There’s a reason that the first openly bisexual senator did not take her oath on the Bible. There’s a reason that an atheist website rebuked me for “misgendering” someone. Simply stated, to embrace the God of the Bible means to embrace His standards. To reject the God of the Bible means to reject His standards. Conversely, to reject His standards is to reject Him. This is really not rocket science.

Breitbart reported that, “Newly elected Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema refused to be sworn in on a Bible, opting, instead, to place her right hand on a book of laws, including the U.S Constitution and the Arizona Constitution.”

It is no coincidence that she is our first openly bisexual senator as well as the only member of the U.S. Senate who has no religious affiliation.

This doesn’t mean that she is a terrible person or that she has no moral values at all. And it doesn’t mean that she cannot serve the government. Of course not. There is no religious test for leadership either way (in other words, you can’t be disqualified for being a Christian or disqualified for not being a Christian).

But it does mean that her lifestyle and identity are at odds with the God of the Bible, hence her lack of religious affiliation and her refusal to swear in on the Bible. That is perfectly consistent.

Over at the “Friendly Atheist” site, a site which is certainly atheistic if not always friendly, Sarahbeth Caplin wrote an article titled, “Christian Writer Deliberately Misgenders Trans Woman to Defy ‘Social Madness.’” She accuses me of “faith-based bigotry masquerading as Christian love.”

As for one of the websites which published my article, she said this: “The folks at Charisma are eager to start off the new year with yet more doses of the only things they have to offer: fear-mongering and anti-LGBTQ bigotry.” (See here for my article.)

The truth be told, it is not bigotry to affirm biological realities, and the average transgender activist does not have science on his or her side. (By this I mean that the average person identifying as transgender is clearly of one biological/chromosomal sex but identifies as the opposite.)

Yet an atheist website that certainly claims to be rational and science-based embraces transgender activism with enthusiasm, vilifying those who reject it. Why?

And why is it that, according to a Pew Research poll, 92 percent of American atheists support same-sex “marriage”? Or, according to this same poll, 87 percent of these atheists believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases?

A recent article by Sally Hunt on the Friendly Atheist website critiques the video arguments of pro-life atheist Terrisa Bukovinac. Hunt writes, “I watched [the video]. I’m not convinced. And that’s because it seems abundantly clear that the atheist ‘pro-life’ argument is identical to the religious one, except Bukovinac didn’t invoke ‘God’ throughout the monologue. Both arguments are logically flawed, though. An atheist who opposes abortion essentially says Abortion should be illegal because of my feelings, while a religious person would say Abortion should be illegal because of my feelings, which also happens to be what God wants.”

Obviously, Hunt misrepresents why Bible believing Christians so strongly oppose abortion. It’s not that we have our feelings, which happen to be what God wants too. Instead, we are convinced by God and His Word that the baby in the womb is a real human being, and therefore we align our feelings with the Word.

Hunt, however, rightly represents the atheistic worldview by stating, “Not every form of life is inherently precious, sacred, and valuable. That includes human forms of life.” Indeed, she states, “To say otherwise is arguably a religious position. (It’s religious people who believe we possess souls from conception thanks to God.)”

And with that observation, we come full circle to our premise: If we fail to recognize God and His Word, we will inevitably stray from biblical morality. We will reject the idea that He created us male and female. We will reject the idea that men and women are uniquely fashioned for each other. We will reject the idea that human life is sacred, beginning in the womb. And we will certainly reject the idea that human beings are created in the image of God, with all that implies.

That’s why I have argued that the only type of conservatism that can bring lasting change to America is a biblically-based, God centered conservatism. All other efforts will fall short in the end.

It is true that there “is far too much diversity among both atheists and theists to assume that they stand on opposite sides of any particular issue.”

But it is also true that general patterns apply and that the worldview of an atheist will be a very different than the worldview of a Bible-based theist. And that means that any true moral transformation in America will start with a “back to God” movement. It is the absence of God that is our greatest problem today.

This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org

~Correction/Update: Although Neuqua Valley High School still lists Hemant Mehta on its Math Department faculty webpage, he no longer works there. Linked screenshot below* was taken today, Dec. 19, 2014.~

A new Chicago-area billboard campaign from the aggressively offensive Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) exposes again this organization’s hostility to and childish misunderstanding of Christian faith.

The FFRF has announced that eleven billboards are going up with these special holiday messages:

• “Kindness comes from altruism, not from seeking divine reward.”
• “We are here to challenge you to think for yourself.”
• “I believe in reason and logic!”
• “Equality for all shouldn’t be constrained by any religion.”
• “Free of faith, fear and superstition”
• “I put my faith in science.”
• And this featuring Neuqua Valley High School math teacher* Hemant Mehta (aka the “Friendly Atheist”): “I’d rather put my faith in me.” (It’s curious that the billboard doesn’t identify Mehta as a public high school teacher. To learn more about Mehta, click here, here, and here.)

A few brief responses to the FFRF’s shallow slogans:

1. Kind acts are “friendly, generous, warmhearted, charitable, generous, humane, and/or considerate acts.” Altruism is unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Kind acts may be motivated by ignoble, selfish sentiments—perhaps even a wrong theological belief that one earns salvation through one’s actions. But kind acts can also be motivated by altruism that derives from faith in Christ.

Kindness can be the result of the regeneration that God performs in the hearts of believers, which deracinates selfishness and naturally results in desires more in line with God’s nature. Kindness can result from an overflowing of thankfulness for God’s great gift of salvation, which makes followers of Christ love and give more unselfishly, often even sacrificially.  They act kindly and altruistically not to gain reward but to thank God and to express his love to others.

2. Finding the Old and New Testament writers to be persuasive no more constitutes a failure to “think for yourself” than does finding the ideas of Bertrand Russell, John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, or Richard Dawkins persuasive. And believing that reality is not exclusively material does not constitute a failure to think logically.

Are the members of the FFRF actually arguing that Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Barth,C.S. Lewis, G.E.M. Anscombe, Pope Benedict XVI, John Finnis, Hadley Arkes, Alvin Plantinga, D.A. Carson, Eleonore Stump, N.T. Wright, William Lane Craig, Francesca Aran Murphy, Doug Wilson, Robert George, Francis Beckwith, David Bentley Hart, and Alex Pruss did or do not think for themselves and/or that they reject reason and logic?

3. Equality—properly understood—is advanced by Christian faith. Equality demands treating like things alike, and increasingly both those who embrace an atheistic scientific materialism and people who embrace heterodoxy are incapable of recognizing fundamental truths—including even facts—about human nature. Therefore, they are incapable of identifying which phenomena are in reality alike.

4. First, one can make an argument that those who most fear, for example, death are those who have an unproven faith in the non-existence of an afterlife.  Second, a superstition is “a belief held in spite of evidence to the contrary.” As such, the Christian faith does not constitute a superstition, because there is ample evidence for the existence of God and his human incarnation, Jesus Christ. Atheists reject the evidence based on their a priori assumptions about what constitutes evidence.

5. Christians too put their faith in science. Christians, including Christian scientists, trust and have confidence that science proves what it can prove. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of an immaterial reality. And science cannot prove whether altruistic acts are objectively morally good acts or merely acts that humans have evolved to believe are objectively good because such a belief serves to enhance survival.

6. Faith in self alone reflects the kind of hubris that leads more often to intellectual and moral error than it does to altruism.

“The Christmas message is that there is hope for a ruined humanity—hope of pardon, hope of peace with God, hope of glory—because at the Father’s will Jesus Christ became poor, and was born in a stable so that thirty years later He might hang on a cross.” ~J.I.Packer

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On Wednesday, Erika Wurst, reporter for the Sun Times Beacon-News wrote an article about East Aurora High School’s recently adopted policy on gender confusion. In it Wurst quoted a “suburban high school math teacher” who blogged favorably about the policy, but curiously, she didn’t provide his name. His name is Hemant Mehta, also known as “the Friendly Atheist.” Although I am loathe to send anyone to his blog, I think readers deserved to know who exactly the math teacher is whom Wurst quoted. Knowing who he is puts his comments in the proper perspective. 

If you spend any time on Mehta’s blog, you will find that he promotes both atheism and the extraordinarily obscene and hateful religious bigot Dan Savage. In addition, Mehta, who is a Neuqua Valley High School math teacher, regularly uses profane and obscene language. Mehta’s endorsement of the East Aurora High School policy provides further evidence that it’s bad policy. 

It’s understandable why Wurst would not want to provide attribution for a source like Mehta, but such an omission is not good journalism.