Don't ask me how it is I always find myself in these situations where I'm having discussions with atheists and whatnot. But, I do. (I think in part it must be through facebook and the fact that I'm back in touch with people from my "past life" who were frequently not of the religious ilk)
At any rate, I'm having a discussion with this atheist and just asking some basic questions about why he's an atheist, and the response was not a huge surprise, but it made me start thinking that once again, the Christian church has failed to convey the proper message when it comes to God. He started out with what I now see as the "standard" atheist rhetoric. You've probably heard it as well... God is just a human idea, the bible is just a bunch of man-made stories, and while Jesus had some nice ideas about being kind to one another, that was about all he was good for.
Naturally, he had not come up with this stuff all on his own. It took a combination of the Christian church and the ideas of Richard Dawkins to turn him off. Growing up, he had listened to the stories of the bible, about creation, the tower of Babel, etc, an as he grew older and was faced with more "logical" ideas like evolution, he had to begin disregarding the Bible as a whole. Then he read one of Mr. Dawkins' books called "The Selfish Gene" that talked about the "meme," which essentially is this idea that religious ideas are simply a genetic "mimicry" that we humans are pressured into culturally. Apparently, belief in God is merely a disease that just gets transmitted from one generation to the next. This he embraced and became an atheist.
Now we can demonize Mr. Dawkins all we want for spewing such ridiculousness out there, but really, it's not Mr. Dawkins' fault. It's our own. Why did this young man go searching for an "alternative" to the bible in the first place? Because of how it was presented. In his mind, given what he was learning in school, the bible seemed completely whacked and didn't deal with the reality of the scientific world.
Now this is not an argument for or against the idea of evolution - but I am thinking we need to find new ways to present these biblical stories to our children so that they aren't so "outlandish" in many ways. For instance - the six day creation account. Rather than focusing so heavily on the fact that it "only took God six days" to create the heavens and the earth, perhaps focusing on the fact that God created an orderly world should be the emphasis. (Besides... as I recently noticed myself, the whole "day" issue seems to not be what the authors were after when they mention the evening first, then the morning, "the first day." Should be reversed, morning, THEN evening, not the other way around, if we want to really take the whole six day thing literally.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in watering the stories down, but maybe we need to start presenting them in ways that are a little more "realistic" in the face of what they're going to learn in the public school systems. I know I for one, if I ever were to have children, really wouldn't want my child growing up thinking Samson was a great biblical "hero," given he was anything but! As I've grown older and studied the bible more, I've realized the vast majority of the stories I heard when I was a child from the bible rarely captured the over-arching idea/theme of what was being conveyed in the story. Now granted, sometimes, the idea is a little too "adult" for our children to grasp, but maybe the story of David, rather than making him out to be this great and wonderful king, we should dirty him up a little...make him a little more "human" like he is in the bible and make the message be about how despite how much David screwed up, God loved him anyway.
This may not solve every problem we have or prevent every Christian youth who turns their back on faith from doing so, but I'm thinking something needs to be done in this area. I'm running across far too many people who have grown up Christian and become atheists because the bible simply isn't real enough to them. So maybe the solution is retelling these stories in ways that better fit our context and culture.
Because if you actually read Mr. Dawkins' ideas, they aren't any more logical or even scientifically "provable" in any way. They're simply a modern "alternative" for people who just don't think the bible is relevant. Given the choice of the two, they turn to Mr. Dawkins.
Thoughts/ideas?
