“Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith.” -Thomas Merton
Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt; they commit abominable acts;
there is no one who does good.
God looks down from heaven on humankind
to see if there are any who are wise,
who seek after God
They have all fallen away; they are all alike perverse;
there is no one who does good,
no, not one.
Have they no knowledge, those evildoers,
who eat up my people as they eat bread
and do not call upon God?
Psalm 53 bears a striking resemblance to Psalm 14. The part about “fools say in their heart there is no God” is often lifted out of its context and used as a weapon against non-theists. In both psalms, the context tells us that the fools in question are identified by their cruel and/or uncaring actions toward other people, i.e. “those evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread“
I know some atheists and agnostics who are far more observant of what James called “the royal law” than some self-professing Christians. Perhaps it is not the concept of God they have rejected as much as the concept of God as it is often presented.
As I understand God, God is not an angry (male) sky god ready to send down lightning bolts to those who don’t offer him proper fealty, or who believe the wrong things. My concept of God is best exemplified by the life and teachings of Jesus, whom the writer of Hebrews says is “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” I understand God to be the architect of the arc of the moral universe and, as Julian of Norwich envisioned, a “force of love moving through the universe that holds us fast and will never let us go.”
joantheexpatriatebaptist 