from Richard Bewes' "Seven steps for atheists"
5. Show us your virtues
It would be a help if you can show us around atheistic youth clubs and camps and summer houseparties and any work you may be doing among orphans; let’s see your family and play groups, and community centres. Could you take us on a tour of your work among the down-and-outs and the homeless, and your equivalent of the Salvation Army’s soup kitchens? And your centres for Aids sufferers? And the hospice movement – had you thought of getting any homes established, and staffing them yourselves?
And – if we can be really adventurous – take us abroad for a peep at your leprosariums? I remember meeting Dr. Dennis Burkitt (of the Burkitt Lymphoma fame) out in Tanzania. He told me that he had been all over the tropics. Every single one of the leprosy hospitals he had ever visited were begun and run by Christians. Surely there must be one, run by an atheist organisation?
You see, I’m not absolutely sure that we have seen all that you have done, or could do, for suffering humanity. It’s only my tip….
7. Let’s see some joy in your lifestyle
Oh we Christians have sometimes been accused of being kill-joys! Perhaps that has occurred when our beliefs have become rigidly nominal and mechanical. But visit a community which bears a close and personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and I would then ask whether you too have an infectious enthusiasm and joy that overspill with songs, love and practical service into the surrounding society, as theirs do, in community after community, in country after country – even when the government and the media try to shut down their operation. We have millions of martyrs on our roll of honour. I have known some of them. They were honoured to die for Christ. How far would you be prepared to be killed for your beliefs?
Are your prophets and your champions happy people? Do they come across that way? For they – and you also – will certainly need to show some joy, if others are to be drawn like a magnet into the sheer satisfaction of an atheistic world-view that really holds together and makes sense of the universe!
(Thanks Paul)
It would be a help if you can show us around atheistic youth clubs and camps and summer houseparties and any work you may be doing among orphans; let’s see your family and play groups, and community centres. Could you take us on a tour of your work among the down-and-outs and the homeless, and your equivalent of the Salvation Army’s soup kitchens? And your centres for Aids sufferers? And the hospice movement – had you thought of getting any homes established, and staffing them yourselves?
And – if we can be really adventurous – take us abroad for a peep at your leprosariums? I remember meeting Dr. Dennis Burkitt (of the Burkitt Lymphoma fame) out in Tanzania. He told me that he had been all over the tropics. Every single one of the leprosy hospitals he had ever visited were begun and run by Christians. Surely there must be one, run by an atheist organisation?
You see, I’m not absolutely sure that we have seen all that you have done, or could do, for suffering humanity. It’s only my tip….
7. Let’s see some joy in your lifestyle
Oh we Christians have sometimes been accused of being kill-joys! Perhaps that has occurred when our beliefs have become rigidly nominal and mechanical. But visit a community which bears a close and personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and I would then ask whether you too have an infectious enthusiasm and joy that overspill with songs, love and practical service into the surrounding society, as theirs do, in community after community, in country after country – even when the government and the media try to shut down their operation. We have millions of martyrs on our roll of honour. I have known some of them. They were honoured to die for Christ. How far would you be prepared to be killed for your beliefs?
Are your prophets and your champions happy people? Do they come across that way? For they – and you also – will certainly need to show some joy, if others are to be drawn like a magnet into the sheer satisfaction of an atheistic world-view that really holds together and makes sense of the universe!
(Thanks Paul)
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