{"id":5392,"date":"2026-04-27T08:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5392"},"modified":"2026-04-27T08:11:00","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T12:11:00","slug":"the-god-who-is-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/27\/the-god-who-is-there\/","title":{"rendered":"The God Who is There"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>
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“There’s\u00a0probably no God.\u00a0Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
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That was the core message\u00a0of the Atheist Bus Campaign in Britain early in 2009.\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
Comedy writer Ariane Sherine, in partnership with Cambridge professor Richard Dawkins (currently the world’s highest profile atheist), plastered their\u00a0slogan on the sides of 800 buses around the country.\u00a0The campaign was a\u00a0response to the seemingly never-ending advertising of various Christian groups and ministries.
\u00a0
If the consortium of atheists and humanists that funded the initiative hoped to get people talking, they definitely succeeded.\u00a0\u00a0
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Most of the conversation centered on the word “probably.”
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When you think about it, that’s a less-than-compelling way to make a statement about personal security.\u00a0\u00a0
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That elevator cable will probably work.\u00a0So stop worrying and enjoy your ride to the top floor. That mayonnaise-based potato salad was probably refrigerated appropriately.\u00a0So stop worrying and enjoy your lunch.\u00a0<\/em>
\u00a0
Sherine admitted that “probably” was probably not the best word to use.\u00a0But while\u00a0people of faith cannot decisively prove God’s existence, she was conceding that atheists can’t utterly disprove it, either.\u00a0“Probably” was also a way to comply with the British Advertising Standards Authority, which forbids advertisers from making untrue statements.\u00a0
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The more noteworthy issue, however, concerns\u00a0the second phrase.
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Since there’s probably no God,\u00a0stop worrying and enjoy your life.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>
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That’s\u00a0fascinating.\u00a0\u00a0
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The implication is that believing we are alone in the universe should bring a huge sigh of relief.\u00a0There’s no God: Now I can stop feeling anxious and fearful.\u00a0Why would that be true?
\u00a0
The answer is fairly clear: God is seen by a number of\u00a0people as the enemy of happiness.\u00a0\u00a0
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He is the\u00a0Cosmic Killjoy \u2013 the grumpy deity who shouts, “Now don’t make me come down there!” He is the intrusive spy who knows all our secrets, watches us indulge our hidden addictions, and makes us feel guilty because of\u00a0our messed-up lives.\u00a0
\u00a0
What a wonderful thing to get him off our backs, and to get ourselves off the hook.\u00a0
\u00a0
Dawkins memorably declared\u00a0in his book\u00a0The God Delusion<\/em>\u00a0that the supreme being of\u00a0the Bible is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
\u00a0
OK, then.\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
The Atheist\u00a0Bus Campaign revealed that a good many Brits\u00a0(and others in Western cultures) have concluded that erasing God\u00a0from our consciousness will give us a real shot at joy.
\u00a0
To which Christians\u00a0can only\u00a0respond, “Everything changes if we choose to see God the way Jesus saw him.”\u00a0
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According to Jesus, the God who is really there is not a celestial tyrant.\u00a0God is a Father who desperately yearns to be reunited with his family.\u00a0God is a Parent who knows everything about us yet isn’t turned off or turned away.\u00a0
\u00a0
Author and speaker Vince Vitale once asked a student at a Chicago university if he thought God loved him.
\u00a0
“No,” the student responded.\u00a0Why did he\u00a0think that?\u00a0“I’m a bad person.\u00a0I do bad things.\u00a0I think bad things.\u00a0I have a bad personality.”
\u00a0
Vitale then asked the student, “If one day you\u00a0have a child of your own, and your child begins to think and do bad things, would you stop loving him?\u201d “No way,” replied the student.\u00a0Vitale went on, “If God is a Father and you are his child, wouldn’t he continue to love you through both the good and the bad?”
\u00a0
The student’s eyes filled with tears.\u00a0“Yes, I think that makes sense.”
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It’s so strange that we think that God would probably\u00a0under-perform<\/em>\u00a0compared to a human parent, instead of being the perfect parent we have always longed to know.
\u00a0
If Jesus accurately described the God who is really there, and if we choose to abandon ourselves to him, we really do have grounds to stop worrying and enjoy our lives.
\u00a0\u00a0
There’s no “probably” about that.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0“There’s\u00a0probably no God.\u00a0Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”\u00a0That was the core message\u00a0of the Atheist Bus Campaign in Britain early in 2009.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Comedy writer Ariane Sherine, in partnership with Cambridge professor Richard Dawkins (currently the world’s highest profile atheist), plastered their\u00a0slogan on the sides of 800 buses around the country.\u00a0The campaign was a\u00a0response… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5393,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[637,848],"class_list":["post-5392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-atheism","tag-gods-love-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5392"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5394,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5392\/revisions\/5394"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}