A group of atheists aimed to mock the Christian Ten Commandments with a list of their own “for the modern age.”
Anti-Christianists Lex Bayer and John Figdor launched the contest last month to “open up for discussion what gives life meaning when secular culture is on the rise.” The contest received over 2800 submissions from 18 countries.
Some of the “winning” submissions for their mock list included “God is not necessary to be a good person or to live a full and meaningful life” and “There is no one right way to live.”
Judges for the action included Adam Savage of the Discovery Channel show “Mythbusters.” Each one of the ten “winners” was given $1,000 for their “commandment.”
The two atheists that headed up the mockery said that they want to demonstrate you don’t have to be Christian to be moral.
Pastor Emery White says in his new book “The Rise of the Nones” that secular thinking is driving more Christians to saying they are not affiliated with any Christian church or denomination.
Pastor White said in an interview with Ed Stetzer that America has definitively moved into a “post-Christian” era.
“We are living in a decisively post-Christian culture and I think it’s taking its toll on existing evangelicals and the church in a way that is creating more and more nominal Christians on the way to ‘nones’ who self-described themselves as evangelicals earlier,” White said.
Research conducted by Stetzer showed that over 30 percent of college age Americans who claim to be Christians say they have no affiliation with church or denomination.
White attributed the problem to not only youth but church culture at large where secular thought has become commonplace. White says that because Christians are thinking the way the world thinks, the values of Christ are washed away and that leads to the rise of behaviors and actions that were considered unthinkable just 20 years ago.
“We only care about our own needs being met because a spiritual narcissism has invaded the church,” White said. “There is a consumer mindset that has crept into the church and it’s not megachurches selling out the culture. The consumer mindset, the narcissism is within the believer, so you hear things like, ‘I need to go where I am being fed’ as opposed to feeding ourselves or maybe feeding someone else. We talk about ‘I need to go where I am ministered to’ as if that’s the goal of the church instead of you being the minister. We talk about, ‘Well, I just walked out of a worship service and I didn’t get anything out of it,’ which is heresy because the worship service has nothing to do with what you get out of it, the question is did God get anything out of it?”
White said anyone who refuses to die to themselves on these consumer ways would never be able to change the church, society or truly reach someone with the gospel of Christ.
“Until we get closer to the heart of the issue, which is the heart of the believer,” White said, “I think we are just going to be just putting band aids on a terminal disease.”