Atheism and Depravity

A Nazi concentration camp guard shoots a woman and her child

Atheists love to claim that religion has historically been responsible for centuries of injustice, bigotry and mass murder throughout the world.

While there's truth to that claim, consider that some of the worst tyrants and biggest mass murderers in modern history all shared something in common--they were atheists.

Who were some of these people? They were Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong, just to name a few. They not only hated religion, they hated those who believed in God and derived special pleasure from persecuting those folks. 

And they all embraced Charles Darwin's atheistic theory of evolution because that theory dismissed God as the author and creator of life and the physical universe.

What does the theory of evolution have to do with the spread of violence, depravity and mass murder across the world? Only this: If people are truly convinced that God doesn't exist, then they cannot be held morally accountable for their behavior during their lifetimes. 

Thus, if God doesn't exist, then such moral constraints as the 10 Commandments, Mosaic Law and the Gospel are nothing but human constructs that can be perverted, ignored or changed by those in power. If God doesn't exist, then death becomes meaningless and the ultimate escape from moral accountability and judgment for one's actions.

Though he lived nearly 2,000 years ago, the apostle Paul knew the evil nature that existed in all human beings. 

And he knew what human beings who reject God and His transcendent moral laws inevitably become. In his epistle to the early Roman church, Paul wrote this: "Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them." (Romans 1:28-32)

That's a pretty accurate description of people who reject God. And it's frightening.

Furthermore, Paul prophesied that the end time world would be filled with people like that. In his second letter to fellow apostle Timothy, Paul wrote this: But mark this: "There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God  having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people." (2 Timothy 3:1-5)

The increase in lawlessness and depravity throughout the world, that really began accelerating in the late 1940s, can be traced to the decline of the Judeo-Christian influence in the world, and particularly in the west. 

What's the reason for that decline? Because the Christian Church stopped contending for the faith and made itself irrelevant. A church that can no longer effectively explain the existence of God, the sinful human condition and mankind's need for redemption from that condition through Jesus Christ, is dead and utterly useless.

And just as dead men tell no tales, dead churches make no disciples. 

And tragically, wherever there's a spiritual vacuum created by a powerless church, something else comes in and fills that vacuum. And that something else is usually the deadly poison of godless humanism.