Tag Archives: Sinfulness

News

Why do people hate Tim Tebow? Why do people want Tim Tebow to fail?

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The Denver Broncos, their amazing kicker and their amazing Christian quarterback, all won again in an exciting overtime win. That’s three games in a row (at least, I’m not following it closely) where Tim Tebow and the Broncos have managed to come from behind to win at the last possible second.

Here’s the scoop on the latest nail-biting victory by the Denver Broncos.

Tim Tebow has led the Broncos to five fourth-quarter comebacks since replacing Kyle Orton at starting quarterback eight games ago, when Denver was 1-4.

“I guess I’ve just got to get to the stadium and start practicing a little bit earlier,” Tebow said.

The win is Denver’s sixth in a row, and secures the Broncos (8-5) the AFC West lead, which they shared with Oakland entering Sunday’s games. Chicago dropped to 7-6, further clouding its playoff chances.

The Broncos could be playoff bound, but the only prediction coming out of Denver locker room Sunday was this: “I’m definitely going to be going bald by the end of the season,” said the 27-year-old Prater, who has made four game-winning field goals this season. “Bald or gray, one of the two.”

Denver could have made Sunday’s game much less of a heart-stopper but muffed two scoring chances earlier in the game. A 28-yard attempt by Prater was blocked in the second quarter. In the third quarter, Broncos receiver Demaryius Thomas broke away from coverage near the end zone but let a deep pass slip from Tebow through his hands.

Tebow said he told Thomas not to worry about it, that Thomas would score the game-winning touchdown.

The prediction was off, but not by much.

With 4:34 left in regulation, the Broncos were trailing 10-0. Tebow completed seven straight passes to lead Denver on a 63-yard scoring drive, capped by two receptions by Thomas. The 10-yard touchdown catch came with 2:08 remaining.

“It was just a big relief,” Thomas said.

Chicago, still leading by three points, lost the opportunity to run off time on the clock when running back Marion Barber, starting in place of the injured Matt Forte, ran out of bounds with less than two minutes left in regulation.

“I might have thanked the Lord when he did that,” Tebow said.

Tebow and the Broncos offense regained possession with 53 seconds left. Tebow completed three passes to put the Broncos in field-goal range, then Prater kicked a career record-tying 59-yarder with eight seconds left to send the game into overtime.

“You can’t say enough about Prater and how clutch he is,” Tebow said.

Man, can the Denver kicker kick field goals – he nailed a 59-yard field goal today. But the quarterback Tim Tebow is the one getting all the attention lately. And I think because this is a Christian blog, we need to take a look at why that is.

I read this article in the Wall Street Journal about Tim Tebow, and I asked myself the question “does God care whether Tim Tebow wins football games?”.

First, Tim doesn’t think that God cares about who wins football games:

In the waning moments against the New York Jets, Mr. Tebow manufactured a 95-yard game-winning drive, punctuated by his own 20-yard touchdown dash. He brought the Broncos back from imminent defeat, just as he had done in previous weeks against the Miami Dolphins, Oakland Raiders and Kansas City Chiefs.

And when the shouting was over, Mr. Tebow did what he always does—he pointed skyward and took a knee in prayer. In postgame interviews, the young quarterback often starts by saying, “First, I’d like to thank my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” and ends with “God bless.” He stresses that football is just a game and that God doesn’t care who wins or loses.

He’s right about that. God doesn’t care about who wins and loses football games. He doesn’t care about making us feel happy or sad, either. He doesn’t care about giving us what we want. God has one reason and one reason alone for creating us. To give us time on Earth to respond to his drawing us toward him. It’s our job to puzzle about science and history and logic now and try to see if he is there and what he is like. Our job is to know God and to serve God. You’re not going to be able to tell whether God exists based on the Denver Broncos’ wins and losses. Football is not a premise in any argument for God’s existence or Jesus’ resurrection.

But that doesn’t mean that Tim Tebow can’t use football to serve God. Here are a couple of ways he helps to do that.

First, charity:

While at Florida, Mr. Tebow became well known for spending his summers helping the poor and needy in the Philippines. He also spoke in prisons and appeared to accept every opportunity to volunteer. He encouraged his teammates and classmates to follow his lead.

As Mr. Tebow recounts in his book “Through My Eyes” (written with Nathan Whitaker), after he won the Heisman Trophy in 2007, he had the idea to use his fame to raise money for the orphanage that his family runs and for other organizations. Since National Collegiate Athletic Association rules prevented him from raising money for his own causes, he worked with the university to found a student society that could be used for charity.

According to the former Florida coach Urban Meyer, Mr. Tebow’s philanthropic efforts reshaped campus culture, and for a time, volunteering became fashionable. In his senior year, the powder-puff football tournament that he launched, with the help of the university’s sororities and fraternities, raised $340,000 for charity.

Mr. Tebow’s acts of goodwill have often been more intimate. In December 2009, he attended a college-football awards ceremony in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. The night before, at another gala at Walt Disney World Resort, he met a 20-year-old college-football fan named Kelly Faughnan, a brain-tumor victim who suffers from hearing loss and visible, continual tremors. She was wearing a button that said “I love Timmy.” Someone noticed and made sure that the young woman had a chance to meet the player.

Mr. Tebow spent a long while with Ms. Faughnan and her family, and asked her if she’d like to be his date for the award ceremony the following night. She agreed, and the scene of Mr. Tebow escorting the trembling young woman down the red carpet led much of the reporting about the event.

You can read more about their date here. (H/T Tim McGrew) Tim Tebow considers his presence something to be given away to others who would benefit from it. It’s not something he uses to gratify his own needs. He gives himself as a gift to people and he leaves them better than he found them.

Second, Tim Tebow gets people curious and/or angry about Christianity, because he acts on his beliefs:

In 2010, while still at the University of Florida (where he won the Heisman Trophy and helped the Gators to win two national championships), Mr. Tebow filmed a Super Bowl commercial for Focus on the Family, the mega-ministry known for its conservative political advocacy. The ad is about how Mr. Tebow’s mother was advised to abort her son following a placental abruption, but she refused and, well, now we have Tim Tebow.

The ad takes the softest possible approach to the subject and never uses the terms “abortion” or “pro-life,” but its intent was clear, and it generated controversy. Since then, feelings about Mr. Tebow have been a litmus test of political and social identity. If you think he’s destined to be a winner, you must be a naive evangelical. If you question his long-term chances as an NFL quarterback, you must hate people who love Jesus.

In another article, Tim Tebow is quite honest about his refusal to engage in sex before marriage.

Excerpt:

Tebow’s successful college football career and current position as Denver Bronco’s quarterback make him a manly-man in an everyday sense, but evangelical Christians say it’s his unashamed willingness to adhere to the moral teachings of his faith that make him a man in a religious sense.

Tebow, who told reporters that yes, he was a virgin and yes, he was waiting until marriage to have sex, has become an example of contemporary “biblical manhood,” a good guy, willing to speak out for Christianity and actually practice what he preaches.

The notion of biblical masculinity is based on a complementation view of gender roles, as described in Scripture, which positions men as head of the household. The leaders of the movement to restore biblical manhood say today’s men aren’t living according to that Christian call, and social and spiritual downfalls have caused them to be lazy and passive or overly authoritative. There’s a man crisis in society, they say, and the church needs to educate men on how to fulfill their responsibilities.

Consistent Christians have to be different like that. People think that none of us actually take these things seriously. But there are people out there like Tim, who understand what sex and love and marriage and parenting are really about, and have the self-control to try to do things as correctly as they can. And we need people to see that there is something different about evangelical Christians – we are the ones who take this stuff seriously. We are the ones who care about children’s need for a mother and a father and a stable marriage, and we advocate for chastity and traditional marriage so that vulnerable children get the stability and love they need as they develop.

But not everyone is going to respond to Tebow’s chastity, charity and pro-life activism with admiration and curiosity. Some will hate Tim and will want him to fail. The reason why people hate him is because people who are sinning, especially sexually, feel better when they think that “everyone is doing it”. In fact, that’s exactly why the left tries so hard to sexualize children, to give them condoms, and to have Christians pay for their abortions and recognize gay marriages. The anti-Christians don’t want to believe that anyone is out there trying to be good. They feel that if they could just bring everyone like Tebow down to their level, then all the evil that they are doing will be OK. What would be great, they think, is if people like Tebow could celebrate their sinful choices so that they would feel better about them.

The Bible actually talks about this in Romans 1, where the Bible explains that sinful people know about the moral law but “they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” They want Tim Tebow to approve of their sinfulness and selfishness, and by choosing to go a different way, he is disapproving of their choices, and they don’t like that. They oppose the idea that there is any purpose to sexuality other than feeling good. They don’t want anyone to impose rules on their pursuit of pleasure. And they don’t want anyone to tell them that what they are doing is wrong. I am not advocating coercing anyone to be moral, but I do think that people like Tim Tebow should be free to be chaste, and free to express his views on what he thinks is moral when it comes to sex and abortion.

News

Fox News: cowardly atheists refuse to debate William Lane Craig

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Is this what atheism amounts to?
Is this what atheism amounts to?

From Fox News.

Excerpt:

American Evangelical theologian William Lane Craig is ready to debate the rationality of faith during his U.K tour this fall, but it appears that some atheist philosophers are running shy of the challenge.

This month president of the British Humanist Association, Polly Toynbee, pulled out of an agreed debate at London’s Westminster Central Hall in October, saying she “hadn’t realized the nature of Mr. Lane Craig’s debating style.”

Lane Craig, who is a professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, Calif., and author of 30 books and hundreds of scholarly articles, is no stranger to the art of debate and has taken on some of the great orators, such as famous atheists Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Harris once described Craig as “the one Christian apologist who has put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists”.

Responding to Toynbee’s cancellation, Lane Craig commented: “These folks (atheists) can be very brave when they are alone at the podium and there’s no one there to challenge them. But one of the great things about these debates is that, it allows both sides to be heard on a level playing field, and for the students in the audience to make up their own minds about where they think the truth lies.”

[…]Others have refused to challenge Lane Craig, too, including Richard Dawkins, one of the Four Horseman of the new Atheist movement, which include Hitchens, Harris and Daniel Dennett.

Craig has debated Hitchens, Harris and Dennett, and defeated them all easily.

More:

Dawkins, who has labeled the Roman Catholic Church “evil” and once called the Pope “a leering old villain in a frock,” refused four separate invitations, extended through religious and humanist organizations, to take part in debates with Lane Craig during his fall tour.

The controversy wafted into the British press after fellow atheist and philosophy lecturer, Daniel Came, accused Dawkins of simply being afraid, saying, “The absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part.”

Here’s an example of William Lane Craig debating the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, arguably the top popular atheist in the world today.

Here’s a review of that debate fromCommon Sense Atheism, a popular atheist web site.

Excerpt:

I just returned from the debate between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens at Biola University. It was a bigger deal than I realized. Over 3,000 people were there, and groups from dozens of countries – including Sri Lanka, apparently – had purchased a live feed.

Of three recent Craig debates, I was most looking forward to his matchup with Morriston, which has yet to be posted online. I was somewhat excited for his debate with Carrier, which was disappointing. I was least excited for this debate with Hitchens, but it was the only one in my area, so I went.

The debate went exactly as I expected. Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child. Perhaps Hitchens realized how bad things were for him after Craig’s opening speech, as even Hitchens’ rhetorical flourishes were not as confident as usual. Hitchens wasted his cross-examination time with questions like, “If a baby was born in Palestine, would you rather it be a Muslim baby or an atheist baby?” He did not even bother to give his concluding remarks, ceding the time instead to Q&A.

So why isn’t there a British atheist brave enough to face Craig on his UK speaking tour?

Well, what William Lane Craig offers in his debates is a set of deductive arguments that are logically valid, and supported by the latest scientific evidence (which he has published in peer-reviewed scientific journals), and the consensus of academic historians, using standard historical methods. Atheists are ill-equipped to respond to this case, because atheism is not really a rational worldview that is based on evidence. It’s really adopted because people cannot be bothered with the demands of the moral law. They make these faith commitments about there being no evidence, or that religious people have blind faith, or that all religions are the same (especially the ones they haven’t studied), or that religion is unfalsifiable. But the root cause is simply the desire to not have to care about right and wrong.

Consider the famous agnostic Aldous Huxley:

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantegous to themselves… For myself, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” — Aldous Huxley in Ends and Means, 1937

What about the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel?

“In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”
(”The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997)

The famous philosopher Mortimer Adler rejected religion for most of his life because it “would require a radical change in my way of life, a basic alteration in the direction of my day-to-day choices as well as in the ultimate objectives to be sought or hoped for …. The simple truth of the matter is that I did not wish to live up to being a genuinely religious person.”

As G.K. Chesterton says,”The Christian way has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found to be hard and left untried“. Atheists want to believe that there is no God, so they do. And they carefully avoid studying anything that might threaten what they want to believe – or having to debate people who might challenge what they want to believe. What you will see from atheists instead of a willingness to study science and to debate qualified Christians is things like one-line ads on the sides of buses, lawsuits forbidding people to exercise their right to free speech, and demands that Christians not oppose abortion and slavery – because that cramps their pursuit of pleasure, don’t you know.

Here’s an example of an atheist learning about history from Bart Ehrman, a famous secular historian:

Of course, William Lane Craig has debated Bart Ehrman (video) as well. And defeated him. Badly.

Atheism really isn’t a knowledge tradition. It’s not really something that they think is true – it’s just that they want to be hedonists, and they want you to stop making them feel guilty with your moral superiority and moral judgments and your “unfair” moral prohibitions on bestiality and infanticide. Often, these people believe that the universe is eternal, that there are millions of unobservable universes, and that unobservable aliens can explain the origin of life. Craziness. And yet they are allowed to vote. I’m scared that these people can vote – especially since most of them voted for 1.65 trillion dollar annual deficits, because of “hope and change”. Maybe we should try to reform the education system to help them to get used to arguments, evidence and debates.

Polemics

Why do some people not believe in God?

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An analysis of the common causes of atheism. (H/T The Poached Egg)

Excerpt:

Most atheists would have us think they arrived at their view through cool, rational inquiry. But are other factors involved? Consider the candid remarks of contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel: “I want atheism to be true …. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I’m right about my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” Could Nagel’s attitude—albeit in a more subtle form—actually be common among atheists?

[…]The 20th-century ethics philosopher Mortimer Adler (who was baptized quietly at age 81) confessed to rejecting religious commitment for most of his life because it “would require a radical change in my way of life, a basic alteration in the direction of my day-to-day choices as well as in the ultimate objectives to be sought or hoped for …. The simple truth of the matter is that I did not wish to live up to being a genuinely religious person.”

Historian Paul Johnson’s fascinating if disturbing book Intellectuals exposed this pattern in the lives of some of the most celebrated thinkers in the modern period, including Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Hemingway, Russell, and Sartre. In their private (and often public) lives, these Western intellectual stars were moral wrecks.

[…]As children of the Enlightenment, we tend to heavily emphasize the impact of belief on behavior. But it also works the other way around. Our conduct affects the way we think. On the positive side, as Scripture’s wisdom literature tells us, obedience and humility lead to insight and understanding. Negatively, as we indulge in immoral behavior, our judgment will be skewed.

[…]External factors may also hamper the natural awareness of God and contribute to a descent into atheism. In his book Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, New York University psychologist Paul Vitz, a onetime atheist, examines the lives of the major atheists of the modern period, including Hobbes, Hume, Voltaire, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Russell, and Freud. He found they had something in common: a broken relationship with their father. Whether by death, departure, abuse, or some other factor, the father relationships of all these well-known atheists were defective. Vitz also examined the lives of prominent theists during the same period (Pascal, Reid, Burke, Berkeley, Paley, Wilberforce, Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher, Newman, Chesterton, and Bonhoeffer, among others). In every case, he found a good relationship with the father or at least a strong father figure.

One more quick quote on the argument that immorality leads to an atheistic worldview:

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantegous to themselves… For myself, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” — Aldous Huxley in Ends and Means, 1937

This rejection of morality is widely acknowledged by prominent atheists as being a selling point of atheism. People become atheists because they know that atheism will free them from having to do anything simply because it’s “good”.

Consider these prominent atheists:

The idea of political or legal obligation is clear enough… Similarly, the idea of an obligation higher than this, referred to as moral obligation, is clear enough, provided reference to some lawgiver higher…than those of the state is understood. In other words, our moral obligations can…be understood as those that are imposed by God…. But what if this higher-than-human lawgiver is no longer taken into account? Does the concept of moral obligation…still make sense? …The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone. (Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), p. 83-84)

The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory. (Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269).

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Richard Dawkins)
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1995-05-10nomercy.shtml

And it works in reverse. When I was a young man, one of my reasons for becoming a Christian was precisely because I did not want to be like atheists. I could plainly see the harm they were causing others with their rejection of prescriptive morality, and when I put that together with the cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory, which I learned about in grade 1, the case was sealed. It helped that I had not done anything really wrong at that time, or it would have been harder for me to accept that I was guilty. The more bad stuff you are into, the harder it is to accept that you are wrong, and to turn away from it. Some clean-living atheists are going to have no problem being fair with the evidence. – switching to Christianity would be much easier for them to do.

As for his second point, consider this article that talks about how important fathers are in passing along religious convictions to children.

Excerpt:

In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.

If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.

Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goes up from 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father’s commitment grows in proportion to mother’s laxity, indifference, or hostility.

That is why I find it so odd that so many “Christians” insist on voting more and more wealth redistribution from rich to poor. The more that government programs are seen as a replacement from the protecting, providing and moral/spiritual leading that fathers do in the home, the more atheists we are going to be producing. Fathers are vital for passing on spiritual and moral convictions to children. Fathers are the ones who show that setting moral boundaries is a way to love someone – that love is not incompatible with rules. It is very important that young people see that it is loving for a person in authority to set up rules and boundaries – and that there are reasons for those rules. It’s very similar to the way that boys raised by single mothers are aggressively sexually – because they haven’t seen men loving their wives up close, and getting respect and approval for that love. And girls raised fatherless are similar – they haven’t seen men loving their wives up close, so they aren’t in a position to judge men and hold them accountable. The family is needed to model all kinds of good behaviors at a pre-cognitive level.

You can order Jim Spiegel’s book “The Making of an Atheist” here from Amazon:

And you can also read a sample chapter for free here.