Acceptance speech delivered by Barak Lurie at the American Freedom Alliance and Council for Democracy and Tolerance annual "Heroes of Conscience" dinner Sunday, June 7, 2009 at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum in Simi Valley.
Thank you so much for this honor.
You know if there is one thing I have struggled with all my life it’s God, and where values actually come from. I was an atheist for half my life. I still remember my brother and I debating God’s existence: I taking the atheist position, and he the side of God. We knew it all, because I was 11 and he was 13. I had figured it all out: because you cannot feel, hear or see God, well he just didn’t exist. I believed religion was the cause of most of the world’s evils. God is a security blanket to satisfy our primordial instinct for order, and so forth.
I was good – very good. I used evidence, persuasion and logic, which I have always loved, and which I love today in my practice of law.
Later on, I set out to prove myself through my honor’s thesis in college. I was intrigued bythe language I had stumbled upon from Dostoevsky, who said: “If there were no god it would be necessary to invent him.” This resonated well with me, to show man’s craving for God as silly and desperate. The problem was that I had horribly misinterpreted his meaning, and so spent months going the opposite way.
Thank God that I did. I soon read The Brothers Karamazov, and that became a life-changing event for me. That book shakes you, it enters your mind and picks you apart. More importantly, it awoke me to atheism’s dangers.
Dangerous? What do I mean by this? I mean that I began to see the world as it actually is: that free will exists, and that – logically – free will and freedom comes from – and can only come from -- God. I also had always believed that there was good and evil in the world. But without God, there are only opinions.
Let me return to my brother for a moment: You would think he would be happy that I now believe in God, but it turns out he’s the atheist now. We recently had a discussion about it, and I love that man deeply. But as we spoke, I realized he was still pushing little more than what I had argued to him when I was 11. It’s not his fault: It’s because atheism is emptiness. It is not so much an ideology, as it is a vacuum. And it always will be.
But, as my brother and atheists insist, religion has been responsible for so many murders and other cruel injustices – How do I justify that? Wouldn’t we be better off with a godless government for a change – one based on realism and logic? Have we not outgrown religion?
I thought about it, and finally said: Yeah, you know there really are no examples of such an atheistic society, to see how it might fare. But then I thought: Well, wait a minute: there was little known period of time I recalled where atheistic governments actually did rule: It was called the 20th century. During that time, we had Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Idi Amin, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jung Il. All of them were godless societies. And the one thing they all had in common was that they were all extraordinary killing machines. Whatever you could point to in religion’s history, Atheism beats religion for cruelty and mayhem, hands down.
And in such a short period of time, too: Combined, these high-minded men of atheism killed almost 100 million people in the span of 20 years. Top that, religion. So don’t let anyone fool you with their contemptuous references to dark periods in religious history, as if rattling off a quick reference to the Inquisition and the Crusades ends all discussion. In religion, mayhem is the exception. In atheism, mayhem is the rule.
And it was that realization that prompted me to start my present book: “Atheism Kills.” Its very premise is that Atheism necessarily leads to killing. Why? By definition atheism has no values or truths. And so truths can change with the whims of whoever is in power. Like a boat without an anchor, never realizing that it is in fact drifting aimlessly.
Even the atheist recognizes the human instinct for God. In fact, the atheist will mock that instinct as unnecessary, like our appendix or tonsils. But powerful it is, and a government without God must still deal with that instinct – or better yet, exploit it. What better way than to make the government itself that new God? That’s why in almost all the atheistic societies, past and present, you will always see building-sized billboards everywhere, glorifying their messiah du jour.
As G. K. Chesterton once said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything." And so as atheism gains traction, the greater the flocking to false gods. False gods like communism, fascism, radical environmentalism, and so forth. But they each have their blind followers; they each have their messiahs. And they each have their willing executioners: all you need is to give them the sense of purpose they crave so much.
Europe has largely abandoned the Judeo-Christian God. As for America, we are still holding onto God’s hand as he dangles over the cliff, but we wonder why we are doing so. If you want evidence of this – and as I said I am a man of evidence -- You could just look at inauguration speeches from American presidents. In the past 50 years, you’d see a precipitous decline in how often they mention God. In fact, one recent president went even further and disavowed that we are a Judeo-Christian nation altogether. To listen to him and other scholars in my own profession, faith is something that this country merely tolerated over the past 233 years – not the very thing that propelled it to its greatness.
So I sound the clarion call: Atheism is on the rise, and Atheism kills. You may not worry so much right now: after all, society seems to remain intact for now. But as Dennis Prager has commented: this is like seeing the roses just after the florist cuts them: they may seem beautiful and even last a few days. But make no mistake: without the nutrients necessary to continue their lives, they are going to wither. They are going to rot. And if we continue to disavow or disregard our Judeo-Christian heritage, it will take only two generations at most before we see our freedom wither.
Freedom is not free; it requires fighting. But if there is no higher purpose, who will be up to the task?
So watch out for this atheism thing. Reject it outright and challenge it whenever you hear it. Atheism kills. It creates only a vacuum for dictatorships or for the ever-increasing threat of Islamo-fascism. Choose your poison.
We must fight, all of us. For that, there is hard work: we need to develop the very same backbone of our predecessors – the kind of backbone of those who died to give us our freedom in 1776, the kind of those who said no to slavery in 1861, the kind who said no to Hitler and Fascism in 1941, and the kind who said no to the evil Soviet empire in 1983.
It is because I believe in this so fiercely that I support the AFA: it is to me a great supporter of Judeo-Christian values, and understands their imperative in the world. It is hopefully one of the roots that will continue to nourish our beautiful rose.
And a special recognition to Avi Davis: Avi, thank you for your extraordinary and tireless efforts and for all that you have done with the AFA. You are exactly the kind of fighter I am talking about.
Thank you, all.