Reaching the "Happy-Thinking Pagan"
Ravi Zacharias
Every generation will try to get us to change the message.
—Ravi Zacharias
At Ohio State University, I participated in an open forum on a radio talk show. The host was an atheist.
From the start, callers were antagonistic. I could feel the tension as soon as the lines lit up. One angry woman, referring to abortion, said, "All you people have is an agenda you're trying to promote. You want to take away our rights and invade our private lives."
Abortion had not even been brought up.
"Just a minute," I replied. "We didn't even raise the subject."
"What is your position on abortion, then?"
I said, "Can I ask you a question? On every university campus I visit, somebody stands up and says that God is an evil God to allow all this evil into our world. This person typically says, 'A plane crashes: Thirty people die, and twenty people live. What kind of a God would arbitrarily choose some to live and some to die?'
"But when we play God and determine whether a child within a mother's womb should live, we argue for that as a moral right. So when human beings are given the privilege of playing God, it's called a moral right. When God plays God, we call it an immoral act. Can you justify this for me?"
That was the end of the conversation.
I feel called to minister to people such as this woman, whom I affectionately call a "happy-thinking pagan."
Such a person believes this world and the success it affords are the greatest pursuit in life. He or she feels no need for anything transcendent. Life has been reduced to temporal pursuits disconnected from all the other disciplines necessary for life to be meaningfully engaged.
Some are completely unreflective; they don't think enough to know they have no right to be happy. They borrow on capital they ...
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