Sorry, atheists, but you’re wrong: The death of ‘Love your neighbour’

Flickr/Richard Cocks (CC BY 2.0)

by David Catchpoole and Warren Nunn

Our country, Australia, has changed dramatically in our lifetime. The streets were a much safer place when we were young than they are today.

For example, when we were young, we put empty glass milk bottles outside our front gate each night, along with the money for tomorrow’s milk. If we didn’t have the exact coinage, we’d place a $1 note half-way under one of the empty bottles—so it couldn’t be blown by the wind but in plain view for the milkman. By morning we’d find in its place our milk, along with the right change.

Everyone else in the street did the same. But we don’t know anyone who does that anymore. The situation now is very different from what it was in the 1960s.

In fact, young people today are incredulous when you tell them how it used to be. “What!?”, they say, astonished, “You used to leave money on the street? And it wasn’t stolen?”

You see, today the situation in Australia has deteriorated way beyond secretive, night-time ‘petty thieving’ of milk money on the footpath. There are now frequent drive-by handbag snatchings from older, vulnerable women, in broad daylight, for example. One lady we know of was badly injured because the handbag strap remained around her neck, so she was dragged by the car for some distance until the strap broke. (We’re told this is not unique to Australia¹—overseas, there have even been deaths so caused.²)

Worldwide, crime rates soared for several decades until more recently when a different pattern emerged as highlighted in a magazine article which suggested rates were falling.³ But that article also provided a number of reasons for the ‘decline’ which explains a shift away from certain types of crime. (See box: Are crime rates really falling, or are there other explanations?)

There are varying factors at work in different countries because South Africa, with its unique recent history, has experienced a surge in crime, particularly murder, which is about four-and-a-half-times higher than the global average.⁴

The violence associated with robberies at shops and private homes today even shocks the police. They lament it’s now both genders committing violent crimes—indeed, some say that women are even more vicious than the men.⁵ Knives, baseball bats, and guns are the tools of the thieves’ ‘trade’ used to threaten terrified fuel station attendants and employees at fast-food outlets during a robbery. And today, something else is now happening. The downhill slide has now grown from petty theft to robbery with violence to random violence. It’s actually been an increasing phenomenon in the past decade or so but two deaths in separate incidents in 2012 certainly brought it into sharper media focus. Here’s how ABC (Australia) radio presenter Fran Kelly introduced a segment on the issue on her nation-wide ‘Breakfast’ program:⁶

[In the aftermath of the death of Thomas Kelly and other individuals because of violent, unprovoked assaults and subsequent perceived inadequate penalties, the New South Wales State Government—along with other Australian States—introduced ‘one-punch’ laws to allow the judiciary to impose relevant sanctions.]⁹

Fran Kelly then proceeded to interview the Head of the Emergency Department at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Professor Gordian Fulde, who has treated many victims of the random street attacks.

Dr Fulde acknowledged that while drunken violence was unfortunately not new in Australia, there now seemed to be no limits, i.e. no longer any sense of restraint. He made this observation when answering Fran Kelly’s question, “What do you think is going on?”:

The late David Hookes that Dr Fulde refers to here was an Australian sporting identity (cricket player and coach) who died in 2004 as a result of being punched on a street footpath in Melbourne. Dr Fulde went on to describe modern Australia’s increasingly violent ‘street culture’:

There are many people who would surely agree with Dr Fulde on that point. Since the 1960s Australian schools have increasingly taught that we are the result of millions of years of evolution, that it’s a dog-eat-dog world where today’s life-forms are the outcome of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, a survival-of-the-fittest contest. However, not surprisingly given the ABC’s history of anti-Christian bias, nowhere in the interview did Fran Kelly refer to the rise of evolutionary teaching, or to the loss of Christian culture. Instead, she endeavoured to prompt Dr Fulde to pin the blame on lax alcohol laws, or inadequate policing.

The presenter asked Dr Fulde about possible solutions, e.g. more police, compulsory earlier closing of nightclubs/bars, or limiting alcohol outlets/sales. He accepted that these could all be helpful, but were clearly not the whole answer.

So, if alcohol restrictions are only part of the solution, what is the key element that Dr Fulde believes is needed? He really ‘nails it’ in this next sentence.

An attitude. A change in community attitude is what’s needed.

And not just in Australia’s two biggest cities, Melbourne and Sydney. In the city of Brisbane, another ABC radio presenter, Steve Austin, interviewed then Royal Brisbane Hospital maxillo-facial surgeon Dr Anthony Lynham.¹⁰ One of the morning newspaper headlines that day had proclaimed, “Hospitals struggle to deal with the regular flow of the weekend wounded at emergency wards”.¹¹ Here’s how Steve Austin introduced his listeners to the topic:¹²

With the interview underway, Dr Lynham described how the violence had increased and become nastier in recent years, and that “now we’re seeing a lot more unprovoked assaults”—but couldn’t say why. He and his hospital team now face having to treat an average of 40–60 assault victims every week. Just like Dr Fulde in Sydney, Brisbane’s Dr Lynham called for a stop to the violence:

And just what might Dr Lynham mean by ‘primary prevention level’? Here’s what he’d told the morning newspaper’s journalist, Janelle Miles:

‘Old-fashioned values’, eh? Well how about this one:

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”—Matthew 22:39b

And, in the same vein:

“And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.”—Luke 6:31

Those words were the words of Jesus, as recorded in the Bible. So well known is the ‘love your neighbour’ commandment that it is widely referred to as ‘the Golden Rule’.

Now it so happens that leading atheists, well aware of the widespread (and correct) understanding that evolution opens the way for an opportunistic ‘anything-goes’ morality, have sought to strategically claim the Golden Rule as simply being an outcome of evolution. They say the Golden Rule is somehow ‘inherent’ to humanity.¹⁴ “Everybody knows it,” they say.

One atheist website even listed something akin to the Golden Rule as being at the top of its list of 10 secular ‘commandments’!¹⁵ But evolution doesn’t ‘command’ anything—the very reason that it is so appealing to many. E.g., self-professed atheist Thomas Nagel,¹⁶ Professor of Philosophy at New York University, said:

And the late renowned evolutionist Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and grandson of T.H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, was similarly candid about the ‘benefits’ of having an evolutionary view of origins (given that evolutionary biology renders life as ultimately meaningless¹⁸):

So for atheists to claim that the Golden Rule is somehow ‘inherent’ in humans, a product of our evolution, is surely disingenuous at best. And with now more than five decades since the imposition of the near-universal teaching of evolution in schools and tertiary educational institutions in western countries, the ‘fruit’ of evolutionary teaching should by now be starkly evident to everyone old enough to remember what our streets used to be like. When it was still safe to leave the milk money on the footpath outside your gate. And even the car-key in the ignition. The first Holden cars made in Australia did not even require an ignition key to start them. How times have changed. Attitudes have changed.

Sorry, atheists, but if you had a strategy to ensure that the ‘inherent’ Golden Rule would remain in the forefront of people’s minds as society became increasingly estranged from Christianity, it clearly isn’t working. If you thought an attitude of neighbourly love is naturally ‘inherent’ in humanity, then time has proven you wrong. You are currently witnessing the ‘death’ of the love-your-neighbour ethos in your city streets, and everywhere else. As someone who has to travel those same streets, we are not at all appreciative of what the teaching of your favoured origins paradigm has done to people’s attitudes.

If we are to change people’s attitudes as per the plea of Drs Fulde and Lynham, and return to the ‘old-fashioned value’ of loving one’s neighbour, we need to return to the source of that ‘old-fashioned value’ in the first place. So let’s go back and look at the context in which Jesus said “Love your neighbour” in Matthew 22:39b. He had just been asked by the Pharisees (v. 36), “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” Here is Jesus’ reply in full:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”—Matthew 22:37–40

Note: “a second is like it”. Integral to, and ultimately inseparable from, the first. Our capacity to love at all comes from God, our Creator, who is Love (1 John 4:8,16). We love because God first loved us (1 John 4:19). And note that the aforementioned, “And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them” in Luke 6:31 leads on to Jesus saying that this will show we are “sons of the most High” (v. 35)—we are to “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.” (v. 36) So, if our community is to return to the good ‘old-fashioned value’ of loving your neighbour, it has to return to the whole package from whence it came as well.

Of course, this will be anathema to atheists. Atheism denies we have a Creator, a Father in heaven—the source of our capacity to love—as evolution posits instead that these are mere concoctions of the human mind, a product of the evolutionary process, a biological characteristic conferring survival advantage to the human species. In other words, atheists say that humans invented love and notions of God, thanks to evolution. It seems to me that the following passage from Isaiah is an apt rebuke for today’s atheists:

You turn things upside down! Shall the potter be regarded as the clay, that the thing made should say of its maker, “He did not make me”; or the thing formed say of him who formed it, “He has no understanding”?—Isaiah 29:16

The increasingly evident barbarism in our streets since the ramping-up of school evolutionary curricula five decades ago ought to be a wake-up call to all that ‘turning things upside down’ clearly hasn’t worked.²⁰

Richard Lewontin from Harvard University wrote regarding schools in the USA: “Evolution … was barely mentioned in school textbooks as late as 1954 … After Sputnik [1957] … the study of evolution was suddenly in all the schools.”²¹ Over the next decade, evolutionary curricula spread from the USA and became the norm in most western countries, filtering from the evolutionary-focused university system right down to primary school level (and often to the children’s parents). As a result, the background thinking of people regarding politics, religion, and morality changed dramatically as well.

It’s interesting that in some things, e.g. the matter of charitable giving and true concern for others, some atheists and other non-Christians have been astute enough to correctly credit Christianity as being the motivating force driving support for the funding of charities. They have recognized the Gospel as being foundational to compassionate attitudes.²² But this matter of street violence really highlights the failure of atheism’s even minimalist ‘do good’ claims. The ‘Golden Rule’ of the aforementioned secular ‘10 commandments’ doesn’t actually say it in a positive way as Jesus said (“Do to others …”), but rather in the negative: “Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.”²³ Note that this is a much easier ‘commandment’ to fulfil, than the one from the God of the Bible! (The illustrations on pp. 144 and 158 in chapter 6, “What about other religions?”, of the book Christianity for Skeptics reproduced in this article make this point beautifully—poverty and a general lack of compassion are so much more evident in countries/regions with majority non-Christian populations!) Yet as the increasing random street violence in the formerly Christian west shows, even the atheists’ “Don’t do …” soft-option ‘Golden Rule’ is manifestly ‘non-inherent’!

What the West would consider callousness and hardness-of-heart is a logical consequence of Eastern religious ideas. The above drawing by Caleb Salisbury is one of the illustrations from Chapter 6, “What about other religions?”, in Christianity for Skeptics (page 158). The book also contains cutting edge material on design in nature and the Christian roots of science, and with its modern, catchy full colour cartoon-style illustrations it is a real ‘pick me up and read me’ book.

In conclusion: A minor prediction—and an appeal to atheists

Readers will note there’s a “Comment on this article” facility at the close of this article. On the basis of our past experiences publishing articles on this same topic (e.g. see listings under ‘Related articles’ and ‘Further reading’ below), we’d like to make a minor prediction. Given the tone of comments received in the past, we forecast that many atheist readers of this article will want to rush to submit comments expressing their outrage²⁴ at their perception that we are accusing them of being immoral, of being incapable of doing good things. But that is not what we are saying—not now, nor in any of our other articles that have so incensed atheists in the past. Note that Jesus, too, didn’t say that unbelievers (sinners, pagans, etc.) were incapable of doing good things:

“If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.”—Luke 6:32–33

So our appeal to atheists on this issue is this. Before rushing in to comment on this article, please first go and read this excellent article by CMI’s Dr Don Batten: Why do atheists hate God? Note the many hostile responses to that article published beneath it. See if they mirror your own reaction. Then please note how Dr Batten has graciously responded to those ‘arguments’/accusations. In short, what we’re saying is: if you think you have some ‘new’ objection, don’t be in too much of a hurry to send it to us, because chances are we’ve heard it all before.

By way of conclusion, here’s a sample extract from feedback to Why do atheists hate God?, from US self-described atheist Mark N. …

… and here’s the latter part of Don Batten’s response:

The ‘golden rule’ is not universal. Just think how its practice was so lacking in those states that based themselves most strongly on atheism: the USSR, North Korea, Albania. Think also about societies based on other major religions; how much do people follow the ‘golden rule’ (which is explicitly stated in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible)? And what evidence is there that the ‘golden rule’ predates the Bible? But more importantly, only Jesus said, “love your enemies”;²⁵ that is peculiar to Christianity and a major reason for the civil societies that exist today based on that heritage. This heritage is rapidly being lost and we are descending into an age of barbarism.

Jesus’ resurrection is God’s guarantee that death is not the end. While all our bodies might well be ‘worm food’, that is not all there is. Romans 8:11 says,

“If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.”

Amen to that.

Are crime rates really falling, or are there other explanations?

Despite reported indications that crime rates are falling, the reality is that there has been a shift to different types of illegal activities.

Consider some of the technical advancements that restrain people from committing such acts as rape, murder, burglary, etc:

©iStockPhoto.com/mauro_grigollo

• The threat of being caught out by leaving behind DNA at the scene of a crime.
• CCTV footage catches people in the act and cameras are now more prevalent in public places, businesses and even private homes.
• Police have far more sophisticated investigative tools to work with—such as DNA and CCTV—and also can track individuals from such things as receipts, banking records, and telephone usage.
• Bank robberies are almost a thing of the past because of the advance of security measures.

Consider also that many acts have been decriminalized, and/or under-reported:

• Definitions of what constitutes a ‘criminal act’ have changed.
• Compared to the 1950s, people in many western countries are now much less likely to report crime, especially property crime. Fifty years ago, if someone lost his wallet, he would report it to the police and the police would take it seriously. In most cities today, few would bother even reporting it now. Graffiti was almost unheard of, but it would be reported on the rare occasions that it happened, etc.

Also, the way in which statistics are gathered has changed, and how they are presented can strongly influence perceptions. E.g. the ‘decline’ in some major crime rates such a murder (where it is claimed) is only relative; it is a decline from record highs not long ago. And property crime in Australia is still twenty times what it was in the 1950s.

And where is the surge in new types of crime?

• On the internet where all manner of fraud is rife, such as stealing passwords to raid bank accounts.
• Criminal gangs raid bank ATMs using devices that help them obtain customers’ passcodes, create fake cards, and steal cash from accounts.
• Corporate crime such as America’s Enron scandal²⁶ reveal the depths to which some companies will go to make a profit.
• Drug cartels take extraordinary measures in moving their ‘product’ around the world.

NOTE: This is not an exhaustive list but should serve to show that the crime ‘scene’ has merely ‘changed’²⁸ and that society wasn’t as volatile before the rise of evolutionary indoctrination.