“It is to be believed because it is absurd.” Tertullian, De Carne Christi (5.4).
“The absurd is a category, the negative criterion, of the divine or of the relationship to the divine. When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd — faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing which masters the absurd.” Soren Kierkegaard, Journals of Søren Kierkegaard X6B 79
Remember last week when TV’s Hercules, Kevin Sorbo, star of God is Not Dead, wondered why atheists are so angry about something they don’t believe in? He and false prophet Rick Wiles feel they have found the answer.
Wiles, you may remember, is the guy who said recently that America is turning into a godless Pagan cesspool of Free Mason fascism, and even threw the Illuminati into the pot, as he came to the determination that the Obama administration is the “Obamanista communist regime.” Sorbo is the guy who called the people of Ferguson “losers and animals” and then said he was taken out of context.
So you smell what I’m cooking when I say that putting Sorbo together with Rick Wiles almost produces one complete brain and a semi-coherent thought. Putting this embarrassment of riches together, they squeezed out the idea that atheists are angry because they know God exists and hate him for “judging how they live their life.”
Listen courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
Wiles: “The truth is, they know he exists and they hate him. That’s what it’s all about.”
Sorbo: “That’s exactly what it is. I know these guys must believe in something, otherwise they wouldn’t get so angry about it and they don’t like the fact that there is a higher power out there judging how they live their life.”
The meeting of the two men makes Lloyd and Harry in Dumb and Dumber look like Francis Bacon and Galileo in comparison. It is hardly a surprise then that the intellectually-challenged duo clicked on all broken cylinders. Wiles said he doesn’t believe in the tooth fairy, he said, “but I don’t spend all my time from trying to stop people from believing in the Tooth Fairy.”
No, but you do spend all your time trying to convince others to believe in the tooth fairy. And why is that, exactly? After all, I believe in my gods too but I don’t care if anybody else does.
Robert Pirsig makes an interesting observation in the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), that people only get fanatical about things they don’t really believe in: nobody is extreme about the sun coming up. They know this will happen:
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
What people like Sorbo and Wiles are doing through their own fanatical devotion to the tooth fairy is masking their own doubt in its existence. They care about what atheists believe, even obsess about it, because each person who disbelieves, particularly, each person who disbelieves and succeeds, is a threat to their own tenuous belief.
It is not atheists who are obsessed with proving the tooth fairy doesn’t exist, but Sorbo and Wiles with proving he does.
There is a reason that in times of doubt, when science is pushing back the veil of the supernatural, apologetics become such big business. Fanatics want to be convinced they are not wasting their time, that they have not made a catastrophic error in judgment.
Sorbo and Wiles want to be convinced.
What this all comes down to, in other words, is not the anger of atheists bur rather the anger of Kevin Sorbo; that when Kevin Sorbo complains atheists are angry because they know God exists, what it means is that Kevin Sorbo is angry because he doubts God exists.
- Resistance Leader Maxine Waters Receives Standing Ovation at MTV Movie Awards - Mon, May 8th, 2017
- A Desperate Trump Lashes Out As Sally Yates Prepares to Testify - Mon, May 8th, 2017
- Idaho Republican Claims ‘Nobody Dies Because They Don’t Have Access to Health Care’ - Mon, May 8th, 2017
