the duck of reason

I'm currently converting to Christianity, so the following may be a different perspective from others'. At least it's new for me. During the video, especially near the end, one line from my limited grasp of Scripture kept ringing in my head. When Pontius Pilate asks the Jews if their King is to be crucified, the chief priests cry "We have no King but Caesar!". Their rejection of Christ is simultaneously the clinging to Caesar's authority (to kill, no less). I cannot think of a better illustration of Stefan's point that there are people exchanging God for government. WasatchMan said: > Atheism is a new cultural phenomenon which has greatly expanded due to the Information Age. It is the rebellious teenager who has woken up one day and realized that his parents rules are authoritarian, abusive, and manipulative and decides that he is no longer subject to their rules. However, there is no other direction available to him to fill that void. He becomes the rebel without a cause. He finds his new rules in other lost teenagers, in the nihilistic programming of the media, in his leftist teacher who tells him everything is relative and there is no right or preferable values, well except altruism of course. The void left by his authoritarian parents is filled by chance and by whatever other ideological structure is already formed to step in. I can't argue with that, but I'd like to suggest something else is at play, at least with leftist atheists. Yes, part of this is a rejection of religion. However, I think it is entwined with a rejection of reality. Whether God and reality can truly be divorced I'll leave alone, because we don't need to go that far. Let's just work with the "denial of reality" angle. I expect the "rebellious teenager" WasatchMan mentions would chafe at anyone or any "thing" (reality) telling him what is, and thereby informing him what he should do. There was a saying in my youth: "I reject your reality and substitute my own." It was a joke back then, but I think it's a common modus operandi today. Then the void left by his authoritarian parents isn't just filled by chance, etc. The void left by reality is fantasy, delusion. Now he is free to ignore sexual differences, racial differences, cultural differences, etc. Men can go into the women's restroom as long as they "identify" as female. The abnormal is to be considered normal, and how dare anyone say otherwise. Government programs will produce the claimed results. Taxation isn't theft. Killing isn't murder if you wear a uniform. The list goes on, and they are topics naturally covered in FDR podcasts. Stefan focuses on facts, reason, and evidence. That leads him head-on against the left and leftist atheists. To be more succinct, I suggest that (many) leftist atheists are not necessarily atheists first who were later subsumed into the left. Instead, I think these people are at least superficially individualistic, but they do not universalize. They are also disconnected from reality, and perhaps affluence facilitates this disconnect. They deny the more obvious external controlling factors (God, tradition, culture). And sooner or later, as the world doesn't match their fantasy and others don't necessarily play along, they resort to the State for enforcement and coercion. They may still claim to be atheist as they bow to Caesar. WasatchMan later said: > Christianity made up 86% of the US population in 1990, 78.6% in 2001, 70.6% in 2014 therefore the dominant cultural force we are living today came from a Christian dominated culture. Wouldn't it make more sense to say that the cultural changes we see today coincide with the decline of Christianity? If anything, I think the numbers count against your argument, and we are living with the diminishing remnant of a Christian-influenced culture.