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5 Lies Our Culture Is Telling Us: Rosaria Butterfield

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5 Lies Our Culture Is Telling Us

September 11, 2023by: Rosaria Butterfield

 

Lie #1: Homosexuality is normal.

Included in this lie is the belief that homosexual orientation is true and immutable—fixed and never-changing. Homosexual orientation, a nineteenth-century Freudian invention, is an unbiblical category of personhood and an antagonist to the creation ordinance because it redefines sinful desire as something that defines who you are rather than how you feel. Lie #1 claims that the word of God doesn’t apply to homosexual orientation because homosexual orientation represents a person’s core truth. Some professing Christians believe that homosexual orientation is fixed, immutable (unchangeable), and part of God’s creational and eternal plan. Some people believe that homosexuality is embedded in a person’s identity.

We must ponder why God’s attribute of immutability has been embraced by the LGBTQ+ movement as an attribute of homosexual orientation. God is immutable—God never changes. One theologian defines God’s immutability as “that perfection in God whereby He is exalted above all.” But if you exchange the Creator for the creature, you impose God’s attributes on man. When we hear “homosexual orientation is fixed and immutable—it never changes,” this is only imaginable in a world that has already exchanged the worship of the Creator for the worship of the creature—of God for an idol. “Gay Christians” (an oxymoron if there ever was one) teach that you can’t repent of who you are, how you feel, or even what you desire. They believe that homosexual orientation is morally neutral, separate from one’s sin nature, cannot be repented of, and rarely changes over a person’s lifetime. This is a lie.

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age

Rosaria Butterfield

Bestselling author Rosaria Butterfield addresses 5 lies modern culture has embraced about sexuality and spirituality, using the word of God to help illuminate each topic. 

Lie #2: Being a spiritual person is kinder than being a biblical Christian.

Unbiblical spirituality welcomes people exactly as they are or, at least, makes this promise. This is a religion that elevates being a “good” person over giving your life to Christ. To the unbiblically spiritual person, everything is one. Distinctions and hierarchies are called abusive, and true spirituality is supposedly found inside ourselves. This sort of spirituality, unbiblical spirituality, believes that everything in the universe supposedly shares in this divine power and unifying balance. Rules, divisions, and distinctions are violent, or so says the unbiblically spiritual person.

In contrast, for the biblical Christian, there are two kinds of reality: God and creation. God is eternal, triune, personal, holy, loving, and separate from his creation. According to biblical spirituality, there are two kinds of people: those who love God and those who defy God. Even though we create our own problems by refusing to live by his laws, God provides the only solution through the Lord Jesus Christ. Pastor and theologian Peter Jones, founder of TruthXchange, offers the most helpful paradigm for comparing unbiblical spirituality to biblical spirituality. While unbiblical spirituality self-promotes as kind and inclusive, it is in reality narcissistic and damning.

Lie #3: Feminism is good for the world and the church.

Feminism began in 1792 with Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. As its title suggests, it sought to “vindicate,” which means “to assert one’s right to possession.” And what rights needed possessing? Women needed to possess the rights to citizenship. Wollstonecraft sought rights for education and voting for women. Feminism has gone through four “waves” or phases since 1792, with the most recent wave so tied to the LGBTQ+ movement that now, in 2023, we cannot even define what a woman is or defend her right to exist—least of all to be noted as a citizen. Feminism in the world is passè—it has been displaced by transgenderism. Feminism in the evangelical church, however, is alive and well. When the church sets itself up to follow the world and not to lead it, it necessarily lingers long with discarded trends and affections.

We don’t need to be all-knowing, because God is. Christ alone can solve the problems we face today.

Adherents of feminism believe the Bible has no bearing on gender roles, responsibilities, or requirements because the idea of men and women being made by God’s design for God’s purposes on earth is old-fashioned, silly, dangerous, abusive, and culturally driven. Some professing Christian feminists believe that Adam’s headship is a consequence of the fall—and thus a sin. They claim that there is no biblical warrant for a married woman’s submission to her husband and elders or for elders and pastors to be qualified men. Bible verses that call for a wife to obey her husband in the Lord, such as Titus 2:4–5, 1 Peter 3:1, 5–6, and Colossians 3:18, are “contextualized” and then dismissed. Such feminists believe that feminism offers a corrective to Christianity because, without it, misogyny (the hatred of women) will run rampant with biblical support. Without feminism to the rescue, they argue, the church will unwittingly promote sexual abuse by giving perpetrators extreme and unchecked power and spiritual abuse by prohibiting a woman from using her gifts of teaching from the pulpit and assuming the roles of pastor and elder. This is a lie.

Lie #4: Transgenderism is normal.

People who believe in what is called “gender fluidity” also believe that sexual difference has no biological or ontological (original and eternal) integrity. Transgenderism is supposedly as normal for some people as freckles and a blue sky on a North Carolina summer day. Transgenderism maintains that there are more than two biological sexes and even more genders. The year 2022 boasts seventy-two genders and seventy-eight gender pronouns. In time there may be ten thousand. What does this all mean? How did we get to a place in the United States where someone can walk into Planned Parenthood and, forty-five minutes later, leave with a prescription for powerful hormones that will leave her sterilized for life if taken over time? We got here by believing the lie that transgenderism is normal—at least for some people.

Lie #5: Modesty is an outdated burden that serves male dominance and holds women back.

People who believe this lie dismiss the virtue of modesty for Christian women. Having denied that men and women are different, with different responsibilities, callings, and boundaries, those who reject modesty believe that calling women to a different standard of dress, speech, and conduct is oppressive. They deny that women owe their brothers the kindness of modesty. At the bottom of this is a feminist belief that it is not fair that women are different from men and that asking women to dress and behave with biblical modesty serves male dominance and holds women back. In the contemporary church climate, modesty has been replaced by exhibitionism.

Cling to Christ with Courage

When it seems like we are living at ground zero of the Tower of Babel, when the whole world seems to have gone mad, we need to cling to Christ with courage, read and memorize our Bible with fervency, be active members of a faithful Bible-believing church with passion, sing psalms with joy, and pray for our enemies with humility. We need to be humble people, remembering that we were not created to be all-knowing. We don’t need to be all-knowing, because God is. Christ alone can solve the problems we face today.

God calls us to live our Christian lives with courage, tell the truth, and fear God and not man. Can we with Jesus sing Psalm 118:6: “The Lord is on my side; I will not fear. What can man do to me?” I know. You can think of a long list of things the world can do to you. Your son, who calls himself Julie, won’t talk to you. You will be fired from your job if you don’t put a rainbow sticker on your door. Your neighbors will hate you when they learn that you believe in the God of the Bible. All of this may be true, and still this verse calls us to put things in perspective, specifically the Lord’s perspective as seen in Hebrews 11, where we see firsthand that God uses our faith whether we live or die.

This is the faith story we like:

And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets—who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. (Heb. 11:32–34)

This is the faith story that terrifies:

Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated—of whom the world was not worthy. (Heb. 11:36–38)

God records that both life and death, if done in faith, advance the gospel and give glory to God. Christians ought never despise suffering for Christ. And as we are seeing today and have seen throughout church history, all true Christians will suffer for the truth of Christ.

This article is adapted from Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age by Rosaria Butterfield.

Rosaria Butterfield

Rosaria Butterfield (PhD, Ohio State University) is an author, pastor’s wife, homeschool mom, and former professor of English and women’s studies at Syracuse University. She is the author of The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert; Openness Unhindered; and The Gospel Comes with a House Key.

 

Akos Balogh: 5 Subconscious Lies of Our Therapeutic Age that Can Deceive Christians

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From The Daily Declaration:

5 Subconscious Lies of Our Therapeutic Age that Can Deceive Christians

feelings

 

As we shed our traditional Judaeo-Christian values, our worldview has radically changed, including our expectations of life, of others, and what we base our identity upon. Feelings trump reason and suffering is unacceptable.

Over 200 years ago, a revolution was launched across the West.

Or rather, revolutions. Western societies began to move away from Christianity. They moved slowly at first — like a crawling baby. But as that baby grew, it became less and less Christian, shaking off its religious beliefs.

Fast forward to 2022, and this child (to continue the metaphor) has a radically different view of reality and humanity than 200 years ago.

We’re now a society where our feelings are critical to our existence. Or, in the words of sociologist Philip Rieff, we live in the ‘therapeutic age’: we’re driven and defined by our feelings in ways utterly foreign to our ancestors. And this has spawned all sorts of beliefs that shape us and our view of the world.

What’s more, these beliefs are mostly subconscious:

We don’t consciously choose to accept them. Instead, we ‘catch’ them as we swim in the sea of Western culture. Whether through the media we consume (e.g. Disney, Hollywood), our workplaces, social media, or friends.

And because these beliefs are unbiblical, they can wreak havoc on people’s lives. 

Here are 5 of those beliefs:

 

1) Our Feelings Determine Who We Are

This belief is the bedrock of our therapeutic feeling-based age.

You see it everywhere, from Disney (‘just follow your heart’) to the transgender movement (your internal feelings about gender trump your physical biology). Genuine ‘authenticity’ now means living out your inner feelings, no matter what they are (and woe to anyone who tells you otherwise). [1]

But when anyone — including Christians — adopts this belief, it shapes us in strange and ungodly ways:

We can let our feelings trump our given identity in Christ. We can let our emotions drive our moral decision-making. And we can judge our Church not on its faithful teaching and living, but on how it serves our felt needs.

 

2) True Freedom Means Defining Your Own Existence

If our feelings determine our identity, then true freedom means society giving us space to express that identity.

This view of freedom is a bedrock belief that sustains the abortion rights movement across the West. As the US Supreme Court wrote in a ruling about abortion rights:

‘At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under the compulsion of the State.’ [2]

With freedom thus redefined, oppression is also redefined: oppression now includes anything — any belief, any law — that prevents people from expressing their own view of existence (the Biblical sexual ethic, anyone?). And so, Christians have moved from being the ‘moral guys’ to being the ‘bad guys’.

While Christians feel this pressure externally, from society, it’s also a belief that shapes us internally:

We’re less willing to submit ourselves to others, like church leaders and religious institutions. We’re less likely to see submission as good. We don’t want others telling us what to do.

And if we’re in positions of leadership, we’re less likely to want to enforce rules like church discipline, as it feels a little unfair.

 

3) Always Trust Your Feelings

Because feelings are essential to who we are, they now hold authority like never before.

If something or someone makes you uncomfortable, then the problem is always the other person and never your feelings. Your interpretation of reality (which leads to those feelings) is always right because we are our feelings.

We see this in the rise of cancel culture, where any person or belief that causes people to feel offended is attacked and shut down. There’s little engagement or understanding with what the other person might mean or why they might hold to that view — let alone whether that view is true or not.

 

4) We’re Meant to Have Good Feelings, So Avoid Anything That Makes You Feel Bad

The aim of life in a therapeutic age has moved from having good character to having good feelings.

Feeling good becomes a moral duty: the big question we ask ourselves is no longer ‘what’s the right thing to do?’, but rather ‘how will it make me feel?’. And so, as a culture, we avoid anything that makes us feel bad:

We avoid the difficult person at Church because they don’t make us feel good.

We avoid having those hard but important conversations because they make us feel uncomfortable.

And we avoid conflict like it’s an out-of-fashion pair of jeans.

We use people and things to help us feel good: life becomes increasingly self-centred.

Of course, this has all sorts of problems because constantly feeling good is an unrealistic goal. We’ll regularly feel frustrated. Yes, we might feel good for a while — when we get that new phone, friend, or partner. But it never lasts.

More perniciously, life lived for self-centred feelings and avoidance of difficulty can leave a trail of damaged relationships.

(Ask almost any celebrity.)

 

5) Suffering Serves No Good Purpose

If life is all about feeling good, then suffering is all bad: it serves no purpose.

Suffering gets in the way of my feeling good. And I’ll do anything to avoid it. There’s no ‘higher purpose’ to my suffering.

But we can’t avoid suffering in a fallen world.

It’s part of our human condition (no matter how much we try to avoid it). Adopting a therapeutic view of suffering leads to anger and even despair when suffering hits us. We’ll feel discombobulated and fearful, worrying about the next bout of suffering that might come our way.

 

These 5 beliefs, these lies, are deeply embedded in Western Culture. But in an upcoming post, we’ll explore how we can respond to each of them in a way that frees us from their grip.

 

___

 

[1] It’s worth mentioning there are still culturally accepted limits to what desires people can live out: e.g. pedophilia is still unacceptable.

 

[2] Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992). Quoted in Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self – Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020), 303.

 

Ben Davis: Cancel Culture Is About Control, The Grammys Just Proved It

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From Caldronpool.com

Ben Davis: Cancel Culture Is About Control, The Grammys Just Proved It

Just days after it was announced that Looney Toons character, Pepé Le Pew, had been officially cancelled for encouraging “rape culture,” the woke Grammys hosted a performance so vulgar, that the National Center on Sexual Exploitation said it “could have been cut from a hardcore pornographic film.”

NCOSE’s slammed the CBS broadcast of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s performance of the song “WAP,” saying it “contributed to the sexual exploitation of women by glamorizing prostitution and stripping.”Fight Censorship! Join Our Mailing List Today

“CBS allowed a glamorization of stripping and prostitution to be broadcast in front of a national audience – a portion of which were children – for no other reason than for TV ratings,” Dawn Hawkins, NCOSE’s senior vice president and executive director said in a statement.Advertisement

Hawkins continued, “Prostitution and stripping are never empowering for women, as they set up systems that exploit and oppress women. CBS has contributed to furthering the sexual exploitation of women and contributed to the ‘normalization’ of porn culture.”

While many have rightly highlighted the progressive Left’s double-standards, especially after recently taking the axe to 60-year-old children’s books, gendered potatoes, and cartoon skunks, it’s important to understand that these things are not really being “cancelled” because they are phobic, sexist, or racist.

“Cancel Culture” is not about censoring offensive content. If it were, we wouldn’t have Cardi B, or half of what passes as “entertainment” today. It’s about control. It’s about silencing the opponent. It always has been. That’s why the double-standards are so evident and the hypocrisy, so blatant.

Does anyone really believe these people are convinced that a cartoon love-drunk skunk is worse for kids than watching Cardi B swinging on a stripper pole near-naked while singing about “whores in the house” and “wet-a** p***y”? Of course not. They know exactly what they’re doing, and protecting the innocence of children and advancing social justice causes is not it.

That’s why they rage against Christmas carols like “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” while vulgar figures with greater influence on the culture are entirely overlooked, or even celebrated and promoted as icons.Advertisement

Their double-standards don’t merely prove they’re hypocrites. They prove they have another agenda. They want to desensitize us to their unsolicited intrusion into our lives. Before long, telling us what books we cannot read to our children will become telling us what books we must read to our children.

Make no mistake, “Cancel Culture” is nothing short of a political power flex. The language of social justice is simply employed to justify tyrannical demands for dominance while silencing objectors as phobic, sexist, racists.

The Grammys, and the deafening silence from the progressive Left, is proof that these sorts only exploit social justice causes when there’s political power to be gained in the process.Advertisement

So, while we’re busy debating the morality of Pepé Le Pew’s romantic exploits, and whether it’s ethical to assign a gender identity to a vegetable, these people are preparing for something far more sinister than deleting our children’s bedtime stories and daytime cartoons.

It starts with cancelling fictional characters we can live without. It’ll move to cancelling political parties, ideologies, and religious beliefs. It’ll end with cancelling people.

Don’t be distracted with debates about whether or not Dr Suess is a White Supremacist, or whether Pepé Le Pew is a rapist. They already know they’re not, and more than that, they don’t care either way. It’s all just a cover for tyranny because feigned virtue is merely the mask and cloak of those striving for total control and absolute dominance over our lives.

WAP

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There is a song that has been at the top of the billboard charts for several weeks now. The song is called WAP, sung by a couple of black women. I won’t tell you what the title stands for, as I would have to deep clean my computer afterwards.

The whole song is obscene in its lyrics, although feminists describe it as a brave and liberating statement of female sexuality.

I watched the video of the song yesterday, even though I had heard of the song’s tone.

I felt spiritually violated.

The video is probably not particularly explicit, nor more sexualised than other music videos.

But there is a spiritual malevolence in the video and in the song that will make you feel ashamed of being human, desolate, like you have taken part in a satanic worship ritual.

I believe that this song has been launched as a spiritual missile at the hearts of our young people. It is demonic in its nature.

I am not given to believing that all music since the 1950’s is of the devil. I love all forms of music. But this song is straight from the deepest pit of hell.

Parents of teenagers and pre-teens, you need to talk to your kids. You need to have a conversation about the things we allow to enter our hearts and shape our thoughts. You need to encourage them to delete the song from their phone, playlist, whatever.

Now I need to grab the holy water and garlic. Just writing this makes me feel polluted!

Margaret Court and Diversity

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Here is a letter to the editor which I sent to The Courier a couple of weeks ago while the media and the leftists activists were demanding Margaret Court’s head for daring to stand up for the existing law of the land that marriage is between a man and a woman. Due to other pressing issues at the time, they published it yesterday.

Tolerance and diversity are buzz words in our culture. Of course if you deviate from the politically entitled view tolerance comes to an end and diversity is discouraged.

Tennis great Margaret Court, now Senior Pastor at a big Perth church, stated that because of Qantas’ constant promotion of same sex marriage, she would not fly with them any longer unless there was no alternative means of transport. As a christian she believes in the Biblical view of marriage as between one man and one woman.

All the enlightened, “progressive” media and celebrities, led by Ten program “The Project”, piled on, calling her a homophobe and a bigot. Sam Stosur called for a boycott of Margaret Court Arena until the name was changed; on recent form she would probably only miss one match there anyway.

This is what passes for civil debate in this age. If you disagree with me, I will shut you down by just calling you names. We must not allow any rational debate that might upset the status quo.

By insulting a great tennis player who happens to be a significant christian leader in Perth, the knee-jerk attacks have also alienated tens of thousands of people who agree with the Christian view of marriage. A boycott might just be a blip on the bottom line of Qantas, but it might be enough to push Ten over the edge.

The supporters of diversity and tolerance would do well to actually look up the meaning of those words, and show real tolerance to those who really are diverse.

A Torah Scholar Helps Explain the Age Of Foolishness

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An interesting insight into the foolish age in which we life from crisismagazone.com

A Torah Scholar Helps Explain the Age Of Foolishness

JONATHAN B. COE

Maybe it takes a Torah scholar and religious Jew to help us understand the roots of the inverted values that animate Western civilization. For over ten years, author and radio talk show host Dennis Prager taught the first five books of the Bible verse-by-verse at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. According to Prager there is no greater concept in the Torah than that of “distinction,” or, put another way, the clear separation God makes between certain things: God and man, animal and human, life and death, sacred and profane, good and evil, male and female. He even goes so far as to call these distinctions “God’s Signature” on the created order. Like six pillars holding up a great house, when the structural integrity of those columns becomes significantly compromised, the whole house comes crashing down.

Of the six distinctions listed, the one between God and man is antecedent to all the others: once it is compromised, the others will fall too like so many dominoes. When Adam and Eve succumbed to the serpent’s temptation, they switched places with God and made themselves the arbiters of truth and morality. The seeds of their godship that were sown in Eden are coming to full flower in our age. In his magisterial work, The Study of History, the eminent historian Arnold Toynbee divides world history into twenty-one ages and makes the case that our present age is the first one whose prevailing ethos does not appeal to a divine text or a holy tradition for guidance in the major areas of life. To say that we are living in a post-Christian age is as obvious as saying that the sun rises in the east.

What’s sometimes overlooked is that this godship is not exclusively driven by agnostics and atheists, but receives major contributions by those calling themselves Christians. I can’t help but think of the recent effort by Catholics for Choice to overturn the Hyde Amendment thereby allowing taxpayer-funded abortions. Their position on this issue rejects two thousand years of Church teaching.

Then there are large sectors of the mainline Protestant denominations who have become so accommodating to the Zeitgeist that they are actually just the cultural ethos dressed up in religious vestments (e.g., the United Church of Christ). Chesterton was right that only dead fish swim with the current. Without guilt I admit that I am encouraged each time I read about their precipitous decline in membership and finances and look forward to their eventual placement on the slag pile of history. As the late, great Richard John Neuhaus used to say, “The mainline has become the sideline.”

When man becomes God, the other distinctions that Prager identified become blurred and introduce toxins into the cultural bloodstream. If people are not created in the image of God, then it follows that they are no different than animals. Prager cites the example of animal rights groups like the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who call the slaughter of chickens a “Holocaust on a Plate,” thereby equating such an act with the slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust.

For over thirty years Prager has asked high school seniors the question, “If a stranger and your pet were both drowning and you could only save one, who would it be?” In this informal poll, about two-thirds of the students chose their pet. An Associated Press pollrevealed that half of American pet owners consider their pet just as much a member of the family as anyone else. Prager is right to say that we live in the Age of Foolishness with our folly being rooted in a lack of reverence for God: the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

No reverence for God = no wisdom. No wonder our secular universities have become institutions where great knowledge (e.g., the hard sciences) is juxtaposed with great foolishness. In recent years, at Swarthmore College, a course was offered called “Interrogating Gender: Centuries of Dramatic Cross-Dressing.” Examples like this are plentiful. And practicing Catholics will be embarrassed to learn that the University of Notre Dame has twice hosted the Queer Film Festival.

Read the rest of the article here

A Deadly Culture

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I was shocked and distressed to hear on the news last night that a 4 year old child is beginning to transition gender. It is disturbing that “adults” involved in the care of the child considers this to be a good idea.

 

Really at 4 years of age children are still trying to work out how their body works and have only the vaguest of awareness that boys and girls are different. Some boys play better with girls than boys but that doesn’t make them girls. Some girls would rather play with cars than dolls, but as the feminists remind us constantly, that does not make them boys.

 

How does any 4 year old get the idea that they should be the opposite sex, without the encouragement of “adults”?

 

We live in an age that has abandoned all sense of reality. We are taking the concept of “you can be anything you want to be”, which was always a lie, to absurd levels. When feelings are the basis of important life decisions, stupidity will prevail in the long run.

 

What we are experiencing right now is a rapid unravelling of western culture. It started with the sexual liberation movement of the 1960’s, the destruction of families through easy divorce and acceptance of de facto relationships in the 1970’s and 80’s, the rejection of christian ethics as relevant to culture on the 1990’s. You could add to that post-modernist rejection of truth as a category and the rise of post-normal science (the results you want are more important than actual data).

 

Now we are faced with massive challenges from radical Islam, political tyrants who will do anything to implement their own ideas, increasing dependence of individuals on government largess and a host of other social and economic problems. We lack the courage and the resources to tackle them because we are too engaged in pandering to feeling good about ourselves.

 

The hope that I hold onto is that eventually as a nation we will turn back to Jesus and embrace the values of the gospel. I hope and pray often for a revival of faith that can only come from a supernatural encounter with the Spirit of God.

Book Review: “The Book that Made Your World” by Vishal Mangalwadi

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514h5wjy8ql-_sy344_bo1204203200_From his perspective as an Indian academic and a christian, Vishal Mangalwadi looks at the factors that brought modern Western civilisation into being. As he points out, there have been many cultures that have achieved limited progress. Uniquely, the Christian-based (particularly the Protestant-based) cultures of Europe and North America have led to tremendous advances in science, literature, commerce, the rule of law, democracy, and so on.

Mangalwadi convincingly connects the availability of the Bible to quantum leaps in social and material wealth in numerous cultures around the world. He argues that where the Bible is available in people’s own language, it provokes a rise in literacy as people want to be able to read the Scriptures. But more than this, cultures which embrace Biblical values, become more prosperous as honesty and trust promote business. Cultures which believe in the creator pursue knowledge of the world and develop science.

Secularists claim that many of the benefits of modern culture go back to the Enlightenment or to Greek and Roman society. However it is only Biblical values that allow the free flourishing of freedom, of science, of democracy and law. Sadly, as our elites seem determined to cut off the connection of our society with its christian past, it is likely that our culture is headed for rapid decline.

This book is a great read. Mangalwadi’s knowledge of history, cultures and of history is very extensive.  He makes his case with an easy story-telling style and will open readers’ eyes to how we got here and why.

Junk Spiritualtity

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junk-food

This morning I was thinking about how I have felt uninspired about blogging lately. I’ve shared the odd post that I have found elsewhere and the routine things like our sermon posts, but I’ve had no passion to write anything.

I prayed about it and felt that God was saying that it was because I read too much junk stuff on both Facebook and Google Plus. Just as junk food dulls our appetite for genuine food and, after the initial boost, actually de-energise us, so the constant bombardment of small doses of junk data dulls our appetite for useful input and removes our ability to be creative.

We live in a society that is satiated with empty calories and useless food. When I was growing up, there were very few franchised food outlets, and we regarded a trip to McDonalds as a once a year treat. Even a glass of Coke or lemonade was a rare treat. Now these sugar, fat and salt concoctions are almost a daily staple for many people.

We live in a society that is also overfed with information. The internet has brought the knowledge of the world to everyone’s fingertips. But we want to consume cat pictures and funny thoughts in 140 characters or less. Politicians have to deliver complex policies in 15 second sound grabs or we grow bored.

So we fill up on burgers and cola and blob out in front of screens and wonder why we have an obesity and dumbness epidemic.

Contrary to our fast fill mentality, God has created us to be slow growers. He deals with us over a life-time, gently moulding us into his image. His word needs to be consumed and chewed over slowly- there are whole chapters to be meditated over not Tweet length verses.

I’m not ready to go cold turkey on social media, but I am going to restrict my consumption of it. It’s time to reclaim my time and offer it back to God as an offering.