Five Minute Ministry

Last week’s class was about whether God does evil like ordering genocide or approving of slavery.   Today’s class deals with the question “Don’t Christians do evil.   The rise of the New Atheists and a lot of backlash against Christians came about out of the Islamic 9/11 attacks, strangely enough.   The atheists looked at the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and jumped to the knee jerk conclusion that all religions are harmful . Hence the title of Christopher Hitchens ’ book “God is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything.”   Christopher Hitchens lambasts Christians, Catholics, Muslims and more in his book.   He doesn’t limit his ire to Muslims at all, but how many Amish terrorists have you heard of?   Still, to his credit he has done a great deal help a fellow author, Salmon Rushdie, who has a death sentence on his head from an Islamic Fatwa placed on him because of his book, The Satanic Verses.   That book was referring to the questions Muhammed had about the Koranic vers

Last week’s class was about whether God cares about or ignores evil.  Today’s class deals with the question “Doesn’t God do evil?”   Skeptics look at the Bible and challenge that God actively does evil things.  Richard Dawkins , the famous and infamous atheist Scientist is well known for his oft repeated quote about the God of the Bible.  “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal , genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.“  Richard Dawkins has great experience in calling names but he’s very bad at intellectually rigorous and philosophically sound arguments.  As challenging as his complaints sound at first they are quite weak.  Even atheists point out how bad they are.  Atheist philosopher Michael Ruse says that Daw