“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none who does good” (v. 1). Psalm 14 opens with an uncompromising assessment of the human condition. David isn’t addressing those who struggle honestly with doubt or who wrestle with difficult questions of faith. The focus falls upon a heart that resists God’s presence altogether—a posture shaped by moral refusal rather than intellectual uncertainty. This denial seeks autonomy from divine scrutiny, truth, and judgement. While humanity attempts to silence God, the Lord Himself speaks from Heaven with clarity: “They have all turned aside, they have together become corrupt; there is none who does good, no, not one” (v. 3). Psalm 14 functions as a mirror held before the world and before each reader, reflecting reality as God perceives it. The image revealed is unsettling: hearts curved inward, estranged from their Creator, and incapable of righteousness on their own.
“Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge, who eat up my people as they eat bread, and do not call on the LORD?” (v. 4). The psalm portrays evil with chilling normalcy. Injustice becomes habitual, exploitation routine, and cruelty as unremarkable as a daily meal. Those who live apart from God consume others without conscience or restraint. Yet the psalm refuses to grant evil the final word. Eve amidst widespread corruption, a decisive truth remains: “God is with the generation of the righteous” (v. 5b). God’s presence doesn’t evaporate when He’s denied. The faithful may feel exposed or abandoned, yet the Lord remains their refuge (v. 6). Heaven is never vacant, regardless of how confidently it’s dismissed. Though the righteous may appear insignificant, they stand within the shelter of God’s abiding nearness.
Psalm 14 thus confronts and consoles simultaneously. It cautions against what might be called practical atheism—the subtle habit of living as though God were irrelevant even while professing faith. Self-reliance can quietly supplant prayer, and confidence in human ingenuity can displace trust in divine provision. The psalm presses Christins to examine whether daily life reflects dependence upon God or merely nominal acknowledgement. At the same time, it comforts by revealing that God’s verdict over human corruption is not His final action. Judgement gives way to promise: “Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion!” (v. 7a). This longing finds fulfillment in Jesus Christ, the wisdom of God incarnate. In Him, folly is confronted, sin is forgiven, and rebellion is transformed into belonging.
“When the LORD brings back the captivity of His people, let Jacob rejoice and Israel be glad” (v. 7b). This hope now shapes the life of the Church. The God whom humanity denies has acted decisively. He did not merely observe the human condition from a distance; He entered it (John 1:14). The corruption exposed by the psalm met its remedy at the cross, and the denial of God encountered its answer in the resurrection. Therefore, Psalm 14 is sung without triumphalism. It is voiced with humility and gratitude. Those who confess it remember that they, too, once lived in denial until mercy intervened. Through Christ, rejection has been answered with grace, and despair has been transformed into rejoicing.
The Lutheran Column 
sigh, every cultist makes these claims that everyone outside the cult is a “fool” and yet not no one of them can show that their imagniary friend exists.
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It’s always interesting when someone travels into a space not meant for them simply to declare its contents meaningless. My post, like the psalm itself, was written for those who believe, or at least those willing to wrestle honestly with the text. You did neither. The irony, then, is that your comment unwittingly illustrates the very Scripture you reject.
Your claim assumes two things: first, that those who believe in God belong to a “cult,” and second, that knowledge of God must conform to empirical demonstration. Both assumptions collapse under scrutiny. “Cult” is a rather convenient rhetorical label to dismiss without engagement, for it replaces dialogue with contempt. And the demand for material proof of the immaterial is not rationalism; it is category error. One might as well demand to weigh justice or measure beauty in grams. The metaphysical cannot be reduced to the material without ceasing to be what it is.
Moreover, the psalm doesn’t call unbelievers “fools” as an insult. It’s a diagnosis of DISORDERED WISDOM—the kind that sees the universe’s design, morality, consciousness, and order, yet insists on meaninglessness. The biblical “fool” is not stupid, but self-enclosed—the one who mistakes silence for absence and transcendence for fiction.
So while you see faith as delusion, I see your comment as a testament to faith’s persistence. Something about the Word of God compelled you enough to oppose it. You wandered into a temple to shout that temples are useless, and in doing so, you acknowledged its threshold.
Peace to you, and may the God you deny still grant you the truth you seek.
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Really, a space that isn’t meant for me? A space where you go out of your way to make false claims about atheists? That you used these keywords for to get traffic: “atheism, Christian, LCMS, Lutheran, Lutheranism, practical atheism, Psalms, unbelief”
If you didn’t want atheists to see your failed claims, then you should realize that using these keywords will get attention. Your post is full of the common false claims of Christians, and you don’t like that I’ve noticed and have pointed out how it has failed.
I have wrestled honestly with the text and the text is quite clear. I have read the bible and I have been a Christian, so I know the attitude behind such nonsense very well. Every religion wants to claim that only it is true, and not one religion can support that claim.
You claim that those outside the religion are fools, and yet you can’t show that your religion is any better than any other religion. A religion is a cult, and often it is a religion that is considered strange by the culture around it because of what the religion requires. This often that the cult requires everything be given up for the cult.
Guess what jesus requires for someone to be a Christian?
Knowledge is based on empirical demonstration, and when a Christian claims that they know what their god wants, etc, they have no evidence to support that claim. Christians cannot show that their god exists or that their version of their god is the right one since you all make up different gods that want different morals and consider different things to be “sin”. You do not accept the claims of knowledge from other theists since you know that they have no evidence and that a feeling isn’t evidence. I do not accept those claims of knowledge either, I add just one more to the mix with your claims.
There is no “metaphysical” and theists of all types have spent millennia trying to find evidence for it. There is no “immaterial” since everything comes from the material, from the idea of love from the material brain. yOu simply presume that there is something “immaterial” and yet have nothing to show it exists at all.
The psalm does indeed call unbelievers fools as an insult and the one who determines the insult is the victim, not the person making the claim. Unsurprisngly, there is nothing “disordered” about not believing in your imaginary friend, Garrick. There is no wisdom in belief in the imaginary.
You try to claim that there is “design” in the universe, but per your own myths, you can’t see any since there was a “fall”. You have no idea what your god actually intended. Christians cannot agree on what morality their god wants, nor can they show that morality is objective at all. Consciousness is a mystery but again, not evidence for your imaginary friend.
Funny how I don’t insist on meaninglessness at all, but nice false claim. Humans give ourselves and others meaning. Your god isn’t needed at all.
Strange how your god wasn’t absent per the bible, it had no problem makng personal appearances, giving direct evidence, etc. Now, Christians, and other theists, must make up excuses why their god suddenly can’t be found. You can’t show your god exists and you can’t show any evidence for the events that supposedly happened per your bible. There is evidence of absence and absence of evidence. Those together make a very strong argument that your religion’s claims are false.
Faith in the unseen and unsupported by evidence is a delusion, and I would say the same for anyone who tried to claim fairies existed too. That ignorance and gulliblily persists doesn’t mean your religion’s claims are true.
Unsurprisngly, your god compelled nothing, but funny how if it did, the common Christian claim of free will is handily destroyed, another one of those things Christians can’t agree on. I oppose harmful lies. Acknoweleging that a cult tells lies doesn’t show its true.
When I was a Christian, and losing my faith, I prayed for help. This god never showed up. So your promises and hope failed 30+ years ago.
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You’ve written a great deal, and though I cannot reply to every line, the spirit behind your words speaks louder than the words themselves. You claim to have once believed, yet the tone here suggests not the quiet resolve of one who has left an illusion, but the lingering anger of one who cannot stop arguing with what he insists is imaginary. That paradox alone is telling.
Let’s begin with the accusation that my “space” is meant to deceive or manipulate keywords. I use such terms because theology—especially Lutheran theology—exists in public conversation. You stumbled here not because I lured you, but because you were already searching for what you now call falsehood. In that sense, the irony remains: for someone who insists there is no God, you still seem to seek Him wherever His name is spoken.
You say you once wrestled with Scripture and found it wanting. Then you should recall that the Bible itself names this wrestling as part of faith’s story. Jacob didn’t win by argument but by surrender. Faith, properly speaking, is not about intellectual conquest but about trust in the One who transcends empirical proof. You say “knowledge is based on empirical demonstration,” but you live daily by unprovable truths—love, beauty, moral obligation, consciousness, purpose—all immaterial realities. You cannot see justice, only its effects; you cannot touch meaning, yet you appeal to it constantly. The immaterial is not a superstition; it’s the soil from which all human reason grows.
You claim there is “no metaphysical,” yet your very sentence presumes logic, which itself is not material. Neurons fire, yes, but the laws of reason that govern your argument are not composed of atoms. They are abstract, universal, and unchanging—qualities that cannot emerge from blind materialism without invoking metaphysical order. To deny metaphysics is to saw off the branch on which your reason sits.
You also insist that the psalm calls unbelievers “fools” as an insult. But the text was not written to mock. It was written to mourn. The fool of Psalm 14 is not condemned for ignorance, but for willful self-enclosure, for saying in his heart, “There is no God,” while benefiting daily from breath, beauty, and order he cannot account for. The psalmist weeps more than he sneers. He names folly not to gloat, but to warn.
You say morality, meaning, and purpose are self-created. That may feel empowering, but it collapses under its own weight. If morality is self-made, it is self-revocable; if meaning is self-created, it is self-destructible. You cannot rebuke lies, injustice, or cruelty with any final authority if all truth is human invention. To say “I oppose harmful lies” presumes an objective standard of truth and harm—one that cannot be grounded in materialism without borrowing from the very moral law you deny.
As for your story of unanswered prayer, I hear pain beneath the sarcasm. I won’t mock that pain. God’s silence can feel like abandonment. Every Christian knows this ache, myself included. Yet Scripture’s entire drama rests on that silence being broken in Christ. You may say He never showed up. He would answer that He did so once and for all on a cross. You may not believe it, but disbelief doesn’t undo the event—it only blinds one to its grace.
You call faith a delusion. But the delusion, perhaps, is thinking that the universe itself is capable of producing truth, morality, consciousness, and longing out of chaos, and that those very longings have no meaning. Your worldview must borrow transcendent categories from the very God it denies in order to function. And when the atheist borrows the language of logic, morality, and meaning to deny God, he is like a man using borrowed air to curse the lungs that gave it.
You came here, not as a student of theology, but as an evangelist of unbelief. I understand that. But understand this: I do not write to convert the defiant, but to comfort the faithful. You read my post uninvited and then declared offense; that’s like walking into a church to demand silence for your disbelief. And yet even there, you are welcome. For the Shepherd still seeks the lost, even those who no longer believe they are lost.
May the God you once called upon—whether you believe He heard you or not—have mercy on you still.
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No one ever responds to every line, but you certainly have written a lot, Garrick. Your attempt to invent a ‘spirit’ behind my words is no more than you trying to ignore what I’ve said and put your own meaning on things.
I have indeed claimed that I was a Christian, that’s because I was. Your notions of “quiet resolve” is just invented to make yourself feel better. I speak out against the lies of cultists since they cause real harm. I can be angry with that, and I should be angry with that. You have no paradox, just your false claims. Curious how you do that when your god hates lies and liars.
I said nothing about your space being deceiving by using keywords. I said that you chose those keywords and then have tried to tell me that I don’t belong in a space that mentions atheists. Yep, your blog is public and your claims are false yet again.
Again, I don’t seek your imaginary friend. I seek where Christians are making false claims.
Unsurprisingly, your bible doesn’t say that one should need to wrestle with scripture if your god is what Christians claim. Christians can’t agree on what their bible even means, so they also wrestle with it and they lose. To surrender to incoherent nonsense is rather silly. No reason to trust a god that can’t make itself understood and that fails in its promises, Garrick.
Unsurprisingly, I don’t live by unprovable truths at all. Love is a feeling created by the material brain. Beauty is an opinion created by the material brans. Morality is an opinion created by the material brain. Consciousness is created by the material grain. Purpose is created by the material brain. They are ideas, not some magical platonic forms. Justice is an opinion, created by the material brain. Meaning is an idea that is created by the material brain. So, your silly attempts to make such things magical and “immaterial” fail. All of he things you listed are known to exist. Sadly, your imaginary friend isn’t.
Again, no metaphysical nonsense, and logic isn’t metaphysical. It is from the brain too, and you fail yet again. No neurons, no laws of reason. They are human inventions to describe how the universe works. The universe aka matter/energy causes them.
The psalm does call unbelievers fools as an insult. The text was written to convince cultists that they are ever so clever to believe in their nonsense, and yes, it is an insult to those who aren’t Christians. The fool is literally condemned for ignorance since your cult says that someone who doesn’t know this cult will be damned. Context is everything, right? No evidence for your god, no “willful self-enclosure”.
You then try a common theist bit of nonsense that your imaginary friend somehow is responsible for breath, beauty, and order, when you can’t show that it exists at all. Garrick, all cultists of all religions make the exact same claim about their gods, so gee, are you denying those gods when you dare to benefit from breath, beauty, and order? I can account for all of these things without your imaginary friend. You simply presuppose it exists and is responsible for these things. The psalmist is a vain and ignorance cultist who claims to have the only right answers and has nothing. He has nothing to warn anyone about.
Yep, morality, meaning and purpose are self-created. We can see that from how Christians make up what morality they claim that their god wants and surprise, you don’t agree. No collapsing, just the baseless claims of a cultist who can’t show his god merely exists. Yep, all of those things are self-destructible too. So? There is no “final authority”, your cult has just made that up. Nope, no objective standard is assumed at all, but nice set of lies there. I can only use my own standard of truth and harm. I borrow nothing from your cult that can’t agree on what morals its god wants.
It’s nothing new to see you try to excuse your god’s failure with me. No pain, just relief and amusement that I believed in such garbage. So, your attempts to gaslight me fail miserably. No god, so no expectation of its doing anything. Your god is silent since it doesn’t exist and Christians make up excuses why it fails them every single day. No silence being broken by myths that have no evidence that their claims are true. It’s not Jesus that says he showed up, it’s you making up a lie that your myths are true and that covers everything that it fails at.
The bible says prayers will be answered, and it doesn’t say that oh well, JC showed up so no prayers need to be answered anymore. You’ve managed to lie about your bible in your need to invent excuses.
Since there is no evidence for any crucifixion or resurrection, that’s what “undoes” the event. Curious how no one noticed this Jesus, despite the biblical claim that he was a famous miracle worker. No one mentions him during his supposed life, which is yet another thing Christians can’t agree on: when Jesus lived. No one noticed the major earthquake, the sky darkening, and the dead Jews wandering around roman-occupied Jerusalem during a Passover. The romans, the Jews, and even Paul noticed nothing at all.
Yes, faith is a delusion, and you claim it is a delusion when it isn’t about your particular god. Funny how you can’t produce your god, and you baselessly claim that the universe can’t produce truth, morality, consciousness, longing, etc. I see you are trying the Christian nonsense that somehow humans “long” for a god, and happily, that’s not true. I don’t borrow anything from your cult and those ideas have been around long before your cult exists, so you are evidently borrowing from all of the humans who came before you. Tsk-tsk.
Again, always fun to see Christians lying about morality when they can’t even agree on it amongst themselves, showing that Christian morality is entirely subjective.
I came here to point out how Christianity’s claims are false. That the ignorance and arrogance of a cult that claims anyone outside of it is a “fool” is what all cults do. Your post is public and that’s all the invite anyone needs. Churches are privately owned buildings that don’t take out keywords to attract attention. Unsurprisingly, your claim I’m welcome in a church if I said that they were wrong in church is hilariously false. If I went to any of the many, many different churches that are around here on a Sunday and stood up during services and said they were wrong, just how quickly do you think I would be shown the door?
Curious how this god doesn’t answer your prayers either, Garrick. Per the bible, true followers of Christ will get any prayer answered quickly and with what is asked for. Why do you, and every other self-professed Christian, fail at that?
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You’ve written at length again, and while you accuse me of inventing meaning where none exists, that accusation itself presupposes meaning—a curious contradiction for someone who denies any objective source for it. You call my discernment of “the spirit behind your words” projection, but tone and intent are discernible realities in communication; they are what make conversation possible. To pretend all language is purely literal is to misunderstand language itself.
You object that I claimed Scripture tells us to wrestle with Scripture. I didn’t. I said faith wrestles—as seen in Job, in Jacob, and in every believer who struggles with the silence of God. Wrestling is not a failure of revelation; it’s the inevitable tension between finite understanding and infinite truth. The fact that Christians sometimes disagree about interpretation doesn’t disprove revelation; it proves that finite minds must work within mystery. The Church doesn’t lose the wrestling match; it learns humility through it.
Your reduction of love, beauty, morality, justice, and meaning to chemical reactions is neither scientific nor rational; it’s metaphysical materialism masquerading as empiricism. You call these things “ideas,” yet ideas are not composed of neurons. Neurons fire when ideas occur, but they are not the ideas themselves, any more than piano strings are the music. If all thought and value are products of brain chemistry, then so are your own arguments, which means they are not rational conclusions but chemical events, making reason itself an illusion. The moment you argue for truth, you’ve stepped into the realm of the immaterial.
You claim logic is merely a human invention derived from the material universe. But logic is descriptive, not creative. We discovered the laws of reason; we didn’t invent them. You cannot choose to make “A and not-A” true simultaneously. These laws exist independently of human preference, which is precisely what makes them universal. That is metaphysical order, whether you call it that or not.
As for Psalm 14, your interpretation is historically and linguistically shallow. The psalmist isn’t mocking outsiders to boost in-group confidence; he’s observing the moral and spiritual disorder that flows from a heart turned inward. At the risk of reiterating myself, in Hebrew thought, “the fool” is not the uneducated but the self-enclosed—the one who refuses divine wisdom and therefore lives as though the moral fabric of the universe were self-created. The psalmist doesn’t say unbelievers are unintelligent; he laments their self-blinding.
Your appeal to moral subjectivism (“I can only use my own standard of truth and harm”) collapses the moment you criticize harm or lies as wrong. If morality is merely self-defined, you can’t condemn anyone’s morality—not mine, not another culture’s, not even history’s tyrants. Yet you do, constantly, because you must. Moral outrage betrays a belief in objective moral law, which your materialism cannot justify without borrowing from the very moral framework you deny.
You accuse me of lying when I say Christ answered the silence of prayer by His cross and resurrection. But your disbelief in the evidence does not mean the evidence doesn’t exist. You reject every testimony, every historical document, every eyewitness, every martyr’s confession, and every transformation of life throughout history, not because they’re disproven, but because they violate your presupposition that the supernatural cannot occur. That’s not rational skepticism; that’s metaphysical bias.
You claim there’s “no evidence” for Jesus’ existence or the events of the Gospels, yet this is an outdated internet trope that no serious historian—atheist, agnostic, or Christian—upholds. Even scholars like Bart Ehrman, who rejects Christ’s divinity, affirms His historicity. The resurrection cannot be empirically repeated (by definition, miracles cannot), but neither can the Big Bang or consciousness. You live by trust in unobservable realities every day, only you call them “laws of nature.”
You say your loss of faith brought “relief and amusement.” Relief, perhaps. Amusement, maybe. But if everything is material, then emotions are nothing more than chemical surges, not truth statements about reality. Your laughter cannot refute my God any more than an electron’s vibration can disprove music.
You dismiss church community as cultic and imply you’d be “shown the door” if you interrupted worship to mock it. Perhaps you would be asked to leave, but not because you’re feared. Rather, because worship is sacred, not a debate club. You’re free to reject it, but respect for sacred space is not hypocrisy; it’s basic civility.
Finally, you ask why God doesn’t answer prayer “quickly and with what is asked for.” That’s not a failure of the text; it’s a failure of expectation. Scripture never promises God is a vending machine. It promises He hears, answers, and gives according to His wisdom, not ours. Job cried for answers and received not explanation but presence. That’s what faith trusts: not control, but communion.
So I won’t trade insult for insult. You speak as one convinced that all light is illusion; I speak as one who has seen the dawn of Christ. If you wish to go on calling all faith delusion, you may, but even your outrage testifies to a moral law that your worldview cannot explain. And if you continue on this directionless road of insulting, I will have to discontinue this conversation that is leading nowhere.
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