Godlessness and Religion

Crime statistics for England in the 20th century: As Christianity's influence waned, crime exploded

When the apostle Paul revealed that "there will be terrible times" (2 Timothy 3:1) throughout the world during the last days, he also mentioned something that explains why evil will prevail in the end times.

Paul wrote that many folks will have "a form of godliness" (2 Timothy 3:5) but without any power. What does that mean? It means that godliness lacking God's supernatural power is useless. It's empty, hollow and irrelevant.

There's a proper term for this type of godliness and it's called religion. Unlike true faith, religion is cold, hard, mechanical, repetitive and cultural. And it comes from man rather than God. 

While true faith challenges its adherents to believe in and fear God based upon the available evidence, religion mandates blind loyalty to a structured man-made belief system along with its customs, fetishes, idols, traditions and rituals.

Religion is the reason why western civilization is dying a slow, methodical moral death. Religion only works absent a competing secular belief system. For many centuries, religion went unchallenged in the west until the advent of Charles Darwin and his godless theory of evolution.

When Darwin published his Origin of the Species in 1859, a terrible book that attempted to explain the existence of life without God, it was poorly received in the science community because it was filled with lies, myths, half-truths and untested theories. 

Nevertheless, Darwin's theory gained traction because it sounded more logical to the natural ear than talking serpents, man-eating whales and a global flood. After all, you can see fossils and the skeletal remains of dinosaurs, but you can't see God. 

And for nearly a century, Darwin's dubious theory went virtually unchallenged until the advent of microbiology. What's so significant about microbiology? It allowed us to examine the genetic structure of the living cell. 

What that examination revealed was a vast network of DNA that is so complex that only a fool would believe that such a network came about by some random, unintelligent process. That network revealed design--the design of life created by an incredibly intelligent being who is God. 

And each living cell revealed the complexity of over 300,000 bits of DNA arranged in a specific order to allow the cell to function and multiply. To rearrange or even remove just a few of those tiny DNA bits would destroy the cell. 

Unfortunately, the Christian church in the west failed to take Darwinism seriously. Many church leaders not only believed that most people would continue to believe in God despite the growing threat from this nemesis, they were convinced that both Christianity and Darwinism could coexist peacefully.

And they were dead wrong. Why? Because Darwinism denies God. And religion can't provide an adequate explanation for God's existence nor make the Bible's revelation of man's corrupt sinful nature and his need for redemption relevant to the modern world.

Thus, when people no longer believe in God they don't believe that they're held morally accountable for their actions. And they certainly don't believe that there's eternal judgment awaiting them at death.

And so, there's a direct correlation between the decline of the Judeo-Christian influence in the western world and the rise in crime, lawlessness and depravity. What the western world desperately needs is a return to true God-centered faith, not more dead and decrepit religion. That always fails.

Or, as Paul so aptly put it: "I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith." (Romans 1:16-17)