Jan 13, 2017 | Plausibility
Donald J., now President-Elect, Trump has never been and is not now seen by conservative Christians, Evangelicals among them, as one of their own, to say the least. But in an important way, he is very much one of us.
For the last 50 plus years, the dominant cultural apparatus (education, media, and entertainment) has grown increasingly strident in its secularism and hostility to Christianity. No longer can conservative Christians be accepted in polite company; they must be shamed and demonized because they believe in something as archaic as objective morality, absolute standards of right and wrong, and even worse, Truth!
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Apr 8, 2015 | Uncategorized
By now everyone has likely heard that Indiana has become a hotbed of anti-gay bigotry, and America’s cultural elites are not going to put up with it! The Indiana state legislature passed a religious restoration and freedom act and the governor signed it; then all hell broke loose. According to liberals and gay rights activists the law is “anti-gay” bigotry pure and simple. Of course it is nothing of the sort, but since truth never got in the way of any committed activist, that doesn’t much matter.
You can read an overview by Jonah Goldberg of what the law is not, but I want to point you to a piece by Red State’s Erick Erickson about the real agenda of secular liberals and gay rights activists:
Around the country, gay rights activists have attacked Christians for daring to put their faith ahead of the wants and desires of homosexual marriage advocates. The Christians must be silenced and punished. Their faith cannot be respected. Legislation designed to allow diversity of religion and the free exercise thereof must be stopped and must be decried as discrimination.
The move to put “free exercise” on the same footing with “free speech” must be opposed because most major faiths recognize homosexuality as outside normal behavior. The logical outcome of this will eventually be to reduce free speech. People and faiths are going to have to be shut up for homosexuals to have the veneer of normalcy.
But it won’t stop there. Over time, the gay rights movement will move to pushing churches to marry gays because normally people get married in churches. Over time, it will move to push religious schools to abandon standards on sexuality. Over time, it will mean religious institutions lose their tax exempt status. Over time, it will require Bible believing churches be labeled hate groups and orthodox Christianity be forced to the sidelines. Over time, it will mean that the state must intervene and protect children from parents who want to raise them as orthodox Bible believing Christians.
Essentially, replacing the prohibition on religious tests clause of the Constitution will become an enforcement of a secularism clause. People of faith need not apply for jobs, political appointments, or elected office. People of faith will be the new bigots because their God said “go and sin no more” and dared list homosexuality as one of those sins.
Ultimately, over time, two thousand years of Christianity will be forced to be treated as the deviant lifestyle. You will be forced to pick a side. If you remain true to your God, you will be outside the bounds of acceptable conduct. You will be made to care.
There you have it, Christians are now the deviants. This of course has been the goal all along, to normalize non-Christian (non-Jewish, non-biblical) sexual morality, and demonize anyone who dares embraces traditional sexual morality in the public square. Western cultural elites want people like me securely in the closet where I can believe or think whatever I want, but that’s where such thoughts must stay. This is what Christians get for abandoning the culture a hundred years ago, a mistake many believers understand now more than ever.
R.R. Reno at First Things offers this clear-headed insight into what’s in store for Christians:
Christian leaders in America need to be clear-minded. It’s very foolish to think we can settle into a modus vivendi with the coming gay rights regime. This regime is the political form of the sexual revolution, and like all revolutions, it’s committed to the destruction of the past.
I had to look up modus vivendi, given I’m a product of a public school education and my Latin is a little rusty: an arrangement or agreement allowing conflicting parties to coexist peacefully, either indefinitely or until a final settlement is reached. To the gay rights regime conservative Christians are bigots, and there can be no arrangement with bigots; they must be silenced at least, or as Erickson says, be made to care.
Jan 1, 2015 | Uncategorized
A year ago I read a story about how a former Seventh-Day Adventist pastor was going to try out atheism for a year, see what it was like to live without God. And to no one’s surprise after this year he’s declared himself an atheist. If someone is inclined to try on atheism, chances are their belief in God is already lost. Given the larger currents of American culture it’s not surprising that some people see God as implausible.
In 1967 sociologist Peter Berger wrote a book called The Sacred Canopy in which he described the idea of a plausibility structure, or something that seems true to a person. Whether it is true or not isn’t the point; the person may think sincerely what they believe is true, but they tend to think it’s true more based on it seeming plausible to them than on evidence. American and Western culture make belief in God less plausible, make God seem more like Santa Clause than the eternal creator and ruler of the universe. Why is this?
Unless children have a strong religious presence in the home (Notre Dame professor, sociologist and author Christian Smith has found through very extensive research that the religious orientation of the parents is the number one factor in whether children grow up to embrace religion or not), they will be influenced by an education system where under the guise of secularism God is persona non grata, and if they go to a typical college or university, they may get open hostility to God, as I did as an undergraduate at Arizona State. God is also typically not a big topic in Hollywood or entertainment in general, unless of course you are a Woody Allen fan (his latest Magic in the Moonlight was the most overt in your face metaphysical fight he’s had with himself in a movie yet), and American media in general is devoid of God as well.
So for many Americans these cultural influences build in them a plausibility structure where God is irrelevant if he even exists at all. Although I’ve been a Christian for a very long time, in my 40s I went through a bit of a plausibility structure crisis. I don’t call it a crisis of faith because believing that God doesn’t exist is simply impossible for me. I know deeply in my being what the Apostle Paul states in Romans 1, that “God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” Everything in the universe shouts, God! I could no more doubt his existence than I could doubt my own existence.
Yet, I could see how others could see this God thing as kind of strange. You could probably say I could relate to someone like this newly minted atheist. But something changed for me several years ago when for Lent instead of giving something up I decided to commit to reading the Bible and praying every day. I haven’t done this perfectly, but it’s been pretty close. Then two or three years ago I found the Apologetics 315 website and started availing myself of all the apologetics resources there, especially MP3s I could download to my player and listen in the car or while I walked. I also started reading books defending the Christian faith. I’ve been amazed that even though I’ve known this all along, that God has given us an incredible amount of evidence for the veracity of Christianity.
Which leads me to a trope many modern atheists use in their polemics against Christianity. They are fond of saying that Christians believe what they believe in spite of the evidence, which is how they define faith. Nothing could be further from the truth. Biblically defined faith is having enough evidence to trust in the character of God, to believe in him, not just that he exists. Christian faith depends on evidence. Even a cursory reading of the Gospels makes this clear. When Jesus rose from the dead he showed himself to his disciples, ate with them, and famously invited the doubting Thomas to touch his wounds. Reading Acts and the other New Testament letters makes it even clearer.
Actually from the very beginning, God has been a God of evidence. I’ve found it interesting as I’ve been reading and writing my way through the Bible that God revealed himself to his people via physical manifestations, over and over again. He never asked the people of Israel to trust in him because he demanded it, but encouraged them to trust him, to have faith in him because of what he showed them, or the evidence. Read the Pentateuch sometime and see what I mean.
I recently read a book by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, and immediately thought of the book when I read the piece about this newly minted ex-pastor atheist. He says:
I’ve looked at the majority of the arguments that I’ve been able to find for the existence of God, and on the question of God’s existence or not, I have to say I don’t find there to be a convincing case, in my view. I don’t think that God exists. I think that makes the most sense of the evidence that I have and my experience.
I’ve always thought that atheists do what they accuse Christians of doing, believing in spite of the evidence. I think a careful read through the Geisler and Turek book would likely fill this new atheist with profound doubts about his new-found faith.
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