The Challenge
It started in December when Brian Flemming, a 40 year old filmmaker based in Los Angeles, started Blasphemy Challenge, asking people to post videos on YouTube denying the existence of God. Mr. Fleming is a former evangelical Christian turned atheist.
The Flemming web site so upset Mike Mickey, a 43 year old police officer in Christiansburg, VA and Steve Buchanan, a 34 year old carpenter from Henderson, KY that they began Challenge Blasphemy, their own web site. Mr. Mickey is also the web master for Rapture Alert, a web site “sounding the alert that Jesus Christ is coming soon.”
Emily Henochowicz, 18, who gave a wry smile as she denied God in her video,is among those who find the videos are an interesting way to talk through the issues of religion and faith. But others think differently. “This is a very, very serious situation,” said Denise Gumprecht, a homemaker from NC, “We are not dealing with human vs. human. It is a spiritual battle.”
Mr. Flemming said he started questioning his religious faith during his senior year of high school. “Once I started asking questions about Christian doctrine and seeking answers to Christian doctrine, I realized there was no way Christian doctrine would survive,” he said. “I discovered you can’t think your way to Christianity, you have to unthink your way there. Once you start thinking about it, you end up not being a Christian.”
“The goal is for us to dump religion from our culture,” he added. “We want to get rid of this supernatural belief in the same way it would be great if we could dump astrology or phrenology and all the other pseudosciences.”
I read through this story and wondered, “What would the Devil think about these guys?” I turned to C.S. Lewis’ book, The Screwtape Letters, for some inspiration.
“There are two unequal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel and excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
“Be not deceived, Wormwood, our cause is never in more jeopardy than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe in which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
