We live in very strange times, something I’m reminded of every time I go to the store and for some strange reason everyone is wearing masks, except me! I wonder if I’ve entered the Twilight Zone, but my family assures me this is very much reality. So more than ever I’m in need of recalibration. I came across this phrase, “recalibrate your reality,” while listening to an episode of White Horse Inn some time ago, and it stuck with me. To calibrate usually refers to some device that does measurements, and setting it up so it can measure accurately. Put an “re” before it, and it is now being fine tuned to measure more effectively. The gentleman being interviewed on the podcast said we spend most of the week living in what we think is THE reality, and the God stuff is part of THAT. But that has it exactly backward. The Sunday reality is THE reality, and the rest of our week is part of that. Our tendency is to fit God into our story, when what we should be doing is fitting our story into God’s. Big, huge, gargantuan difference! (more…)
You may have heard the term Scientism, which is treating science as something it was never intended to be, the only source of knowledge and insight into the true nature of reality. Actually science is much more humble than that; it knows it’s place, what it can and can’t do, should and should not do. Ever since the so-called Enlightenment, as Western intellectuals were turning away from religion, science slowly came to replace religion as man’s most reliable authority about the nature of reality. I came across a video from 2012 put out by the Discovery Institute called, “The Magician’s Twin: C.S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism.” It was being promoted at their website, Evolution News, with a title that instantly drew me in: “C. S. Lewis Foresaw Scientism’s Totalitarian Potential.” It is, of course, no coincidence that they are promoting the warnings of Lewis about the dangers of scientism at this point in time.
Watch the short documentary, and it will become quickly apparent how prophetic Lewis was about scientism in the age of COVID-19:
I feel like I’ve entered an episode of The Twilight Zone, although I’m convinced Rod Serling couldn’t have imagined the absurdities of COVID-19 2020 America. Since this is a blog dedicated to the defense of the Christian faith, I try to stay away from politics, but you can’t escape politics now without it, literally, hitting you in the face. I thought in Florida we may have escaped relatively unscathed, and by that I don’t mean cases or deaths for an over-hyped virus, but without our lives being turned completely upside down. Now, unfortunately, because of an “order requiring face coverings,” aka masks, by our county board of commissioners, everywhere I go it’s masks, masks, masks! Of course I refuse to wear a mask because, well, it’s absurd for healthy people to be required to wear a mask! On Thursday I entered The Zone. I went into a local RaceTrac, and three employees pointed at me and hissed, “You have to wear a mask!” No I don’t, I said right back. For this I was summarily refused service, even as I pointed out that there is a very clear exception in the so called “order” (item 10). Kafka himself would have been proud. (more…)
I was listening to this short video of Khaldoun Sweis on the philosophical issues of truth, a great primer on some introductory epistemological issues well worth Christians thinking about. He makes the statement all Christians are familiar with, that Jesus claimed to be “The Truth.” The full statement in John 14:6 was Jesus’ reply to Thomas (that one given to doubt) when he told the disciples that they knew the way to the place where he was going. Thomas said they had no idea where Jesus was going, so how could they know the way. Jesus replied, ” “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Given that I’m sort of obsessed with defending the truth of Christianity, the first thought that struck me was, What kind of person says something like that! No one in all of recorded history has said anything like that, or many other things Jesus was recorded as saying. Unless they were stark raving mad. Jesus of Nazareth most certainly was not. (more…)
There is something that the vast majority of people in the world take for granted: the modern world. Not only the most obvious things like science, medicine, and technology, or the infinite number of conveniences and blessings we enjoy every day, but things like universal education, universities, hospitals, human rights, equality, caring for the weak and the poor, in other words, all the things that make the modern world, well, modern! It seems that very few people bother to stop and wonder where all these things come from, and why they exist. This doesn’t surprise us because we live in the most ahistorical generation ever to have lived. The modern obsession with progress, itself a Christian concept, leaves little room for the critical importance of learning about the past. But the modern world is a miracle that itself only exists because of another miracle, a man 2000 years ago who died on a Roman cross, was buried three days, and rose from the dead, Jesus of Nazareth. The most consequential figure in all of history, his life, death, and resurrection, in a typically modern cliche, changed everything. Why and how did it do that? (more…)
The news that the basketball great Kobe Bryant, his 13 year-old daughter, and seven others died Sunday in a helicopter crash is a shocking reminder of what should not be shocking: Momento Mori, Latin for, “remember that you must die.” I wrote of this just last week about the death in 1956 of a young missionary, Jim Elliot, and four companions who died trying to bring the gospel to Indians in the jungles of Ecuador. One of the things I appreciate about death, even as I hate and despise it, is that it relativizes all human achievement. What does all human striving and achievement mean if in the end we are just worm food? If that is all we are, if there is no life after death, it means absolutely nothing. A mist we are, and poof! We’re gone, forever. (more…)
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