Importance of History

History is the study of the way people, based on various religious worldviews, act through time to accomplish their goals. The study of history is vital because by looking back on the past, we can see how people’s decisions affected their fellow humans’ ability to flourish. As George Santayana famously admonished, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We thus need an accurate view of the past if we are to sustain trends toward greater wealth, justice, and sustainability. History can guide us to learn from our mistakes, act rightly in our current circumstances, and get better over time.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.472

Economics

In Latin, the word for “economics” comes from the Greek word oikonomos, meaning “the art of running a household.” Economists study institutions and human beings, especially how they compete, cooperate, and distribute goods, services, and information. But economists don’t just study the world as it is. They also make claims about how it ought to be. Unfortunately, some economists are captive to utopian visions based on wrong assumptions about God, humans, and the world. This is why the answers to life’s ultimate questions matter so much in making economic decisions. 

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.470

Post-modernism and the End of Justice

Postmodernists focus on structures of society rather than the heart. They view as unjust anything resulting from traditional power structures, such as Christianity, the Enlightenment, heterosexism, or patriarchy. Therefore, the postmodern understanding of justice in relation to the law is not actually connected to any objective standards. Rather, it is the process of uncovering the various forms of oppression. This way of thinking continues to creep into judicial decisions, most recently—and notably—through the decision of Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy to overthrow the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) because he viewed it as oppressive to people experiencing same-sex attraction. In a similar vein, New Mexico Supreme Court justice Richard Bosson recently wrote an opinion reflection the view of the court that the refusal of a New Mexico photography studio to photograph a gay wedding violated the human rights of a gay couple. In these cases, the battle against “heterosexism” was seen to trump religious and economic freedom.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.468

Survival of Society Requires Family Unit

Societies can survive tragedy and economic disaster, but if the family falls apart, societal collapse is inevitable. Such unraveling is now a statistical reality. At its most basic level, the Christian sociological claim is that society functions best when organized around the natural family (father, mother, and children).

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg.466

Goodness vs Corruption

Is it not ironic that the worldview proclaiming the corruption of humankind [Christianity] has led to so much good, while worldviews proclaiming the goodness of humankind have led to so much corruption? Marxism is the clearest example, having staked its credibility in direct opposition to biblical truth. It led to the slaughter of more than one hundred million people, more than twice the combined dead from World Wars I and II. Ideas have consequences. Good ideas have good consequences, and bad ideas have bad ones.

Jeff Myers & David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times: A Survey of Competing Worldviews, pg. 459

Society Shifting to a Dangerous Worldview

The view that treats puberty and pregnancy as undesirable processes stems from a more fundamental shift in thinking. Society has slowly abandoned the Christian worldview and its theistic implications. If there’s no God, then there’s no Creator who made our bodies to operate in a certain way. Organs don’t have a teleology—a way that they’re designed to function. If there’s no design, no standard, or no optimal way for organs to operate, then there can be no substandard or less-than-optimal way they function. A uterus can gestate a fetus or not. It can grow fibroids or not. It can be kept in a woman’s body or removed. Likewise, it is reasoned, genes and the endocrine system can progress a body through puberty or not. We can accept the process of puberty or block the hormonal pathways that lead to it. There’s no way our body is supposed to be. It just is, and we can do what we want with it.

As a result of this worldview shift in our culture, some people think it’s possible that any process of the body is optional. That’s why they think puberty might need consent. Indeed, even life itself is a matter of consent for some, which is why physician-assisted suicide is gaining in popularity.

Alan Shlemon, Do Children Need to Consent to Puberty?

The USA Will Collapse Under Its Own Corruption

 

Are YOUR Children Being Raised By Others?

The cellphone in a teenager’s hand is doing more to shape their worldview that one hour of Sunday school or the admonition of parents. We are failing to pass our faith on to the next generation because they are captives to the culture, social media, their peers, and the indoctrination by the public schools. Parents clothe their children, feed them, and send them to school, but the hearts of their kids are being stolen and molded by a world that many of us don’t understand.

Erwin W. Lutzer, We Will Not Be Silenced, pg.156

Think About It

The greatest aberration of the mind is to believe a thing to be, because we desire it

Louis Pasteur

What About Your Beliefs?

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

Blaise Pascal

Will You Fight?

If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival.  There may even be a worse case.  You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm.

Do You have the “Wrong” Beliefs?

The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by the individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the “wrong beliefs.”

Friedrich August Von Hayek (1899-1992)

Do Words Have Objective Meanings?

If words have no objective meaning; and all interpretation lies in the mind of the reader (hearer), then the logical deduction is that communication is impossible. Additionally, the reasoning, logic, and pronouncements of the post-modernist proponents are just as preposterous as anyone else’s. If the content of their words have no meaning, apart from the meaning you or I choose to give them, then they have nothing meaningful to say.

Gary E. Gilley, This Little Church Stayed Home: A faithful church in deceptive times, pg.32

The World Hates Non-Conformity

The world is a society of rebels. It finds it hard to tolerate those who are in joyful fellowship with Christ. There is a sense in which believers are aliens. They do not belong. They are different, and the world hates the difference. … Says [William] Barclay, “To put it at its widest—the world always suspects nonconformity. It likes a pattern; it likes to be able to label a person and to put him in a pigeonhole. Anyone who does not conform to the pattern will certainly meet trouble. It is even said that if a hen with different markings is put among hens that are all alike, the others will peck her to death.”

David J. MacLeod, “Destroying Our Illusions: What the Bible Says About the World: A Meditation on John 12:31,” The Emmaus Journal, Vol.5/No.1, pg.16-17

The Worldview of Humanism

Humanists claims to be humanitarian, i.e., caring about people. Yet as a world view humanism is atheistic and secular. This world is all there is. There is no divine revelation. Mankind is the only source of morals. The humanist will stand one night outside a prison protesting capital punishment, yet the next morning he will stand outside an abortion clinic defending the right of a doctor to kill and unborn baby. He loves humanity, yet he will fight for legislation to protect 40 or 50 spotted owls—legislation that will cost 50,000 people their jobs.

David J. MacLeod, “The Consecrated Christian and Conformity to the World: An Exposition of Romans 12:1-2,” The Emmaus Journal, Vol. 4/No. 2, pg.113

The LEFT Seeks to Destroy Marriage

If you’re a leftist and your goal was to destroy, then remake society into whatever twisted image you had in your head of what it should be, you’d likely first go after its foundation. Could this explain why leftists have been going after marriage as an institution - and by extension the family - for decades? Destroy the means by which humans raise stable, functional, healthy members of the next generation, and you strike at the root of society itself. If you believe that traditional society (a.k.a. Western civilization) is evil at its core, as today’s leftists do, it’s a strategy that makes sense, at least in their own warped minds.

Scott Morefield, Rescuing Marriage From The Liberals, Because Civilization Is At Stake

The American Miracle

Since the days of the Pilgrims, leaders of the new society that arose in the New World have embraced the core concept of a divinely determined destiny. For nearly four hundred years, Americans nourished the notion that God maintained an intimate, protective connection to their singular nation. Only recently, with the emphasis on guilt over gratitude in our teaching of history, has the public grown uncomfortable with the idea that fate favors American endeavors. Today, the merest suggestion that the Almighty plays favorites among the nations of the world strikes contemporary sensibilities as offensive, outrageous, or at least controversial.

Much of that controversy involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the old idea of divine providence in the rise of the Republic. It confuses the reality of American exceptionalism with fantasies about American perfectionism. To argue that a higher power directed the United States to a unique and valuable role in the world isn’t the same as insisting that our national saga unfolded without flaw, folly, or failure. The confidence that this nation has been distinctly blessed doesn’t mean that it’s been exclusively blessed—or that it has provided an unmitigated blessing to each citizen, or to all nations, at every moment in its history. … The evidence for divine providence doesn’t prove that America is perfect, but it does strongly suggest that America is no accident.

Michael Medved, The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic, pg 359, 360

Family Is Still the Building Block of Society

The methodical, deliberate redefinitions of terms such as life, gender, marriage, identity, etc. and the replacement of critical institutions, like the family and the faith community, with the government, have created the new normal. Many citizens now look to government programs to fulfill needs and solve problems, releasing them from a sense of personal responsibility or ownership and lessening dependence upon family.

Today, one’s identity is warped into a social construct permitted by some conjured up “right” to reject biology. Marriage, similarly, has been redefined to make a political point instead of its purpose as a key in a healthy society to procreate and provide sustenance and support. These reckless maneuvers borne on the political Left aimed to establish a more “progressive” society are, in fact, resulting in its destruction and material harm to individuals. …

The Left demands “educational equity” in schools but won’t dare touch the facts that children do better when parents are their first teachers, and a home is comprised of a mom and a dad. The “liberated” women of the Left, now even more angry and militant than ever, seem to thrive in the newly defined male persona of either an effeminate and compliant being or excessive in masculinity that translates into violent, oppressive, and sexist behavior. As noted in the June 2014 edition of the Institute for Family Studies, these women, united in their grievances, completely disregard social science that demonstrates “daughters whose fathers have been actively engaged throughout childhood in promoting their academic or athletic achievements and encouraging their self-reliance and assertiveness are more likely to graduate from college and to enter the higher-paying, more demanding jobs traditionally held by males.”

Robin Smith, The Family Is Still the Building Block of Society.

Logical Thinking Is Hindered

When your mind has been so seared by acceptance of evil that you condone amputation of healthy body parts, it's not surprising that your ability to think logically is hindered. If you start with the premise that radical mutilation of the body is an acceptable practice ... you shouldn't be surprised to find it applied in ways that are different, yet equally disturbing.

Joe Carter, "The Diabolic Logic of Transableism," The Gospel Coalition, 6/5/15.

The Culture That the Socialist Left Has Wrought

The conservatives, who, in principle, should oppose the socialists and liberal democrats, quite sincerely argue that they, too, are open, pluralistic, tolerant, and inclusive, dedicated to the entitlements of individuals and groups, non-discriminatory and even supportive of the claims of feminists and homosexual activists. All in all, the liberal democrats, the socialists, and the conservatives are unanimous in their condemnations: they condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, intolerance, and all the other sins listed in the liberal-democratic catechism while also participating in an unimaginable stretching of the meaning of those concepts and depriving them of any explanatory power. All thoughts and all modes of linguistic expression are moving within the circle of the same cliches, slogans, spells, ideas, and arguments. All are involved in the grand design of which those who think and speak are not the authors but with whose authorship they deeply identify, or—in case of doubt—from which they do not find strength or reasons enough to distance themselves.

The grand design, its supported say, should be implemented at all cost because it is believed to bring with itself freedom, autonomy, tolerance, pluralism, and all other liberal-democratic treasures. Therefore, all barriers that block its coming can and must be broken down, also for the benefit of those who put up these barriers. If abortion means freedom, then we should raise the consciousness of those who think differently; force doctors to support this freedom and silence priests so they do not interfere with it. If same-sex marriage means freedom, we should then compel its opponents to accept it and silence fools who may have doubts about it. If political correctness is a necessity of life in the liberal-democratic society, then imposing it is, after all, nothing else but a measure of its emancipation for all.  The groups that managed to capture this liberal phraseology and the logic that underlies it—such as homosexuals and feminists—have exerted a disproportionate influence on the government to the extent that the state institutions, including the courts, have taken upon themselves the task of breaking the resistance of less conscious and more stubborn groups—that is, of coercing them to freedom.

Today, those who write and speak not only face more limitations than they used to, but all the institutions and communities that traditionally stood in the way of this “coercion to freedom” are being dismantled. As in all utopias, so in a liberal democracy it is believed that the irrational residues of the past should be removed.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, pg.66-67