c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) And lo, I awakened from a dream during this most blessed Christmas season.

Three Wise Men named Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”), Sam Harris (“The End of Faith”) and Christopher Hitchens (“God Is Not Great”) traveled from afar to announce their tidings of great joy _ there is no God, no king to rule over us, there is only us.

And suddenly, there was a bright light from the East, telling a tale from the wintry north, announcing this same good news to children. There is a world beyond this one, a world where free will reigns and everyone does what is right in his or her own eyes. There is no dark, sinister authoritarian Magisterium to dictate belief, nor are we ruled by parents or religious zealots.

In this magic place, we trust our fates to an inanimate golden object, a compass called an alethiometer. It does not engage our logic but miraculously reveals the truth through the alignment of a few icons on its watch-like face. The compass is particularly useful if you are the child prophesied by the witches long ago. Such a child will throw off the rule of authority and submit only to what is revealed by the magic Golden Compass.

Such miracles in a godless world, thought I.

And then I heard the voice of Philip Pullman, the man who created the universe of “The Golden Compass.” He spoke of his anger at C.S. Lewis for using the “Chronicles of Narnia” to smuggle belief into fantasy literature. I heard him say he would do for children’s disbelief what Lewis did for their belief. I recalled his saying things in my waking hours: “I am all for the death of God,” and “My books are about killing God.” He wasn’t finished. “I am of the Devil’s party and I know it,” and “I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.” Is this authoritarian adult trying to control children’s thinking, I thought? Is he the new Magisterium?

I wondered at the passion of these men _ Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Pullman. I marveled at their creative, imaginative leaps of faith, at their skilled writing and at the workings of their minds. I wondered, as did G.K. Chesterton, if the worse moment for these atheists is when they are really thankful and have nobody to thank.

And then I heard a voice _ could it be the voice of reason? _ crying out. “Fear not!” the voice said. “Nothing in the `new atheism’ is that new, novel or different from the old atheism.”

I mind wandered back to my senior year of high school, in 1966, when Time magazine asked: “Is God Dead?” It caused a great furor and then faded away.

I remembered reading Nietzsche, who announced with a flourish that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” I remembered the graffiti on a brick wall at Cal Berkeley _ “God is Dead, Nietzsche,” followed by “Nietzsche is dead, God.”

And then in my dream I heard another voice _ a British philosopher from Oxford named Anthony Flew. After years of advocating atheism, he concluded there must be a God, and wrote about it in “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.”

I remembered hearing Flew two years ago in Oxford, when he was asked if he had ever met C.S. Lewis, who in 1930 made the journey from atheist to theist to Christian.

Flew shared that as an Oxford student, he and his friends would go for drinks at the “Bird and Baby” pub in Oxford, and would sit as close as they could to the “inklings” _ Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson and other literary types who were also Christian. Flew was taken by their cheerful disputation, their witty repartee, their willingness to take on any idea and consider it from every angle. In short, he was awed by their intelligence, their comprehensive knowledge and fearlessness in the face of argumentation.

These men of good will had sought the truth and found it, and the truth had set them free. They found this truth _ not by placing blind faith in an alethiometer, nor in an authoritarian religious bureaucracy _ but in a child who was a savior and king, born in a manger in Bethlehem.

And then I heard a voice in my dream say: “Wise men still seek him.”

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

KRE/CM END STAUB