Ed Stoffel

By Chip Hammond

The American Humanist Association has put up some $40,000 to run a “holiday ad campaign” on D.C. Metro buses. The mobile bill boards read, “Why believe in a god? Be good for goodness sake.”

I’ve heard people who should know better trying to make the case that these ads should be taken down because they “violate the separation clause of the first amendment.” Nonsense. No aspect of government is displaying these. It is paid advertising, and provided it is not obscene, as long as Metro takes everyone’s paid advertising, people can ask the questions they want, be it in magazines, newspapers, or on bill boards.

There are, however, two problems with the ad campaign, one having to do with societal hypocrisy, and the other having to do with an astonishing lack of ability to think logically.

A spokesperson for the AHA has argued that they are not attacking anyone. They are simply asking a question (“why believe in a god?”) and making a statement (“be good for goodness’ sake”). But they are doing it at Christmas time. What, I wonder, would be the response of the AHA, D.C. Metro, the ACLU and any number of self-proclaimed crusaders for “fairness” if a church or Christian group took out ads at Ramadan asking this question and making this statement: “Why believe in allah? Trust in the God who can save you.”

At worst hate crimes against that Christian group would be overlooked because “they had it coming.” At best it would appear to most to be boorish. How rude to crash someone else’s holiday. Despite the AHA’s reference to “a god,” at Christmas time you don’t have to be a genius to figure out who they are trying to refer to.

That’s the societal hypocrisy. Here’s the lapse in logic. Without God, and therefore a deontological ethic, just what exactly is “good?” None other than Frederick Nietzsche asked this question. No one who reads Nietzsche’s bold statement “God is dead” in various places can fail to see the anguish as he writes it. He deeply believed the proposition, but also knew that once the cat was out of the bag man would be ungrounded, unanchored, and there would no longer be any right or wrong. “Good for goodness sake” would be a fluid perspective now, not a bedrock touchstone.

So where would we get perspective? Nietzsche told us. I would come from the Übermensch, the “superman,” who will give us guidance and direction. Nietzsche’s ideas were read with fascination and embraced by Adolph Hitler, who believed he would become the vehicle for delivering to the world the Übermensch.

The spokesperson for AHA said that “good” is defined not by moral absolutes, but by what is deemed acceptable to a society. Does he really want us to go there? What was acceptable to German society in the 1930s? What was acceptable and “good” to the Taliban when they were in power in Afghanistan? Does the AHA really want to define “good” as whatever direction society goes in? What if society goes in the direction of seeing American Humanists as the problem for which is needed a Final Solution? Do you see the predicament?

Interestingly, Aristotle who lived in the age of Greek gods, saw beyond them to a First Cause, a Creator of even the gods (if they existed). The later medieval synthesists could not resist identifying this Unmoved Mover with, not a god, but with God. For somewhere a wise man had said that even for the pagans, “What may be known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made.”

I don’t quibble with the “right” of the AHA to put up their bill boards. I do think it is boorish to do it at Christmas time. And it is hypocrisy if Metro will not accept formally equivalent advertizing at Ramadan from churches. Mostly, though, I just feel sorry for them. They are behaving like a man who so hates the Christmas Tree that he calls for it to be cut down while he barks out the orders from atop of it.

Christmas time is the celebration that God sent his Son into the world to announce amnesty to rebels, and a grace period for them to come to their senses. He does not call for the immediate judgment of those who rebel against his rightful rule, and who seek to replace God with a nebulous and shifting definition of “good” that can encompass anything from Meals on Wheels to the Gestapo, depending on “were society is going.”

The question of the AHA is a valid one: “why believe in a god?” A god, as distinct from God, is anything short of God which men worship and by which they order their lives. In other words, the members of the AHA worship a god. So I’ll ask a question of the members of the AHA and make a statement to them: “Why believe in a god? Put your trust in the true and living One.”