The holiday — I mean Christmas — season is once again upon us and as has become every bit as much a holiday tradition as decorated trees or eggnog, the aggressive secularists are out in force to degrade the sacred season with all the non-religious fervor they can muster. Some call it the “War on Christmas.”

A group called American Atheists, for example, is out with this little ditty of a billboard:

They’re so clever. They want to celebrate Reason (with an exclamation point!) over Myth.  They present the gratuitous assault on another human being’s faith as a call for “closeted atheists” to come out of the closet and stand up to believers. Atheists have apparently have been denied their civil rights because occasionally they come across a nativity scene. ‘

Any Christian who has ever been cornered by an atheist at a holiday party may be surprised to learn that atheists are apparently shy about their non-belief. I can say, from my perspective, atheists (at least in this day and age) come across as far more “in-your-faith” (so to speak) about getting across their ideas than your average Christian is in converting his or her fellow partiers.

But, back to those billboards, if one religion attacked another (or atheism) in such a way, it would be cited as an example of religious,small-mindedness and bigotry. But when atheists go on the attack, it’s supposedly a breath of open-minded fresh air.

And, just why do atheists think they have a corner on reason anyway? I fail to see why believing that the cosmic material that exploded in a Big Bang magically appeared out of essentially nothingness is more reasonable than believing that an intelligent force (God) was behind it all. Most believers, BTW, don’t deny that a Big Bang happened. It’s the cause that’s up for debate.

Why is my “Man in the Sky” as militant atheists derisively refer to God less reasonable a theory than their magic particles created out of nothing. Now, I know that renowned physicist Stephen Hawking (who I will concede is smarter than I am) says “Because there are laws such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself
out of nothing. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper
and set the Universe going.”  To which I answer “Blah, blah, blah.”  The obvious question is “Where’d the gravity come from?”

BTW, while atheists may like quoting Stephen Hawking, believers have no less a logician than Sherlock Holmes on our side — who once deduced the existence of God through the existence of a rose. (And, yes, I realize Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character.)

Pure logic it would seem to me would dictate that there should be nothing but nothingness — that in the absence of a creator there should not be creation. The concept of an intelligent creator may be weird but not quite as weird as imagining the emergence of something out of absolutely nothing — and, particularly, something as complex as life.

When it comes to individual religions, I believe in Christianity and feel no need to be apologize or be embarrassed about that. I don’t put down people of other faiths or no faith and I expect the same courtesy in return. Do we believers need to guard against the impulse to look down on and even attack people who don’t believe or who believe differently than we do? Of course. But, I think that rule applies to atheists too.