Last week, actor John Rhys-Davies, best known for playing the dwarf Gimli in "The Lord of the Rings" films, gave a strong defense for Christianity.
Speaking to the Christian Post from the red carpet at the Movieguide awards, Rhys-Davies said, "We seem to forget that Christian civilization has made the world a better place… We owe Christianity the greatest debt of thanks that a generation can ever have…" he went on, crediting it for the ideas of religious liberty, free speech, and individual rights.
Rhys-Davies, who recently starred in an animated adaptation of "Pilgrim's Progress" and is the lead in an upcoming biopic of Saint Patrick, said he often finds himself sticking up for Jesus in his line of work.
The strange part of this story is that Rhys-Davies is a self-professed "rationalist and a skeptic," not a Christian. Yet he is still able to see how the faith of Christ's Church, as author Alvin J. Schmidt puts it, "changed the world" for the better.
Rhys-Davis is just one of many skeptics, atheists, and secularists of late who reject the rhetoric of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and recognize the immense good the Gospel has done for the world. Whereas the so-called New Atheists slandered Christianity as being backward and poisonous, a new crop of unbelievers see it as beneficial, beautiful, and maybe even in some limited sense, true.
Take Douglas Murray, British journalist, political commentator, and author of the new book, "The Madness of Crowds." Though a self-professed non-believer and gay man, Murray admits to admiring Christianity and "the positive role it has played in building Western civilization." He even labels himself, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, a "Christian atheist."
In a recent dialogue with Christian writer Esther O'Reilly on the "Unbelievable" podcast, Murray praised Christianity's "revolutionary moral insights" such as the command to "love and forgive your enemies."
"The more atheists think on these things," he confessed, "the more we may have to accept that…the sanctity of human life is a Judeo-Christian notion which might very easily not survive [the demise of] Judeo-Christian civilization."
But even more than recognizing Christianity's usefulness, Murray sees the faith as meaningful. Describing a trip he took last year to the Sea of Galilee, Murray admitted he couldn't stop thinking that, as he put it, "something happened here." |
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