The Gospel is foolishness to many who think they are being saved

I teach Christianity to pupils of various faiths and various attitudes to the Christian gospel. But one thing really disturbs me, and that is this: unbelievers understand the Bible better than believers in my classroom. On one level that's not true - I'm not talking about spiritual receptiveness. But their conceptual understanding of the awesome nature of God ("if there is a God, then if I was standing before him, I'd be scared out of my mind"), holiness and sin ("why doesn't God just spit on us?") and the transcendence of God and its impact on the likeliness, and therefore graciousness, of divine intervention for us ("if there is a God, then why does he bother with tiny little insignificant human beings?") beats the conceptual grasp of many churchgoers, whose God is thoroughly domesticated. No wonder I have two Christian pupils who regard church as stupid: the semi-Christian Christless Christianity they are, by their account of it, receiving probably is.

At my most amateurish

The Amateur is most amateurish when he gets to philosophy, but here goes.
The Enlightenment seems to me the intellectual reaction to the Wars of Religion, particularly the evils of the 30 Years' War - note how figures like Lessing and Kant were German. Deism and then Kantianism ( I would like to distinguish them) reject the transcendental God of theism, because such a God would require revelation to be knowable, giving authority to bearers of revelation, the Church, which carries the can for the Wars of Religion. Kant, by destroying the proofs for God (sorry, I haven't read Kritik der reinen Vernunft - but I'm told so by reliable sources) that Aquinas erected, I would propose does away even with the Watchmaker God of deism.
Kant then wants us to be good. He wants us to submit to categorical imperatives, things that are right simply because they are right, rooted in the twin thoughts of humans as ends (never use anyone) and autonomous (write your own laws). The Kantian then makes such laws as he would want others to live by, and, hey presto, we come up with duties all will accept as right and do.
Is all this a bit A-Level, not university? Spot on! I'm teaching A-Level philosophy of religion.
Problem is, Kant is realistic enough to know that deontological ethics convince no one. So he proves God morally to give us a teleological reason to obey: Kant's God exists for the same reason as the Bogeyman - to get us to bed on time. But the Bogeyman doesn't exist.
But if God is dead, why shouldn't I treat equally random collections of molecules as I want? I am a random collection of molecules, so are you. What gives another being moral value? There is nothing between me and doing what I want other than slave-moralities designed to hold me back in my pursuit of imposing on the world my own will.
London is an atheistic city. 14 youths have been knifed to death in 2008 already, putting us on course for a record. In South-East London in the last month, there have been four knife attacks gaining nationwide publicity.
Just all random coincidences, I'm sure.

Dumbing Down

If you've listened to the track from YouTube mentioned in the previous post, you'll know why the following question from a pupil really sent me into despair:
"Sir, can you tell me what to think?"