Interesting article, Mr. Stanley, and the faith of the faithful in Christ asking God’s will be done, steadfastly, earnestly, faithfully on this earth to stay evil is what is needed. Not more heading in the right direction, sort of, stalling, stammering, and stopping before reaching the destination.

The first part of Mr. Stanley’s comment is true. Atheism does take away. It attempts to take away that which is most important to every human being that has ever lived, is living now, and are yet to be born — God the Creator, Jesus the Christ, and the only way to salvation, the Holy Spirit, and the inerrant infallible living Word of God.

“…atheism can only take something away; once the old faith is gone, it offers nothing to fill the void.”

But Mr. Stanley is totally incorrect in writing… “it offers nothing to fill the void.”

The void created with the attempt to make God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Bible null and void, to vainly, foolishly imagine the most important reality in all existence could be somehow cut away and removed like a loose thread on an article of clothing, a hangnail treating the Christian faith with such disdain and hostility is never left empty. That void established by atheism is quickly filled. With paganism and any and every other form and vain imagining of the inherently evil hearts and minds of men and women. Vainly, foolishly deluding themselves they live by rational thought when the reality is in denial of creation, denial of God, denial of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit they remain seeking, searching for meaning.

In all the wrong places having thrown away the truth, the hope, the only source of life and answers to every question.

Mr. Stanley does continue below acknowledging;

“…Yet some atheists acknowledge that human beings consistently demonstrate a need to believe in something beyond themselves.”

Enter paganism. Enter self-worship. The idolization of everything. While reviling belief in the One True God of the Bible, and His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Every atheist, every non-believing person is merely emulating, imitating their ancestors from the Garden of Eden. Having been given Paradise, perfection, the way to eternal life and a pain-free forever relationship with God the Creator, directly, being able to commune with God they of their own will determined to follow rebellion, the voice of a lie, disobedience, and imagine themselves gods not in need of God. Denying the Creator that gave them life and Paradise destroying it all in exchanging that for a lie that they did not believe God or need God. Disobedience originates in the heart and mind due to disbelief in what is heard, and arrogance that the self knows better and must find out for itself through rebellion against what has been said or written.

“Don’t touch that.”

This leads to the running to the touching of whatever has been off-limits as soon as the opportunity arises. From the time of being a little child throughout the life cycle.

Such is the inherently troublesome and evil spirit and soul of man and woman.

The void is filled continually with dung, rotting flesh, and internal spiritual and mental disease. Heart disease. The kind that eternally kills.

And once the door is flung open inviting every evil and rotten thing in there is no sweeping it out, closing the door, and ridding of that which has been permitted to enter. Evil is like a black mold, a toxic rot allowed within ad once within it can never be fully removed.

Except in the heart and spirit of a truly repentant individual. In that individual’s faith and obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ becoming their Saviour and Friend, the Holy Spirit their Comforter and Helper, and God becoming their Father. No longer the child of rebellion and disobedience.

All due to the reality of what took place on that tree of shame a couple of millennia ago when God sacrificed Himself for the sin of that now repentant, believing soul.

There are no true voids. Everything, everyone is filled with something.

Read on…

Ken Pullen, A CROOKED PATH, Monday, August 7th, 2023

New Atheists allowed the transgender cult to begin. Christianity can now end it

07 August 2023

By Tim Stanley

Reprinted from The Telegraph

We all love a repentant sinner. After a decade of encouraging the transgender cult, the elite has realised that it’s a dreadful idea and is nimbly backing away. Self-ID is out; the Tavistock clinic is closing. Gender services will return via NHS England, but with a minimum age of seven – just in time for one’s first communion.

The Tavistock Centre in London © Provided by The Telegraph

But don’t let the powerful tell you the transgender agenda was a one-off mistake, a wrong-turn down a blind alley from which we can reverse. It was, and remains, our direction of travel. It’s the consequence of tearing up the old maps by which we once lived, inviting us to plot our own chaotic routes to nowhere. Yes, I blame Richard Dawkins for a lot.

I recently stumbled upon a popular online video of the philosopher Peter Boghossian interviewing the journalist Helen Joyce about what Joyce regards as the transgender madness. He notes that the two of them were once supporters of the New Atheism – the noughties movement, spearheaded by Dawkins, that sought to discredit religion.

Do you ever wonder, he asks, if we were wrong? Wrong, because the “vast majority” of New Atheists went on to become fanatically woke. Even Dawkins, who insists sex is a biological reality, has been mildly cancelled; the American Humanist Association took away his humanist of the year award. Could it be, Boghossian suggests, that without religion, people “go to crazy town” and “believe things even far more out there than walking on water”?

Well, he can’t say he wasn’t warned! The key error of the New Atheists was to insist that all faith is equally irrational, that if you open the door to just a bit of theology, you’ll end up with fundamentalism. Refusing to take seriously what they regarded as a fantasy, they failed to appreciate the difference between, say, al-Qaeda and Anglicanism. Baby, bathwater; it was all thrown out.

Had they done the lightest of reading, they’d have realised Christianity was influenced by Greek philosophy; that it experienced a Renaissance and a Reformation; engaged creatively with the Enlightenment; and provided the philosophical foundation for liberal democracy, while holding it together by encouraging us to be law abiding or compassionate. After two thousand years, the Christian church has a contribution to make to discourse; it might even act as a referee, gently discouraging false ideas and providing intellectual support to the good.

And yet, today, the Christian clergy is almost silent on the transgender agenda. Why? Cowardice. A sense that it’s no longer their place. The church did plenty of harm to its own reputation, no doubt, but New Atheism also spread the notion among my age group that religion is wholly unreasonable and thus totally irrelevant, a claim it pursued with a zeal bordering on the religious. Young adults were encouraged to make videos denouncing the faith they were raised in. People were publicly de-baptised with blow-dryers. Boghossian was associated with “street epistemology”, a mission whereby sceptics stopped Christians in the street and interrogated their beliefs.

It all must have seemed jolly clever. The problem, however, is that atheism can only take something away; once the old faith is gone, it offers nothing to fill the void. Yet some atheists acknowledge that human beings consistently demonstrate a need to believe in something beyond themselves, conceding that this might serve an evolutionary purpose. Whatever the cause of our curious instinct to put our hands together for gods, dictators or Gary Lineker, we can now see that a generation that doesn’t look outwards, towards God, looks inwards, to itself. The defining spirit of our time is self-obsession; neurosis, self-actualisation, the triumph of mind over matter. What I want, I must have. What I wish to be, I can become.

Again, many of the loudest critics of the transgender movement were responsible for creating the fractured culture they now hate. Feminists said gender was a prison we needed to escape; queer theorists that sexuality is a spectrum to be joyously cruised. Along with the New Atheists, they tore up the old rules in the expectation that once given freedom, we’d mature into it and become sophisticated navigators of our own destiny. Instead, we resemble sailors lost on a stormy sea – and watching the prophets of older revolutions running about in a panic is most amusing.

Some of them have become allies of the reactionaries they once railed against. Dawkins now enjoys a growing audience among social conservatives, touring studios, preaching that male and female are a concrete thing – demonstrating that the religious and the hyper-rational have something in common after all. We both believe nature matters.

There’s a moment in the Boghossian/Joyce interview when the philosopher asks what sex is, and the journalist poetically explains that male and female are a genetic code programmed into every cell and transmitted through millions of years of evolution. It reinforced that Genesis could be read as a metaphor for evolution, or even vice-versa. Christians typically approach science as the study of God’s design, and thus male and female are not simply categories on paper – a matter of language – but a reality created for a purpose. The body is entwined with the soul/personality. The idea that the two are separate is a heresy Christianity dismissed centuries ago.

Therefore, denying the realities of sex spells misery for individuals while also undermining social cohesion, for we lose a common understanding of what words mean. Our new culture says that truth is subjective, that what matters is lived experience; two plus two might equal four to you, five to me. But science and religion search for truth on the assumption that it is objective and of universal meaning. There is the basis in that commonality for a dialogue that is far more sophisticated and enriching than the one we had in the past when Dawkins toured Lourdes and said it was far-fetched.

Without an honest conversation, we are doomed to repeat the mistake of privileging feeling over fact, for fear of causing offence. To return to the NHS’s approach to gender, a minimum age on treatment isn’t good enough. Do we believe that human beings can change their sex with medical intervention? I say, as a rule, “no”. And by establishing this, we can accept, love and support those who happen to break it.