Atheist

In the days of the Roman Empire, the emperor was cast as a deity. There were repurcussions if you didn't agree. And it wasn't too difficult for them because they had lots of deities, so one more wasn't much of a problem. Unless you were a Christian. Christians denied the existence of any other deity except the God of the Bible. So their society referred to them as atheists because they didn't believe in other gods. Of course, they believed in one, but it wasn't their gods, so they were atheists. Today's atheists are more ... atheistic. Atheist Ricky Gervais said, "You don't believe in 2,999 gods. I don't believe in just one more." Turns out the distance between 2,999 and 1 is much less than the distance between 1 and 0.

On one hand, 2,999 and 1 both agree that there is something beyond humans. They simply disagree on who (or how many). but the atheist -- zero gods -- has some huge leaps to make. He has to explain how this universe began. "He does," some will argue. "Evolution." Actually, no, that's not the answer. Evolution is "the origin of the species," but offers nothing on the origin of the universe. "The Big Bang Theory." Nope, that simply suggest how the current universe came to be. It requires that something existed prior to this one. No, how everything came from nothing is unexplainable in the "zero god" group. Then there's the whole "Just because it looks designed doesn't mean it is" problem. They want us to believe that all the order we see is a cosmic accident. It just happened. First there was nothing, then there was something, then there was everything. Somehow a pool of goo produced life. Somehow a single-celled organism (which, by the way, is the fittest life on the planet, so it should be the only) became multi-celled. These multi-celled magically mutated organs that had no purpose at all until other components mutated and then they merged and became complex multi-celled organisms. Eyes, a pulmonary system, the brain, all this and more ... just happened. Now that takes a lot of faith. Then they want to tell us we are wrong, evil, immoral for believing what we believe ... without a universal moral source. And more.

Atheists are incredible people of faith, ignoring logic and evidence to claim that there is actually no god. Despite the difficulty of proving a negative, they assure us that believing in a Designer is irrational, that subscribing to a Lawgiver is arbitrary, and that we are better off if we accept that there is no ultimate purpose to life. That's huge. That's a big difference between believing this god or those gods or this God exists and answers all those massive questions. The distance between one and zero in this case is a vast gap. And, if taken at face value, it is certainly good grounds for hopelessness.