Reading the linked article helped bring focus to something that’s been rattling around in my head for a while.
The most consistent argument against Christianity on the part of atheists is the Problem of Suffering, i.e., why would a good and loving God allow unmerited suffering?
I think there are many valid responses to that, and if one assumes a Christian worldview, it really ceases to be a problem; this world is a crucible and proving ground for the next one, where the good will be rewarded and the evil punished. A problem for the atheist in arguing this viewpoint is that they really don’t have an effective countervailing alternative, other than the obvious one: We have one life, this is it, suffering has no meaning other than as a physiological response, life sucks and then you die, and that’s it. This limited perspective on life has obvious problems as a recruiting tool for the secularist worldview.
Increasingly, I’ve noticed that secularists do have an answer for the problem of suffering: The Culture of Death.
Are people in persistent pain? Use the medical establishment to kill them. Does an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy create the possibility of hardship or anxiety for the mother, or want to avoid the messy cost and pain of childbirth? Use the medical establishment, or a pill obtained from an anonymous vending machine, to kill the life that was created. Are old people a drain on medical resources? Reduce the available medical options available to them under state-run health care plans, and increase their mortality. Is overpopulation seen as a problem? Prevent any lives from being born by flooding a woman’s body with artificial hormones throughout the period of fertility, and abort any pregnancies that may slip through the cracks. Could a baby be born deformed or mentally handicapped, or of a gender that is not desired by the parents? Scrape out the life or scramble it and vacuum it out of the uterus. In the meantime, the surviving organisms can seek out whatever stimuli give them a pleasurable physical or psychological stimuli while awaiting the inevitable termination of consciousness through age, disease, or violent accident, and laissez les bons temps rouler!
If your worldview is that there is nothing on the Other Side, and the quality of life is not what you (or someone who claims to speak for you) desires, why not hasten the ultimate end of all pain?
Contrast this with the Christian view of suffering: it is inevitable throughout life, so rather than deny it or seek to remove any possibility of continued suffering through hastening death, we ameliorate its effects as best we can through acts of charity to others, and enter into it personally and offer it up as an act of union and discipleship with a crucified Master, with the knowledge that an earthbound perspective is false and limited.
The latter is a harder path in some ways, but I think a better one.
