I was an adjunct professor at Niagara University in the ‘90’s, teaching in the department of Religion.  Because Niagara is a Catholic university, all the students were required to take two courses in Religious Studies.  To say that I had a frequently less-than-eager class assembled for my lectures would be an understatement.  But you know which students were always engaged, always read the assignments and nearly always got the best grades on their exams and papers?  The atheists.  It makes sense if you think about it.  They weren’t drifting along like flotsam on the stream of an inherited cultural religious tradition.  They had thought about the viability of religion and the notion of God and rejected it.

Psalms 14 and 53 begin the same way:

The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”

My experience is that atheists are not fools – far from it. They are often the most intellectually challenging people I know.  So, is my experience a contradiction of scripture?  Not really, because these psalms don’t refer to philosophical atheists like Bertrand Russell or modern atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late atheist-provocateur Christopher Hitchens.  The psalmist doesn’t condemn philosophical or theoretical atheism, but practical atheism.

The psalmist is talking to people like you and me; and he calls us fools.  The psalmist refers to people who believe in God theoretically, but who act as if God was not relevant to them in the moment.  How do we act like practical atheists?  When we willfully sin and disregard God’s commands we are acting like God isn’t a reality to be reckoned with.  We live as atheists when we consume our days with anxious labor and our nights with sleepless worry, denying our trust in God’s providential care.  We act as though there is no God when we allow ourselves to lose hope, giving up on ourselves, on our future, and on the hope for peace and justice in the world.  When we live as though everything depends on us alone, we deny God.  When we do these things, what else are we but fools? Prayer:  Faithful God, we foolishly forget you when our eyes are fixed on ourselves.  Save us from foolish self-absorption and draw our gaze to your saving presence ever near us.  Amen.