ARE THEY STILL TRYING TO KILL GOD?

ARE THEY STILL TRYING TO KILL GOD?

It's fashionable these days to connect the dots. All right, try connecting these three:

* "News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising." (William Randolph Hearst)
* "Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it." (Russell Baker)
* "Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions" (Albert Camus)

Here's one way. In our modern secular world, news reports about God are not what you usually lead with. We seem to prefer covering the bad, the bold and the beautiful. And yet, when all is said and blogged, somehow that old guy (you know, Yahweh, The Trinity, Allah) is still hanging around. He just won't die, and a lot of secular intellectuals don't know what the hell (or heaven) to do about this!

Among these best-selling intellectuals are Sam Harris ("The End of Faith"), Richard Dawkins ("The God Delusion"), and Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great"). Today's atheists are more articulate and aggressive than ever as they argue the real clash of civilizations is not between our different religions...but between our superstition and our modernity. To help their cause, Mr Dawkins has established an organization to help atheists throughout the world "fight the really important fight."

What may drive the secular intellectuals crazy is that it has been a canon of progressive thought ever since the Enlightenment -- that heady combination of science, learning and democracy -- that religion would die its natural and over-due death. Exactly as this monstrous superstition should....! Somehow, though, the deed has yet to be done. Billions of us still cling to our gods and our faiths despite everything we've been told.

Now for awhile the 20th century looked like it might pull off this caper. Religion was officially banned from politics and, wherever possible, from the public square. God was undone by Darwin...dismissed by Marx.... deconstructed by Freud...and virtually buried by everyone from Hitler to Stalin to the new EU to our own ACLU.

So why then won't the old guy just give it up? Move off the stage of history like all the other silly superstitions? There may be as many answers to that question as there are Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. Which means, I suppose, this new battalion of best-selling atheists may have to pick us off one at time. And that could take a very long time!

Now for those who prefer a few PhDs after the names of their "experts," here's one PhD with his own scholarly explanation. Professor John Lewis Gaddis, a Yale historian, thinks this so-called clash between superstition and modernity took a very sharp turn in favor of God during the Six Day War in 1967 between Israel and her Arab adversaries. "That was when Israel's miraculous triumph over secular pan-Arabism gave God a stronger voice in their politics, emboldening among other things the Jewish settler movement."

Gaddis and others argue this was followed by a "stronger voice for God throughout the 1970s with a born-again President Jimmy Carter, Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Iran replacing the worldly Shah with Ayatollah Khomeini, Buddhism being formally granted a place in Sri Lanka's constitution, and an anti-communist Polish Pope in the Vatican."

So here's one way to try connecting today's dots. To postulate that not only is God not dead....but that those who wish he were, will just have to do more than shouting him off the stage of history. Instead, they may have to recognize he still has a leading role. And whether they approve or not, they had best accommodate themselves to this reality. After all, they didn't author this play...