Recker's World
Reason 2
Atheists are not evil horrible people
Psalm 14:1 The fool says in his heart, “God does not exist.” They are corrupt; they do vile deeds. There is no one who does good.
Psalm 10: 7 Their mouth is full of curses, lies, and oppression, their tongues spread trouble and iniquity.
Romans 1:28-30 And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what should not be done. They are filled with every kind of unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, malice. They are rife with envy, murder, strife, deceit, hostility. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, contrivers of all sorts of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, covenant-breakers, heartless, ruthless. Although they fully know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but also approve of those who practice them
One thing I learnt as a young child was just how evil and despicable atheists were. According to my Sunday School teachers, atheists persecuted good Christian children. The stories they told us were terrifying. To me, atheists seemed like the most horrible people in the world and I hoped that I would never meet one.
Fortunately, I never came across anyone remotely as evil and Christian-hating as the atheists I heard about at Sunday School. In fact, I took it for granted that everyone I knew believed in God because none of them seemed that bad, even the bullies. I rejoiced that I lived in a country where no atheists lived!
Well, except for perhaps the woman my dad worked for in Onewhero. I saw here as an evil old dragon. She never smiled and seemed to scowl whenever she saw my younger sister, Lee and me. As well as cows, she also farmed chickens and threw dead pullets into a big barrel drum in a shed.
I don’t know how it came to be that so many were thrown into that barrel, I shudder to think why, but they weren’t always dead. My dad rescued several from the barrel, nursed them back to health and as a result accumulated his own coop full of chooks at home.
Lee and I used to put dirt and stones into the old dragon’s letterbox on a regular basis when we went to the cowshed to see Mum and Dad after school. The old dragon often complained to Mum and Dad about us, although we never really did anything wrong, she was just a horrible witch who saw us as a nuisance.
The place we lived at, owned by the old dragon, was horrendous. I can still remember the day we moved in. The place stank terribly. There was fly shit all over the walls, junk piled up outside and rubbish in every corner. There was even a rotting corpse of an animal hanging in the shed, completely covered in flies. My parents couldn’t get rid of that stink completely, no matter how hard they cleaned.
I don’t know what the previous tenants were thinking, but they must have been disgusting dirty people. I will never forget the smell of that house as long as I live. Occasionally, I catch a whiff of that smell in places I visit and it takes me right back to that house. Maybe they were atheists too!
Living in Taupiri at the age of about 10 years old was where I came across my first bon-a-fide atheist!
He was a new boy from somewhere in Scandinavia. We sat on the bus one day and I was talking about Jesus. He said he didn’t believe in Jesus, nor any god at all. This was the first conversation I’d ever had with someone who said they didn’t believe in God.
I started preaching to him, which resulted in him poking some fun at God, all in good humour of course, but I didn’t see it that way. This brought out the “righteous anger of Jesus” in me and I bopped him one right on the nose. I didn’t think I’d hit him that hard, but then his nose began to gush with blood.
I felt so terrible about it. I’d never intended that to happen, I just wanted to punish him for making fun of Jesus.
Once me and the Scandinavian boy got to school, I did all I could to help him get cleaned up, apologetic for what I’d done, but when I think about it now I shake my head and think just what a world of delusion I lived in to think that atheists were such terrible people. This boy wasn’t bad. He just didn’t believe in God and there were many other people I was friends with at the time who were no doubt atheists too. The fact was I had been lied to at Sunday School AND by the bible. I just didn't realize that until a lot later on.