As reported in Monday’s Jakarta Post, Kaing Guek Eav is the only Cambodian from Pol Pot’s killing fields who has confessed to his crimes. This 66 year old, better known as Duch, is on trial for being the former superintendent at the S-21 torture centre. Here they routinely tortured and murdered, inter alia, new-born infants, anyone wearing glasses and soft-handed people. The other co-conspirators still insist that they did nothing but right. Given this anomaly, one should surely enquire why Duch is up until now the only one of this regime to have expressed his guilt and contrition. The answer is quite easily discovered from his comments: He has recently become a Christian. His former colleagues in crime, partners in, arguably, the most violent social experiment in human history, remain atheists.
Atheists would reject the idea that “as a man thinks, so he is”, yet here is living proof that this is all too true. It’s not that atheism qua atheism makes a man necessarily inhumane…it’s just that there really isn’t anything in atheism as such that necessarily makes a man a good one. Chesterton stated this well when he said that when a man disbelieves in God it isn’t that he believes in nothing, but that he will believe anything…including the mass murder of his fellow human beings.
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3 comments:
John, thanks for the post. I saw this on TV the other night myself. Amazing news!
What atheists, and other's apart from Christ might think is that Christians have an urge to moral action by keeping to rules that are imposed, religious fashion, on their conduct: its the world's mistake, and often one we allow to be made...but its not rules, the Christian impulse is to love others, and seek their good, to reflect in our own actions those we would seek done to us: that is, to seek benefits for others.
We do this, not because we are great rule-keepers but because on the one hand, of the love that Christ demonstrated and extolled, for the fact that love is basic in reality: that's what the real is 'really' like (God being prior to all, and being love, and our creator makes it so), and, on the other hand, and above all, because God is in us by his Spirit; most astonishing of all.
I sometimes think we fail to really talk about the transcendent and quite spiritual aspects of Christian faith, but these are the most phenomenally exiting parts of it: that God has 'touched' you and is right there in and with you, makes everything else fall away. Including, as we grow in love and wisdom (we pray) the desire for promotion of the self.
Good without God?
I don't think so. Not even good with God for fallen man.
Neil
Knowing the usual atheopathic deceit, they would use Dech's recent conversion to blame the entire killing fields on Christianity rather than radical antitheism.
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