Tag Archives: Secularism

News

Another nurse faces termination for being a Christian in public

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Story from the Telegraph. (H/T Pursuing Holiness via ECM and Andrew)

Excerpt:

Shirley Chaplin, a committed Christian, has been told by her employers that she must hide or remove the cross or remain out of the hospital wards.

Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital told her that she cannot wear the one-inch tall silver cross openly around her neck, because it breaches their uniform policy and poses a risk to patients.

While the Trust has banned the crucifix in its wards, it makes concessions for other faiths, including allowing Muslim nurses to wear headscarves on duty.

She has been warned by her employers that she will be suspended if she does not comply with their request. There are fears that this would lead to her dismissal.

Mrs Chaplin, 54, says she has been shocked and distressed by the threat, which means she must choose between her faith and her job.

The London Times article that Laura linked to has a re-cap of the previous discrimination.

Excerpt:

Chaplin is being advised by Paul Diamond, a human rights barrister specialising in the law of religious liberty. He also advised Caroline Petrie, a nurse who was suspended in February this year at a hospital in Weston-Super-Mare for offering to pray for a patient. She was later reinstated.

In 2007, Nadia Eweida, a British Airways worker, appealed unsuccessfully to a tribunal against the airline’s decision to ban her from wearing her cross pendant in public.

Here is my previous post on the UK stewardess who was fired for refusing to dress as a Muslim as well as the Christian couple that was arrested for debating their faith with a Muslim. Here in the United States, the fascists at the ACLU had two Christians arrested for praying in a church.

Analysis

In my opinion, a non-Christian who interferes with a Christian’s ability to act out their fatih in public has done something diabolical. Worse than murder, in my opinion. It is hard enough to be a Christian without being intimidated and coerced by people who are willing to use the coercive power of the state to suppress the religious freedom of Christians.

What a non-Christian is doing is to force their non-Christian religion onto the Christian. The non-Christian basically wants to avoid feeling bad for not being a Christian, so they suppress the Christian’s religious faith, which requires public witnessing, in order to avoid feeling badly about not being a Christian themselves. They are elevating their own feelings above the Christian’s inalienable rights to religious liberty, free speech and free expression of religion.

But it is actually much, much worse than that. The result of suppressing a Christian’s public expression of their faith is that some other people who might have seen that public witness of authentic Christianity and spoken to that witness lose their opportunity to talk to the Christian. Not only that, but the Christian is also negatively impacted. You can’t take away someone’s human rights based on hurt feelings!

A lot of feminized multi-cultural postmodern relativist universalist “Christians” think that suppressing public Christianity is actually good. They have redefined Biblical Christianity so that the new goal is for everyone to have happy feelings now and to go to Heaven regardless of their beliefs. They think that divisions and exclusive claims to salvation make people feel badly. What are hurt feelings compared to Heaven and Hell?

So this is a serious, serious crime against Christ, one that I highly recommend my non-Christians readers avoid.

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News

Are we ever going to run out of oil and natural gas?

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Story from Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology. (H/T Stop the ACLU via ECM)

Excerpt:

Researchers at KTH have been able to prove that the fossils of animals and plants are not necessary to generate raw oil and natural gas. This result is extremely radical as it means that it will be much easier to find these energy sources and that they may be located all over the world.

“There is no doubt that our research has shown that raw oil and natural gas occur without the inclusion of fossils. All types of rock formations can act as hosts for oil deposits,” asserts Vladimir and adds that this applies to areas of land that have previously remained unexplored as possible sources of this type of energy.

“With the help of our research we even know where oil could be found in Sweden!” says Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the KTH Department of Energy Technology in Stockholm.

Together with two research colleagues, Professor Kutcherov has simulated the process of pressure and heat that occurs naturally in the inner strata of the earth’s crust. This process generates hydrocarbons, the primary elements of oil and natural gas.

According to Vladimir Kutcherov, these results are a clear indication that oil supplies are not drying up, which has long been feared by researchers and experts in the field.

Maybe this will help some of the overpopulation/resource scarcity people on the left to stop trying to impose totalitatarian government on the rest of us? I don’t mind if they obsess over the end of the world, but could they please engage in their religious speculations in private? Leave the energy policy to the grown-ups.

Mentoring

MUST-READ: Guest post: Purposeful parenting today

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The following post is a guest post from my friend Andrew.

Purposeful Parenting in Today’s World

Bob drives his bright red sports car 140 kilometres per hour on the highway and is pulled over by a police officer.  The officer gives Bob a:

  1. friendly greeting
  2. cookie
  3. speeding ticket

Susan prefers sleeping late to showing up at work on time.  After arriving at the office two to three hours late for two weeks in a row, Susan’s boss tells her to:

  1. get to bed a little earlier
  2. take some vacation time to rest up
  3. look for another job

This reality check comes from an article on parenting by Dr. Bill Maier from Focus on the Family.  It shows in a humorous way how real life consequences will catch up with your child sooner or later (the answer to both questions is number 3, of course).

Now here are a couple of my own:

Your son starts university and soon realizes that one of his professors is a hostile feminist.  The feminist professor:

  1. immediately concedes her radical feminist views and offers to help your son with his studies
  2. tells the class what an asset conservatism and/or Christianity is to our society
  3. publicly humiliates your son when he voices an objection, and makes every effort to fail him

Your daughter enters the workforce.  Her colleagues say things like:

  1. how I can become a Christian just like you?
  2. maybe we could start a Bible study together
  3. are you for real – do you actually believe that Jesus rose from the dead

Are your children going to be able to handle this?

Let me start off with some general principles that I think you will find useful for parenting in general.  Then in the second half of this post I want to share some more ideas that will help you be more purposeful in the formation of your child and help them prepare for what life will throw at them – ideas that I hope will help you to address the last two scenarios above.

Your children need you to be their parent, not their friend

Children need and want their parents to lay down the rules, to set boundaries, and to give them guidance.  They really need to know where they stand.  While they have friends elsewhere, they don’t get parenting from anywhere else.  Your children don’t have to like you, but they have to respect and obey you.  When you make the rules clear and consistent and your children choose to disobey them, then the punishment is their choice rather than your infliction.  This should really be a separate point, but don’t be afraid to discipline your children.  This will help them in the long run.

Your children respect your authority and guidance more than you think

Parents tend to underestimate the influence that they have on their children and overestimate the influence that friends have.  Don’t be afraid to teach your children, give them your opinion and set boundaries.

Follow through or your children won’t take you seriously

Children learn quickly, so if you state a consequence you have to be willing to follow through with it.  If you don’t, your words will be empty to them and they will not respect you or listen to you.  If you tell your child that if they hit their sibling one more time you will call off the big trip to the zoo then you have to be willing to do this, so choose your words carefully!

Short term pain, long term gain

This was our motto when our children were infants, and it still is.  Addressing problems immediately will be painful, but they will only become a habit or worse problems down the road if you don’t.  We learned pretty quickly that running to our crying baby every hour during the night would quiet them down and give us instant gratification at a time when we were sleep-deprived, but we also learned that if we suffered the short term pain of letting them cry it out a bit then our baby would learn how to settle themselves and sleep better.

Let boys be boys and girls be girls

Don’t let feminist ideology creep into the way you parent.  It’s healthy for girls to play ‘house’, nurture their dolls, and play dress-up.  And it’s okay for boys to try ‘dangerous’ things, be rambunctious, and open doors for ladies.  Boys and girls are innately different, and that’s okay.

Okay, these are some great general guidelines that have helped us with our parenting so far.  Now for some deeper principles that I hope will prepare your child for life:

Be purposeful with your parenting…have a plan and an end goal in mind

You can’t guarantee how your children will turn out, but if you are purposeful with your parenting and have an end goal rather than just hoping they will turn out okay, there is a good chance you will be successful.  For my wife and I, the end goal is to train our children so that when they come of age we will be able to launch them into life with them being capable of standing on their own two feet (e.g., capable of dealing effectively with the third and fourth situations at the start of this post).  This is our conscious plan.  Children need to be gradually given more and more freedom and responsibility as they demonstrate that they can handle it.  Don’t wait until they are about to leave the nest to give them their freedom because it may be more than they can handle.  You have a relatively small window of opportunity to train your children.  This window decreases with time, so don’t waste it.

Allow your children to fail under controlled circumstances

Failure is a great teacher, so allow your children to fail when they are young.  For example, let them spend some of their hard earned chore money on a cheap toy that will fall apart after the first use.  This will teach them the value of money and give them discretion in spending.  You don’t want them to learn this lesson the hard way later on when they are buying their first house.  Let them go to their math test in grade 10 without having studied because they really wanted to play.  Better to have them learn this lesson now than in univer$ity.

Expose them to scenarios that they will experience later and teach them how to deal with them

Again, in a controlled setting you need to carefully expose your children to what they will encounter in life.  Take them to a university debate between a Christian and an atheist.  Let them hear the arguments, see how the audience reacts, and allow them to feel uncomfortable.  Show them a news article about schoolchildren who were told that they had to send a letter to their government representative with a certain view.  Let your child hear a homosexual activist on the radio.  Supervise them and discuss with them what they have just experienced.  Teach them how to respond in these scenarios.  You won’t be able to shelter them for life, so gradually expose them under controlled conditions and teach them how to deal and respond to what they encounter.

Train yourself, and do it well

Listen, training up your children is your responsibility and no one else’s.  Not only that, but you are the only one that is going to prepare them properly – you can no longer rely on school, church, friend’s parents, etc.  In order to train them to respond to life circumstances and defend their beliefs you are going to have to learn this stuff yourself.  Take the time to read books, listen to lectures/debates, etc.  As a parent I know it is really tough to find the time to do this when you are working full time or are busy with life, but you have to do it.  Don’t let your life get too busy with distractions because otherwise your purposeful parenting plan won’t happen, it requires purposeful daily decisions. What is the point of having children only to lose them to militant atheist, leftist, feminist, homosexual, etc. ideology because you didn’t prepare them properly.

Train your children well

I know I’ve touched on this already, but let me expand a bit.  This is really, really important!  A lot of people around your children are going to teach them bad ideas that are opposite to your own – their school, their friends and the government will all do this.  You need to be purposeful in teaching them moral values and virtues, otherwise they probably won’t learn them.  Training your children is your responsibility.  Be purposeful in teaching your children virtues like loyalty, bravery, chivalry, respect, modesty (especially for girls), and discipline.  Teach them about freedom of speech, religious liberty, chastity, capitalism, free markets, the sanctity of life, post-modern culture, traditional marriage, and abstinence.  Also give them books with characters who portray these things and discuss these things with your children on every occasion (as an aside, don’t let your children rot in front of the trash that is shown on television…rather teach them to love to read books).

Most importantly, as a Christian who believes that Christianity is objectively true, I can’t stress enough how important it is to teach your children about Christianity.  All religions are testable, and our Christian faith can hold its own and can compete well in the marketplace of ideas.  The evidence is very much on our side and we stand on the shoulders of giants who have gone before us.  Having said this, we live in a world that is very hostile to Christianity and you need to teach your children the evidence for their faith.  They need to know the Bible inside-out and backwards, but they also need to know how to defend their faith using other evidence (hint: Christian apologetics; see the Resources section below).  Teaching them how to do this will give them the courage to defend what they believe to be true.  You also need to teach your children about different worldviews and religions, and why they don’t make sense.

I know, this all sounds like a tremendous amount of work, but your child is relying on you and no one else to prepare them for life.  It’s actually easier than you think.  Just start off with a few books.  This is so much more important than teaching them how to be on time, how to drive a car, how to take a math test, how to swim, and all of the other things that you will obviously teach them.  As I said above, you have a relatively small window of opportunity to train your children.  This window decreases with time, so don’t waste it.  For a first step please look at the Resources section below.

And lastly:

Put your marriage first

Make sure that you put your marriage ahead of your parenting.  I am convinced that one of the best things that you can do for your children is to give them the security of a stable family life and to model what a good marriage looks like.  Let them witness husband and wife roles, let them see that you love each other, and let them see you apologize to each other when you get angry or make a mistake.  Don’t get so involved in your children’s life that you neglect your spouse.  If you do this then once your children are out of the house (if your marriage survives that long), you and your spouse won’t know each other anymore.  Parenting in today’s world requires a parenting team, so you need to make sure your team is strong.

UPDATE: This is Wintery Knight. I wanted to include this bit of wisdom from commenter Shalini:

One other important thing is when one parent is disciplining the child, the other parent MUST NOT talk in defense of the child. Parents should always agree on disciplining, ’cause if one of the parents try taking sides with the kid, chances are the kid is going to assume that one parent is good and the other is bad. It doesn’t help the case in anyway!

Andrew liked this comment,  so I thought I would add it to the post.

A few resources:

Parenting

Christian Apologetics

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