Secularists have been known to complain that Christians obsess about sin. They even complain that Christians tell children that they are sinful. Secular thinkers allege to believe that babies are pure and innocent when they are born, incapable of sin, incapable of desiring to sin. These are the same babies that secular thinkers claim have no rights, no personhood, not even the right to be called babies if they have not yet exited the womb. Furthermore, secular thinkers who refuse to give credence even to the concept of sin willfully execute those babies if the mother so chooses. The people who advocate for this method of managing pregnancy when it turns out to be inconvenient become violently angry when people who believe that a baby has a right to life offer to pray with or counsel with women approaching abortion clinics where they can have their babies killed on demand. Secularists say that abortion is not sin, and no woman should feel guilty for cleansing her womb of a parasite.

Secular thinkers engage in numerous behaviors that Christians consider to be sin, and Christians expect people to feel guilty if they engage in such behavior, but secular thinkers claim not to suffer any qualms about these behaviors.

For example, secular thinkers are advocating nationwide for the right for adults to die. It isn’t enough that they work very hard to protect the right to kill an unborn baby; they want born babies that live to adulthood to be free to kill themselves. That is what “right to die” means. In a few US states, legislation to this effect has been passed, and there are foreign countries where it is authorized as well. Adults claim to be in terminal depression, for example, or perhaps they have learned they are suffering from an incurable disease. The laws vary widely in terms of the rules for authorization of the “right to die,” but one and all they result in suicide. It is highly incongruous that secular thinkers want some people put on a “suicide watch” out of fear that those people will harm themselves, while others are put on the “right to die” watch, because they have legally declared that they will absolutely harm themselves.

It must be mentioned here that more than one doctor in various places around the world has declared that parents ought not to be expected to keep a child that is less than desirable, and they should not need to justify their lack of desire for the child. A surgeon in England said he could see no problem with parents trying out a child for six months and then ending the child’s life if the child were a nuisance, or ugly, or sickly, or just a pain. Other spokesmen have suggested a longer trial, and one is led to wonder when it will be determined that parents have the right to get rid of unwanted children of any age.

That would close the final gap in death coverage. That would mean that in the secular mind, from the moment of conception, through the time of birth, and all the way to the moment of legal adulthood, a parent has the right to execute any unwanted child. From the moment of adulthood onward, an adult has the right to kill himself (or herself) for a variety of reasons. As everyone knows, legal language is extremely malleable, and as long as the right to die is acknowledged as a universal human right, it should be very easy to justify the decision and make the whole process quite painless.

Is it any wonder that secular thinkers all suffer from endless guilt? Yes, they do. Nobody suffers as much guilt as secular thinkers.

Obviously, no human being could go around advocating a culture of death without suffering immense guilt. Every living being does one thing more energetically than anything else: defend its own life. Even though secular thinkers contend that a human being is nothing more than a highly organized biochemical machine, one wonders why a machine feels guilty when it causes the death of another human being. In fact, secularists rise to the occasion when someone sets off a bomb at race or blazes away with a gun in a prayer meeting. Why are they so outraged? In another moment, all those people might have declared that they no longer wanted to live anyway. This statement sounds crass to sane people, but when you set it alongside the right to abortion on demand, as long as the being to be aborted is under the legal age of contract, and the right to die for whatever reason, as long as the being to be killed is over the legal age of contract, then it sounds like nothing more than a simple, routine, legal process. Fill out the forms. Sign the papers. Terminate the protoplasm.

Secular thinkers desperately need some way to cover up the culture of death that they advocate. This is why they are busy saving the planet from global warming and species extinction. They have very little fodder for the graphs they use so religiously to tell them that human beings are burning up the planet. They cannot actually prove that anything has gone extinct. The discovery of coelacanths in the ocean, millennia after they were declared to have been extinct, completely abolishes the credibility of environmental campaigns to save tigers, elephants and snail darters from the supposed depredations of human beings. We now know that key scientists have doctored the data that supposedly proves global warming, and we don’t need to be told that data from a single petrified tree in Siberia cannot possibly prove global climate warming. These frauds puncture the balloon filled with allegations of humankind’s responsibility for climate change in any direction whatsoever. Secularists suffer from a hovering, smothering guilt that cannot be assuaged by simple argument or positive thinking. Secularists are suffocated by perceived expectations that they do something! Anything! Save the planet!

One way secularists celebrate life is by advocating that when two men marry and want children, all the stops should be pulled out in order to create a person they can claim as their child. This is one way that they claim to celebrate life.

They also celebrate life when a little girl of five declares that she has discovered she is really a boy. People get to be whatever gender comes to mind. There was a time when two genders covered everything. No longer. Now we need fifty genders for people who are experimenting and inventing and flipping back and forth among the variations. Secular thinkers know this way of thinking is ridiculous, uncomical, outrageous, and they feel guilty about playing with something so fundamental to our happiness and well-being as human beings.

How do we know that they feel guilty? Because they worry about every little thing more than they worry about something people want and need as much as they want and need life: liberty. Secular thinkers cannot allow anyone to have liberty any longer, because if people have liberty, they might say things other people do not want to hear. Things such as: “That is not true!” Things such as “God loves you.” Things such as, “Don’t try to make up some way to be offended. Nobody has done anything to you.”

Several months ago, I saw a statement online that declared that the right to exercise personal faith and the right to speak freely without being arrested were special privileges granted to citizens by the government. This is another problem secularists have. Because they do not acknowledge that God exists, they can hardly acknowledge that he grants liberty to human beings from the moment of conception. Yet the people who wrote the Constitution knew that God gave people life and liberty. The authors of the Constitution knew that God allowed people the freedom to choose the God they would serve. Those men knew that God gave people the freedom to speak and have opinions on everything. When they wrote the Constitution, they declared that the new government in North America would protect the rights God had already given to people rather than making a concerted effort to suppress or remove those rights.

Secular thinkers believe that those rights are gifts of the government, and they believe that the government has the right to restrict the boundaries of those rights. People have the right to speak–as long as they don’t say anything that offends the government. People have the right to exercise their religion–as long as the people don’t think their God is more important than government.

Secular thinkers are always on a guilt trip of some sort. They want people to feel guilty for saying things. They want citizens to feel guilty for thinking God’s will is more important than the government’s will. They see babies dying or worse, being dismembered for research while still alive, and they want the people who try to stop it to feel guilty for being at war with women. It is a terrible burden to be a secular thinker.

There is an answer to this guilt. The apostle Paul wrote about it in his letter to the Romans. Ancient Rome was a place where a secular thinker might feel right at home. Despite the so-called national religion, most Romans were very skeptical of both religion and politics. The ancient Romans suffered from just as much guilt as contemporary secular thinkers. Paul wrote to them with a message of hope. He said, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8 ESV) Paul was writing about the guilt the Roman Christians suffered. In fact, he told them that they could have “peace with God through [the] Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1 ESV) He even said, “While we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Romans 5:10 ESV). The beautiful thing about this letter is that the news Paul sent to the Romans is just as fresh and true today. God, the God whom secular thinkers reject, does not reject them. Instead, he reaches out for them with loving arms, ready to wrap them in the love that cleanses and forgives all the guilty pains they suffer. In this letter, Paul wrote that not only does God take away the horror of all that guilt, but God also receives secular thinkers with love that can never be taken away. They worry that all the animals and plants are about to die off. They worry that the earth is about to burn up. Paul promises them what Paul promised to the Romans: “I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39 ESV) Even if the plants wither, the animals die and the globe melts, they are safe in Christ’s love.

In the meantime, they have life with him both now and hereafter.

Secular thinkers can get rid of the guilt. They can stop trying to be the wrath of the god they don’t acknowledge to people who are guilty of a slip of the tongue or of the crime of thinking there are two genders. Secular thinkers can shrug off the weighty responsibility to be the world’s police–for speech, water use, and air quality. Christ will set them free to do the good works and great accomplishments for which they were created, and he will carry them guilt-free into eternity.

Secular thinkers really do not need to be so weighed down with guilt.

By Katherine Harms, author of Oceans of Love available for Kindle at Amazon.com. Watch for Thrive! Live Christian in a Hostile World to be released during winter, 2016.