Commentary

Are pious pastors preparing young Christians to defend their moral values?

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Younger evangelicals more liberal than older evangelicals... is it just ignorance?
Voting for Obama means abortion, gay marriage and end of religious liberty

You might expect Christians to advocate for values like chastity, life-long natural marriage, protection for unborn and born children, right to work, low taxes, limited government, free speech, religious liberty, and so on. But today, many young evangelicals are embracing  higher taxes, more spending, socialism, retreat from just wars against evil forces, abortion, gay marriage, global warming alarmism, etc.

Why is this happening?

Christianity should make me feel happy and be liked by others?

Here is the first problem. When you advocate for moral causes like protecting the unborn, or school choice, or freeing the slaves, a bunch of people are not going to like you. Christians in the time of Jesus knew that being bold about their Christian convictions would make a lot of people think bad things about them – they expected it. But young evangelicals have gotten the idea that being a Christian should not involve any sort of unhappiness and unpopularity. They’ve been told that God has a wonderful plan for their lives, and that plan involves happiness, fulfillment, travel and adventure. They wouldn’t have learned this from the Bible, because the Bible emphasizes suffering and unpopularity as part of the normal Christian life. Christianity has always been opposed to abortion and homosexuality, but these things are not fun and popular today. Since these young Christians believe in a God of love – a cosmic butler who leads them to happiness through their feelings – of course they are going to find defending traditional Christian values too difficult.

Christianity should be about my private experience of belief?

What young evangelicals learn in many churches is that religion is something that is centered on the Bible and the church building – it is not something that flows into real life. This is actually the goal of the most pious, orthodox pastors, with the exception of people like Pastor Wayne Grudem or Pastor Matt Rawlings who can integrate the Bible with real-world how-to knowledge. Pastors want to protect God from being “judged” by evidence, because they regard evidence as dirty, and unworthy of being allowed to confirm or deny blind faith / tradition. Pastors instead teach young people that you can’t find out anything about God from things like the Big Bang, the DNA, the fossil record, or even from the peer-reviewed research on abortion, divorce, or gay marriage. And they don’t respond to arguments and evidence from non-Christian skeptics, either. Their goal is to insulate belief from evidence. If the Bible says “do this” then they don’t even want to study the way the world works in order to know the best way to do what the Bible asks.

For example, when it comes to politics and social activism, young evangelicals learn in church about helping the poor. But pastors never tell them anything about economics, which shows that the free enterprise system is the best at helping the poor. (Just compare the USA to North Korea or Venezuela or Argentina). Instead, young evangelicals blissfully accept the left’s narrative that free markets and charity don’t work, and that  government must step in to redistribute wealth. Most pastors they never pick up an economic textbook to see which economic system really helps the poor. And that ignorance is passed on to gullible and sentimental young people, who jump on any slick politician who promises to help the poor through redistribution rather than economic growth and innovation. What you learn about in church is that religion is private and has no connection to reality whatsoever., so there is no point in learning anything – science, economics, philosophy. Pious pastors put Christianity outside the realm of truth.

The (young) people perish for lack of knowledge

What follows from having a view that Christianity only lives in the Bible and church, and not out there in the real world of telescopes and microscopes? Well, most young evangelicals will interpret what their pastor is telling them as “our flavor of ice cream” or “our cultural custom”. They don’t link Christianity to the real world, they don’t think that it’s true for everyone. They think that “people in church” just accept what the Bible says on faith, and that’s all. So what happens when topics like abortion, marrige, economics, war, etc. come up in their daily conversations? Well, all the pastors have equipped them with is “the Bible says”, and that’s not enough to be persuasive with non-Christians. They have no way of speaking about their beliefs and values with anyone who doesn’t already believe in the Bible. And that’s why they go left… it’s much easier to just go along with their secular left peers, professors and cultural heroes. And that’s exactly what they do. Without facts and evidence – which they never taught  or even mentioned in church – how can they be expected to stand up for Biblical Christianity? They can’t.

If young Christians never learn how to present a case for traditional values and beliefs apart from the Bible for concepts like pro-life or natural marriage or religious liberty, then they will cave to the secular left culture. And this is exactly what the pious pastors have facilitated by “rescuing” the God and the Bible and the historical Jesus from evidence and knowledge. Young people lack courage to take Biblical positions, because they first lack knowledge. They don’t know how to make the case using evidence that their opponents will accept – mainstream evidence from publicly accessible sources. And that’s how the pastors want it – piety, not evidence.

Christianity is a knowledge tradition

No young evangelical is going to lift a finger to take bold moral stands if they think their worldview is just one option among many – like the flavors of ice cream in the frozen section of the grocery store. They have to know that what they are saying is true – then they will be bold. Boldness is easy when you are aware of facts and evidence for your view. Not just what the pastors and choirs accept, but facts and evidence that are widely accepted.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

News

Why are college tuition and college textbooks so expensive?

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As subsidies increase, so do tuition costs
As subsidies increase, so do tuition costs

This article from Investors Business Daily is very helpful.

It says:

Grey Gordon and Aaron Hedlund, economists at Indiana University and the University of Missouri, developed a method to test various explanations for the share rise in tuition costs. Is it state funding cuts? Or the increased wage premium for a college degree? Or is it related to general cost increases in the services industries?

Not exactly. In a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research the economists report that these factors contributed insignificantly to the rapid rise in tuition between 1987 and 2010.

What did account for almost all of it was, ironically enough, the massive explosion in federal aid over the past several decades. Federal aid — in the form of subsidized loans, grants and tax credits — shot up 134% in the past 15 years, according to the College Board. It’s climbed 22% just under President Obama.

Combined with state aid, the government is pouring more than $239 billion a year into programs designed to make college less expensive.

What the authors found is that all this aid money has simply let college administrators spend more and jack up tuition to pay for it, without hurting enrollment. The result is there to see for anyone who visits a college campus these days — gourmet kitchens, luxurious dorms, shiny new administrative buildings, beautiful landscapes, state of the art workout facilities, etc.

[…]Not only does the increased federal aid lead to higher tuition, the authors found, but it perversely leads to “more debt, and in the absence of higher labor market returns, more loan default inevitably occurs.”

This hypothesis – that it is government subsidies that drive up tuition rates – is supported in the radically leftist New York Times, of all places.

This is by Paul F. Campos, law professor at the radically leftist UC Boulder, explains that government handouts is causing the rise in college tuition:

[…][T]he astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.

[…]As the baby boomers reached college age, state appropriations to higher education skyrocketed, increasing more than fourfold in today’s dollars, from $11.1 billion in 1960 to $48.2 billion in 1975. By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.

But where is the money going? Is it mostly going to research? To the classroom? To hire more and better professors?

No:

Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.

By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

Do you wonder why college is so liberal? It’s because instead of hiring professors to teach you how to do useful work for money, they are hiring useless administrators who just enforce politically correct secular leftism onto the students.

The cost of college text books is skyrocketing
The cost of college text books is skyrocketing

College textbook prices are also going way up because of government subsidies.

One way the textbook market is insulated from competition and market forces is that the professor, not the student, makes the decision on the textbook for a course, and it’s probably the case that many professors are unaware of the retail cost of the books they assign for their students. And once the professor decides on a textbook, there are no substitutes for the new edition of the book assigned. If a professor assigns Mankiw’s Principles of Economics textbook, students can’t substitute McConnell’sPrinciples of Economics textbook.

Another reason for skyrocketing textbook prices could be that they are being fueled by easy and cheap credit in the form of student loan debt, which now exceeds $1.36 trillion and has doubled in less than eight years, and tripled in the last decade! Students borrow money not just for college tuition and fees, but also to finance the purchase of textbooks that now routinely cost more than $300, and sometimes approach $400.

What should young people considering college do? If you’re going to college or trade school, go to a low-cost school. Do a STEM degree (e.g. petroleum engineering) or learn to do a trade that pays well (e.g. – electrician). Try to get tuition assistance even if it means going to a less prestigious school. And work at every opportunity you get in the most serious job you can find. Don’t spend your money – save it. Especially don’t spend your money on fun, vacations and alcohol. As soon as you grow up, you’re going to wish you could have it all back.

Commentary

What is Jesus’ view of the definition of marriage?

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Marriage and family
Marriage and family

I noticed that there is some silly video put out by the atheists at BuzzFeed where a bunch of people claiming to be Christians deny that Jesus has any authority in their worldview.

Here’s what Jesus says about marriage.

Matthew 19:1-11:

1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?” 8

He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.

9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”

10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given.

To be a Christian, minimally, is to be a follower of Jesus Christ. That means that we accept what Jesus teaches, on whatever he teaches about. We don’t overturn the teachings of Jesus in order to make people who are rebelling against God feel better about their rebellion. It is central to the Christian worldview that Christians care more about what God thinks of them than what non-Christians think of them. In fact, Christians are supposed to be willing to endure suffering rather than side with non-Christians against God’s authority. So really not sure what the BuzzFeed non-Christians are doing in that video.

Matt Walsh had a fine article about the Buzzfeed video.

He said:

As Christians, our goal is not to avoid being like the big bad “other Christians,” but to strive to be like Christ Himself. This is one of the advantages to having an Incarnate God. He went around acting and speaking and teaching and generally functioning in our realm, thereby giving us a model to follow. This is the model of a loving and merciful man, and also a man of perfect virtue who fought against the forces of evil, condemned sin, defended his Father in Heaven with sometimes violent force, spoke truth, and eventually laid down His life for those He loved (which would be all of us).

[…]This is what it means to believe in Christ. Not just to believe that He existed, but to believe that Christ is Truth itself, and that everything He said and did was totally and absolutely and irreversibly true forever and always. Many Christians today — not only the ones in the video, but millions alongside them — seem to think we can rightly claim to have “faith” in Jesus or a “relationship” with Him while still categorically denying much of His Word. This is a ridiculous proposition. We can’t declare, in one breath, that Christ is Lord, and in the next suggest that maybe God got it wrong on this or that point. Well, we can make that declaration, but we expose our belief as fraudulent and self-serving. We worship a God we either invented in our heads, which is a false idol, or a God who is fallible, which is a false idol.

If you really accept Jesus as God, then you can’t think he is wrong when he explains what marriage is. Period. End of issue.

Real Christians don’t make excuses for sin. Real Christians present the gospel. The gospel is that all men have rebelled against God and fallen short of perfect submission to and obedience of him. For this, they deserve to be separated from God eternally. Jesus paid the price for this rebellion on the cross, and anyone who accepts him as Savior and Lord will be with God eternally after they die. There is no salvation apart from Jesus. That’s what Christians say. And they say it regardless of how weird they look, and how many non-Christians don’t like them for saying it.

News

Football player sees autistic boy sitting alone at lunch, sits with him

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Florida State University football player is a hero
Florida State University football player sees  an opportunity to make things right and takes it

Here’s a story from WGN Chicago that I want to comment about.

Excerpt:

While visiting Montford Middle School with teammates on Tuesday, Florida State University wide receiver Travis Rudolph spotted a boy sitting by himself at lunch, and asked if he could sit next to him according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Later in the day, Bo Paske’s mom posted a photo to Facebook that is capturing hearts.

“I’m not sure what exactly made this incredibly kind man share a lunch table with my son, but I’m happy to say that it will not soon be forgotten,” she wrote.

“He started off and was so open,” Rudolph told the newspaper. “He told me his name was Bo, and how much he loves Florida State, and he went from there.”

Rudolph is the Seminoles’ leading returning receiver, and in addition to earning the praise of his coaches, gained a mother’s love, who says they’re now FSU fans for life.

“This is one day I didn’t have to worry if my sweet boy ate lunch alone, because he sat across from someone who is a hero in many eyes,” the mom stated in her post.

Here’s some of what the mother of the boy said in her post:

Now that I have a child starting middle school, I have feelings of anxiety for him, and they can be overwhelming if I let them. Sometimes I’m grateful for his autism. That may sound like a terrible thing to say, but in some ways I think, I hope, it shields him. He doesn’t seem to notice when people stare at him when he flaps his hands. He doesn’t seem to notice that he doesn’t get invited to birthday parties anymore. And he doesn’t seem to mind if he eats lunch alone. It’s one of my daily questions for him. Was there a time today you felt sad? Who did you eat lunch with today? Sometimes the answer is a classmate, but most days it’s nobody. Those are the days I feel sad for him, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He is a super sweet child, who always has a smile and hug for everyone he meets. A friend of mine sent this beautiful picture to me today and when I saw it with the caption “Travis Rudolph is eating lunch with your son” I replied “who is that?” He said “FSU football player”, then I had tears streaming down my face. Travis Rudolph, a wide receiver at Florida State, and several other FSU players visited my sons school today. I’m not sure what exactly made this incredibly kind man share a lunch table with my son, but I’m happy to say that it will not soon be forgotten. This is one day I didn’t have to worry if my sweet boy ate lunch alone, because he sat across from someone who is a hero in many eyes. Travis Rudolph thank you so much, you made this momma exceedingly happy, and have made us fans for life!

I am friends with a number of high achieving, dedicated Christians. A lot of them are very focused on school and work, and it doesn’t help that I bully them to get good grades and make money. But I worry sometimes about whether, when they read their Bibles, they are really getting the message of taking care of their neighbors. I want them to have the same heart as the football player did in the story, to sit down and spend time with those who are needy or awkward or unpopular.

I remember growing up very poor, and being a different color than all the well-off white students in the school. I would often go to school with messy hair and torn or faded clothes, because we just didn’t have the money to buy me expensive polo shirts like some of the other kids wore. My parents were immigrants. I didn’t get invited to many birthday parties, either. I know what it feels like to sit alone at a table because of things that I can’t control being uncomfortable for others.

The Bible actually has something to say about it.

Luke 10:25-37:

25 And a [a]lawyer stood up and put Him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

26 And He said to him, “What is written in the Law? [b]How does it read to you?”

27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”

28 And He said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.”

29 But wishing to justify himself, he said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

30 Jesus replied and said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among robbers, and they stripped him and [c]beat him, and went away leaving him half dead.

31 And by chance a priest was going down on that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

32 Likewise a Levite also, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.

33 But a Samaritan, who was on a journey, came upon him; and when he saw him, he felt compassion,

34 and came to him and bandaged up his wounds, pouring oil and wine on them; and he put him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

35 On the next day he took out two [d]denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I return I will repay you.’

36 Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers’ hands?”

37 And he said, “The one who showed mercy toward him.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do [e]the same.”

I will say that today it can be difficult to reach out to the other, especially since so many on the secular left make it a condition of talking to them that you agree with them, that you hide your faith and convictions, that you celebrate everything that they are doing even if it is sinful and destructive. They are so intolerant that they even try to get you fired if you disagree with them on moral issues. Still, there are some non-leftist people who are not popular and who will let you be who you are safely. The man who was beat up was a victim of forces outside of his control, he was being immoral and demanding that everyone celebrate his immorality. He was safe to help.

As long as I am free to be who I am as a Christian, what is it the harm of sitting with unpopular people? After all, as long as I’m an open Christian, I’m probably not going to be accepted by the popular crowd anyway. Sin is popular, today. Drinking and hooking up and sexual immorality are popular. I think we ought to be looking for opportunities to be open and welcoming to those who do not force us to hide our faith and deny our moral convictions. For those people who are “safe”, we shouldn’t resent their demands. Another person’s needs shouldn’t be a deterrent to reaching out to them. Their hostility to our faith and moral convictions might be, if we judge them to be dangerous.

And I think this openness to opportunity is even more important, if they are asking for advice on spiritual things. Every person was made to know God, and when a person comes to you and asks about God, that makes them the most important person in the world. You have to drop everything and handle that opportunity.

News

What are some reasons why God might allow his creatures to suffer?

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Lets take a closer look at a puzzle
Lets take a closer look at a puzzle

There’s an interesting article posted at Belief Map.

He sets up the possible reasons with a very good explanation of the structure of the argument. His explanation allows him to balance the existence of suffering with “greater goods”.

Most Christians can name some of the ones that he talks about: free will, character formation, etc.

But what about this quote from a section entitled “Worldly people turning to seek God is good”:

Seeking fellowship with God is a great good (especially in the context of eternity). This is relevant because, with less suffering, fewer would seek God. Indeed,

• “Religiosity declines as worldly prosperity of individuals rises.”[2005 WIN-Gallup International poll]1

• Studies confirm that Christianity grows most rapidly during hardships.2

• It is intuitively clear that suffering would lead us to turn to God.3

• Eleonore Stump (Philosophy professor at Saint Louis): “Natural evil—the pain of disease, the intermittent and unpredictable destruction of natural disasters, the decay of old age, the imminence of death—takes away a person’s satisfaction with himself. It tends to humble him, show him his frailty, make him reflect on the transience of temporal goods, and turn his affections towards other-worldly things, away from the things of this world.” [“The Problem of Evil” Faith and Philosophy, 2 (1985): 409.]

A bit later, it says this:

This is not to say God causes suffering, or even that that God permits suffering to bring this about. It only says the world is better to at least some degree for God’s not preventing it for a time, and God’s knowing that could factor into overriding his reasons to prevent suffering.

For example:

• Peter van Inwagen: “If God did what is proposed, we should all be satisfied with our existence–or at least a lot closer to being satisfied than most of us are now. And if we are satisfied with our existence, why should we even consider turning to God and asking for His help? An essential and important component of God’s plan of Atonement—this constitutes an addition to our theodicy—is to make us dissatisfied with our state of separation from Him; and not by miraculously altering our values or by subjecting us to illusion or by causing us suffering that has no natural connection with our separation, but simply by allowing us to ‘live with’ the natural consequences of this separation, and by making it as difficult as possible for us to delude ourselves about the kind of world we live in: a hideous world, much of whose hideousness is quite plainly traceable to the inability of human beings to govern themselves to or order their own lives. Let us expand our theodicy: An essential part of God’s plan of Atonement for separated humanity is for human beings to perceive that a natural consequence of human beings’ attempting to order their own lives is a hideous world—a world that is hideous not only by His standards, but by the very standards they themselves accept.” [“The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: A Theodicy” Philosophical Topics Vol XVI, No. 2 (1988): 174.]

[…]

• Paul Moser (Philosophy professor at Loyola University Chicago): “We can make some sense, in Paul’s wake, of why a perfectly loving God would allow certain kinds of pain and suffering. This God, as perfectly loving, would be after something more valuable than human sensory pleasure and the satisfaction of worldly human wants. God would hope that people be liberated from deadly idols in virtue of trusting God as the authoritative Lord who provides genuine human security and contentment, come what may in this world. This divine hope could thus make good use of allowing pain and suffering among us rather than protecting us from all pain and suffering. This would be part of God’s redemptive judgment of human idols, by bringing them to noticeable futility, for the sake of reconciliation of humans to God in volitional fellowship with God. It would be judgment intended, at least characteristically, to correct humans from their reliance on futile idols and to restore them to their creator and sustainer in volitional fellowship.” [The Elusive God (Cambridge, 2008), 42.]

And even mentioned in Scripture itself:

• Psalm 119:71 — It is good for me that I was afflicted, That I may learn Your statutes.

• Philippians 4:12-14 — I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. Nevertheless, you have done well to share with me in my affliction.

If you want to check out some of the other reasons, then click through and read the article here. I think it’s worth it to read something if I learn something new, and I found some new competing goods to God’s permission of suffering in the article. I like the references to academic work and the Bible, too.

…integrating Christian faith and knowledge in the public square

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