Tuesday’s article about the mistreated atheists who are not going to take it anymore was a little over the top. During the past 100 years, atheists in Communist China, the old Soviet Union, North Korea and Cambodia collectively murdered 150 million of their own citizens — men, women and children — in the name of their godless beliefs. Elitists in the film industry, mass media and education permeate everything we hear, read and see with their atheistic views. It’s virtually impossible to find a college or university where Christians are not ridiculed by a cadre of elitist intellectual atheist professors and their GPA-hungry students. These facts soundly refute the atheist claim of victimhood.

Some of the slogans used by the atheist group in question, such as “Truth is real; God is not” and “Evidence and Science trump myth — reason wins” completely ignore the difference between the moral world and the physical world. The physical world can tell us how things work, not how we should or ought to conduct ourselves in our relationships with one another. In a truly atheist world, an animal world, we would take advantage of the weak, not lend a helping hand. Thousands of years before the “enlightenment,” humankind universally rejected Darwin’s notion of “survival of the fittest” and it is this act itself that we call civilization.

The science which these atheists embrace as the end-all of truth and fact and knowledge is constantly changing its knowledge base about what is true and factual. How we should and ought to behave is eternal; lest we truly become nothing more than animals, forfeiting all notions of decency and civility.

When Darwin first espoused his views, modern science was in its infancy; Watson and Crick had not discovered the double-helix, we did not have the equipment now available for the new field of molecular biology that reveals an intricate code directing specific functions, which is rapidly replacing the old notion of random theory upon which atheism has always depended.

Taking science teachers to court and telling them that they cannot teach intelligent design even though the science now supports it, smacks of the same bigotry that was used to silence Galileo 400 years ago. The fact that atheists are using such tactics as this, claiming victimhood and putting up billboards attacking religion, are merely signs of a world view in decline.

STEVE NOVAK

Coeur d’Alene