Entertain-o Church From the Atheist's Perspective

Read and say "ouch" here:

HT: @Phil_Johnson_

Raising Kids in a Pornified Culture

Helpful.  From Zach Nielson re: @betweentwoworlds.

1. Aim to give our kids a huge view of God who is gloriously delightful.

2. Teach them the gospel. 

3. Teach them that boundaries bring freedom and obedience is a blessing.

4. Talk to them sooner than later about sex.

5. Begin to train your kids on how to interact with the opposite sex.

6. Guard who your kids spend time with.

7. Put Your Computer in a Public Place and Turn Off The T.V.

8. Seek to cultivate a relationship with your kids such that they feel as though they can be open with you about anything.

Go here for the whole thing.  It's worth the read, especially here in the OC.

Slow Down the Texting!

From Al Mohler:

Statistics can be used to inform or to mislead, and sometimes they can shock.  See if this statistic isn't shocking:  In the fourth quarter of 2008 American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages per month.  That, dear friends, is nothing to LOL about.

That statistic comes from The New York Times.  In "Texting May Be Taking a Toll," reporter Katie Hafner offers a view into the lives of American teens.  They are fanatical texters.  As Hafner reports, "They do it late at night when their parents are asleep. They do it in restaurants and while crossing busy streets. They do it in the classroom with their hands behind their back. They do it so much their thumbs hurt."

Authorities now blame excessive texting for sleep deprivation, distraction in school, poor grades, and even repetitive stress injuries.  These teens are texting while they should be sleeping, and they are sleeping with the cell phone set to vibrate so that they can respond to texts from friends without waking parents.

A Brilliant Man With Great Thoughts On An Important Topic

Gender roles, church, and culture.  Tough, essential topics.

D. A. Carson has two outstanding lectures on these issues.  Must-listen stuff.

The Flow of Thought In 1 Timothy 2

Is the Culture Shaping Us or are We Shaping the Culture

April Fools?

Depends how you look at it.

Ecumenical News International reports that church authorities in the Netherlands have decided not to take action against a Dutch pastor who openly declares himself to be an atheist.

That "pastor" says, 

The non-existence of God is for me not an obstacle but a precondition to believing in God. I am an atheist believer...God is for me not a being but a word for what can happen between people. Someone says to you, for example, 'I will not abandon you', and then makes those words come true. It would be perfectly alright to call that [relationship] God.

No. No it wouldn't.

From Al Mohler

Population Threat?

From Al Mohler:

So, is overpopulation a real threat? Not hardly.  Though population density can threaten sustainability in some areas of the globe, the far greater danger for our future is what Longman calls "depopulation."  On a global scale, we are seeing the population of older persons exploding and the numbers of young persons falling.

The United Nations now predicts that total world population may begin falling as early as 2040, and much of the surviving population will be very old indeed.

And that is a problem indeed.

Honest Atheists

D'Souza makes it plain here:

Why haven't the atheists embraced Peter Singer? I suspect it is because they fear that his unpalatable views will discredit the cause of atheism. What they haven't considered, however, is whether Singer, virtually alone among their numbers, is uncompromisingly working out the implications of living in a truly secular society, one completely purged of Christian and transcendental foundations. In Singer, we may be witnessing someone both horrifying and yet somehow refreshing: an intellectually honest atheist.

HT: Jason Taylor

The Culture, It Is Cracking

Here's another fissure.

"Helping" "Transgender" Children

This is disgusting:

Dr. Norman Spack is the pediatric specialist behind the clinic for “transgender children,” and he is treating patients as young as 7-years-old. For younger patients who desire to be the opposite gender from that of biology, birth and Providence, Spack offers counseling and drugs that delay the onset of puberty. The drugs, he says, halt the natural flood of hormones that will make it difficult to have a sex alteration later in life, allowing children “more time to decide whether they want to make the change.”

Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, is one such critic and he hints at transcendent truth in analyzing the potential harm of such dangerous therapy and injections: “Treating these children with hormones does considerable harm and it compounds their confusion,” McHugh told FOXNews.com. “Trying to delay puberty or change someone else’s gender is a rejection of the lawfulness of nature.” Further, McHugh said “gender reassignment” for children recalls the dark ages, “when choir boys were castrated to retain their high-pitched voices…It’s barbaric.” 

I use quotes because I don't believe the above helps and I'm quite sure the two actual genders are fairly obvious.

If Over 1/2 of Evangelical Christians Believe That Many Religions Can Lead To Eternal Life...

then what does it mean to be evangelical?

From the New York Times:

Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation...

“It’s not that Americans don’t believe in anything,” said Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. “It’s that we believe in everything. We aren’t religious purists or dogmatists.”

Even the atheists are confused:

Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, 70 percent of the unaffiliated said they believed in God, including one of every five people who identified themselves as atheist and more than half of those who identified as agnostic.

From my alma mater:

“It could be that people are not very well educated and they are not expressing mature theological points of view,” said Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. “It could also be a form of bland secularism. The real challenge to religious leaders is not to become more entrenched in their views, but to navigate the idea of what their religion is all about and how it relates to others.”

When Your Church Is A Business

From Joe Carter quoting Jared Wilson:

Warning: If you treat your church like a business, you will treat other churches like your competition.

The Most Popular Game For 12-14 Year Old Boys

Various reviews of the huge money-maker:

Time Magazine

It's ironic that Grand Theft Auto is the poster thug for mindless violent gaming, since no other franchise commits so fully to games as an artistic storytelling medium.  It's back, grimmer in tone, slicker in graphics, with the tale of an immigrant in a gritty pseudo New York City. A-

Chris Baker writes at Slate.com:

The violence is no longer cartoonish. Shoot an innocent bystander, and you see his face contort in agony. He'll clutch at the wound and begin to stagger away, desperately seeking safety. After just scratching the surface of the game--I played for part of a day; it could take 60 hours to complete the whole thing--I felt unnerved. What makes "Grand Theft Auto IV" so compelling is that, unlike so many video games, it made me reflect on all of the disturbing things I had done.

Lazlo Jones, the game's creator

If you let your child play this game, you're a bad parent.

See Al Mohler's article...

What do you think?

The Marketing Model Empties the Truth of the Gospel

I am loving my former professor's book, The Courage to Be Protestant.  If you want to understand today's "evangelical" landscape, Dr. Wells is a trusty tour guide.  Here are some of his thoughts as to the fraud and failure of the "marketing" - "seeker" philosophy of the church:

First, the needs consumers have are needs they identify for themselves.  The needs sinners have are needs God identifies for us, and the way we see our needs is rather different from the way he sees them.  We suppress the truth about God, holding it down in "unrighteousness" (Rom. 1.18).  We are not subject to his moral law and in our fallenness are incapable of being obedient to it (Rom. 8.7), so how likely is it, outside of the intervention of God through the Holy Sprit, that we will identifiy our needs as those arising from our rebellion against God? No, the product we will seek naturally will not be the gospel.  It will be a therapy of some kind, a technique for life, perhaps a way of connecting more deeply with our own spiritual selves on our own terms, terms that require no repentance and no redemption.  It will not be the gospel.  The gospel cannot be a product that the church sells because there are no consumers for it. When we find consumers, we will find that what they are interested in buying, on their own terms, is not the gospel.

Furthermore, when we buy a product, we buy it for our use.  When we accept Christ, he is not there for our use but we are there for his service.   We commit ourselves to him in a way that we do not commit ourselves to any product.  There is a world of difference between the Lord of Glory, the incarnate second person of the Godhead, and a Lexus, a vacation home, or a trip to the Bahamas.  The marketing analogy blurs all of this, reducing Christ simply to a product we buy to satisfy all our needs.

The Modern Creed

By Steve Turner, English journalist

We believe in Marx, Freud and Darwin.
We believe everything is okay, as long as you don’t hurt anyone to the best of your definition of hurt and to your best definition of knowledge.
We believe in sex before, during and after marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe that adultery is fun. We believe that sodomy is okay.
We believe that taboos are taboo.
We believe that everything is getting better despite evidence to the contrary. The evidence must be investigated and you can prove anything with evidence.
We believe there is something in horoscopes, UFO’s, and bent spoons.
Jesus was a good man just like Buddha, Mohammad and ourselves. He was a good moral teacher, although we think basically his good morals were really bad.
We believe that all religions are the basically the same, at least the ones we read about. They all believe in love and goodness. They only differ on matters of creation, sin, heaven, hell, God and salvation.
We believe that after death comes nothing because when you ask the dead what happens they say nothing. If death is not the end, and if the dead have lied, then it’s compulsively heaven for all except perhaps Hitler, Stalin and Chingis Khan.
We believe in Masters and Johnson. What is selected is average, what’s average is normal, and what’s normal is good.
We believe in total disarmament. We believe there are direct links between warfare and bloodshed. [The good guys] should beat their guns into tractors and [the bad guys] would be sure to follow.
We believe that man is essentially good-it’s only his behavior that lets him down. This is the fault of society; society’s the fault of condition; and conditions are the fault of society.
We believe that each man must find the truth that is right for him and reality will adapt accordingly; the universe will readjust and history will alter.
We believe that there is no absolute truth, except the truth that there is no absolute truth.

I prefer the Apostles'.

The Golden Compass

Al Mohler educates us to the books, movie, and a helpful Christian response.

To The Atheist and Bishop

John Piper responds to Christopher Hitchens and John Shelby Spong in his Thanksgiving meditation.

"God's Quarterback"

Jemele Hill writes of John Kitna who "[every Monday] hosts a Bible study at his home that draws at least 30 teammates."

"Cultural Cowardice"

Consider Piper's thoughts on women in combat.

John Paul in Flames

Two incredible statements:

1. The Vatican news station has reported a visit from John Paul. "The Daily Mail" reports:

Service director Jarek Cielecki, a Polish priest and close friend of John Paul II, travelled to Poland after hearing an onlooker had photographed the image. Father Cielecki said he was convinced the picture showed the former pontiff.
"You can see the image of a person in the flames and I think it is the servant of God, Pope John Paul II," he said.

2. In response, "Shirley" claims,

Each to their own. Don't condemn people's beliefs. If this "vision" is what gives some people comfort, then that is their business.

Superstitious, Christ-less "faith" often begets real faith being pushed into the category of "comfort-myth." The truths of Scripture are not considered real knowledge, but reality-less stories to comfort the weak that are best left to personal opinion and preference.

Drive-through church

Ouch! Thanks, Ed.