Atheists believe the universe is made up of only physical material. Souls, spirits, divinity, the afterlife — it’s all fiction.

But how do they reckon with phenomena — those hair-raising moments that shatter physics and turn our brains inside out? How do they make sense of miracles, like the terminal cancer patient who’s healed after prayer or the clinically dead person who wakes up with knowledge impossible for him to have?

The hardened skeptics will clutch their materialist beliefs even tighter, insisting there must be some scientific explanation. The more curious ones who allow themselves to venture down mystical rabbit holes, however, often find themselves in the position where disavowing the supernatural takes more effort than acknowledging its existence.

That was Lee Strobel — famous Christian apologist and author of the beloved book “The Case for Christ.” He set out to debunk Christianity, but his rigorous investigation into miracles and the veracity of biblical claims shattered his atheist beliefs and led him to the feet of Jesus.

In this fascinating interview with Glenn Beck, Lee shares several documented cases of miracles and wild stories that will challenge even the most committed atheist.

Proof of the soul

“There are 900 scholarly articles published in peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals over the last 40 years on the topic of near-death experiences. These are cases where a person is clinically dead — generally, no brain waves, no respiration, no heartbeat. Some of them have been on the way to the morgue. ... But then they’re revived,” Lee says.

“And when they come back, they say, ‘I was conscious the whole time. I was watching them try to resuscitate my body in the hospital.”’

Glenn and Lee revisit the spine-chilling story of a Hispanic woman named Maria, who suffered a severe heart attack in the 1970s and was resuscitated at a hospital in Seattle. When she regained consciousness, Maria reported having an out-of-body experience, claiming her spirit floated around the emergency room while she was being operated on.

Skeptics dismissed her initially, but then Maria told them there was a sticker on the top of the ceiling fan blade in her hospital room — a detail invisible from the ground. Hospital staff brought in a ladder and beheld the sticker exactly as Maria had described it.

Lee shares another story of a young girl who drowned in a YMCA swimming pool.

“[The doctors] just were keeping her body basically alive until they figured out what to do,” he says.

But three days later, she was miraculously revived. She told hospital staff that she was “conscious the whole time,” Lee recounts. But they scoffed at the girl until she began sharing confirmed details about what her parents were doing at home while she was clinically dead in the hospital.

The girl knew that her mother made chicken and rice for dinner; she knew what specific clothes her family was wearing and that her little brother had played with his G.I. Joe toys while alone in his room — “things she could not have known unless her body, unless her spirit really did follow them home.”

Documented miracles

In his recent book “Seeing the Supernatural,” Lee shares the story of a woman who was blind from birth due to an incurable condition.

“She married a pastor. And one night they’re getting ready to go to bed, and he comes over. ... He puts his hand on her shoulder, and he begins to cry and begins to pray, and he says, ‘God, I know you can heal my wife. I know you can do it, and I pray you do it tonight.’ And with that, she opened her eyes with perfect eyesight,” Lee says, adding that her vision was perfect for the remainder of her life.

“How do you explain that?” he asks.

He then shares another “well-documented case” of a woman named Doris, who had a deathbed vision.

“She sees the heavens open up, and she sees angelic beings, and she sees her father, who had died a couple years earlier. ... And then she gets this puzzled look on her face, and she said, ‘Wait a minute. What’s Vita doing there?”’ Lee recounts.

Vita was Doris’ sister, who had died a couple of weeks earlier. However, Doris’ family hadn’t told her the news for fear that it would worsen her waning condition.

Doris is one of many documented cases of people who “see something in the realm to come that they could not have known about.”

Radical redemption

Evel Knievel — the American daredevil and stunt performer famous for his death-defying motorcycle jumps in the 1960s and 1970s — radically encountered God at the very end of his life.

“He was a drunk. He was a womanizer and once beat up a business associate with a baseball bat and went to jail for assault,” Lee says, retelling the icon’s incredible conversion story.

Just a few months before his death, Knievel was “on the beach in Florida, and God spoke to him and said, ‘Robert ... I’ve saved you more times than you’ll ever know. Now, you need to come to me through my son, Jesus.”’

Freaked out by this profound spiritual encounter, Knievel called Frank Gifford, a renowned sportscaster and Christian, to ask about Jesus and Christianity. Gifford pointed him to Lee’s famous book “The Case for Christ,” and he came to faith in Jesus after reading it.

Knievel had a “180-degree change — more than anybody I’d ever seen in my life,” Lee says, noting that he and Knievel became friends as a result.

He was baptized in California’s Crystal Cathedral, and after he gave his powerful testimony, roughly 700 people spontaneously came forward to be baptized during the same service.

Angelic and demonic encounters

Well-known psychiatrist Dr. Richard Gallagher, who’s also a professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and a psychoanalyst on the faculty of Columbia University, has a hair-raising story about his first demon encounter that set him on a 25-year journey of studying the demonic.

He and his wife had two cats, who had never had an issue getting along with one another. One night, however, they randomly began to savagely attack each other, shocking Gallagher and his wife, who had to put the cats in separate rooms to stop the fighting.

The very next morning, Dr. Gallagher had an appointment to psychiatrically examine a woman named Julia, who claimed to be the high priestess of a satanic cult.

“She looks up at him, and she sneers, and she says, ‘How’d you like those cats last night?’” Lee says.

Later that day, Dr. Gallagher was speaking to a Catholic priest about Julia on the phone, and during their call, a “satanic voice” interrupted and said, “You let her go. She’s ours.”

After years of studying the demonic, Dr. Gallagher has accumulated many terrifying stories of demon possession. He’s documented a case where “a petite woman ... picked up a 217-pound Lutheran deacon and threw him across a room” and a case where “eight eyewitnesses saw a demon-possessed person levitate off a bed for half an hour.”

But there are just as many stories of angelic encounters too. One, which was documented in a doctoral dissertation, tells the story of a young girl in the hospital asking her mother if she could see the angels. “They’re so beautiful. Listen to their singing,” she told her mother, who was skeptical but played along.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, I see them. Look at their big wings,” she told her daughter, who confusedly responded, “Oh Mommy, you don’t have to lie. They don’t have big wings.”

“She went on to describe these angels in great detail. You would think if this was just something coming from the subconscious mind of a little kid, they would imagine what an angel would look like to them from a cartoon,” Lee says, but “that’s not what they see.”

To hear more documented cases of miraculous occurrences, as well as Glenn and Lee’s personal experiences with the supernatural, watch the interview above.

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The Dawkins delusion: Why atheism can't explain the one thing that matters

Consciousness is the ultimate wonder and the deepest mystery — even for the devout. Not dark matter or quantum mechanics, but the fact that you are reading these words, that there is something it feels like to be you.

Believers may affirm that God made man in His image, and I agree, yet the question remains: Why should dust, shaped by divine hands, open its eyes and know itself? Why breathe into us not only life, but the inner life — the hidden sanctuary where thought, memory, and prayer rise and take flight?

The mystery matter can't master

Scientists can catalogue every neuron. They can trace every chemical cascade and chart every flicker of electricity racing through the brain. They can build diagrams so precise you could almost mistake them for the thing itself.

Yet none of it explains the one detail that matters most — that there is an inside.

That matter, when shaped in a certain way, suddenly gazes back at the universe and says, “I am.” Perception isn’t just the processing of inputs. It’s the lived immediacy of them: the taste of coffee, the ache of loss, the terror before a fall. These are realities experienced, not merely computed.

Some argue this is a puzzle that can be solved. All we need is more funding, more computational power, and more time, the argument goes.

What nonsense.

Disdain and disbelief cannot erase the fact that to be aware is to stand in a place where the finite brushes the infinite.

The answer, it turns out, has been staring at us all along. Consciousness isn’t an accident of biology. It’s a fundamental part of reality, present before the first atom came to be. Matter doesn’t simply wake up by chance. It’s animated by something older, deeper, and impossible to quantify.

Call it spirit. Call it soul. Call it God.

The Dawkins delusion

For the Richard Dawkinses of this world — those allergic to religion — “God” sounds like a convenient escape hatch, a quick patch over the gaps in our understanding.

Yet the theological view is anything but a shortcut. It doesn’t merely declare, “God made man and switched on the lights.” It suggests that the light itself — the act of knowing — is the purpose. Awareness is the link between dust and divinity, binding the created to the Creator.

In other words, consciousness is no evolutionary afterthought but the central drama of existence, the stage on which heaven and earth meet within the human soul.

francescoch/iStock/Getty Images Plus

This changes everything.

If awareness is fundamental, then the mind is not just an observer of the universe. It is a participant in it, a co-creator. The inner life becomes more than a collection of survival tricks honed by natural selection. It becomes the very arena in which the material and the divine meet.

Every moment of thought, every flicker of self-recognition, is a point of contact with something infinite.

That idea unsettles people because it shifts responsibility onto each conscious being. If awareness is a sacred link — which it is — then how we use it carries weight beyond anything science can quantify. The ethics of thought, intention, and attention move to the center. A life squandered in distraction or cruelty becomes much more than a personal failure.

In this view, it becomes the misuse of something unimaginably rare.

The sacred spark

Even our most advanced machines make the contrast clear.

They can mimic conversation, create art, and solve problems at rapid speeds, yet they remain completely vacant. There is no inner witness, no “I” behind the code. Their outputs may dazzle, but no one is there to be moved, to care, to suffer, or to rejoice. Set beside a single conscious breath, a single human glance, the difference is profound. And perhaps that’s the point. Consciousness is not about speed or efficiency. It is about relationship — between mind and world, self and other, creature and Creator.

For centuries, Christian mystics have spoken of the soul as a mirror made to catch and reflect the light of God.

Teresa of Ávila wrote of the “interior castle” with its deepest chamber reserved for union with Christ. John of the Cross spoke of stripping away every lesser light until only God’s radiance remained. The German theologian Meister Eckhart called it the “spark of the soul,” a place untouched by sin where God’s presence burns brightest.

In their eyes, consciousness isn’t a random flicker of awareness. It's the faculty by which the creature knows the Creator, the meeting place of heaven and earth within the human heart.

We are alive because He willed it, aware because He designed our awareness, and we are lit from within by His light.

Modern science has given us remarkable tools to study the mechanisms of the mind, but the mechanism is not the mystery. The circuitry is not the song. You can dismantle a radio and never hear the music that once flowed through it. Likewise, you can map the brain and never touch the consciousness that animates it.

That gap — the chasm between matter in motion and the breath of being — is where the divine dwells.

Conscious by creation

We live in an age that prefers to compress the mystery into whatever measurements our tools can take. It's the spirit of 2025, an era when meaning is traded for metrics and a culture drifting toward nihilism mistakes data for doctrine.

But we must let the mystery magnify us and let it widen our grasp of what it means to be alive. Consciousness is a bridge between two eternities — the dust God shaped us from and the divinity that calls us home. To stand in the middle is to bear the weight of the world and feel the pull of the world that awaits.

Atheists will no doubt roll their eyes, but the reality remains: Disdain and disbelief cannot erase the fact that to be aware is to stand in a place where the finite brushes the infinite.

We are not bystanders in God’s creation. We move through it as participants, shaping its story as it shapes us. We are alive because He willed it, aware because He designed our awareness, and we are lit from within by His light.

Every thought, every act of attention, every choice is a line in the ongoing dialogue between Creator and created, a conversation that will echo into eternity.

Was 'Scooby-Doo' actually atheist propaganda for children?

Does "Scooby-Doo" teach children the core philosophical tenets of atheism?

I recently saw an atheist claim that "Scooby-Doo" was created to teach children about rationality and skepticism because every episode begins with a supernatural event — like a haunting ghost and unexplained phenomena — and ends with a "natural explanation" (i.e., it's just a person in a mask).

I saw this claim on Reddit:

I just realized scooby-doo was made to teach kids skepticism and rationality

Suddenly it makes sense why my ultra religious mother ended up forbidding me from watching it as a kid. Last night, it suddenly occurred to me based on what I could vaguely recall about the show before I was banned from it that every episode was about something supernatural happening and then getting proven to have a non-supernatural cause. I looked it up and it turns out that was exactly the case.

This argument got me thinking and raised two important questions:

Is "Scooby-Doo" naturalist propaganda for children?
How strongly does the plot of a generic "Scooby-Doo" episode bolster the argument for naturalism?

Subversive Scooby

When you stop and think about it, "Scooby-Doo" is actually kind of subversive.

It teaches children that whenever we think something is supernatural, it really just has a natural explanation. It drills into young minds that the right answer is always the non-supernatural one. The ghosts are never real, the curses are always fake, and the monsters are just people in costumes.

There's always a natural explanation. And by reinforcing this idea over and over, it teaches children that believing anything supernatural is irrational.

God isn’t one more cause among the many other causes in the universe. He’s not just another thing pushing particles around.

"Scooby-Doo" is not a neutral show. It's naturalistic indoctrination.

And here's why that's a problem: The argument that “every time we investigate, we find a natural explanation, so everything must have a natural explanation" is the same argument atheists use to claim that God isn't real.

Fatal flaw

The subversive argument of the "Scooby-Doo" plot is not only a problem because it's the same one that atheists use, but it's a problem because it's not a good argument.

In fact, it's a really bad one.

First, even if you grant for the sake of argument that a natural explanation is found on the other side of a supernatural cause, it doesn't require that all explanations are natural. That's just logically invalid. It's like saying, "All the swans I’ve seen are white; therefore all swans must be white," or, "Every time I walk into a house, I see carpet; therefore all houses have carpet."

These are inductive overreaches. It’s completely fallacious reasoning. Still, there's an even deeper problem.

ra2studio/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Atheists believe that if God existed, then we should be able to see him directly intervening in the world in a visible, testable way. They think that if we hear a weird sound in the attic, we should be able to climb up there and find God directly causing the sound.

But this is a bizarre line of logic, because that's not how God is understood in theism. God isn’t one more cause among the many other causes in the universe. He’s not just another thing pushing particles around. Instead, God is the one who makes the whole universe possible in the first place.

Worldmaker

Consider J.R.R. Tolkien. When you read "The Lord of the Rings," you don't see Tolkien himself in the story. Rather, you see Frodo walking to Mordor, Gandalf giving advice, and Aragorn being born from parents. You’d never see Tolkien manipulating Middle-earth — he’s nowhere to be seen.

If you lived in that world, you might think based on your experience that everything was caused by something else in that world. The characters have their own internal causes, and yet their ultimate existence and explanation is found in what? J.R.R. Tolkien. He brought all of it into being.

Notice that even though Tolkien is the ultimate explanation for everything in his world, you cannot find him directly causing anything in his world.

That’s how God relates to our world. He’s the reason anything exists at all. Just as Tolkien is the cause of everything in Middle-earth without being a character in it, God is the cause of everything in our universe without being a natural object within it.

So to expect that you can "see God" in the chain of natural causes is like tearing apart the pages of a novel looking for the author's actual fingerprints.

The final answer

Still, there is a much bigger philosophical problem with this argument that atheists hate to acknowledge.

If you say that everything has an explanation, then you are forced to ask: Where does the chain of explanations stop?

Sure, perhaps natural things are explained by other natural things. But what explains those? And what explains the natural things that explain those natural things? It's a circular argument that results in infinite regress, which produces contradictions and ultimately explains nothing.

That's not rational.

There has to be something at the end of the chain, something that explains everything else but is not explained by anything else. Something that exists by the necessity of its own nature.

If the supernatural foundation of all reality has a mind, then that’s God.

That thing, whatever it is, must be radically different from everything else. It’s not one more link in the chain — it’s the foundation of the chain. And if it’s not caused, not contingent, and not dependent on anything else, then it's not "natural." It's supernatural, and it's fundamentally different from all of the "natural" stuff.

Once you realize this, you're forced to consider: Does this supernatural foundation have a mind?

And what do you find in the universe it caused? You find minds. Information embedded in DNA. Consciousness. Reason. Intelligibility. Purpose. Order. Morality.

None of these things we would expect to get from mindless matter. These are exactly the things an intelligent mind produces. We know this because we ourselves possess minds. So if the fundamental cause of everything contains the power to bring forth minds, intelligibility, and moral reality, then the most reasonable conclusion is that it, too, has a mind.

And if the supernatural foundation of all reality has a mind, then that’s God.

Maybe the real mystery isn't whether or not "Scooby-Doo" was debunking ghosts. The real mystery is why so many atheists think that repeating a cartoon plotline counts as an argument against the existence of God.

'Left-wing lesbian atheists': Oasis singer mocks liberal comedian who said he stole her audience

Oasis singer Noel Gallagher mocked a progressive comedian who claimed Oasis was the reason no one was showing up to her shows.

Kate Smurthwaite describes herself as a "comedian, writer, activist." Audiences may remember her from a plethora of culture-war clips dating back almost a decade, where she defended feminism, political correctness, and more, often resulting in her ridicule.

Smurthwaite was attempting the stand-up comedy portion of her career at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last week, and unfortunately her show coincided with an Oasis concert during the band's comeback tour stop in Scotland.

'What kind of a culture have we become?'

Smurthwaite posted a video from a venue last Wednesday that showed an empty room 25 minutes after her show was supposed to have started.

"This is the Oasis effect," she claimed. "Big groups of people in Oasis shirts are not interested in my show or anybody else's."

While Smurthwaite called it "heartbreaking" to have to cancel her shows, the Oasis singer — who is not known to bite his tongue — addressed her claims to a massive crowd in Edinburgh just two days later.

"Are there any left-wing lesbian atheists?" Gallagher asked the crowd, appearing in black and white on a massive screen.

Gallagher then looked to see how many of Smurthwaite's fans had made it to the Oasis show as opposed to going to hers.

"Can we get a show of hands, please? ... Not a f**king one."

"What kind of a culture have we become?" Gallagher sarcastically asked. "Disgraceful."

The artist immediately dedicated his next song to "lesbian atheists."

Gallagher did not seem to be far off, as Smurthwaite has been described in a favorable tone as a "left-wing, feminist, atheist, polyamorous comedian and activist."

Photo by OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images

In a follow-up video that showed off her armpit hair, Smurthwaite complained that the Oasis concert should not have been scheduled at the same time as the art festival, and that news outlets have "twisted the story" surrounding her claims.

She expanded on her original gripe that Oasis should be more considerate of fellow performers, adding that the story had been "spun to [sound] like, 'horrendous feminist comedian can't get an audience for her show because she's woke and she's not funny and nobody's interested and she's not as good as Oasis and she's bitter about it and she's furious.'"

Smurthwaite said the news coverage was overshadowing more important issues facing the United Kingdom, such as "climate change" and "horrendous racist immigration policies."

According to commenters on YouTube, the Oasis song Gallagher dedicated to the "lesbian atheists" was the 2000 single "Where Did It All Go Wrong?"

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The left’s real enemy isn’t Sydney Sweeney

The recent outrage over an American Eagle ad featuring actress Sydney Sweeney would be hilarious if it weren’t so revealing. The ad shows Sweeney wearing jeans with the cheeky caption, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” It’s a harmless pun — wordplay on both genetics and denim.

But as we know, grievance culture doesn’t do humor. According to outraged leftists, this ad is “Nazi-coded propaganda” because Sweeney has the wrong look: blonde hair and blue eyes. That’s right — Sweeney didn’t goose-step across your screen or quote “Mein Kampf.” She just smiled in a pair of jeans. Apparently, that was enough to unleash the fury of the perpetually offended.

It’s not a crime to recognize beauty. It’s an act of sanity.

Why does something so lighthearted spark such disproportionate rage?

Beauty threatens the left

At first glance, the reaction seems to fit a familiar pattern. Sweeney is white. She’s conventionally attractive. She’s not apologizing for either of those things. That’s three strikes in the diversity, equity, and inclusion playbook.

The new cultural catechism of the left says that beauty is a “social construct.” It’s used by oppressive systems to maintain unjust hierarchies, so it must be redistributed according to equity quotas.

Admiring beauty becomes an offense. It must be deconstructed — if not altogether abolished — and reprogrammed with DEI.

But there’s something deeper at work — something more visceral and more theological. You can sense it in the feral energy of the backlash. It’s not just that Sweeney is beautiful. It’s that she didn’t earn it. And the leftists are mired in high-schoolish insecurity.

She didn’t pass a DEI review. She didn’t seek approval from the sensitivity board. Her looks aren’t the result of a curated political identity — they’re the result of, well, her parents.

And that’s what drives the left insane. Beauty, in this case, violates the central tenet of their moral framework: fairness. Sweeney didn’t do anything to deserve being attractive (aside from perhaps watching her diet and going to the gym). Her features are, largely, inherited — in their language, “privilege.”

‘Why not me?’

The old-school leftists like Herbert Marcuse rightly critiqued the one-dimensionality of ads like American Eagle’s. Commercial culture does not aim at beauty, truth, or goodness. But the modern leftists dropped that message. Now, beauty is whatever the activist class tells you it is, as long as it serves the cause.

This is the theology of the grievance industrial complex: If something is unearned, it’s unjust. It's just not fair. “Why not me?” is the battle cry — less a revolution, more a toddler’s tantrum.

This is why leftists don’t just go after people — they go after beauty itself. I’m not equating sex appeal to beauty. But the outrage is beyond sex appeal and is aimed at the very idea that someone can be beautiful without approval from the Committee of Twelve.

Spend five minutes on any state university campus or in Democrat-run city and look at the newest buildings. They are intentionally not beautiful. They have even abandoned Soviet functionality. Concrete cubes with exposed ductwork and LED-lit virtue slogans where cornices and stained glass used to be are statements of contempt, monuments to cynicism and self-hatred, rather than structures designed to lift the soul.

The leftist assault on beauty goes beyond architecture. University art galleries — such as the one run by my school, Arizona State University — are considered “activist installations.” Chaotic splashes of rage, deconstruction, profanity, and noise aren’t merely misguided attempts at beauty — they are refusals of it. They reject order and celebrate cacophony.

A war on God

This reveals a deeper truth: Leftists' war on beauty is ultimately a war on God.

Beauty is not a construct. It is not the invention of Western power structures. Beauty is real — it flows from the nature of God Himself. As Augustine wrote, ”Being is good.” Evil is not a thing in itself. It’s the corruption of the good. Likewise, beauty is not a weapon of oppression. It’s the radiance of order, truth, and harmony.

But if you hate the Creator, you will hate creation. You won’t rejoice in beauty; you’ll resent it. The truly dark impulse behind much of leftist cultural production is not liberation. It’s vengeance.

A world that won’t conform to their demands must be punished. If they can’t make reality fair by their standards, then they’ll make it ugly and demand that you call it a masterpiece

Reject the mob

But you aren’t required to play along. You don’t have to pretend that brokenness is beauty, that chaos is art, that bitterness is profound, or that atheism is intellectually deep.

You don’t have to nod along when they tell you that Sydney Sweeney’s ad is a hate crime and that art school murals of screaming female body parts are sublime. You can say, without apology: That’s not beautiful.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

And that’s a kind of cultural resistance we desperately need. Christians in particular must recover a theology of beauty. We serve the God who clothes the lilies of the field in splendor, who filled the skies with stars and the oceans with wonder, who made the human form. This God of beauty is the same one who redeems the lost sinner and works all things together for good.

So don’t let the rage mob deprive you of beauty. Don’t let their tantrums over privilege drive you into false guilt. And don’t let the secular liturgists of ugliness define what your heart is allowed to love.

We were made to love what is good, true, and beautiful. That includes a well-cut cathedral, a sonata in a major key, a sunrise over the Grand Canyon — and God, who created all of this.

It’s not a crime to recognize beauty. It’s an act of sanity.

Farewell to Stephen Colbert, fake laughs, and lame late-night bias

Those who still remember what real comedy looks like got some good news last week: CBS announced that it’s canceling Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

I know what you’re thinking — hadn’t that already happened? Spiritually? Emotionally? Creatively? Fair questions. After all, the last time Colbert got a genuine laugh, the Comedy Network still existed, and you could make a joke on TV without it requiring a full apology tour.

Look, I’m not saying no one ever laughed. But if someone did, it probably wasn’t because of his act. More likely, they were laughing at him. People often told him his show was funny — just not his show. Somewhere on television that night, something was funny. That counts, right?

Colbert spent a decade scolding America to sleep, hoping the canned applause would drown out the snoring.

Let’s be serious for a moment (which is more than Colbert’s done in about a decade). Without his show lulling viewers into a state of dull leftist self-congratulation each night, we might see a nationwide spike in melatonin sales. “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” served as a free sleep aid for coastal elites who needed to be reassured — just before bed — that they were smarter than everyone else. No comfort like being tucked in and handed their favorite Squishmallow.

Melatonin for the masses

From the beginning, Colbert built his career on mocking conservatives. His original shtick on Comedy Central was a parody — a pretend conservative who was mocking real conservatives, but with just enough smugness to pass as “clever” in a faculty lounge.

It worked — for a while. But like most one-joke acts, it wore thin fast. When he made the jump to CBS, the parody turned into reality: a genuine leftist, playing the role of a leftist, telling jokes only a leftist could love — while aiming hate at conservatives.

See on Instagram

Colbert wasn’t a comedian. He was an actor pretending to be a comedian, which is only slightly more honest than most modern pundits pretending to be journalists.

Bias dressed as truth

But there’s a deeper lesson here. Colbert belongs to the same cultural bubble as NPR’s president, the university diversity officer, and the late-night writers’ room packed with Ivy League graduates who somehow believe their worldview is “neutral.”

They talk a big game about identifying bias — but can’t see the deep blue (or Marxist red) lens that shapes everything they see and say. They honestly believe they’re just “telling the truth” — a truth that, conveniently, always punches right and kisses left.

That’s what made Colbert’s show feel like a parody of itself. You kept waiting for the wink, the nudge, the moment he’d break character and admit the absurdity. But it never came.

Instead, he delivered gentle laughs for Democrats — “Teehee, aren’t they quirky?” — and launched into furious monologues about Trump, DeSantis, or anyone to the right of Mitt Romney. It wasn’t satire. It was seething partisan rage, disguised as applause-sign comedy.

You wanted it to be a bit. But it wasn’t. It was just Colbert. Night after night. Until the ratings finally collapsed and put the whole sad production out of its misery.

Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

One shining moment

I’ll give credit where it’s due. Colbert did have one moment of brilliance — a genuine philosophical zinger. It happened years ago, back when Colbert still hosted “The Colbert Report.” His guest was none other than Lawrence Krauss — the disgraced ASU physicist who became famous for telling people the universe came from nothing (a philosophical trick so bold it somehow earned him a book deal and a speaking tour).

Krauss was on to promote his book, “A Universe from Nothing,” and Colbert got him to admit that what he’s talking about isn’t nothing, but rather something called “quantum foam.” The book’s title was blatant false advertising.

And then Colbert — clearly out of character for once — did something I still show my philosophy students. He pressed Krauss: “So you believe the universe came from nothing?” Krauss nodded. “And you believe God doesn’t exist, that God is nothing?” Another nod. Colbert paused and delivered the knockout line: “Then aren’t you really saying the universe came from God?”

Boom.

That one line did more to dismantle Krauss’ book than any academic critique ever could. It was sharp, witty, and philosophically devastating. (You can watch my analysis of that clip here.)

If only Colbert had stuck to that kind of comedy — the kind that exposes absurdity rather than reinforces it. Instead, he spent the next decade scolding America to sleep, hoping the canned applause would drown out the snoring.

Make comedy great again

The sad truth is that we haven’t seen real late-night humor in years. I recently caught a rerun of Johnny Carson, and it was like discovering a comedic oasis in the desert. Carson could poke fun at both sides of the aisle without apologizing for loving his country. He didn’t flirt with the virus of multicultural guilt or the blame-America-first bug that has infected entertainment for the last 20 years.

He was funny because he understood something Colbert never did: America, for all her flaws, is still worth laughing with — not just sneering at.

So farewell, Stephen Colbert. I’d say we’ll miss you, but we’ve already had years of practice.

Club Misery: How the godless elite let the truth slip about atheism

What do Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, and Ricky Gervais have in common?

If you’re the sort of person who reads HuffPost, sips oat milk lattes, and thinks everything wrong with the world boils down to white men with opinions, you probably already have your answer: privileged patriarchal monsters.

Atheism, in its purest form, is an ideology of erasure, a faith in subtraction.

But if you’re a little more honest — and a little more curious — you’ll notice something different.

These aren’t just successful men. They’re atheists — and they’re also, quite clearly, miserable.

Bill Maher

Maher is a comedian by trade, but rarely funny any more — at least not in the way that feels joyful or generous.

On "Club Random," his podcast that masquerades as freewheeling conversation, Maher talks over his guests so relentlessly that it’s become the most consistent punch line in his YouTube comments.

“Stop cutting them off, Bill.”
“Let them speak, for once.”
“Do you invite guests just to hear yourself talk?”

He lectures, sneers, and plays the same greatest hits week after week. He’s not sharing ideas — he’s performing superiority. You can practically feel the clenched teeth through your screen.

Richard Dawkins

Then there’s Richard Dawkins, the patron saint of Darwinian superiority, the man who turned religious skepticism into a career of scowling, condescension, and book tours.

Dawkins hasn’t smiled in public since the Cambrian explosion. He scolds believers like a substitute teacher who can’t believe anyone is still talking about God after he’s assigned the fossil chart. Every public appearance is an exercise in barely contained frustration — at creationists, at the Bible, at people who pray for the sick instead of shrugging their shoulders.

Dawkins doesn’t merely disbelieve. He resents belief, and nothing is more exhausting than a man perpetually outraged that billions of people don’t think exactly like him.

Ricky Gervais

Some will point to Ricky Gervais as the exception.

An atheist, a comedian, a master of satire, and they’d be right — at least partly. Gervais is funny. Incredibly so. But happy? That’s another story.

Gervais has never struck me as someone content. Even in interviews, there’s a fog of irritation that never quite lifts. He’s always complaining, always nagging, always rolling his eyes at something. And while he packages the whole thing in charm and wit, the engine underneath doesn’t sound like joy. It sounds like frustration dressed up for a Netflix special.

His entire career — brilliant as it may be — has been a decades-long monologue of gripes. Yes, he makes people laugh. But the deeper source of it all feels like a man quietly suffocating on his own disbelief. If in doubt, feel free to watch his recent interview with Jimmy Kimmel, a practicing Catholic, where he spent minutes rambling about everything wrong with himself and the world — his body, his brain, society, death.

Funny? Sure, but also bleak. The laughter lands, but the undertow is pure despair.

And then there’s "After Life," his hit Netflix show. Lauded for its honesty, praised for its emotion. But look closely, and what you see isn’t fiction; it’s confession. A man mourning his wife’s passing, clinging to sarcasm like a flotation device in a sea of grief. It’s gulag humor without the bars — just a soulless bloke with a dog and a sharp tongue, cracking jokes to keep the walls from closing in.

Gervais is playing himself. "After Life" isn’t just a comedy — it’s an atheist’s eulogy.

Sam Harris

Gervais' close friend Sam Harris is no better.

Before he was consumed by Trump derangement syndrome, he was a sharp mind who took a blowtorch to radical Islam. Harris positioned himself as the cold, rational surgeon cutting through sacred narratives full of hate and delusion.

But even then, the man radiated pessimism. There was always an oddness to him — like he was describing humanity from orbit, distant and curiously detached.

These days, it’s worse. His permanent frown, his stilted delivery, his fixation on Trump supporters as if they’re some primitive tribe to be studied under glass — it all screams anxiety, not authority. He doesn’t project clarity. He projects burden. Every podcast, every essay, every panel feels like another brick in a bunker of airtight, joyless "reasoning" — sealed off from awe, from beauty, from anything resembling peace.

No comfort. No transcendence. No light. Just a man methodically dismantling meaning while sounding more drained with each attempt. Harris whispers meditations and mouths moral truths, all while insisting there’s no divine author behind any of it.

Christopher Hitchens

Even the great Christopher Hitchens — brilliant in so many ways — died with a cigarette in one hand, a scotch in the other, and a rage against the God he claimed didn’t exist.

Hitchens was a man of genuine intellect and rhetorical firepower. He could dazzle a room into silence. He could devastate an opponent with a single line. Joy, however, was never part of the package. The Brit burned hot, but never warm. His wit wasn’t rooted in love. It was weaponized. He didn’t laugh with you; he laughed at the absurdity of the world and often at the people trying to find meaning in it.

His takedowns of Mother Teresa, of Henry Kissinger, of religion itself — they were theater, yes. But they were also therapy. They came from a place of deep unrest. His war wasn’t just with belief systems but with the very structure of consolation. The human need for mercy, for absolution, for something sacred. He couldn’t tolerate it, maybe because he wanted it too much.

Atheism didn’t bring him peace. It gave him license to rage: to reject sentiment, spit on tradition, and scorn the spiritual longings of billions.

He could speak for hours. But when it came to rest — to true stillness — he had none.

The problem with atheism

The problem with modern atheism isn’t just lack of belief. It’s that it builds identity around lack itself, around the removal of things. Strip away God, strip away the soul, strip away metaphysics, strip away teleology, and what’s left isn’t freedom — it’s vacancy.

Atheism, in its purest form, is an ideology of erasure, a faith in subtraction. And subtraction, no matter how eloquently defended, is not a place from which joy can grow.

It is, however, a place from which misery flourishes. Consciousness gets recast as a glitch, morality as adaptive behavior. Love? A chemical bribe from nature. Everything that once lifted the human soul now gets filed under "illusion."

And illusions, we’re told, are best destroyed.

But here’s the truth atheists ignore: You cannot build a life — let alone a civilization — on negation. You cannot inspire the heart with “there is no God,” no matter how clever the phrasing. You can’t raise a child on “nothing matters” and expect the child to thrive. You can’t look into the eyes of someone dying and offer neurons as comfort.

This public face of atheism — the podcast hosts, the viral thinkers, the smug Substack intellectuals — don’t sell joy. They sell despair dressed up as clarity. They tell you that meaning is a delusion, that your suffering has no higher context, that the love you feel is just your DNA playing dress-up. They perform autopsies on transcendence, then wonder why their audiences walk away spiritually numb.

Humans don’t just crave truth. They crave belonging, direction, awe, and something to serve that isn’t themselves.

Atheism offers none of that. It hands you a mirror and tells you it’s a map — and then it dares you to walk in circles and calls it freedom.

The lie that launched a thousand riots

For decades, academic leaders insisted on "neutrality" when it came to life’s most important questions — whether God exists, what defines the highest good, and how to live a virtuous life. But that neutrality was always a ruse. Now the roof is caving in.

In Los Angeles, rioters burn police cars, wave foreign flags, and earn praise from elected officials who call them “peaceful demonstrators.” These aren’t isolated incidents. They reflect the long-term effects of a philosophy cultivated on campus and subsidized by taxpayers.

The neutrality myth has run its course. The wolves are no longer pretending to be sheep.

The recent unrest didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s the predictable bloom of a poisonous seed — one we let grow under the false belief that the First Amendment demands silence in the face of subversion. It doesn’t. And this strategy from America’s enemies didn’t begin last week. It’s been unfolding for decades.

Attacking the American order

Arizona State University, the nation’s largest public university, offers a snapshot of the broader national crisis. It imports professors from elite graduate programs and churns out activist graduates steeped in a worldview that condemns the United States as irredeemably evil.

Look at the student organizations ASU endorses — like MEChA, whose stated mission reads like a political ultimatum:

“[We] devote ourselves to ending settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, heteronormativity, borders and prisons because our liberation does not exist until these legacies of colonization are abolished.”

In 2024, ASU suspended the campus chapter of the far-left Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán — and only suspended them — after the group declared, “Death to the ‘Israeli’ entity! Death to the ‘American’ entity! Long live Palestine! Long live Turtle Island!”

("Turtle Island" refers to a Native American creation myth that North and Central America rest on the back of a giant turtle.)

Despite the suspension, MEChA remains listed as an active club on campus. The group still enjoys faculty support.

This isn’t about revising reading lists or replacing Shakespeare with indigenous poetry. “Decolonizing the curriculum” masks a much larger goal: revolution. This is a coalition of radicals — communists, LGBTQ+ activists, pro-Mexico nationalists, anti-Semitic “Free Palestine” organizers, land acknowledgment militants, and Islamist groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations — who align not because they share values, but because they share a target: the American constitutional order and its Christian foundations.

And yet naïve liberals and sentimental Christians often fall for the rhetoric. These groups invoke empathy, community, and sacrificial love — virtues rooted in the Christian tradition. But they weaponize those virtues. They wear sheep’s clothing to cloak their wolfish designs.

Rather than reform through representation, they aim to abolish representative government entirely. They don’t seek equality before God; they demand a transfer of power — to a Native tribe, to Mexico, or to some vague utopia where oppression has been deconstructed out of existence and LGBTQ sex litters every street corner.

That may sound absurd. It is. Mexico, after all, functions under cartel rule and bleeds citizens who risk everything to escape. But revolutions don’t require coherence. Absurdity often accelerates them. These movements aren’t governed by logic or principle. They run on resentment — the fury of those who believe life cheated them.

What the moment demands is moral clarity. That begins with rejecting the lie of neutrality.

Neutral education is a lie

A “neutral” education doesn’t exist. Every curriculum is built on a view of the “good life.” Every professor teaches from a vision of what humans are and what we are meant for. When we allowed universities to abandon the pursuit of wisdom and virtue — to stop teaching that God created us and that our rights come from him — we didn’t establish neutrality. We created a vacuum — and radicals rushed in to fill it.

As a professor, I’ve seen firsthand how godless academics wield the First Amendment as both shield and sword. They argue that “free speech” protects those who seek to dismantle the very system that guarantees that right, while insisting those same protections exclude Christian ideas from the classroom.

But the Constitution doesn’t require taxpayers to subsidize sedition. Nothing compels a university to hire professors who publicly call for the abolition of the American republic.

Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images

This isn’t about banning ideas. People can believe whatever they want. But taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to underwrite the education of young Americans in philosophies that teach them their country is an imperial cancer.

If a professor wants to advocate abolishing the United States, let him do it honestly. Declare it on the syllabus. Reject public funding. And stop pretending any of this qualifies as neutral education.

A little truth in advertising would go a long way. Imagine just a few basic reforms.

Preparation: Professors should demonstrate a grasp of foundational truths — about God, goodness, virtue, wisdom, and the greatness of the U.S. Constitution. Anyone who denies these basics has no business teaching at a taxpayer-funded institution. Private universities exist for that. Once upon a time, American universities valued this knowledge, often requiring courses in natural theology for all students.

Transparency: Require state-employed professors to disclose if their courses promote a political or ideological agenda — especially one hostile to the principles on which this country was founded.

Accountability: Tie public funding to standards that reflect the values of the citizens footing the bill. That includes respect for the rule of law, representative government, and the God-given rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Reform: Restore universities that teach what used to be obvious — that God is our Creator and knowing Him is the highest good of human life. State dollars come with strings. Those strings should include love of God and country.

That last point may sound idealistic, but it’s far more grounded than the utopian fantasies now taught with your tax dollars. It takes human nature seriously. It acknowledges the need for redemption, the pursuit of virtue and wisdom, and the moral order built into creation.

It’s time for students, parents, donors, governors, pastors — and yes, President Donald Trump — to recognize what the Los Angeles riots truly represent: not just political unrest, but philosophical collapse. The neutrality myth has run its course. The wolves are no longer pretending to be sheep. They’re outside your child’s classroom, dressed in regalia, holding a metaphorical Molotov cocktail.

Enough pretending. The time for reform has come.

How atheism created a terrorist — but his bomb shattered secularism's illusions

Last month, a 25-year-old named Guy Edward Bartkus set off a bomb at American Reproductive Centers, an IVF clinic in Palm Springs, California. Four people were injured, and the FBI said that Bartkus was killed in the blast that tore through the building.

Akil Davis, assistant director of the FBI Los Angeles field office, called it “the largest bombing scene that we’ve had in Southern California.”

Without any standard, we should not be surprised when man begins to act like the animal that secular atheism claims he is.

Though the clinic endured heavy damage and a nearby car was crumpled in a burned heap, Dr. Maher Abdallah, who leads the clinic, said that no eggs or embryos were harmed.

“Thank God today happened to be a day that we have no patients,” said Abdallah. “We are heartbroken to learn that this event claimed a life and caused injuries, and our deepest condolences go out to the individuals and families affected. Our mission has always been to help build families, and in times like these, we are reminded of just how fragile and precious life is. In the face of this tragedy, we remain committed to creating hope — because we believe that healing begins with community, compassion, and care.”

Abdallah’s view of life stands in stark contrast to the bomber’s, as the FBI has confirmed this was an intentional act of terrorism spurred by his ideological position.

In an online manifesto, Bartkus said he was a “pro-mortalist.” Pro-mortalism is the belief that death is better than life and is supposedly motivated by the desire to end suffering.

It is related to anti-natalism, or efilism, as Bartkus called it, which is the belief that it is morally evil to have children.

His manifesto shows that Bartkus viewed humans as parasitic to the planet and other life forms. He also showed a hatred toward religion and God, stating that he preferred Satan over God.

Though he is being called a nihilist, Bartkus saw a difference between his views and nihilism, saying that “religion is retarded but there is objective value in the universe and it lies in the harm being experienced by sentient beings.”

Bartkus also said that “we need a war against pro-lifers.”

He referred to a friend he called “Sophie,” who allegedly had recently committed suicide, and that the two of them had agreed that if one died, the other would also die soon after. He claimed that they both had borderline personality disorder.

In an audio recording, he said that he was committing the attack because “it just comes down to I’m angry that I exist and that, you know, nobody got my consent to bring me here” and “I’m very against [IVF], it’s extremely wrong. These are people who are having kids after they’ve sat there and thought about it. How much more stupid can it get?”

How did we get here?

Though the philosophies to which Bartkus ascribed are not commonly known, they are gaining popularity, even being taught in university courses and recently being platformed by outlets such as the New Yorker.

I believe that these philosophies are not new, but are the logical progression of secular atheism and a society that increasingly is entitled, despises religion, and sees no meaning in life.

Our culture has been systematically stripped of its religious and moral values and our very foundation for what makes life meaningful.

When you tell people from the time they are children that the universe is an accident, life is hopeless, and that man, who is no different from animals, is a parasite destroying the planet, you cannot then expect that they will grow into happy and fulfilled people.

When you lie to people daily that we are in imminent peril of a man-made climate cataclysm that will destroy ourselves and all life on Earth because we are selfish and use fossil fuels, you should expect that at least some of them will begin to believe you.

When you champion the idea that the only life that has value is one free of suffering and promote euthanasia as a solution, you should not be shocked when young people act on such an idea and seek not only to kill themselves and the unborn but to harm those who would bring life into the world.

The reality is that secular atheism — with its desire to eliminate God and any objective morality and meaning grounded in religion — has effectively doomed mankind. All secularism has to offer is: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”

Unfortunately, that isn’t enough, as most people will still seek meaning and purpose. And many will still find that all the supposed fun to be had doesn’t outweigh the hardships and suffering in life.

Without any standard, we should not be surprised when man begins to act like the animal that secular atheism claims he is.

What is the answer to the questions of life, meaning, and suffering?

In short, thankfulness — not thankfulness alone, but thankfulness to God.

G.K. Chesterton — the great author, philosopher, and apologist of the 19th and early 20th centuries — discussed this idea throughout his life, but I want to focus on what he said near the end of his life in his autobiography. You can read the book for free here.

In the final chapter, entitled “The God with the Golden Key,” Chesterton wrote that the “chief idea of my life” was “the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking things for granted.”

From his childhood, Chesterton said he had an almost “violently vivid sense of those two dangers; the sense that the experience must not be spoilt by presumption or despair.”

"To take a convenient tag out of my first juvenile book of rhymes, I asked through what incarnations or prenatal purgatories I must have passed, to earn the reward of looking at a dandelion," he wrote. "But in substance what I said about the dandelion is exactly what I should say about the sunflower or the sun, or the glory which (as the poet said) is brighter than the sun. The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed."

Chesterton noted two other perspectives on the dandelion: that of the pessimist, who saw the dandelion as meaningless, and the “offensive optimist,” who complained by comparing the dandelion to what one may find elsewhere.

He reasoned that such comparisons are “ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them. Instead of saying, like the old religious poet, ‘What is man that Thou carest for him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?’ we are to say like the discontented cabman, ‘What’s this?’ or like the bad-tempered Major in the club, ‘Is this a chop fit for a gentleman?’”

Chesterton said that younger generations had developed a sense of entitlement to their “right to happiness” and “right to life,” all while claiming that there was no divine source for those rights.

Chesterton responded by saying that rights “came from where the dandelion came from; and that they will never value either without recognizing its source.”

Life includes suffering, but that doesn’t mean it is without meaning or that it isn’t worth living.

He added, “And in that ultimate sense uncreated man, man merely in the position of the babe unborn, has no right even to see a dandelion; for he could not himself have invented either the dandelion or the eyesight.”

Secular atheism, he argued, logically leads to the types of despairing philosophies that Bartkus ascribed to, which undermine the beauty of life.

“When first it was even hinted that the universe may not be a great design, but only a blind and indifferent growth, it ought to have been perceived instantly that this must for ever forbid any poet to retire to the green fields as to his home, or to look at the blue sky for his inspiration,” Chesterton stated.

"There would be no more of any such traditional truth associated with green grass than with green rot or green rust; no more to be recalled by blue skies than by blue noses amputated in a freezing world of death," he wrote. "When there is no longer even a vague idea of purposes or presences, then the many-colored forest really is a rag-bag and all the pageant of the dust only a dustbin. We can see this realization creeping like a slow paralysis over all those of the newest poets who have not reacted towards religion. Their philosophy of the dandelion is not that all weeds are flowers; but rather that all flowers are weeds. Indeed it reaches to something like nightmare; as if Nature itself were unnatural."

Chesterton did not mean that everything in life is always pleasant or beautiful, but that overall, life is a gift from God.

Life includes suffering, but that doesn’t mean it is without meaning or that it isn’t worth living.

But the only way for life to have meaning, or to make sense of the troubles in life, is through God.

The way forward

I sympathize with those who have been failed by the secular philosophers, teachers, politicians, and other “experts” who have given them nothing to look forward to but suffering.

I am a man who has suffered little but does not suffer well. I understand why people like Bartkus feel as though they wish they had never been born. In their worldview, there truly is nothing to give them hope through life’s toils and tribulations.

But for the Christian, there is always meaning, purpose, and hope.

And when one becomes a Christian, it is with the knowledge that we do not deserve anything but God’s wrath for eternity. The key to life is understanding this and knowing that every good thing we experience is the result of God’s grace.

I share with you an anecdote from the 18th-century preacher Matthew Henry that has helped me when I have been suffering.

Henry was on his way home one night when he was robbed. That night Henry wrote in his journal:

I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse, they did not take my life; third, although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed and not I who robbed.

As a Christian, there is always something to be thankful to God for — even if in the moment it doesn’t seem like it.

To avoid future tragedies like that of Guy Edward Bartkus, let us endeavor even more to counter the lies of secularism and our pro-death culture with the truth and hope of Jesus Christ and to teach people that peace and happiness will only come from humbly thanking God for every good gift He chooses to bestow on us.

This article is adapted from an essay originally published at Liberty University's Standing for Freedom Center.

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Jordan Peterson professes to be an expert on Christianity but doesn't believe in Jesus — in fact, the only higher authority he seems to recognize is himself.