Jun 10, 2018 | Culture
The statistics tell us that 45,000 people kill themselves in America every year; that is 123 per day! According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (which obviously isn’t doing a very good job), for every successful suicide, 25 people try to kill themselves. If my calculator is correct, somewhere around 1.125 million people every year (over 3,000 a day!) so hate their lives that they attempt to snuff them out. What’s scary is that the rate of this happening has increased 24% since 1999.
This relatively quite epidemic vaulted into the headlines this past week with the suicides of two high profile celebrities who killed themselves in the prime of their lives. Kate Spade first on June 5. She was a fashion designer and businesswoman who founded a billion dollar business. She was known to suffer from depression and took medication for it. The other shocking suicide was Anthony Bourdain in Friday, June 8. He was a celebrity chef, author, and television personality. He was also known to suffer from depression.
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Apr 20, 2018 | Culture, Explanatory Power
In the soon to be blockbuster best-seller, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I tell the story of “the clicker.” Yes, that clicker, more commonly known as the remote control. As you’ll read in the book, the clicker is a great tool for engaging popular culture with our children, and teaching them the incredible explanatory power of the Christian worldview. An example comes from a movie we recently watched called Conspiracy. This gut wrenching film dramatizes a day long conference that took place on January 20, 1942, where Nazi officials discuss the “Final Solution of the Jewish question.” This solution was of course the attempt to murder all Jews in Germany, and it was hoped beyond. The cold, calculating demeanor of most of the participants as portrayed in the film is chilling. To figure out who would be included, they discussed blood percentages, parentage, and whether they were German citizens or not. The goal was complete extermination, and it was difficult at times to realize they were talking about human beings, not animals or something less. The clicker got a good workout.
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Mar 10, 2018 | Culture
You can tell from the title of this post, that I won’t be running for political office anytime soon. What’s wrong with public schools? Why would I think they should be abolished? Many would call me crazy, but my argument is based on the first amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . .” The public schools have an established religion, the religion of secularism/agnosticism, and thus they are unconstitutional. On second thought, maybe I will run for office. That would be a great campaign slogan! But I’m deadly serious. The whole idea of public schools (i.e., government schools) in a pluralistic society is problematic. Why?
In a pluralistic society God must be bracketed as persona-non-grata (to keep the government appearance of neutrality to all the different religions and worldviews), so the schools are promoting a worldview that is hostile to Christianity, or any other religion for that matter. And the idea that government schools can be “neutral” to all religions and worldview is so obviously false it’s a wonder anyone has ever believed it. But believe it they have, and most still do. It’s not that the idea of a “secular” space in society that allows for people of all religions to get along by putting their religion on the shelf is a bad thing in itself. In fact, in most of our interactions with our fellow citizens it’s a very good thing. But the presumption that we could apply it to the education of our children is naive, dangerously so.
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Feb 17, 2018 | Culture
I’ve been on a bit of a secularism kick of late, and as you may know I’m not a fan. I thought of secularism, and its discontents, as I heard of the latest American mass shooting in our new home state of Florida. Seventeen people killed in the prime of life, not by a gun, but by a wicked person bent on destruction. People go off to school or work one morning, like every other morning before, and don’t come home, ever. A tragedy that we hope never touches us, our loved ones or friends, but which we can’t help but wonder if it may some day. Such is life in secular 21st century America.
Do I blame secularism for the carnage that has become a staple of the latter part of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries? You bet I do! And of course I blame sin and the fall, so we always have and always will deal with evil in all of its distorted manifestations of God’s good creation. But there is something unique about the senseless nature of killing and mayhem in our time. I would argue that what we are experiencing in American culture is a cumulative case of thoughts and ideas and actions that have been brewing for centuries. There are no simple causal links one can definitively point to, but rather a rushing river of existence away from God that has brought us to this point.
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Feb 10, 2018 | Culture, Explanatory Power
In my previous post I dealt with why secularism might be appealing in our modern context. I argued that it’s not anything inherent in secularism that makes it more appealing than Christianity, but the cultural messaging machine that promotes it. That’s why it’s a paper tiger and can be no more enduring than was the Berlin Wall. Remember that for those of us who lived through the Cold War from the 60s through the 80s, the Berlin Wall appeared like an unalterable fact of existence we’d just have to live with for the foreseeable future. It certainly didn’t seem like a paper tiger, until Ronald Reagan came along. But now we know it was as brittle as the worldview that upheld it. Secularism is, I contend, no different. Why? Tomes have been written about what secularism is, why it will or will not endure, and why it is or is not a credible worldview. A measly little blog post can’t do any of that justice, but a few thoughts about the weakness of secularism as a worldview will have to suffice, and why it doesn’t ever have to appeal to our children.
The philosophical foundation of secularism is naturalism, or materialism, the view of existence that the material is all there is. The good news for Christians, and their children, is that such a view of reality is logically, rationally, and philosophically absurd. The cool kids, culturally speaking the secularist/naturalists as I wrote about in my last post, want to make us think that naturalism is the most obvious thing in the world, that only a religious obscurantist would think there might be some spiritual reality beyond what our five senses experience. But the more scientific knowledge advances, the less cool these kids become.
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Feb 4, 2018 | Culture
I ended my last post claiming that secularism is no less a paper tiger than the Berlin Wall. That’s quite an assertion in the face of a secular cultural hegemony that seems to approach absolute. Everywhere we look, people who claim the name of Christ are on the defensive. Many (most?) Christian parents feel insecure against the onslaught. It seems for many (most?) Christian parents that keeping their kids Christians in the face of such hostility is a challenge they might not be up to. The goal of my book and this blog is to convince them that this is not the case, at all. That we can have confidence is what inspired me to write the book. I finished the book where I began:
The conclusion I come to at the end is the conviction I started with at the beginning: Christianity is so powerfully credible that my children should never ever want to leave it, or even be slightly tempted to do so. God has revealed himself in so many compelling ways that it is inconceivable that a secular Western culture would be more appealing to our children than Christianity. God has provided us an over-abundance of resources to make the Christian Faith winsome, appealing, attractive, and compelling to our children. Thus, we should have every confidence that we can keep our kids Christian.
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