There is a certain bravado in the modern atheist. He declares that "there is no God" with a sense of relief, as if he has just thrown off a heavy backpack. He believes that by erasing the divine, he has liberated humanity to be the master of its own fate.

But in the realm of politics, ideas have consequences. And the consequence of the "Death of God" is not the birth of freedom. It is the birth of the Absolute State.

The Horror of the Vacuum

Nature abhors a vacuum. This is true in physics, and it is true in politics. If you remove the Throne of God from the moral universe, that throne does not remain empty. Something else ascends to fill it.

Throughout history, whenever a civilization ceases to worship the Creator, it begins to worship the Power. We saw this in the ancient world, where the Caesar was a god. We saw it in the 20th century, where the Party was the supreme truth.

When the critic says "there is no God," he is implicitly saying: "There is nothing above the State." He is establishing the government as the highest reality in human existence. This means the State is no longer a steward of the law; it becomes the source of the law.

The Source of Rights

Let us look at the concept of "Human Rights." The American Declaration of Independence claims that men are "endowed by their Creator" with unalienable rights. This is a theological claim. It asserts that your right to life and liberty comes from a source that the government cannot touch, because the government did not give it to you.

But if the critic is right -- if the Creator is a myth -- then where do your rights come from?

They can only come from the State.

If rights are granted by the State, they are not unalienable. They are permissions. They are licenses. And what the State gives, the State can take away. Without the Imago Dei -- the belief that man bears a divine spark -- the human being is merely a biological accident. And biology has no rights. The strong eat the weak. That is the law of nature.

The Mortal God

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a father of modern materialism, understood this perfectly. He described the State as a "Mortal God." He realized that if there is no spiritual authority, the State must have total control over the bodies and consciences of its citizens to maintain order.

This is the trap of the atheist position. He wants to be free. He wants "liberty" and "dignity." But he destroys the only foundation that makes those things real. He saws off the branch he is sitting on.

If there is no God, then there is no objective Good or Evil. There is only "what we want" and "what we have the power to take." Justice becomes nothing more than the will of the majority -- or the will of the tyrant who controls the majority.

The Safety of the Believer

The Christian tradition introduced a radical idea to the world: Limited Government. Because the King is under God, the King is not absolute. There is a law -- the Natural Law -- that judges the King.

This is why the most dangerous thing for a tyrant is a man who fears God more than he fears the State. Such a man cannot be fully owned. He has a loyalty that transcends the border.

The atheist critic thinks he is enlightened. But by rejecting God, he has returned to the oldest darkness of all: the world where Power is the only Truth. He has left himself naked before the machinery of the State, with no appeal to a higher court.