WHY ARE PEOPLE INFLUENCED BY MEN LIKE THIS?
David Hume was a famous 18th century philosopher and renowned skeptic and atheist; so was Edmund Halley (1656-1742) the astronomer. Their pint-sized-in-comparison counterparts today would be people like pop-culture atheists Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. How any sensible person could be influenced by people like this is, for three reasons, a real head-scratcher.
First, these are disingenuous men. Hume once admitted that he had never carefully examined the New Testament in spite of all his railing against it. Halley confessed the same to Sir Isaac Newton, who said to him, “Now sir, I have examined the subject, and you have not, and I am ashamed that you, professing to be a philosopher, consent to condemn a thing you never examined.” Hume and Halley admitted what all of their ilk ought to confess .— that they didn't know what they were talking about.
The famous American agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll, was once confronted by a college student who told him that he, like Ingersoll, was also an agnostic. Ingersoll replied, “No, you are not an agnostic like me. I am an agnostic for $1,000 per lecture. You are an agnostic because you are a fool.” At least Ingersoll was an honest agnostic. He wasn't as disingenuous as the growing gaggle of pop- culture God-deniers who are collecting "dis-honorariums" on campus after campus with snake oil, soul scamming speeches in the name of academia and free thought — high-browed, more thinly disguised than they think, comedy tours.
Secondly, these are desperate men. Desperate for what? Desperate to bring some sense of significance to their empty selves. This is why they surround themselves with, and make groupies to themselves of, impressionable, pseudo-intellectual little God-deniers on college and university campuses. Today’s rock stars of agnosticism and atheism also are desperate for any sort of security they can find in their own faith that there is no God to have faith in. How pathetic.
Thirdly, These are dangerous men. They are dangerous because (1) they are deceived themselves, and willfully so (2 Pet. 3:5), and (2) because they deduce their self worth and gratification from how many people they can influence to their godless way of thinking (Misery does love company). They “have made a covenant with death and hell” (Isa. 28:18), and actively seek to bring others into the same covenant relationship.
Everything for these people began with either a somehow stimulated molecule or a big sonic blast from somewhere that shock-paddled the universe into existence. But they can never answer the question, “Where did any of that come from?” Why? Because deep down within them, suppressed as it is, they know that the answer is, “In the beginning God … “ (Gen. 1:1).
"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, There is none that doeth good" (Ps. 14:1). (Share this with as many young people as you can).
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