Tag Archives: Apostasy

News

Is Christianity about doing nice things or upholding God’s reputation?

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This comment seemed to get a lot of response on Facebook. It’s short, so I am posting it to see if anyone has any opinions about it.

I have been thinking about how people can be raised as Christians and yet become non-Christians. I am beginning to think that the problem is twofold. Early-raised Christians may get the idea from the typical Christian life that Christianity is like what goes on in church. Happiness, singing, families and games, and mostly well-off people dressed in their Sunday best. When they see the suffering and poverty in the real world, they get annoyed with God for not making people happy and healthy and wealthy, and they then turn to government to meet those needs and create happiness and freedom from poverty here on Earth.

I think we need to tell people early on that Christianity is about knowing God and suffering like Jesus suffered. They have to get used to the idea that other people in other religions are not “bad” but they are WRONG and they aren’t doing their homework. (My Hindu friends, for example, take it as a point of pride that they don’t update their religious beliefs for facts, but just believe what is their national and family religion – it’s about nationalism and culture, not truth) And they have to get the idea that Jesus is not championing the elimination of suffering through wealth redistribution, but private charity.

I think this idea that Christianity is about making people feel good and getting along and being liked is pernicious. A relationship with God doesn’t mean projecting YOUR needs onto him, and having a fit if he has different goals and priorities. A relationship with God means caring about what he wants, and suffering with him when things happen that grieve him. I do believe God is sovereign and allows these things to happen.

A previous post from last week had my preliminary thoughts on this, and my friends and I are talking it over. Mariangela has a lot to say about this topic for sure, if she wants to comment.

But not all the news is bad… I was in church on Sunday and I was thinking about this more. Our sermon had a mix of good works and defending God’s existence and character, but it was more the latter than the former. A solid focus on defending God’s reputation and moral standards, and then doing good was mentioned as well at the very end. But this is an exceptional church I was at. They have apologetics book studies featuring Lee Strobel books, and they have hosted Greg Koukl as a speaker. I think in churches where they DON’T have that focus, people will just stop going since they can be good and do nice things without having to go to church.

What do you think?

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Polemics

Why do some Christians think that government should provide free meals to children?

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First, read this story from the Korea Herald.

Excerpt:

After months of political dispute, Seoul citizens will decide on free school meals in a vote on Wednesday. The referendum will ask voters to choose between providing free meals to all school students regardless of income straight away, as favored by Seoul City Council, or gradually covering students from the poorest 50 percent of households, as backed by Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon. At least one third of the electorate must vote for the result to be valid.

The road to this point has been fraught with controversy and division. In protest of Seoul City Council’s decision to implement a universal meals program, Oh earlier this year boycotted council meetings for six months, prompting the council to accuse Oh of a “dereliction of duty.” On Tuesday, Oh put his political career on the line, promising to step down as mayor should his proposal fail. For Oh and many conservatives, the vote is a last bid to safeguard the city’s finances from welfare populism. To many liberals, the referendum demonstrates more about Oh’s political ambitions than his principles. Where their conservative peers see waste in a universal program, they see inclusiveness that avoids stigmatizing poorer children. But in the end, the voters’ voice will be the one that matters.

The article features two opinions, pro and con.

Here is the pro excerpt:

We cannot stand by and watch classmates be divided between the well-off and the less well-off, nor can we stand idly by as some children feel ever more left out, branded “poor” by their own peers, and all because of school meals. The constitution of Korea is very clear in its declaration that compulsory education ought to be free as well.

And here is the con excerpt:

Kwak begins: “If we harbor the idea of universal welfare …”

This justifies suspicions that the goal is to establish a universal welfare program, not just to help poor kids. “Welfare populism” has defined the current election cycle, with Korean politicians pushing and shoving each other out of the way to announce the latest “free” or “half-free” proposal: “Free” school lunches, “free” medical services, “half-tuition,” “free” childcare.

I obviously agree with the second opinion. These hard-cases are regularly used as a way to push through full-blown socialism. Even many Christians fall for this, and have been tricked into voting for left-wing activists who went on to enact many objectionable things like taxpayer-funded abortion, taxpayer-funded sex changes, taxpayer-funded day care, taxpayer-funded IVF, etc.

Why would Christians support government-provided meals?

Recently I was listening to an interview with an apostate on the Unbelievable radio show. She is a pastor’s kid, listened to Christian music, went on short-term mission trips to Haiti to help the poor, (but no apologetics conferences – eww, yucky!), and did all kinds of Christian activities that would not help her to pass my screening questions at all . I don’t think she was ever a Christian, because I don’t think this happy-clappy pastor’s-kid sing-in-church stuff is any indication of having a Christian worldview.

Anyway, her stated reasons for her apostasy were as follows:

  • I don’t like that people aren’t equal financially (she said she annoyed her father by wearing a pin that said “Jesus was a socialist”, which, of course, he isn’t – unless you decide these questions based on feelings not facts)
  • I don’t like that people are not happy (she talked about the problem of suffering, and was annoyed that God was failing to give people happiness, which she assumed was his job because of her impressions of God from her happy-clappy worship music view of Christianity)
  • I don’t like the idea of a God who could punish people in Hell for disrespecting his existence and character (because knowing God as a real person and caring about his character when you make decisions is such a drag on her autonomy and her need for peer approval)
  • I don’t like some things that Jesus says that are mean (her examples were all misinterpretations of the text that a preschooler could solve)
  • I don’t like where the Bible says that men and women have different roles (she claimed to be a feminist in the interview, which provides a clue about what really happened)

This reminds me of when Lewis Wolpert said in his debate with William Lane Craig that God didn’t help him find his cricket bat so he became an atheist. What sort of investigation of the truth of Christian theism is possible for people who became atheists in their teens? None. They do it because they don’t like rules, and don’t like how the real world doesn’t fit with their emotions and intuitions about what God should be like. They don’t want answers, they want emotions and intuitions.

Often, when people say “God doesn’t prevent suffering”, what they really mean is that God didn’t meet their personal expectations for making them happy. And when they say , “God doesn’t prevent poverty”, what they really mean is that God didn’t give me lots of money for acting irresponsibly. They believed that they could act recklessly and that God would make their  emotional flights of fancy work out somehow. Just read my post on Dan Barker: this is not at all out of the ordinary.The air of intellectualism and critical thinking that atheists put on come much later after the wounded narcissism.

Atheism starts with wanting to be popular or a missing cricket bat. Dan Barker sang songs for most of his life – he was an uneducated man. He was in no position to become an atheist for intellectual reasons. As a young man, he invented a God in keeping with his fundamentalist praise and worship songs, and then he expected his golem-God to make him happy – which it didn’t. He rejected his caricature of God because it didn’t produce the expected benefits. If God can’t be what they want – happiness provider, money provider – then they quit. They are not in it to serve – but to be served.

I see this a lot where people choose to have romantic relationships with non-Christians, and it doesn’t work out. Instead of taking responsibility for breaking the rules while trying to get happiness, and realizing that Christianity isn’t there to make them happy, they blame their Santa Claus caricature of God for not giving them what they want.

And that’s why Christians support government-funded meals. They have this idea that God ought to be in the business of providing for our needs. Many of them fall away from the faith and become socialists when those expectations about God fail to prove out. So they look to government to change the world into something it isn’t. They have an intuition that the world should conform to their happy expectations. When God fails to deliver, they become atheists and turn to government as the solution to their problem. But is happiness really the goal of life?

Do Christian socialists really understand what Christianity is about?

But back to the government-provided school meals. Undoubtedly, this apostate socialist feminist from the radio show would favor the government taking over the duties of parents to feed their children.

But she isn’t alone. I would think that many Christian women also express delight at the idea of the government using family money to “help the poor”. I’ve heard opinions like this from a number of Christian women. They just think that Christianity is consistent with a secular government confiscating wealth and redistributing for secular purposes. Because Christianity isn’t about things like evangelism and private charity – it’s about people of all religions feeling good regardless of what they think about God. It’s also about people who make reckless and/or immoral decisions getting money from the government to make the consequences go away.

Christian socialists think that it’s better for a Christian family to give up their money and lose their ability to share the gospel as they meet the needs of others. Let government do it instead, and let government get the credit for helping the poor. The main point of Christianity, they think, is making people feel good regardless of what they believe and how they act – by means of wealth redistribution by a secular state.

Christianity is not about the equalization of wealth by government, or the elimination of suffering, or allowing people to be reckless and immoral and then feeling happy about what they’ve done. Christianity finds meaning in suffering – look at the example of Jesus – and Christianity is concerned with knowing God and making him known to others, and respected by others. Many Christians reject the real goals of Christianity and substitute alternative goals – and that’s why they are so open to socialism.

Christianity is about loving God and loving your neighbor. To love God you have to know him, integrate his values with your decision making and priorities. Loving your neighbor doesn’t mean shoveling money at them regardless of what they know about God or how bad their decisions are. Giving to your neighbor in the Bible is a private matter – not a government-run redistribution operation. You give SO THAT the recipient gets the better of your input and judgment.

The government in Canada hands out drug needles, and pays for abortions. Is that what Christianity is about? If it isn’t, then stop being suckered by extreme case sob stories and voting to hand more and more money to the government. They will never spend it as well as you will – so long as you think that how you spend money is ALSO under the authority of God. Many Christians don’t.

Are Christian socialist women ready for marriage and family?

To me, I take socialist convictions as if the woman is saying that she doesn’t want her husband to be the leader in the home, she wants to diminish his purchasing power, increase the uncertainty of his job, add to the national debt her children will pay, and to empower the government to get into the business of making more and more citizens dependent on the government instead of being dependent on parents or independent as adults. Many of these women also favor welfare for single mothers, and a whole host of other social programs.

Money that husbands earn is family money, not government money

One of my friends on Facebook who is a pro-life capitalist feminist (not a Christian) wrote this to me as a summary of how to understand what a woman means when she expresses support for government to provide meals to children so that they will be equal:

How about, “I want my husband to give his money to women who didn’t marry the fathers of their babies, rather than keeping it in our family.”

I, for one, am tired of children being used as bludgeons and shields by the Left to argue against any actual repercussions for their actions. While I don’t think that children should go hungry, and I can’t work up much anger at a state-funded (not federal-funded) school lunch for poor kids, but… reality is that parents work their butts off to give their kids advantages. My father didn’t work 80 hour weeks for someone else’s kid (well, he gives away a lot of time and money, but that’s his choice); he did it so that his four kids could have a stable life, food on the table, and college educations. Not so that some other brat he’s never met could have all of that.

Isn’t it amazing that non-Christian women actually acknowledge the importance of the male roles of father and husband more than the many Christian women? I find that amazing. Women who oppose socialism think that the results of my hard work are not better spent by Harriet Harman than by families. If families want to help the poor and to give God honor by being known to be Christians by those they help, good. If families want to share the gospel and answer questions with those they help, good. If families want to choose who to help based on their Christian worldview, good. But government does none of that, so they should not get family money.

And this is why I warn you Christian young men. Money is the fuel that you use to run your lives. It is the flour that you use to bake the bread that you will offer to God as a gift. A woman who thinks that the Christian life is about giving money to a secular government is not ready to marry. A Christian family can always spend their money better for Christ than a secular government.

Men: Do not assume that just because a woman likes baby pictures and weddings that she is qualified for marriage. Marriage is a very particular thing. Wanting it is not the same as being ready for it. Men are not sperm-donors, and they are not bank accounts. They do not exist to cater to the whims of women who want to feel good about themselves and the world. Men are there to execute their own plans to serve God, with help from women. My role is not to make a woman feel better by creating utopia here and now. I am a Christian man. I have Christian goals. Giving money that I earned to a secular government does not help me to achieve those goals. And a woman who thinks that the secular government should spend my money does not help me to achieve those goals.

Christian women especially ought to know this, but many don’t. They have completely given up on the Christian message of sin and forgiveness and reduced it to 1) being liked, 2) feeling good. Abandoning Christian particularism makes them feel liked by people in other religions, and redistributing the money of hard workers, including their own husbands, makes them feel good because government is helping the poor… to a taxpayer-funded abortion at Planned Parenthood. But that’s not Christianity.

Many, many women want this feeling of putting the world right. And since they don’t read about things like education vouchers and consumer-driven health care, they settle on the obvious, but incorrect, solution – reduce “inequality” by redistributing wealth through a secular government. They know nothing at all about the free market, and less still about how the free market works to solve social problems. They don’t read – they just feel. And then they are shocked when a bloated government starts to encroach on religious liberty, right to life, homeschooling, etc.

Christian men, listen. Just because a woman can sing hymns, prayer, dance, read the Bible, and attend church, it doesn’t mean that she has a Christian worldview. She can just be like that apostate on the Unbelievable show, having the form of Christianity, but without any real faith in God or knowledge of his character. She may not support God’s purposes of being known by all and honored by all. She may not support private charity instead of public social programs.

Mentoring

Does contemporary Christian music build up a lasting Christian faith?

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Here’s an interesting account by a young woman who became secular by becoming very involved in Christian music and then jumped to secular music because it was better music.

Excerpt:

“Who’s in the House” is a hip-hop track about the presence of the Lord. Through megaphone distortion, Carman rapped a few lines: “You take him high / you take him low / you take JC wherever you go,” then led into a call and response hook reminiscent of ’80s-era De La Soul. “Tell me who’s in the house? JC!”

If you’re wondering what teenager in her right mind would listen to a forty-year-old Vegas showman with a Jersey accent rap about Jesus, the answer is: me. In junior high, I saw Carman in concert three times. The Standard was the first CD I ever bought. I rocked out to Carman on my Walkman on the way to youth group and dished with my girlfriends about what a hottie he was. At the concerts, I bought his T-shirts and posters, and when he called out “Who’s in the House?” I made my arms into letters, YMCA-style, with the rest of the crowd and shouted “JC!”

I was homeschooled up until tenth grade, and my social life revolved around church. I grew up submersed in evangelical youth culture: reading Brio magazine, doing devotions in my Youth Walk Bible, eagerly awaiting the next installment of the Left Behind series, and developing a taste in music that ran the gamut from Christian rap to Christian pop to Christian rock.

And she ends with this:

Basically, CCM caught on to the number one rule of coolness: don’t let your marketing show. The best bands—the successful ones, at least—learned to gloss over the gospel message the same way TV producers camouflaged corporate sponsorship. Explicitly Christian lyrics prevented DC Talk from crossing over to the secular market in the ’90s; today it’s difficult to imagine their unapologetic faith making it in the Christian circuit.

This trend spreads beyond CCM into many areas of evangelical culture. The church is becoming increasingly consumer-friendly. Jacob Hill, director of “worship arts” at New Walk Church, describes the Sunday service music as “exciting, loud, powerful, and relevant,” and boasts that “a lot of people say they feel like they’ve just been at a rock concert.” Over the past ten years, I’ve visited churches that have Starbucks kiosks in the foyer and youth wings decked out with air hockey tables. I’ve witnessed a preacher stop his sermon to play a five-minute clip from Billy Madison. I’ve walked into a sanctuary that was blasting the Black Eyed Peas’s “Let’s Get it Started” to get the congregation pumped for the morning’s message, which was on joy. I have heard a pastor say, from a pulpit, “Hey, I’m not here to preach at anyone.” And yet, in spite of these efforts, churches are retaining only 4 percent of the young people raised in their congregations.

Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a Christian into my early twenties. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t because being a believer made me uncool or outdated or freakish. It was because being a Christian no longer meant anything. It was a label to slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry one at that because the church isn’t Viacom: it doesn’t have a Department of Brand Strategy and Planning. Staying relevant in late consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth: authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost one more kid to the competition.

So, I’d like to look at whether listening to contemporary Christian music is a good way to build a strong faith that lasts.

Should people sing about things that they don’t know are true?

I would not be comfortable singing about a state of affairs that I did not know was true. And yet, that is exactly what happens in churches and youth groups. Young people are brought up to sing about a story without any evidence that the story is true. Imagine what that does to a person – what are they thinking about the purpose of the singing? They don’t know these things are true, but they sing anyway! And as they grow up, the church makes it a badge of honor to speak only about what the Bible says, and never links what the Bible says to anything in the real world. Naturally, as soon as children hit the university, they fall away. Their questions about the problem of evil, the problem of suffering, the problem of world of religious pluralism, the hiddenness of God, justice of Hell, etc. were never answered.

I think this anti-intellectual approach is really damaging. The impression of Christianity that young people will have is that truth doesn’t matter, that you can sing about something just to be part of a group, and for emotional pleasure. Then with the end-of-the-world fiction and other Christian fiction – all for enjoyment, and all not connected to knowledge. How does any of that connect to the real world? When young people are taught that being a Christian has no connection to reason, evidence or the real world, then their Christianity doesn’t survive leaving the safety of their home and church. If Christian parents wanted their children to be able to integrate their faith with what is taught at the university, then they would have to do better than singing, end-of-the-world fiction, praying about romantic relationships, and so on.

Christian music reinforces the idea that Christianity makes you feel good

The problem with Christian music is that a person listening to it can quickly develop the idea that what Christianity is about is having happy feelings, because people feel happy when listening to music. I’ve noticed that a lot of Christians leave the faith because they have this idealized notion that the world should be a happy place, where no one ever feels bad. Then they find verses in the Bible that are exclusive and judgmental, and they leave the faith because Christianity is too “mean”. This is especially the case with young women who are inclined to doubt God’s existence because of the problem of evil and the doctrine of Hell. If young women are not aware of the reasons why Christianity is true, then the experience of being perceived by others as “mean” can cause them to abandon their faith. Social pressure is an enormous factor in the behavior of women – they want to be accepted and liked by everyone.

Those emotions of compassion and intuitions about happiness are not compatible with hard verses of the Bible and exclusive Christian doctrines. Many people If we teach children that happiness and doing good things are what Christianity is about, then eventually they will dump it when the open profession of their faith causes them to have bad feelings and to lose friends. I think Christian women especially feel pressure to jettison Christian rules when it comes to dating and marriage – because they want to be happy, and they think that the rules shouldn’t stop them from pursuing happiness. If they don’t know why the rules are there (truth) then they will just reject anything that conflicts with their intuitions, emotions and desire to be happy. If the purpose of life is to have good feelings about yourself, and to have everyone like you, then Christianity is not the answer. If the purpose of life is to know the truth and to live according to it, then Christianity is the answer.

English is not a subject that is very friendly to Christian beliefs

I note that she seems to have studied English at the undergraduate level and is currently studying it at graduate level, which I think is significant. English is well known to be a hotbed of postmodernism, deconstructionism, feminism and socialism on campuses. She would therefore be under enormous pressure there to abandon her faith, especially in order to get good grades. Nothing that she did as a young person would equip her to deal with the pressure from peers and teachers when challenged on her Christian faith. Singing, reading fiction, Bible reading and prayer do not help a young person who is confronted by peer pressure and secular left professors holding the grading pen – especially in English where marking of essays is subjective.

My first career choice was to be an English teacher – I won simultaneous awards for English and Computer Programming in high school (public school, not homeschool). But then I took an early university course in English, while still a high school student, and realized that it had been compromised by feminism and postmodernism and other untestable ideologies. Personally, I think that mathematics, computer science and engineering are much safer fields for Christians to study. My background is in computer science, and I have an undergraduate and graduate degree in that area. These areas are safer because it is much harder for the professors to inject politics into the curriculum, so that students don’t have to be forced to accept things on faith, without any critical thinking or debate. Math features answers that are right or wrong regardless of politics, and programming features programs that either run or not, regardless of religion.

It’s not a good idea to stay a student all your life

To be a Christian, it helps to be able to have your own source of income so that you can buy books and debates to learn with. I have been working in the field of computer science for 15 years, starting in middle school, and have saved pretty much everything I’ve earned. I saved about half of what I make. I never take money from the government, although I accepted scholarships from the university because I just considered it a reduction in tuition. The problem with getting things for free is that you get what other people give you – in this case, the government and the university. If you want to rebel against the secular leftist zeitgeist, you have to have arms to rebel with – and arms cost money. William Lane Craig debates and F.A. Hayek books cost money. And you can’t depend on the government or the university to provide you with those.

Our CCM woman seems to have been a student all her life. She doesn’t have the skills or the money to make it on her own. She has to agree with them in order to get tuition, student loans, etc. – in order to live away from her parents. This would be another pressure on her to turn away from her Christian faith. She is trapped by not having any marketable skills that would allow her to earn a living without having to agree with anyone’s views. Students also have the things they read handed to them – it’s much harder for her to find the time to read things that the professors don’t want her to read – and she could never bring those things up in class safely anyway. A lot of people who thrive on being told that they are good prefer to stay in school where it is easy to just do whatever the (secular left) teacher says in order to get good grades.

Avoid women who do not know why they believe what they say they believe

I just want to reiterate to Christian men that they should be asking questions of Christian women before falling in love with them, to make sure they know why they believe what they say they believe. Here are some questions to ask to find out if a woman is a solid Christian that should help men to detect women like the one who wrote the essay. This post may also be useful. Christian men: be careful with women like this who look good, but who fall away. Don’t get hurt.

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