“I think the image that we have put forward in a lot of ways has been a scary, mean, we want to tear down the walls, we want to do destructive things kind of image is what a lot of people have of us,” he said.  “I’m really excited to be able to come together and show that it’s not about destruction.  It’s about making things and making things better.”
     So said a "preacher" at a so-called "atheist" church in Los Angeles recently (more on this innovation later).  Many years ago, Joseph Schumpeter proposed the idea of "creative destruction," that sometimes we need to destroy, to destroy well, to create something better.  It’s not a new idea, really:  ask a farmer.  When a seed is planted, it is dead, but set into good soil, it grows into a beautiful plant or tree.  In many ways, death and destruction lie at the heart of reality.
     And that’s the paradox of existence.  We long for life, yet we know, in our deepest hearts, that sometimes life has to end before it can begin, that sometimes what is now and present must fade into what is past in order for time to move forward.  Death is painful, but death births as well.  Destruction undermines and eliminates, but it also enables emergence.
     So the larger question is this:  why would God create a world like this?  Why would a God of life put death and dying at the center of what will come?  If we read Genesis 1:2 closely, however, we see that in the beginning, there was chaos and darkness, and then, verse three tells us, there was light.
     If everything was always settled and perfect, the world, at least the world as we know it, might not really be.  It's a cause and effect universe; in order for something to happen, something else must happen first.  A closed space can only hold one thing at a time.  Only in eternity, when all accounts are settled and all striving ceases, will death end.  For it is only then that birth will no longer be required:  everything will be alive, always, together, without end.
     As the adage goes, all truth is God's truth.  My thanks to my atheist friends!