Terrell Clemmons was a recent guest and guest co-host on the Knight and Rose Show. I noticed she has not one, but FOUR new articles on the Discovery Institute Science and Culture website. I waited until all 4 had been published to write about the series. It’s about the intellectual journey of J. Budziszewski from nihilism back to Christianity. He is a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Our regular host of the Knight and Rose Show (Desert Rose) loves Jay’s books. She is using them for her D. Min thesis, which is about natural law. Jay actually has a new book out about 30 popular beliefs that are completely false. The book explains why people believe delusions and also offers suggestions for avoiding delusions.

The first article in Terrell’s series is here. It talks about the new book:

In 30 succinct chapters, Budziszewski addresses 30 delusions related to virtue and happiness, politics and government, family and sexuality, God and religion, even human nature and reality itself. He doesn’t polemicize for “sides” on the controversial subjects nearly so much as help us think through falsehoods clouding our current milieu.

As soon as I read what the book was about, I wondered if he was going to talk about how people form their beliefs based on what is easy, convenient and popular with their social groups. And he does, as we will see.

Here is the second article. This one is about Jay’s spiritual journey:

Terrell asks:

After all that, how did you come to profess Christian faith once again?

And here is part of Jay’s answer that I liked:

I hadn’t lost my faith by a rational process either. I just thought I saw through it. In my milieu, all the smart people didn’t believe in God. And I unconsciously wanted to believe I was one of the smart people. There were many other things that pushed me away from faith, but that’s one example of my own motivated irrationality. Another is that I’d committed some sins. I didn’t want to face God, so I stopped believing in him. That’s irrational, too.

I’ve now spent over 27 years in the IT industry, including internships and summer jobs. I have met so many people who grew up in intact Christian homes, some who went to Christian private schools, who abandoned their Christian faith the minute they hit college. When I ask them what the arguments and evidence were that changed their minds, it is almost universally two things. 1) I wanted to be seen as smart by the new social group, and 2) I was away from home for the first time and didn’t want to follow moral rules. That’s it. I mean, part of it is that their entire Christian upbringing had never been grounded on a stitch of evidence, but those are the two reasons I get the most often.

Here’s the third article. This one talks about how people suppress moral knowledge, which is something Jay did during his lost years.

Terrell asks:

Speaking about things that are inherent to being human, you’ve also written that “the longing for truth, for purity, for lightness is indestructible,” but that at the same time, “the fear of truth, of purity, and of lightness is also very strong.” How do you see this play out in your observations of human interactions?

And here is the part from Jay’s response that I liked:

Freud talked about the suppression of libido — his term for the sexual drive — and all the crazy things that he thought happened to us when libido is suppressed. But I don’t think he knew the first thing about it. Because the drive I have in mind — this inclination to know the truth, especially the truth about God — may express itself in indirect or distorted ways when we suppress it. By suppressing it, I mean, for example:

• I don’t want to know the truth about God because I would have to change.
• I don’t want to know the truth about God because I would have to admit that I was wrong.
• I don’t want to know the truth about God because it puts me to shame.
• I don’t want to know the truth about God because he’s so good that it scares me. I don’t want him to be that good. I don’t want him to love me that much, more than I love myself.

We do suppress the desire for the truth, and the consequences of suppressing the desire for the truth are far more potent and powerful than the consequences of suppressing libido.

One of the Bible passages that I found so amazing as a kid growing up in a trash communist country was Romans 1. Romans 1 is the kind of chapter that has the ability to yank a kid out of the atheistic communism he is surrounded by (parents, teachers, government, etc.) and propel him to move to the reddest state in the United States of America. By any means necessary. You should read Romans 1 and make everyone you know read it. It is the “magic glasses” that turns the ship around. Whether you agree with it or not, it describes the way the world really is.

But aside from that, I just want to point out that many famous atheists agree with Jay about the suppression of truth. I wrote about a bunch of them in this old blog post from 2011. Wow! That was a long time ago.

And finally, the fourth article. This is about how morality is related to public policy and government.

Terrell asks:

On your blog, you have called wokeness “status signaling,” as opposed to “virtue signaling.” What did you mean by that?

And this is the part of his reply that I liked best:

I saw a pair of bumper stickers on the right and left side of a back bumper. One said, “Save the laboratory animals,” and the other said, “I’m pro-choice, and I vote.” The driver wanted to save the little bunnies, and not have them hurt, for example, by having cosmetics put in their eyes for testing. But she didn’t want to save the little humans. There wasn’t much penetrating thinking about right and wrong there, but there was a very sharp awareness of what was acceptable in her milieu and of what attitudes would give her approval among people in it: “The people that I associate with would never say it’s wrong to have an abortion, or that it shouldn’t be a woman’s choice. That’s just not done.”

You can see this in Austin, a sort of ideological hothouse populated largely by woke professional classes. They’re all imitating each other and imitating each other’s attitudes. It’s about conformism. It’s much more about that than about conscience.

My friend Bonnie told me recently that she never met a person who believed more in “engineering belief”. I engineer my own beliefs and the beliefs of others by making choices about what to consume, and meddling in what other people consume, too. So, for me, I don’t watch anything on TV, streaming services, and new movies (unless they are war movies like Midway (2019) and Greyhound (2020). I was forced to watch the first Star Wars movies as a kid, but I’ve never seen any of the new ones.

On the other hand, I fill my head with good stuff like Shakespeare, Jane Austen, free-market economics and military history. If I want to build up another Christian, I buy them the books that I want them to read, like Thomas Sowell books, and then I give them rewards for reading them. Or, I take them to places and do activities where they have a practical experience of gaining knowledge or solving a problem. This is how I build up their resistance to the sorts of social pressures that Jay talked about. And it works on other people. One of my friends loves Salvo magazine, so I bought her 25 back issues because it’s her birthday this week. I’m trying to level her up.

I think that when it comes to anything in life, if it is important to you to believe it, then it should be important to you to show your work. And before you can show your work, you have to do your work. If you want to change your mind about something, the best thing to do is to read the best books you can understand and watch or listen to debates. And test it for yourself. That way, you can explain how you arrived at your beliefs. That process almost always makes you resistant to the surrounding culture. And that means you are one step ahead of the people who just believed whatever was easy and convenient.

Unfortunately, most people who grow up in Christian homes don’t get the idea that the process of doing your work is important. We have to fix that.

Our next guest on the Knight and Rose Show is Tyler O’Neil, who is the senior editor at Daily Signal. It’s still in editing. Tyler is an expert on the SPLC, and monitors threats to religious liberty. Well, he had back-to-back articles this week exposing two different ways that the secular left showed their hostility to family integrity and parental authority. I thought it would be worth putting these together into a blog post, so you can read about them, too.

The first Daily Signal article was from March 18th, and it talks about a new program designed to indoctrinate young women in wokeness:

The organization that sets the agenda for the 130,000 school counselors across the U.S. just promoted a left-wing activist program that advocates for transgender ideology and critical race theory, according to a new report.

“While the American people are actively rejecting the harms of transgender ideology, the invasion of women’s private spaces, and the culture of critical race theory, the American School Counselor Association is working overtime to install these very same radicalisms into our daughters,” Alvin Lui, president of the conservative group Courage Is a Habit, told The Daily Signal.

The American School Counselor Association, which counts about 42,000 of the nation’s estimated 131,230 school counselors as members and which releases guidance for the entire profession, held a Feb. 19 webinar promoting the Lean In Girls program. The Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation, founded by former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, launched Lean In Girls as a leadership program for girls ages 11-15.

[…]The handbook’s section on “Gender Inclusion” warns facilitators that “some teens in the program may identify strongly with being a girl, while others may be exploring their gender identity or may feel uncomfortable with the label ‘girl.’” The section recommends resources from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the British LGBTQ nonprofit Stonewall, and GLSEN (which rebranded to GLISTEN in February).

[…]Courage Is a Habit also faults the handbook for promoting critical race theory, the idea that American society is systemically racist despite the progress of civil rights laws and that it requires fundamental change to root out “white supremacy.”

“Group facilitators are directed to rank themselves and each other on an intersectional hierarchy of oppression, a textbook critical race theory exercise that divides children by race, sexuality, and perceived victim status—all disguised as harmless ‘mental health’ support,” the Courage Is a Habit report states.

The second Daily Signal article has to do with how secular leftists in government view the parents who pay their salaries:

When the Biden administration turned its attention to concerned parents in the fall of 2021, the Central Intelligence Agency drafted a memo warning about white racial extremists recruiting women for “traditional motherhood” and “homemaking.”

The CIA produced an intelligence assessment focused on “women advancing white racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist radicalization and recruitment” on Oct. 6, 2021.

[…]The CIA warned about the “great replacement” theory, which it framed as extremist.

“White REMVEs and their sympathizers have claimed in online posts that it is essential for white families to have as many biological children as possible to counter the rising birthrates among non-white populations, white REMVEs allege that this rise is a conspiracy, which they have termed the ‘great replacement,’” the assessment states.

The CIA discussed a specific organization—the identity of which has been redacted—and noted that this group “has lauded motherhood and homemaking as women’s most important responsibility.”

Now, I work with a fair number of conservative Christians. They love to read people like Russell Moore and David French and Tim Keller and JD Greear. If I had to summarize what their worldview is like, I would say that they are experts at Netflix, Star Trek, Disney and especially Star Wars. When I talk to them about these threats to religious liberty and parental authority, they say “I don’t want to get involved in the culture war, I just love everybody”. They just don’t believe that corporations or governments could ever interfere with their ability to live out Christian life plans. They just “love everybody”. But their taxpayer dollars are going to pay the salaries of powerful people who don’t love them.

I think it’s something that we all need to think about. You might not be interested in fighting the secular left, but the secular left is most definitely interested in fighting you. We should be learning from what happens to Christians in places like Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc. and make sure that it never happens here. Part of that is going to be voting conservative, but part of that is surely convincing others to vote conservative, too. And you’re not going to learn how to do that from Star Wars. Instead of feeding at the trough of popular culture like good little piggies, Christians are going to have to work a little harder and learn how to discuss policy issues.

I was already a Christian by the time I made it to university, but I had never seen the sorts of sophisticated arguments that could be presented for Christianity. Somehow, I stumbled upon a website called Leadership University, and that pointed me to a whole bunch of Christian professors who had written essays on a wide variety of topics. From there, I was able to locate actual lectures they had given to students on university campuses.

Although I grew up in a trashy communist country, I was still able to order campus lectures on audio cassette or VHS video tape. I got them from Veritas Forum, Integrated Resources, Access Research Network, etc. So I was able to listen to and watch lots of lectures by Phillip E. Johnson, Michael Behe, Walter Bradley, Henry F. Schaefer, J. P. Moreland and of course William Lane Craig. Some of these recordings were actual debates between a Christian and a non-Christian. That’s how I got serious about Christianity.

There is just something about watching a Christian professor get up on stage at a secular research university and deliver a lecture to non-Christian faculty, graduate students and undergrad students. And then take questions – that’s the key part that’s so different from church sermons and vacation Bible school. In the campus lectures, you can see hostile questions from non-Christian thinkers being handled gracefully by Christian scholars. Sometimes I wonder if the reason I stuck with Christianity this far is because of the non-traditional way that I learned about it.

Anyway, what made me think about this? Well, it was this interesting article written by physicist Dr. Brian Miller. We just had him on the Knight and Rose Show, to discuss fine-tuning and the multiverse. He just did some talks at a different universities, and I wanted to share what he wrote and the video of one of the talks with you.

Here’s what he wrote:

I recently had the privilege of speaking at High Point University, ranked the best-run university in the country, and at Duke University, my alma mater, on the cumulative case for God drawn from cosmology, the origin of life, and the centrality of information in biology.

I was joined by Dr. Rice Broocks, whose training in philosophy and history complemented my scientific expertise. Over the past several years, we have also addressed students together at several other universities, such as Berkeley and MIT, engaging in questions at the intersection of science, philosophy, and Christian thought. Last year, I spoke at the University of Washington, and the presentation, along with the Q&A, was recorded. The consistently positive response reflects a deep hunger among students to examine foundational questions of truth, meaning, and purpose.

Dr. Broocks and I labored to create an atmosphere in which listeners from any philosophical or religious background felt respected and safe to share their ideas.

So, the key part is that when you are on a non-Christian university campus then you really have to know your stuff. Because people who don’t agree with you are going to ask you questions, and this is in front of a live audience, and the recording is probably going on the Internet.

Brian listed some of the questions that he was asked:

• How can we infer that Earth was designed if we do not know the total number of planets? I addressed this question in a recent article (here).
• In what ways can evolutionary theory be integrated with faith, and which evolutionary claims conflict with traditional religious beliefs?
• To what extent is modern science consistent with various religious doctrines?
• If God is an all-powerful creator who is directly involved in the world, why does so much evil and suffering exist?
• What role does evidence play in Christianity, if religion is supposed to be grounded in faith?
• Why should anyone even pursue the ultimate truth? Isn’t skepticism the easiest option?

Have you ever heard any Christian leader in a church take questions from a non-Christian? Have you ever heard a Christian leader in a church even interact with non-Christian views? Have you ever heard a Christian leader in a church explain why people who go to church just assume that the Bible is authoritative? Most people who grow up in the church never hear questions, because most leaders in the church don’t know how to answer them. And that does send a message to young people about the sort of thing that Christianity is. As J. P. Moreland says, most Christians see Christianty as a “faith tradition”. But Moreland says that Christianity is actually a “knowledge tradition”. Young Christians dump Christianity because a “faith tradition” grounded in community is easily swept away when they arrive at university and have a new godless community. But if they were trained to see why Christianity is a “knowledge tradition”, then maybe they would be a bit more resilient.

Anyway, back to Dr. Miller. Here’s a lecture where Dr. Miller shares reasons and evidence for the core claims of his Christian worldview:

Here’s the summary:

• evidence for an origin of the universe
• evidence for cosmic fine-tuning
• evidence for habitability fine-tuning
• evidence from the origin of life
• refutation of naturalistic alternatives

So, there is a “show your work” approach to Christianity that is going on outside of the church / family environment. That’s how I learned about it, and I’m still taking Christianity seriously even nearing my wealthy early retirement years, where I don’t have any felt needs. People who stick with Christianity over the long-term don’t do it because of “needs” or “feelings”. They choose it because it’s true. Christianity actually makes life harder these days, because of the moral rules, the self-denial and the social disapproval. But real Christians like all that, because we want to suffer like Jesus suffered for obeying the Father. We like losing some of our autonomy for the sake of relationship and we like taking a loss to our reputations when we stick up for the Boss. Christianity is life on hard mode, and we like that. We want the deep vertical relationship more than we want the shallow horizontal relationships.

Let me know in the comments if you have any experience with campus lectures and debates contributing to your lasting faith.