Dear Friends,

Why people become Atheists

Most people that become involved with religion do so through their families and the established churches. Many of the people in the Churches of God come from other churches. Many of us read the Bible and saw that what was said in the Bible was not what was being done in our churches. Most saw that the Bible said that the Seventh Day was the Sabbath, but the mainstream churches said that the First Day of the week was the so-called “Lord’s Day” and so they met on Sunday instead. When asked why they did that they usually reply “the church decided to do that”.

Many people simply say “oh rubbish” and start looking for a church that actually follows what the Bible says. That is when they get persecuted by the mainstream.

A lot of people are damaged by these people. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Churches of God were linked with false prophets and abusive individuals. They also turned people off religion in the hundreds of thousands. One of the greatest false prophets in the Churches of God was Herbert W. Armstrong. He had the dubious honour of never getting any prophecy right. No prophecy he made came true and his theology was a jumbled mess between Ditheism and Binitarianism. He observed a fourth-century Hillel calendar with a Pentecost based on the Hillel error, which had not been done before. He invented a false theology based on an erroneous Third Resurrection, which has no basis in Scripture (see The Fallacy of the Third Resurrection (No. 166)).

More than 75% of the people baptised under his system were forced into a complete rejection of his theology through abuse and incoherent reasoning of him and his ministry. The damage he did, however, was nothing compared to that done by the Trinitarian churches.

The Scriptures tell us that only a fool says in his heart there is no God (Ps. 53:1). However, it is too simplistic to dismiss these Atheists as simple fools. They denied God because they were forced to follow lesser intelligent people preaching an obviously false doctrine. They did not study the Scriptures properly and so chose to reject the concept of God because these people, in varying disguises, made stupid pronouncements and literally punished people and made their lives a misery because they were forced to believe babble. For centuries, men knew that the Earth was round and had mapped it before the birth of Christ. When Rome took over, the Earth became flat and people were persecuted if they said otherwise. Galileo was declared a heretic, and the Earth remained flat until the fifteenth century. Intelligent men simply ignored these fools and to all intents and purposes became private in their beliefs and many decided it was all simply too hard and too silly to make sense out of the whole mess.

False prophets and prophetesses abounded, and the Sabbatarian movements were wrecked by them (see the paper False Prophecy (No. 269)).

The purpose of the Worldwide Church of God was not to prophesy, but simply to consolidate the interaction of later workers in the Churches of God who would then publish the Mysteries of God to all nations. Herbert Armstrong not only did not publish the Mysteries of God to all nations, but he was also wrong in what he did publish. So also was it with Ellen G. White and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and all the way down the line.

The worst of this ridiculous and illogical behaviour came out of the US over the last two hundred years. Sane men do not spend their time with babbling snake-handlers. The Pentecostalist gibberish in the US is on a rank with African witchcraft. It does not uplift the Faith at all and has no part in it.

The activities of Armstrongism do not mean that they did not have the power to baptise and develop churches. They did have that power. However, it was turned into a man-worshipping cult by unscrupulous people that sought to advance themselves by means of this man-worship. It is still happening, but God will strip it of its idolatrous behaviour and reduce its ministry.

We are having people join us in Africa because the splinter ministry of the WCG system spilt churches by appointing known polygamists to office and then blamed the people who refused to be ministered by them as unconverted people who left the church. The ministry simply did not investigate the reasons.

You cannot blame reasonable men from rejecting this behaviour.

The existence of Atheists does not diminish God; it merely demonstrates the illogical means by which these men made their decisions and deliberations. Many scientists now believe in God, but they arrive at that belief as a form of Modalism. Many use a Buddhist argument when Buddhism is itself a denial of the existence of God even though at the lower levels it is a form of idolatrous worship of dead beings and a reconstruction of the Mother Goddess cult. See the work (Mysticism B7) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/b7_a.html.

Most of the astro-physicists believe in the creation as part of the Big Bang and, as we said, as part of a modal structure.

Evolution is a religion and the god of evolution is the creation itself. Many of the New-agers speak of it as the Gaia.

The system is blatantly discontinuous, and any scientist would see that it is incoherent if they applied logic to the system.

Atheists are thus not at fault because they deny the absurd reasoning of Catholic and Protestant babblers and the snake-handling Baptists and Trinitarians of the US. They are correct in rejecting the myths of Mormonism that are shown to be pure lies in the claims of Joseph Smith, when compared with the scientific analysis of DNA.

We all rejected that nonsense also. What sets us apart and makes Atheists fools is that they did not ask for enlightenment and then study the Bible correctly. They did not say: “the religions are the product of demonically inspired fools but the Bible, if it is the word of God, will be correct so I will study that and then test it against the reality of the creation”.

Had they done that it would have all made sense to them. They did not do that and rejected it all and that is why God, through the prophets, correctly described them as fools

Before you throw the Bible away test God first. For example, look at the paper Creation versus Evolution (No. B9).

Every year we find new evidence that supports what the Bible says.

God will never leave us or forsake us. Place your problems before Him and look to the solutions and answers to the questions you have and the problems you face.

Wade Cox

Coordinator General