I believe that debate should be on every college campus in America and in Europe - and through the miracle of the internet, it can be!
Heard Ravi Zacharias speak today (as I drove to Church Service) about what it feels like to speak as a Christian before a "hostile" audience such as at a University in America or in Europe. Ravi, like Dinesh, is one of the most eloquent of those who speak to the modern "post Christian" peoples and insitutions. In fact Ravi's discussions can be found at his website and through his radio ministry, "Let My People Think!"
Anyway, Ravi said that after speaking before such an audience today, it always leaves him drained - physically, emotionally, spiritually.
So I thank Ravi, I thank Dinesh, I thank before them Dr. Francis Schaeffer, and C.S. Lewis, and others who have not in any way shrunk from the hostile audiences but have attempted, by God's help of course, to present the case for Christianity before the thinking world. While it may drain them, it rejuvenates me and I am sure others out here in flyover country as we work and live and "talk" with others who have either tried Christianity and turned away - or who have for whatever REASON or NONREASON decided it is, as Hitchens says, just a fairy tale which because it has been believed by many has done immeasurable harm to this world.
Dinesh pointed out that the preChristian world - and even the "Christianized world" for centuries - was based on one idea - slavery. Enslavement of human beings by other human beings. And that it has been the CHRISTIAN worldview which has moved the world away from an endorsement of slavery as a "given" of living life in this world. Yes there is still slavery in the world today. The atheistic communists are the worst enslavers on the planet followed closely by the followers of "Allah". Yet the West is not far behind through its enslavement to the state of those whose livelihoods are given primarily over to paying for the STATE to "take care" of them.
And soon, should we forget the God of Christianity and JUdaism, and the FREEDOM for which every human being longs - especially the atheists who seek freedom from God but freedom in all expressions....the idea of enslavement will become "accepted" - has already been so as the socialists in Europe have showed us.
Solzhenitzen warned the west of this danger so many years ago now.....pleading with us to see the suffering of the Russian and other peoples under atheistic communism.....and learning from their suffering the dire folly of "forgetting God."
Yet Hitchens and his like learned nothing from their suffering and would put us into similar suffering if his militant atheism should conquer the west.
Yet Hitchens and his like learned nothing from their suffering and would put us into similar suffering if his militant atheism should conquer the west."
Militant Atheism Conquers The West~Be afraid. Be very afraid!
Dateline Peoria: Church bells remain quiet in this exemplary American community as militant atheists again stay home in droves to sleep late on Sunday morning.
"You know they're in there, just waiting ..." said Cyrus Kornbluth, an erect and bright-eyed octogenarian, "... Who knows what Devilment they're cooking up? We've all been afraid to leave our homes because of all the emptiness out in the streets."
It is an uncanny, disquieting quiet in this otherwise somnolent midwestern town, whose sleep is now disturbed by the stirring undercurrents of inaction.