Tag Archives: Emotivism

News

Why did the lead vocalist of a Christian rock band abandon belief in God?

25 Comments
A conflict of worldviews
A conflict of worldviews

Carla told me about this celebrity singer who decided to leave Christianity. Since we’ve had a few high profile departures, I thought it might be worth giving my very controversial view on Christian musicians, artists, athletes and celebrities. I’ve always been suspicious of celebrities claiming to be Christians and there’s a very simple reason why.

Anyway, here is the story from Christian Post.

It says:

Jon Steingard, the Canadian Christian rock band Hawk Nelson’s lead vocalist, has declared on social media that “I no longer believe in God,” explaining “it didn’t happen overnight.”

[…]“After growing up in a Christian home, being a pastor’s kid, playing and singing in a Christian band, and having the word ‘Christian’ in front of most of the things in my life — I am now finding that I no longer believe in God.”

He has three objections, the first being the problem of evil, the second being Old Testament violence, and finally the doctrine of the atonement:

“If God is all loving, and all powerful, why is there evil in the world? Can he not do anything about it? Does he choose not to?”

[…]”Why does he (God) say not to kill, but then instruct Israel to turn around and kill men women and children to take the promised land?” and “Why does Jesus have to die for our sins (more killing again)?”

[…]I am not looking for a debate at all — just a chance to share my story in the hopes some good can come from it.

He mentions having his “heart changed”, and that’s how most people these days approach religion. Whether they accept it or not depends on their feelings, experiences, and peer approval. Their Christian worldview isn’t compelled by logic and evidence. They have a non-STEM approach to religion. If they like it, they keep it. And this is why so many people who are raised in the church give it up in high school and college. They feel that Christianity isn’t truth in the same way as math, science, engineering or history. Christianity, they are taught, is about their family, their feelings, their community. If it feels good, and helps them fit in, they keep it. But when they get to high school or college, they find things to do that are more fun, feel better, make them look smarter, and make their new friends like them more.

Regarding his three objections. For the problem of evil, William Lane Craig answers that in “Hard Questions, Real Answers”, or more technically in “Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview”. For the Old Testament challenge, Paul Copan answers that in “Is God a Moral Monster?” The third objection is just philosophical theology. William Lane Craig has written on the logic of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, for example, and found parallels in the insurance business. These topics are debated in formal academic debates, but Mr. Lead Vocalist probably won’t find the answers by watching TV and asking his artist friends.

By the way, the Christian Post article notes that he was objecting to the moral demands of the Christian life prior his atheism:

In 2015, talking about the song “Live Like You’re Loved” from Hawk Nelson’s album Diamonds, Steingard told The Christian Post that it was “inspired by growing up and learning the dos and don’ts of Christianity and how to be a good Christian.”

[…]“I just had an epiphany … all this running around and trying to do everything exactly right, these are not the things that bring us closer to God. Our relationship with God is already secured with what was done on the cross. What if we went into life with confidence of knowing we are already loved?”

Lyrics to “Live Like You’re Loved” include: “So go ahead and live like you’re loved, it’s OK to act like you’ve been set free / His love has made you more than enough so go ahead and be who he made you to be / And live like you’re loved.”

He had an epiphany. Doing what the Bible teaches isn’t how you love God. No, no. You just follow your heart, and God will love you for that. That’s so convenient and very popular in the feminized church today. But it’s also exactly the opposite of what the Bible teaches:

1 John 5:1-3:

1 Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him.

2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments.

3 For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.

I don’t know his personal life, but I know a lot of Christians who went nuts in college drinking and having sex, and then subsequently found “reasons” for thinking Christianity was false.

I meet so many Christians whose entire reading life consists of reading fiction, romance novels and popular female preachers. Instead of learning how to engage against challenges to the faith like socialism, feminism, atheism, etc. we’re more focused on entertaining ourselves, and trying to be liked. Not only is this narcissistic, it also doesn’t result in a stable and influential Christian life.

Most of the adult Christians I know today slipped into the wild life of atheism as soon as they left home. They came back to the faith later, but they’re still politically liberal and they have a non-cognitive understanding of Christianity. They may have returned to the faith and church, but it’s still all about their feelings, experiences and peer approval. They aren’t working for God, they’re making God work for them.

This is the exact opposite of my experience of Christianity. I wasn’t raised in a Christian home. I wasn’t raised in a church. I don’t sing songs. I don’t have fun. I am not trying to be popular. I don’t drink. I’m a virgin. I have multiple STEM degrees. I work in a STEM field. I read evidential apologetics. I engage in debates with non-Christians. I’m a non-white immigrant. My view of Christianity is masculine, not feminine. It’s effective, not emotional.

Christian scholars are more important than “Christian” entertainers

I don’t think that Christians should waste their time on Christian entertainers and celebrity preachers. And I’m going to lump in pastors and preachers who focus on feelings and experiences into that group. If you’re going to pick someone to look up to as a Christian, then choose people who have put in the time to study the truth claims of the Christian worldview enough to defend them to other scholars, using arguments and evidence.

I admire people like William Lane Craig, Stephen C. Meyer, Michael Licona who actually debate non-Christians on university campuses and other public forums. In contrast, an entertainer isn’t usually qualified to defend truth claims in public settings. Defending Christian truth claims is a low priority for most Christian entertainers and celebrities. Don’t be like them.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

News

UK parents accuse school of secretly brainwashing their child into transgenderism

2 Comments
Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties
Where do young people get their positive view of LGBT issues?

Last week I blogged about a case from Canada where the teachers and administrators conspired with doctors to get a child onto the transgender track. Here is another case that was just reported on the weekend, this time from the UK. What was shocking to me was that this school is apparently a “free school” – the UK term for a private school.

Here’s the story from the UK Daily Mail:

A school has been accused of secretly allowing a 13-year-old girl to attend ‘radicalising’ mentoring sessions that convinced her that she was transgender.

Ashleigh and Ged Barnett allege that until the one-to-one sessions began last September, their daughter appeared comfortable in her body and showed little interest in transgender issues.

But they say she had changed completely by November, sporting a short haircut and talking about feeling that she was really a boy.

They were confused by the transformation until they met her headteacher to discuss another matter and learned that their daughter had been having weekly sessions with the head of the school’s LGBT group.

[…]‘The teaching assistant also pointed her in the direction of a YouTube website of a trans activist, which featured a video where they showed off their mastectomy scars and told how well the operation had gone.’

The couple said they were furious when they found school staff had let the teenager attend the sessions ‘behind our backs’. 

Mrs Barnett said: ‘The school didn’t think it was fit to tell us. We are her parents, but responsibility to care for our child has been taken away. The attitude is that it’s the child’s choice and it’s got nothing to do with us.

The teachers are very clear that although they are being paid to do a job by parents, they are not going to their job. They deserve to be paid by parents to do whatever they want. Not what parents want. In fact, the schools are in league with organizations on the radicl left, and the teachers and administrators are much more interested in getting the approval of these far-left groups than the parents who pay their salaries.

Mrs Barnett also claimed that the teaching assistant encouraged their daughter to change in a boy’s cubicle and that staff began using a male name for her.

She alleges the teaching assistant had no formal counselling qualifications and only received training from local charity Eikon that provides ‘LGBT+ awareness sessions’ for schools.

In recent email correspondence with the couple, headteacher Jane Davies said she believed their daughter should be left to use the changing facilities she preferred.

‘We will continue to provide a safe environment for [your child], but it is not our place to alert you to how she feels,’ she wrote.

‘It is important that you understand that she is old enough to make her own decisions.’

This is not an unusual attitude for teachers to take about handling the children who are entrusted to them. There was a time in the past when teachers were more humble, and saw themselves as partners with parents. But that went out of fashion way back during the time of progressive President Woodrow Wilson.

He said this:

The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible. By the time a man has grown old enough to have a son in college he has specialized. The university should generalize the treatment of its undergraduates, should struggle to put them in touch with every force of life.

Instead of seeing their purpose a serving parents, they see themselves as masters of the child, and the parents just pay their salaries and feed and clothe the child. The worldview transfer is done by the teachers, because they are the keepers of all wisdom and morality.

Well, as always in these matters, it’s good to look at the studies. So let’s look at a recent one that should help parents to understand transgenderism.

Here’s how the study was first reported by Science Daily:

This month, a Brown University researcher published the first study to empirically describe teens and young adults who did not have symptoms of gender dysphoria during childhood but who were observed by their parents to rapidly develop gender dysphoria symptoms over days, weeks or months during or after puberty.

[…]The study was published on Aug. 16 in PLOS ONE.

Peer pressure / The Internet:

The pattern of clusters of teens in friend groups becoming transgender-identified, the group dynamics of these friend groups and the types of advice viewed online led her to the hypothesis that friends and online sources could spread certain beliefs.

[….]”Of the parents who provided information about their child’s friendship group, about a third responded that more than half of the kids in the friendship group became transgender-identified,” Littman said. “A group with 50 percent of its members becoming transgender-identified represents a rate that is more 70 times the expected prevalence for young adults.”

This article at The Federalist had a few examples to illustrate the conclusion of the study. I’ll pick two.

The study includes other eye-opening information, such as case studies of several children’s stories.

  • “A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends were taking group lessons together with a very popular coach. The coach came out as transgender, and, within one year, all four students announced they were also transgender.”

  • “A 14-year-old natal female and three of her natal female friends are part of a larger friend group that spends much of their time talking about gender and sexuality. The three natal female friends all announced they were trans boys and chose similar masculine names. After spending time with these three friends, the 14-year-old natal female announced that she was also a trans boy.”

I thought this quote from that article was interesting as well, given the culture’s obsession with “bullying”, which is a nebulous term that can mean actual bullying, or mere disagreement.

The study also may indicate that school “anti-bullying” programs typically created by LGBT activist organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign may help accelerate children identifying as transgender by pushing peers and authority figures to profusely express their support.

Coming out as transgender means instant fame and popularity, because you’re a victim, and everyone has to be nice to you… or else:

“Great increase in popularity among the student body at large. Being trans is a gold star in the eyes of other teens,” wrote one parent on the study response form. Another wrote, “not so much ‘popularity’ increasing as ‘status’ … also she became untouchable in terms of bullying in school as teachers who ignored homophobic bullying …are now all at pains to be hot on the heels of any trans bullying.”

People on the left are always faking hate crimes against themselves or making false rape accusations. Being a victim gets them attention and makes people treat them nicely.

The response from LGBT activists to this study was to claim that it was full of errors, so it was pulled and submitted to rigorous review. You won’t be surprised to find that the second review process found no major errors in the paper.

News

UK judge rules in favor of firing people who disagree with transgenderism

7 Comments
Thinking about transgenderism
Thinking about transgenderism

This case is from the UK, but keep in mind that the United States is just a few years off from this, depending on who wins the presidency in 2020. A woman tweeted that transgender women (biological men) are not the same as biological women. The judge ruled that it should be legal to fire employees who say that a transgender woman (biological man) is not the same a biological woman.

Here is the story from Insider:

A judge in the UK ruled on Wednesday that it was legal for a leading think tank to fire a worker for arguing publicly that transgender women are not real women.

The Centre for Global Development (CGD) sacked tax expert Maya Forstater in March 2019 over a series of tweets in which she supported the notion that “men cannot change into women.”

She sued the CGD on grounds of discrimination, but her argument was rejected by a judge, who said her position on the issue is “not worthy of respect” and does not enjoy legal protection.

[…]Before her dismissal Forstater was accused by her managers of using “offensive and exclusionary” language and “fear-mongering,” the Times of London reported.

The judge said that the defendant “is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.”

NBC News had an article up where the author explained why the ruling was justified:

This, then, is what Forstater wanted the courts to uphold: Her right to make her co-workers uncomfortable… her right to be… rude and disrespectful in social and professional contexts; and her right to disrespect U.K. law, which defines transgender women as women and transgender men as men…

Courts, of course, tend to look askance at being asked to rule that an employee should be allowed to harm their employers and co-workers based on “philosophical beliefs” they’ve decided are both “biological truths” and tantamount to religious canon.

Indeed. So the mainstream view among the progressive elites is that not affirming the views of transgender people is “harming” them. And the right way to stop dissent from the LGBT agenda is to have these people fired, so that they have to choose between feeding their family and supporting the LGBT agenda. And this is all fine with the “compassion” crowd, who are more concerned with the feelings of transgender people than with free speech and conscience rights.

By the way, the UK judge’s position is the same as about half the people in this country – the half that votes for the Democrat Party. The Democrats in the House have already passed a bill called the Equality Act, which would make American laws match the UK laws that make it acceptable for people who express disagreement with the LGBT agenda to be fired.

Personal application

I’ve noticed that a lot of evangelical pastors and leaders are drifting away from the teachings of the Bible on sex, marriage and morality in general. And it’s becoming a real question about how far they will go with this. Like, I don’t know where “conservative” evangelical pastors and leaders would stand on this question of firing someone who isn’t “generous” about accepting a transgender person’s preferred pronouns.

Based on what I’m seeing right now, I don’t expect that Bible-believing conservatives who disagree with LGBT agenda are going to get any help from the “conservative” evangelical pastors and leaders . And that affects how free those Bible-believing conservatives are to be generous about taking on additional responsibilities, like charitable contributions, marriage, and children. After all, if the “conservative” evangelical pastors and leaders aren’t concerned when a secular leftist fires a dissenter from LGBT orthodoxy, then why should that dissenter take on additional obligations to others that reduce his ability to survive being fired?

Here is what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 7:

32 I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord.

33 But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—

34 and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord’s affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world—how she can please her husband.

35 I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord.

And here’s Paul again in 2 Timothy:

 3 Join with me in suffering, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.

4 No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries to please his commanding officer.

I do understand that evangelical pastors and leaders think that men just marry for love, and they don’t even think about how much providing for a wife and children costs. But that’s delusional. Men DO calculate the costs of having a wife and children, and they understand that it is easier to be faithful on controversial issues when you are a single man, than when you are burdened with a wife and children. If pastors don’t want to do anything to defend free speech from the secular left, that makes marriage less attractive to men who are committed to fighting the secular left.