Why Leftists Hate the Mention of ‘Thoughts and Prayers’

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When there’s a tragedy, you know what Democrats are going to say. “Guns are the problem,” and “thoughts and prayers” are not a solution. “Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr pinch-hit for MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart on Friday’s PBS News Hour and, during the discussion on the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis, blamed the GOP and its embrace of gun culture for mass shootings in America.” New York Times columnist David Brooks is getting close to the real problem:

“Some people kill because they have some crazy ideology like the Unabomber…. The FBI now has a category of terrorists which are nihilists, people who just believe in nothing. And we’re seeing a rise—the anarchists 100 years ago were killing people, but now we’re seeing this tide of nihilism. So, I look at it as a gun problem, as a mental health problem, and really as an intellectual problem about our culture, that you have people who believe in nothing and just want to destroy.”

Leftists have a worldview problem. Prayers are ridiculous if there is no God. The same is true of evil and grief. If there is no God, then there are no tragedies. Evolved biological units (not persons) are the result of millions of years of accidental and unguided changes in our species. We are nothing but highly evolved animals. This is nihilism writ large. R.C. Sproul writes that “God’s existence is the chief element in constructing any worldview. To deny this chief premise is to set one’s sails for the island of nihilism. This is the darkest continent of the darkened mind—the ultimate paradise of the fool.”[1]

Against All Opposition

An apologetic methodology that claims Christians should be “open,” “objective,” and “tolerant” of all opinions when they defend the Christian faith is like a person who plans to stop a man from committing suicide by taking the hundred-story plunge with him, hoping to convince the lost soul on the way down. No one in his right mind would make such a concession to foolishness. But Christians do it all the time when they adopt the operating presuppositions of unbelievers. There are no “neutral” assumptions about reality.

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Evolutionists, most of whom are atheists, can’t account for the emotions or thoughts parents feel for the senseless death of their children. Evolutionary theory posits that our current state is the result of microscopic changes over time that began in a chemical soup untold millions of years ago. The struggle for survival was bloody. “Nature, red in tooth and claw” is the operating mechanism with no accountable moral brake.

If there’s no God, there is no way to account for morality or meaning, and some people imbibe the logical reality. Richard Dawkins describes it this way:

In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.[2]

This is what every child is taught in our nation’s government schools. If not overtly, certainly by exclusion of any other scientific explanation, and certainly with no consideration of religion.

Dawkins is not alone in his assessment of our evolutionary origins. Bertrand Russell wrote something similar.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.[3]

The Rocky Mountain News reported that the 1999 Columbine murderers justified their actions based on Darwinian Natural Selection. Harris was wearing “a white T-shirt with the inscription ‘Natural Selection’ on its front.” It was based on a video game of the same name. “The game’s World Wide Web site says it encompasses a ‘realm where anything can happen,’ a place for the ‘bravest of the brave and the fiercest of the fierce…. It’s a place where survival of the fittest takes a very literal meaning…. It’s the natural way, it’s Natural Selection.” We’ve learned nothing in 26 years. Then there’s this.

“At least seven people were killed when a teenaged gunman opened fire at a school in southern Finland on November 7, 2007, hours after a video was posted on YouTube predicting a massacre there. The gunman was a pupil at Jokela High School, a teacher who witnessed the attack told Reuters, and had walked through the school firing into classroom after classroom…. The YouTube video, entitled ‘Jokela High School Massacre—11/7/2007,’ was posted by a user called ‘Sturmgeist89.’ ‘I am prepared to fight and die for my cause,’ read a posting by a user of the same name. ‘I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection.’ Sturmgeist means storm spirit in German.” He describes himself as “a social Darwinist.”

Douglas Wilson made the following statement during a panel discussion in Dallas, Texas, before the 2009 screening of the film Collision, which featured a debate between the anti-theist Christopher Hitchens and Wilson. “If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason to assign truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning, or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If there is no God, humanity is a set of bipedal carbon-based units composed mostly of water. And nothing else.”

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COLLISION carves a new path in documentary filmmaking. It pits leading atheist, political journalist and bestselling author Christopher Hitchens against fellow author, satirist and evangelical theologian Douglas Wilson, as they go on the road to exchange blows over the question: “Is Christianity Good for the World?” The two contrarians laugh, confide, and argue, in public and in private, as they journey through three cities. And the film captures it all. The result is a magnetic conflict, a character-driven narrative that sparkles cinematically with a perfect match of arresting personalities and intellectual rivalry.

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Feed the following to enough people, and we will get what happened in Minneapolis ten thousand times over: “No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us, and we have no ultimate meaning in life.”[4]

[1] R. C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts That Shaped Our World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000), 171.

[2] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: HarperCollins/BasicBooks, 1995), 133.

[3] Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic Including A Free Man’s Worship. From the Introduction.

[4] William Provine, “Scientists, Face It! Science and Religion are Incompatible,” The Scientist (September 5, 1988).

American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources