Amazing. Then, and GET THIS, then this celibate for life Catholic Saint was sealed (meaning eternally married) on March of 2000 to a woman named Marie Damien. Once again, to the LDS, what they offer is so appealing, they are going to do it in the name of our dead no matter who they were or what they believed while they were living.

Maybe . . . just maybe, it’s things like this that make some people automatically dislike Mormons, eh?

In the classic film, “Judgment at Nuremberg,” actor Spencer Tracy said: “just because something is logical, does not make it right.”

In Isaiah 55:9 it reads: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

When men and women are not satisfied with the information God provides us in His Word, when His ways are not “logical enough for them, they construct their own doctrines and practices to fill the faithless void – and if they are Joseph Smith, they call them revelations. God does not tell us what we are going to do for eternity – so Joseph did. Neither did God delineate what the state of human families in the hereafter is – so Joseph did.

You see, Joseph Smith learned to love telling people about things that they could not see – but he could. In his early life, he used to take a rock and go to people’s property and claim to be able to see buried treasures on their property – and for a fee, he would try and get the treasure for the family as their own private treasure revelator and seer. He was arrested AND convicted of this in a court of law. So then, with the very same rock, he claims to have translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates. When he discovered that revealing so-called hidden spiritual truths was a much more defensible act, he gave up the money digging and built himself the reputation of being a prophet, seer, and revelator of hidden religious truth?

What happens to the aboriginals who have not heard of the Mormon gospel? Joseph told us. And what did man do before he arrived on earth? Joseph knew.

Where did man come from? Joseph contradicted the Bible and gave us a more logical, if not more Hellenistic response.

The Veil of Certainty

Did even God come from? What does God look like? How was Jesus conceived? Where did Satan come from? What do you do if you meet a spirit?

Joseph explained it all in detail – all the way down on how to shake a spirit's hand – just like he explained in detail the buried treasures he saw under the earth in people yards.

What happens to children who die? Joseph said.

What is the purpose of life? What will we do in heaven? Are there men on the moon? Can a man have more than one wife? Why do some people have black skin? Where did the American Indians come from? Where was the Garden of Eden?

And on and on and on… Joseph knew. Joseph could see. And people believed Him over the plain simple Word of God. Because he filled-in the gaps. He provided certainty. And in the process killed faith and trust by getting people to KNOW – To KNOW the Book of Mormon is true. To KNOW they existed before. To KNOW the Church is true.

Charlatans have ALWAYS claimed to know the hidden secrets to life, of God, and about the world. But God says, trust me and trust my Word – completely.

Encounters With the Other Side

Growing up in Huntington Beach I had a couple of friends to whom I have always loved and resonated, even if we didn’t hang out with each other all the time. One was a very artistic girl named Holly I’ve known since I was eleven. Holly is respected artist now, educated, and successful, and I had the blessing of being able to catch up with her the other day over lunch in LA.

The two of us had another friend named Steve, who since as far back as I can remember was an aggressive, “go-after-life-with-all-you’ve-got” kind of surfer who remained this way even as an adult. Holly informed me that a year or so back that she had heard that Steve had suffered a heart attack and had actually died but was brought back to life. She went and visited with him and he told her that he was really terrified by what he experienced. That he was surrounded in darkness and demonic faces were all around him.

Now, this was something Steve would say just – he was too macho of an individual – but Holly says she could tell that he was truly frightened. Six weeks later Steve suffered another heart attack and died.

There is a solution to the demonic darkness that awaits the unsaved. It is the ONLY solution available to us. His name is Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus – who called Himself without shame, The Light of the World. He gave Himself up to overcome deathSeparation from God—now overcome. Physical death remains, but it no longer separates us from life with God. and hell and calls to ALL to receive Him. Some hear, some do not. I hope that Steve, in the short interim of his life, received Yeshua – before he returned to life in the spirit. It literally means the difference between eternal life in light, or eternal darkness. I pray Holly hears His call too.

And with that let’s have a prayer.

Reflections on Belief Systems

PRAYER

PRAYER

MESSAGE

Last week, we talked about one of the unspoken fruits of Mormonism – atheism. We said that not believing in God is often the result of people buying into the errant LDS teachings that it is the only true church on earth and then discovering it to be a fraud. This often leads to them being so burned that they even come to hate or renounce God’s existence.

Additionally, we mentioned two facts for the “Atheist” to consider – because we have a heart for people burned by religion. The first was that Atheism is a faith. It requires an extraordinary amount of belief in no-God. The second fact we discussed was in reference to the Atheists claims that belief in God usual equates to bloodshed and violence. Regarding this, we illustrated that atheistic governments were far more inclined to inhumane governance than theistic.

Tonight, I’d like to give those from those who ardently believe in no-God a few more points to consider.

The first is the smug atheist argument is that God is merely a crutch for the feeble. Nietzsche’s superman would never have need for such a creation. Borrowing from such proud ideologies which were made popular by men like Feuerbach, Karl Marx quipped one of the most famous lines, saying:

“Religion is the opiate of the masses.”

In other words, the masses of humanity WANT there to be a God to quell our fears from lightning and thunder, to protect us from the unknown, to comfort us with guilt and shame and to pacify us in the dark face of the inevitable – death. I would suggest that there

The Debate on Belief and Accountability

There is a tremendous amount of truth to what Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Marx had to say. But by agreeing I also want to ask: "So what? What’s wrong with human beings wanting a source of comfort in the face of their sins and failures? What’s wrong with giving allegiance to a power and source that is reliable, unshakable, trustworthy, and kind? Is an atheist a better human being, a stronger human being, a more loving human being because they embrace the faith of denial over an individual who chooses to make her or himself accountable to God? I would suggest that where atheists call theists' belief in God a crutch, the atheists' denial of God is motivated by fear of accountability.

Tell me, what is more convenient for a murderer, to deny the existence of God and thereby remove the fear of retribution for his crimes or to embrace the notion of God and to therefore live with the inevitable consequences of his actions. Bottom-line? Atheism, and all of its forms, becomes the vehicle by which men and women are able to ignore, renounce, or hide from the consequence of their lives.

Perspectives on Atheism

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in the 1980's, commented on this Atheistic attitude in an essay called, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism. Milosz, who was silenced under Stalinism and Nazism said: "Religion, opium for the people! To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in the afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice and murders we are not going to be judged. The Marxist creed has now been inverted. The true opium of modernity is the belief that there is no God, so that humans are free to do precisely as they please." To me, a stated faith in no God is about as ego-centric a statement that could ever be made because cemented to the claim is the idea that the speaker has examined all the evidence!

The Challenge of Proof

There is no God? How do you know? Have you examined all the proofs? Of course not. But to make such a claim it would only reasonably infer they had! And the argument here cannot be flipped. All the evidence does not need to be examined for a person to see that God exists anymore than a microscopic examination of every square inch Donald Trump needs to occur to see he exists. A couple of evidences would suffice. But in order to categorically deny that Donald Trump exists, a person would have to have literally examined the entire universe! Get it?

This leads us to the final criticism atheists heap upon believers today – that Christianity is a leap into an unfounded chasm of unsubstantiated claims and that science has disproved the evidence for God. Enter Richard Dawkins, atheist extraordinaire and author of The God Delusion. Dawkins ignorantly and consistently insists that faith in God is the "process of non-thought," that believers possess a "blind trust in the absence of evidence."

Reason and Faith

While Dawkins' inflammatory accusations may carry weight against some so-called faith-based religions like Mormonism, where people believe in books and claims that have absolutely no evidentiary basis, he is truly guilty of his own accusation of non-thought when it comes to biblical Christianity. Great twentieth-century Christian thinkers like Wolterstorff, Plantinga, Swineburne, and C.S. Lewis – to name a few – have made robust intellectual cases for faith and have helped true Christians the world over see that God does not expect us to blindly embrace the claims of every piker to step up to a pulpit.

God Himself, in His own Word, tells us to: The Lord through the prophet Isaiah said: “Come now, and let us reason together . . .”

Paul told us to “earnestly contend for the faith” which was once given to the Saints and called the Berean’s in the book of Acts more noble because they “received the word with READINESS OF MIND and SEARCHED THE SCRIPTURES DAILY to see if what was told them was true or not. You find me a true Christian and I will show you a man or woman who reasonably seeks for truth, no matter how hard it is to hear, embrace, or incorporate into their walk of faith BUT you show me a true Atheist and I will show you the most bitter, cynical, closed-minded to truth you will ever meet.

Atheists

The Intersection of Faith and Science

Often equate the theists belief in God with the belief in Santa Claus or the tooth-fairy. This accusation, too, is weighed in the balance and found wanting because I stopped believing in tooth-fairy by the time I was six and Santa Claus by the time I was seven because I started thinking and reasoning then. Atheists stop believing in God because they stopped reasoning at some sad point in their lives and gave into the notion that have seen it all.

Hand in hand with the false claim that Christians “don’t have a sound core intelligence to their faith” comes the relentless claim that science has all but decimated the archaic notions of God. Has science destroyed the structure, form, and variety of the universe, the galaxy, the solar system, or earth? Has science proven anything, at all, about there not being a divine power behind the construction of DNA, the cell, or a simple rose?

Questions Science Can't Answer

Can science explain the origins of the seasons, billions of stars and planets in a single galaxy which is one of a trillion other galaxies? Can it tell us how and why the diversity of foods, the beauty of music, the variety of fingerprints? Take a computer and tear it apart then throw it out in the desert. How many years would it take for those components to come together into a functioning whole again? Then look at the complexity of a single human body and explain its origins. How long would it take a thousand monkey’s sitting at typewriters to reproduce Shakespear’s Macbeth? A thousand years? A trillion years? Ever?

Can science ever, EVER answer life’s most meaningful and important questions? Why are we here? Where are we going? How come human beings can be selfless, sacrificial, even loving? Science will always and forever support, in one way or another, the existence of God – or it was never true science with-which to begin. In the end it always has and it always will because where science is changing, God is not.

Supporting Alathea Ministries

Let’s open up the phone lines: 801 973-TV20 801 973-8820

Listen, while the operators are clearing the lines and screening the calls, allow me to take a minute and talk about our ministry and your support. First of all, let me thank each and all of you for supporting Alathea Ministries through whatever means the Lord has lead you to act. Many of you pray for us constantly – you pray for me – and I can’t tell you how much these prayers are appreciated and how far they go in keeping this ministry alive. Sincere prayer to our God and King on our behalf will do more for this ministry than ANY other form of support. Your financial support is also appreciated. They all – great and small – go toward keeping us alive and expanding in the direction the Lord wants us to go. We thank you so much for this form of support and sacrifice.

Finally, we also thank everyone who has ever stepped forward and volunteered their time and talents to the ministry. This studio right now is full of people who give part of their lives to seeing Heart, and now the Grey Generation, produced and aired each week. You see me, but behind me are the vital organs of our ministry – the heart, the lungs, the arteries – I’m just the face and mouth. We thank all of you for whatever form of support you can lend to help keep Alathea Ministries alive in this fallen world. Emails

Phone calls

Conclusion