A 22-year-old man killed himself because, according to WND, he lost his belief in God after reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Young Jesse Kilgore blew his brains out, convinced that God and faith in God are delusions. (I became a Christian some 10 years ago. Unlike young Christians today, I didn’t have to deal with unbelieving college professors challenging my faith or making me question my beliefs. I was just as much a heathen as they were.)
His father told WND that a biology professor was “really challenging my son, his faith…They didn’t like him as a Republican, as a Christian, and as a conservative who believed in intelligent design.”
First, I take a hard stand when it comes to suicide. It’s the work of inconsiderate and self-centered cowards, whatever the reason. But we’ve all had suicidal thoughts – from mild “what if I just offed myself right now” to actually taking a weapon in hand (bottle of pills, gun, whatever) to attempting suicide and ending up in the hospital. If you say you haven’t, you’re probably lying.
[Update: Did she write "inconsiderate and self-centered cowards"? There I go again, being too harsh. Christians aren't allowed, so I've heard. What about the mentally ill, you ask? Well, if someone isn't in his "right mind" when he commits suicide, I suppose that's a different story. In some cases. Generally, my opinion of suicide, which I've contemplated in my younger years, stands. More sympathy for those left behind, please.]
Back to Jesse Kilgore. How can one book cause a seemingly intelligent man to not only lose his faith wholesale, a faith he’s even defended in debate, but to kill himself because he’d lost faith? Most likely, he was dealing with other issues. The God Delusion just put him over the top. Quite naturally, his father is desperately seeking someone or something to blame for his son’s suicide. And he’s feeling sorry for himself.
“I put a toddler in the front of my car,” he said about allowing Jesse to attend a secular school. “My son is the Adam Walsh [a kid who was kidnapped and beheaded by a pervert] of the culture war. That’s who my son is.”
The elder Kilgore has my sympathy.
The Christian faith has been challenged from its beginning. For 2,000 years, people have tried to discredit Christianity’s claims, undermine the reliability of Scripture, slander Christ, and everything in between. In the United States, Christians are mocked and made the butt of jokes. We’re called deluded, ignorant, uneducated, and unintelligent. Some Christians are intimidated enough to keep their faith to themselves and avoid “preaching” to people, while others (like myself) are not intimidated and refuse to be silenced or put in a corner. Some Christians take the “Great Commission” more seriously than others.
Having said that, most Christians, at some point, have had a crisis of faith. We question our beliefs, especially when we’re going through trials. But that’s when we turn to God, not away from him, and to other Christians, living and dead, who’ve gone through similar crises. There is nothing new under the sun. There are no new questions or challenges that can’t be or haven’t been responded to. Since Christianity’s inception, faithful men and women have been answering those questions and meeting those challenges and equipping Christians to defend the faith.
Jesse could have gone to his church, sought out older Christians who could have helped him with his doubt…anything but killing himself, for goodness sake.
Let’s say he did those things and still believed God is a figment of his imagination. Is it so unbearable to the human psyche to believe there is no Creator? Or that the death of our bodies is final…no seeing God, no afterlife. Or that we’re no longer accountable to this “God” and can do what we bloody well please with no eternal consequences? Or that our existence merely is an accident of chemicals that oozed together in some primordial goo and ended up generating life, through which a series of random biological events resulted in the person we see in the mirror? For Jesse Kilgore, apparently it was.
Can you imagine a hardened atheist blowing his brains out because he’d lost faith in atheism and began to believe in a God who allowed his Son Jesus Christ to be sacrificed on the cross to pay for his sins, and that God loves him and wants to give him life, abundant and eternal?
Neither can I.
