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Before I broach the subject, I feel I need to register my own opinions on the whole existence of God debate: Yes, I believe in God, that he had a son of the name of Jesus who died on a cross to redeem the human race and all the other things that you can read in the Apostle’s Creed, and my childhood as the son of a minister was not enough to dissuade me of those ideas.

Which is to say, I know what side I’m on.

Recently, it seems that hundreds of books are coming out every few days attacking the idea of religion and of an all-powerful deity. It’s like the world’s atheists all got together, went on a bender and made a bet about who could made the most people angry by attacking the most cherished ideas of millions of people all over the world.

Probably the two biggest releases of the bunch are “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins and “God is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens. Clearly, these guys are not pulling their punches.

Both authors argue that the idea of a omnipotent being beyond human comprehension that created the world and looks after the affairs of the beings who live on it is, in fact, completely nonsensical. They see religion, at best, as a belief system that arose from primitive societies that, without access to modern scientific thought, created beings who explained away all the natural processes of the world. At worst, they see it as a cancer on society that prevents scientific progress, enslaves man’s mind to false and ancient precepts and is the cause of much of the suffering of the world.

What I wonder is why these books are coming out now. After all, atheism and its awkward, indecisive cousin agnosticism have been around a long time. Tracts and books on such subjects have come out before, especially as Darwin’s evolution thoughts gave such thinkers a convenient backdrop for their literally godless worldview. Yet why have such books come so quickly in the past few months?

The “War on Terror” is certainly part of the equation. The clash of societies present in the conflict is easy to boil down to Islam versus Christianity, even if the Islam practiced by the terrorists is a twisted, darkened theology and much of the Western world is now only Christian by tradition, not belief.

Yet a war based on religious thoughts gives writers like Dawkins and Hitchens a way to scapegoat religion as the cause of wars, a ploy common since the Crusades. Let’s just forget the atheistic credo of communism that helped cause the Cold War, shall we?

What atheism often ignores in its laying of the blame for violence on religious grounds is both the presence of violence in any human mind — including the godless one — and the creation of morality through religion that sees such violence as wrong.

I doubt my short piece here would convince any self-confident atheist to abandon their lack of belief, but it is important that those who cling to faith be able to argue against such thought. There is a God, of that I am sure, and He smiles upon those who can defend him with rational though and logic, not just empty platitudes. It’s a lesson we could all take to heart.

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