God As Reality Beauty for Ashes

God As Reality
by Barak Lurie
I was once an avowed atheist. I had determined that God was a tool to manipulate the masses. Devious men wrote the Bible for their own self-aggrandizement. I knew all the terrible history, too: Christianity in particular had been guilty of the Crusades, the Inquisition, priest molestations, and more.

Oh, the horror…

So I dismissed God. Anyone who believed in God was a fool, clutching for soothing answers in an uncaring and brutal universe.

They lived in fear. I didn’t.

But questions nagged at me. I knew I had free will and consciousness. How and why do we have such things? What are the chances the Big Bang would result in the universe we now have? What are the chances that earth could form as it did with all the perfections of its ozone layer, its rotation locked in by our moon to create seasons, a perfect distance from the sun and a perfect placement in the Milky Way galaxy? What were the chances that life would form at all, let alone life that could reproduce, evolve into many animals, and culminate in a self-aware human capable of speech and abstract thought?

And if survival and necessity explained everything, then how could one explain our love of music, art, beauty, humor, and storytelling? What of our need for purpose, creation, and happiness? None of these is necessary for our survival.

I had to conclude one thing: However the universe and life started, randomness couldn't explain it. This was the hardest moment in my journey to God. I realized that as an atheist, I hadn’t so much not believed in God, as that I hadn’t wanted to believe in God. Without God, there was no obligation to the past or to the future, only to what I fancied doing in the present. I wanted to believe that my life was finite and would vanish like a flame on a candle. Life was limited to the time between the sunrise of my birth and the sunset of my death.

Why? Because it was easier.

Dismissing a Creator allowed me to live in a world where I could booze it up, sex it up, and do whatever I damn well pleased — steal, lie, and even murder.

But with God in my life, I would be accountable. There was life before my sunrise, and I saw that there would be life beyond my sunset. What I do matters, not just in this life but beyond. I have obligations to the past and to the future, and to Civilization. It was not just a simple decision of whether to believe or not, It was an epiphany that rocked everything about my sense of life and the universe. It forced me to change who I was. Yes, it was a burden, but it was meaningful and glorious, too.

My atheist’s bias had clouded my head, preventing me from entertaining real science, actual logic, and simple observation. The atheist blinds himself to what’s right in front of him, starting with his own free will and consciousness.

But it’s easier.

Barak Lurie is a managing partner of the firm Lurie & Kramer in Los Angeles, California. He obtained his BA with honors at Stanford University in 1985, and his JD and MBA at the UCLA School of Law and Anderson School of Business in 1989. He was the host of The Barak Lurie Show, a #1 Sunday morning radio program in Los Angeles. Barak also hosts the weekly “Barak Lurie Podcast” and bestselling author of Atheism Kills and Rise of the Sex Machines.

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The ideology of this worldview for people has a name - Nazism. It is evil.
Ethics of the Fathers, 3:14 Rabbi Akiva said: “Beloved is man for he was created in the image [of God]. Especially beloved is he for it was made known to him that he had been created in the image [of God], as it is said: “for in the image of God He made man.’” (Genesis 9:6)