O the Secular Outside is Frightening...

Recent news relates how a campaign is starting in London to pull ads promoting God off the side of the famous red, double-deck buses. Prominent among the protesters is Richard Dawkins, famed evolutionist and author of the "God Delusion". Apparently, the protesters are upset about messages posted by Christian groups that nonbelievers will go to hell, and they wish to counter with

"There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

Being a devout Catholic myself, I look at that statement with a mixture of amusement and disbelief. I know that they really want to say "There is no God", but could not pull that off because of the defensible public outrage. They can't make it a definitive statement because they don't have any proof there is no God. (Oh, they offer arguments against God, but believers aren't convinced any more than atheists are convinced about arguments for God.)

I can understand the atheists' dismay at the Christian message of "Believe or go to Hell", because that tends to be an abrasive statement. And it is partially misleading, because ultimately none of us make the decision as to someone else's eternal destination. That is truly between a person and God. But the message is partly right, as well, because a disbelief in God could very easily put a person's soul at risk. If Hell is the chosen eternal separation from God, proclaiming and trying to adhere to a disbelief in God is very risky.

The reason that I can qualify that even an atheist might not face eternal damnation is because he might be seeking the Truth, the justice, and righteousness that is God, but have a fundamentally mistaken notion of God. Because of this notion, he cannot in good conscience believe in God, but he would if he had the correct understanding.

Practically, though, it must seem that the above case is vanishingly rare. Too many atheists we come across don't want to believe in God because God interferes too much with their lives. Thus the "stop worrying and enjoy your life." They think God ruins all our fun.

(John Zmirak has some good articles here, here, here, and here on how God takes all the fun out of life.)

My complaint about the protesters' slogan, though, is not their denial of God. That's their prerogative, not mine. What irks me, though, is the "stop worrying and enjoy your life" part. I know for me, coming to an understanding of the nature of God and the teachings of the Catholic Church connected all the disparate pieces together that once upon a time seemed in odd and even contradictory juxtaposition. Coming home to my faith removed a huge amount of worry from my life. It gave my life meaning. It offered clear reasons why certain actions the religious always condemn are wrong. It offered clear solutions to problems that plagued my life and plague society as a whole. It isn't easy, by any means, following these teachings, and they do carry their own bundle of worries with them, but I'm fundamentally better off for my belief in God.

Absent that, how can I stop worrying? If this life is all there is, how can I but worry? How can I hope to make a good life, when a single stupid decision or even a freak accident can ruin everything? Consider the hurricanes that have ravaged our coast lines. Consider the financial crisis. Consider the terrorists in the world. Consider all the things we do in our lives that make relating to other people difficult if not impossible. With so many calamities that threaten to destroy our fragile, ephemeral existence, how can we but worry?

Indeed, I could go on to argue that as a society grows increasingly secular and people become increasingly agnostic if not outright atheist, they find themselves with a fundament anxiety they cannot shake. They seek to fill their lives with material possessions, emotional fulfillment, and physical pleasure in order to dilute the anxiety, or at least keep their minds off of it for the time being. As we progress away from God, we only become more keenly aware of something missing in our lives. The result? We devote our lives to toys, where having the latest video game console and a high-bandwidth internet connection is the most important aspect of our lives. Or we devote ourselves to pleasure, and fill our lives with rampant promiscuity, ever on the lookout for that perfect orgasm that will fulfill our lives--for the next thirty seconds. Or we sit before the TV and vicariously experience life from the couch with the remote in one hand and a bag of potato chips in the other. (Or it could be corn chips with salsa, like at my apartment.) And all of these things can be taken away from us at a moment's notice. Our toys can break, or be stolen, or be lost in an accident. Our fall lineup can be a total flop, and then we're stuck on reruns and the miserable boredom in that nothing new is on. Or we experience that orgasm, and then try to seek it again and again with new and different people (different sex, same sex, same age, different age, animal...), degrading those people to nothing more than a penetration device or an orifice.

No thanks. I'll keep God in my life, I'll explain time and again that in all likelihood God exists, and I'll even keep the worry that hell awaits me if I ultimately choose against God. There's less worry for me that way.