Engaging with Atheists: Understanding their world; sharing good news by Robertson David

Author:Robertson, David [Robertson, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781909919136
Publisher: The Good Book Company
Published: 2014-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

7. Freedom or repression

Human beings have been offered freedom by those who wish them harm many times. It never works out. Take for example the notion of sexual “liberation”. This was not something invented in California in the 1960s. The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) wrote an infamous book entitled Philosophy in the Bedroom, in which he envisaged a 15-year-old nun escaping from the oppression of faith in God who “discovers all kinds of sexual delights, sodomy, incest and flagellation…”. The link was clear: atheism made sexual experimentation legitimate and interesting.

But this narrative ignores the fact that the atheist version of sexual morality is itself incredibly repressive and harmful. Atheism finds it very difficult to have an absolute morality, and as a result morality, and especially sexual morality, is reduced to the dictum “as long as it does no harm”. But who is to determine what harm is? If I sleep with someone else’s wife, does that not do harm? Does sexual promiscuity not do harm?

After a debate on same-sex couples adopting (at that point, not long ago, same-sex marriage seemed unthinkable), my opponent and I were approached by several gay activists. During the course of the conversation, I was accused of repressing and abusing my children, who were then eight and six years old. Why? Because I did not allow them to experiment sexually! They proudly told me that if they were babysitting my children, then they would have no qualms in encouraging them to sexually explore their bodies.

To be fair my opponent in the debate was horrified by his “allies” and completely disowned them. But at least they were consistent. The paradox is that modern sexual “liberation” does not lead to freedom, but rather, to disease, distortion and destruction. By contrast, the Christian perspective is truly liberating. Again, we Christians need to reclaim God’s gift of sex, and set it in the context of God’s world and the purpose for which he gave it.

Every now and then you come across a secular columnist who is more prescient than many Christian commentators. For example, take this from Hephzibah Anderson, writing about how turning sex into mere biology has done so much damage.

In banishing religions from our intimate affairs over the past century, we’ve let science in, neutering and depersonalizing our passions by explaining them away as biological urges over which we have no real control. We have misplaced the human element of love.7

Our society has its own litmus tests of good and evil. Currently the most predominant is the attitude towards homosexuality and same-sex marriage. The perception of Christianity as homophobic, repressive and intolerant is one that does a great deal of damage, not least because there is an element of truth in it.

Of course there have been those who have misused their status as Christians, or who have warped Christian teaching in order to repress and suppress. But still we all agree that there are some things that should be repressed. Your urge to murder your neighbour as they blast out rave music at three in the morning needs to be repressed.

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