On June 4, 2016, a few thousand atheists gathered at the National Mall in Washington, DC for the Reason Rally.  It was an assemblage of “freethinkers” who timed their function to coincide with the quadrennial presidential elections.

“Reason Rally 2016 is a celebration of fact-driven public policy, the value of critical thinking, and the voting power of secular Americans…Not only are we celebrating our secular, atheist, agnostic, humanist, freethinking, and nonreligious identities, we are preparing to exercise our power at the voting box to bring good sense back to government.”¹http://reasonrally.org/about/

I thought this would be a great opportunity to mingle with secularists who had loftily claimed the word “reason” for themselves at this mass meeting. So, I packed my bags and headed on out to the east coast. Now, I have to admit that it was great seeing the sights. The Washington Monument, the White House, the National Mall, all of it was great.  In fact, other Christians were there.  Some were friends, some weren’t, and we mixed in with the crowd of God-deniers. I was able to have many conversations with them and we got some of these encounters on film. (to be released later). There were obnoxious atheists and very polite atheists. Discussions were varied, but after a while, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was an “Unreasonable Rally” nearby where the participants had inadvertently mixed with the freethinkers at the National Mall.  After all, when I dialogued with the freethinkers, atheists, and secularists on various issues, I found a profound lack of critical thinking ability.

Now, lest you think that I’m just being judgmental, I want you to understand that I’m doing my best to be objective. But, there were several times when I was speechless for a few moments as I tried to wrap my brain around the utter illogic that was offered by so many of them. Take for example a discussion I had with one atheist who denied the idea of an antonymic pair.  At the one point when I said that there are two possibilities, God and not God, and he said that was not true. There was a third option. I asked him what the third option was and he said, “It depends on what you define God as being.”

…several moments of silence…

When it came to objective morality, I found equally “interesting” responses.  They said morality was subjective. I asked one atheist, “Are you absolutely sure that all morals are subjective?” He said “Yes!”

…several moments of silence…

Anyway, I am sure that you get the picture. Now, I’m not trying to make fun of them. But their thinking was universally pretty bad – at least with all the conversations I had. In my opinion, and this is just my subjective opinion, I conclude that their disdain for God and their self-righteous proclamation of moral superiority over all others, blinded them so much that they could not see the simple errors of judgment of claiming “reason” for themselves and attributing the moral high ground to themselves so as to pronounce judgment on others…especially the Christians!

From what I heard, they expected around 20,000 people to join their cause. Now, I’m no expert on numbering a crowd, but there was absolutely no way there were 20,000 people there. I estimated 4000, maybe 5000 people, tops.  They were well-organized, and for the most part, people were polite. Many displayed anti-God T-shirts that had mocking slogans and images against God while others displayed their tidbits of wisdom about the virtues of secular reason.  Thankfully, many Christians, possibly over a thousand, showed up as well to witness to the atheists.  I know there were many very good conversations happening and even some Christians were able to pray for a few atheists.

In all, it was a worthwhile endeavor to go and seek to reason with them at the “Reason Rally.” But I hope that next time they take courses in logic so that their rally title would be more apropos.