I want to talk today about the first chapter of my book. I talk about why evil happens in the first place.
Now you’ve heard this many times – where your friends who are atheists or agnostic say, “If there is a God, then why is there so much evil in the world?” That’s a great question, but it’s been discussed many times. Of course, many religious theorists have talked about this and they have answers to it. Most of the time it’s about free will and I agree with that. But it’s also very important to remember that the reason why evil happens, is because we LET it happen. We humans let evil happen. It’s not a question of God letting evil happen.
Let me give you a case in point: Hitler, for example, is the go-to issue. How could God exist if Hitler could happen?
Well ok. The fact is that we could have stopped Hitler at many points along the way and I go through in my book – this chapter – about how we could have stopped him well before 1941 – the beginning of our involvement in World War II.
We could have stopped him before September 1, 1939. We could have stopped him on many different occasions but instead he grew and grew and grew in power and then ultimately to the point where we, not only have to get involved, but it was not clear that we could actually win World War II at all.
We let the monster known as Hitler grow and flourish to the point where we almost lost our entire civilization. We let Hitler happen. God has nothing to do with it.
Ironically, it was because we lost our sense of God because of what happened in World War I that we decided that it’s best not to get involved in that European theater. And for that matter the Europeans themselves didn’t want to get involved. They so badly didn’t want to have another World War that in the process they got themselves the World War that they wanted to avoid – and in a multiple beyond their wildest imagination. This is the problem of evil. It’s not that God lets it happen. It’s that we let it happen.
Now, one of my favorite stories when I was a little kid – and I never thought I’d be saying it in connection with my books in the future – it’s the story of The Three Little Pigs. This simple story, where one pig doesn’t have a strong enough house and another pig also doesn’t have a very strong house and only the third pig – who builds it out of brick and mortar and really works hard at making sure that it’s sturdy – only he, the one with the brick house, is able to withstand the attack from the big, bad wolf. And the lesson there is not: How can we change the wolf? Maybe the big, bad wolf will understand our ways. Maybe he wants to be a community of the animal kingdom. You hear this nonsense and it’s just ain’t so. There are sometimes things that are just evil. The wolf, his mission, is to eat little pigs. The story is only about protecting the pigs and fortifying their houses. That’s it. If you don’t fortify your house, bad things will happen. And that is the essence of ATHEISM DESTROYS. We need to fortify our house and that means that we have the courage to understand what’s necessary to fight evil. We need to understand that evil grows and that without God, we don’t have that courage. To fight. To resist. To do the hard work of fighting evil. That’s my clarion call in ATHEISM DESTROYS. I’m Barak Lurie. Thanks for watching and we’ll talk with you next week.