Thursday, March 31, 2005

pUrity vs. pOwer

I was reading a commentary on the New York Times Sunday Magazine piece on megachurches, and came across a good insight.

Jeff Sharlet,writing for "The Revealer," says that evangelicals are not "like fundamentalists of old, more concerned with purity than power."

Instead, he says, "What's striking about megachurch evangelicaldom is that it combines the passion of separatism -- purity -- with the ambition of assimilation -- ubiquity."

Setting aside whether Sharlett's conclusion is actually correct, I like the juxtaposition of those two words: purity and power. That does seem to be the tension between the Christians who were saved during the Jesus movement and their offspring.

conservatism

Reynolds also has a great description of his worldview on politics and government.
I believe in a role for tradition like Burke, heeding the wisdom of the past like Chesterton, that our rights come from the Creator like the Founding Fathers, and in a higher moral calling for our nation like Lincoln. I believe that man was created in the image of God as taught in the Bible and that a nation should err on the side of life like President Bush. I believe in the rule of law, but a law limited by the Law of Nature and Nature's God, like John Locke. I recognize the limited promise of government in this age and view a theocracy as wicked like Augustine, Dante, and Calvin. However, I more deeply fear godless secularism seizing our state and bring on a reign of terror as it always does, just like Ronald Reagan.

we live in good times

You are a Christian. You are beginning to engage with the world after being raised by Christian parents that, by and large, did not.

It is easy, as you engage your mind with the world, to begin thinking that hope is lost. Evil abounds.

Mark John Reynolds, a professor at Biola University, says things are not so bad.
So the next time you hear the "modern world" and its ideas attacked sit quietly and then leave. Laugh if you can. Go on enjoying rights given to you by God and confirmed (as best they could) by modern thinkers like Burke and Locke. Go on voting. Press for reform. Refuse to be reduced to a consumer, but enjoy the things you do consume. Fight racism and injustice, but be glad for a system that allows you to do it. Fight government where it has gotten too big so that it transgresses liberty and vote for more government where liberty has turned to abuse. Thank God that you were born at this time when men are more free, with more ability to do good, than at any other time.


Even if things are so bad, I saw we need to think like Reynolds anyway, because looking dour won't help or attract anyone.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Cool Merchants

Click on the title above to see an incredible website on a PBS "Frontline" special about how businessmen make money off our country's youth, consequences be damned.

You can watch it online. It's well worth your time.

Must-visit websites

I've placed permanent links on the sidebar to the right ------------> to two websites that are becoming regulars for me.

Hugh Hewitt and Al Mohler are on top of what is going on in the news, and are very clear-minded. Both are Christians.

Hewitt's blog is a must-read, and Mohler's radio program is great. You can download the mp3 and put it on your iPod.

Mohler is more dogmatic, and Hewitt is a link-monster. You'll find lots of other interesting stuff on his site.

87% of elite professors are liberal

The Washington Post reports today on a study that finds that "...by their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative," while, "The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative."
The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights (84 percent); believe homosexuality is acceptable (67 percent); and want more environmental protection "even if it raises prices or costs jobs" (88 percent). What's more, the study found, 65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left of the Democratic Party.

"Left of the Democratic Party." Technically, I think that qualifies their viewpoint, according to the Post, as extreme. So does the fact that, according to the article, "In contrast with the finding that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are liberal, a Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33 percent describe themselves as conservative and 18 percent as liberal."

The most left-leaning department, where "at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative," are:
English literature
Philosophy
Political science
Religious studies
And then, for your comedic enjoyment, the article (click on the title above to see it) quotes a grand total of one expert, Jonathan Knight, director of academic freedom and tenure for the American Association of University Professors. Mr. Knight has the following insight:
"The question is how this translates into what happens within the academic community on such issues as curriculum, admission of students, evaluation of students, evaluation of faculty for salary and promotion." Knight said he isn't aware of "any good evidence" that personal views are having an impact on campus policies.
"It's hard to see that these liberal views cut very deeply into the education of students. In fact, a number of studies show the core values that students bring into the university are not very much altered by being in college."

Yes, that's right, the extreme views of intelligent, charismatic and arrogant professors have little or no impact on impressionable young freshman who up to that point in their lives have thought less deeply than perhaps any generation before them about substantive matters due to the pervasiveness of TV, movies and video games.
You might say that the disparity between professors and the general population's views show that there is minimal impact. But there is evidence to the contrary.
In the last major survey of college faculty, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1984, 39 percent identified themselves as liberal.

Hm.

Monday, March 28, 2005

Pedophilia is next

This is a quote from David Fishback's letter to the D.C. Examiner. David is one of the leading proponents of a pro-homosexual sex education curriculum in Montgomery County.
"The proposed revisions simply present the conclusions of every mainstream American medical and mental health professional association that homosexuality is not an illness - and most experts do not believe it is a choice."

In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. That is what Fishback is referring to.

And now, the APA is considering removing other things from their list of mental illnesses.

Pedophilia
Gender-Identity Disorder
Transvestism
Sadomasochism

Here is the rationale.
Psychiatrist Charles Moser of San Francisco's Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and co-author Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa presented a paper entitled, "DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal."

...The existing research cannot distinguish people with the paraphilias, they say, from "normophilics" (the term the authors use for people with conventional sexual interests), so there is no reason to diagnose paraphilics as either a distinct group, or psychologically unhealthy.

Besides, Moser and Kleinplatz add, psychiatry has no baseline, theoretical model of what, in fact, constitutes normal and healthy sexuality to which it could compare people whose sexual interests draw them to children or sadism/masochism.

..."Any sexual interest," Moser concluded in his Archives commentary, "can be healthy and life-enhancing.

...The situation of the paraphilias at present," Moser and Kleinplatz conclude, "parallels that of homosexuality in the early 1970's."

Did you catch that? "Psychiatry has no baseline, theoretical model of what, in fact, consitutes normal and healthy sexuality...Any sexual interest can be healthy and life-enhancing." Think about that. That is the scientific naturalist's worldview carried out to its logical conclusion.

Thankfully, there are experts out there who are responding to this.

The National Association for Research and Thereapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) had this to say.
"What is needed is not more research," NARTH's Joseph Nicolosi countered in response to reports describing the symposium. "What psychology really needs for its advancement is not another study, but a more accurate worldview. That worldview must take into account our creator's design, which inevitably involves gender complementarity.

"And," Nicolosi added, "we must agree on those things that genuinely enhance human dignity. It's a measure of how low the psychiatric establishment has sunk, that it would even debate the idea that pedophilia, transvestism, and sado-masochism could ever be expressions of true human flourishing."

Psychoanalyst Johanna Tabin, Ph.D., of NARTH's Scientific Advisory Committee, also commented on the A.P.A. symposium. "If the arguments prevail that are given for ignoring these psychological problems, then suicide attempts must be considered normal when they are desired by the participants. And what about the sociopath, who--having no conscience--feels quite content with himself?"

Is There a Gay Gene?

No.

Read on here if you care enough to educate yourself.

Click hereto read about sex education that teaches that homosexuality is genetic in public schools.

Smoking crack

The New York Times Magazine interviewed Michael Eric Dyson , who I've never heard of, about his new book that bashes Bill Cosby's speeches over the last year criticizing black parents for their failure to maintain the home and family life.

Listen to his reasoning:

None of us want our children to be murderers or thieves. But Cosby never acknowledges that most poor blacks don't have a choice about these things.


What is this guy on? And why is he being taken seriously?

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Justice Scalia

The New Yorker's Amy Davidson profiles Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this week. The piece is not online, but the magazine has a question and answer with Davidson about her piece on line, which is very interesting.

Scalia is eviscerated by many liberals, but Davidson, who we can assume is far to the left, got to know him a little, and her opinion is more objective.

"He’s so polarizing because he is very clear and very adamant about the method of constitutional interpretation that he stands for—originalism—and he has a kind of polemical zeal about making the case for it. He’s really out there on the law-school speaking circuit, making his argument in a forceful way; I was impressed to see how willing he is to take hostile questions and engage with people. He’s also quite funny. The other Justices tend to give pretty anodyne speeches—talking about their upbringings, or telling inspirational or educational stories about the great justices and cases of the past. But Scalia is laying out his approach and telling you in no uncertain terms how dangerous it is for American democracy and the American Constitution if judges don’t follow it."

A Darwinist Open to Intelligent Design

Jay Matthews, the Post's education reporter and an avowed Darwinist, says allowing Intelligent Design into schools is a good idea.

I am as devout a Darwinist as anybody. I read all the essays on evolution by the late Stephen Jay Gould, one of my favorite writers. The God I worship would, I think, be smart enough to create the universe without, as Genesis alleges, violating His own observable laws of conservation of matter and energy in a six-day construction binge. But after interviewing supporters and opponents of intelligent design, which argues among other things that today's organisms are too complex to have evolved from primordial chemicals by chance or necessity, I think critiques of modern biology, like Ladendorff's contrarian lessons, could be one of the best things to happen to high school science.

Drop in on an average biology class and you will find the same slow, deadening march of memorization that I endured at 15. Why not enliven this with a student debate on contrasting theories? Why not have an intelligent design advocate stop by to be interrogated? Many students, like me, find it hard to understand evolutionary theory, and the scientific method itself, until they are illuminated by contrasting points of view.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

The Centurion Program

Guys, the main reason I am doing this group with you is because of the year of study I did with the Centurion program, something Chuck Colson started a year ago. Click on the title above to read Colson's description of the program.

Money quote:

This program is urgently needed. One of the reasons the Church is having so little impact on culture today is that too many Christians view their faith only in terms of a personal relationship with Jesus. George Barna’s research backs this up. His 2003 national survey found that only nine percent of born again Christians even hold a biblical worldview. And flawed worldviews have fatal consequences: Barna found that Christians who don’t embrace a biblical worldview are more likely to condone things like premarital cohabitation, homosexuality, adultery, and abortion.

Many Christians believe we change cultures from the top down—get righteous leaders, they think, and you’ll have a righteous society. But throughout history, the greatest movements have started from the bottom up—ordinary people talking with their friends and before their church groups and reaching their kids.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Ravi Zacharias at the Mormon Tabernacle

The second cd by Ravi Zacharias we will listen to is titled, "The Exclusivity and Sufficiency of Jesus Christ." It was given at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.

Ravi was the first non-Mormon to speak at the tabernacle in 105 years. For more details on how that happened and what it was like, click here and here.

Ravi explains how this happened:

What it boiled down to was that they were interested in hearing from an evangelical Christian about what lay at the heart of our faith. I asked for two personal conditions. One, that I be given the privilege of selecting the subject and two, that I bring someone to provide the music. They gladly granted both. But even after that I hesitated till several key evangelical leaders and professors from across the country wrote and urged me to accept the invitation to speak at the Tabernacle. After much prayer and reflection, I did.


Notes will be posted soon.

"Loss of Truth" notes and discussion

On Saturday, March 12, the Garage Scholars, named that day by Robert Grange, held their second meeting and listened to a talk by Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. This talk was given the day before Ravi's talk at the Mormon Tabernacle.

Ravi Zacharias
A Defense of Absolute Truth
11/13/05
The University of Utah

Sexuality, marriage, stem-cell research, genetics—“these things are getting very, very complex.” It’s hard to know “how to address this tangled subject with meaning and coherence.”

Two worldviews in conflict.
1. The nature of truth: must come to conclusion that truth does matter, especially when you’re on the receiving end of a lie.
a. Trip to courtroom with family—saw trial of man accused of raping two minors. After the prosecutor finished, Ravi was certain he was guilty. But then after the defense attorney spoke, Ravi was not so sure of what the truth was. “How much more important it is that we understand the truth and the source of truth about life’s essence, meaning and destiny.”
b. Churchill: “The truth is the most valuable thing in the world. Indeed it is so valuable that it is often protected by a bodyguard of lies.” He was talking about a context of war.
c. Natan Sharansky: Went back to the prison in Moscow where he was held, and to the room where he was tortured. Told wife, “It was here that I actually discovered my soul.” Laid a wreath at grave of man who gave Soviets nuclear bomb: “I’ve always thought that the most powerful weapon in the world was the bomb. I’ve come to the conclusion that the most powerful weapon in the world is the truth.”
2. Western culture: standing now on the quicksand of relativism, “with our feet planted firmly in mid-air,” as Chesterton said.

How do we find the truth in times such as these?

Three changes in mood and social phenomena in the last 20 to 25 years.

Yankelivich: finding fulfillment in the shifting moods of American life. “Culture is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives.” There has to be a coherence in our culture, he wrote in the 1980’s. “A cultural revolution is one that makes a decisive break with the shared meanings of the past, particularly those meanings that deal with the significant questions of the purpose and meaning of life.” You and I are assumed today to have shared meanings from the past that address the present.

There was a revolution in the last 20 to 25 years.

1. Secularization: the process by which religious ideas, institutions and interpretations have lost their social significance.
a. If you are religiously minded you are assumed to be prejudiced. If you are irreligiously minded you are assumed to be objective.
b. Toronto: the “good” city. Mayor took a position on an issue, he got 20,000 phone calls, and he said he was discounting the calls because the calls were mostly from religious people, and, “We all know they are predisposed and prejudiced on this subject.”
c. Man on trial for pornography. Defense lawyer didn’t want jurors who were religious. Then he cross-examined witnesses by asking them about going into an art gallery with pictures of nudes. He asked them, “What is the difference?” How do you argue at that point?
i. Michaelangelo: said he wanted to paint nudes so he could see “man as God sees man.” The teacher said, “Michael, you are not God.” There are proclivities within the human heart to take that which is normally decent and twist it.
ii. C.S. Lewis: A Pilgrim’s Regress: protagonist , John, arrives at mountain called “The spirit of the age.” The person is charge is grim and unhappy, rather than a smile. John finds himself in chains. When he comments on the deliciousness of milk, a man says, “All it is is the secretion of a cow.” As he left the mountain he said, “You lie because you don’t know the difference between what nature has meant for nourishment and what is has meant for garbage.”
iii. We no longer know this difference, b/c we have no more points of reference. A woman being exploited for pornography, under secularism, will not know that she is being exploited.
d. Secularization has left society bereft of shame.
e. The Passion of the Christ. Liberals, for the first time, were worried about violence on screen and said that it affects our behavior.
f. There is a very thin line between that which is sacred and that which is profane. And if you profane that which is sacred, you plunder yourself. Chesteron: “Emptiness does not come from being weary of pain, but rather weary of pleasure.”

Secularization = no shame.

2. Relativism
a. Pluralization is a good thing: a competing number of worldviews available with none dominant. In a world like this, you cannot avoid this. We must accept it and learn to respect the individual and engage the idea. We keep people in their equality, but ideas in their hierarchy. “Where else but in Los Angeles can you find a Korean selling kosher tacos?”
b. Other cultures and countries have unique perspectives to offer us.
c. America was not framed by a pantheistic worldview. It could not have come into being in a Muslim worldview. “No Muslim scholar has ever disagreed with me.” “Pantheism would never have generated the language of the founding documents.” Islam: the whole world is seen through the lense of the revelation of the prophet. Hinduism likes to call itself a way of life. We in the west have forgotten how a worldview shaped us.
d. Moral relativism puts us on the knife-edge of destruction. Logic will tell you that. You cannot live a life that is systemically contradictory. What contradiction is to reason sin is to life. If your logic breaks down, so does your argument. If your morality breaks down, so does your life.
e. Ravi’s ancestors were orthodox priests in the southern part of India. A hindu professor of Eastern philosophy challenged him to speak on why he is not a hindu, and “afterwards we’ll tear you to shreds.” Ravi said he would speak on why he is a Christian. He said that the pantheistic worldview is systemically contradictory. Anything can basically mean anything; terms are meaningless (The Hindu View of Life; Ghandi said there were some statements from the hindu founding document ??? that he wished he could expunge). Afterward, the professor said that Ravi did not understand the two kinds of logic—the law of non-contradiction, an either/or way of thinking, which is Western thought, and then there is the law of both/and way of thinking, the dialectical system, which is Eastern. The professor said that the dialectical system applied to Hinduism, not the either/or system. Ravi said, “You’re telling me that when I discuss the Hindu religion, I either use the both/and system of logic or nothing else, is that right?” He said, “The either/or way of thinking does seem to emerge, doesn’t it?” Ravi said, “Even in India you look both ways when you cross the street, it’s either you or the bus.” He was using the either/or system to prove the both/and.
f. The way to test the validity of way of thinking is to see that which best corresponds to reality.
g. Unalienable rights. What do we mean? How can a quantity that is the produce of random chance have moral rights? How can we talk about racism if we do not believe in essential dignity (imago dei)?
h. Chesteron: The modern revolution doubts not only the idea he denounces, but the system of thinking by which he denounces it…The modern revolutions, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mind…By rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything…The tragedy of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing in nothing. Alas, it is much worse, that person may end up believing in anything.”
i. Kant: Unconfronted by God, we may use reason to arrive at a moral conclusion. Iris Murdoch responded by saying, “how recognizable, how familiar to us, is this man so beautifully portrayed by Kant, who even confronted by Christ, turns away to hear the voice of his own reason…free, independent, lovely, rational, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of philosophy…he is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which is discoveries uncover…Kant’s creation was created by Milton, though. His name is Lucifer.” “Knowledge is a dangerous friend when no one makes the rules.”

Secularization = no shame. Relativism = no reason.

3. Privatization: a breakdown in the modern experience between the public and the private sphere and we are forced to find meaning in the private. We are muzzled.
a. Dohar universities. Great technology, but in every building there are prayer rooms. “I may not agree with that worldview, but they’re being consistent with what they believe…Here we believe religion is an amputation of the brain. The more educated we get apart from moral absolutes…the more we will train intellectually sophisticated people.” Huxley said that science may have given us “improved means to achieve inferior or deteriorated ends.” Our means may become great while our ends become damnable.
b. Many students at universities come to him and ask how to not take their own lives. We have fragmented ourselves. How can we bring unity and diversity if we do not see the sacredness of life itself…the soulishness of human beings, the inner reality where we see the hurt and pain and needs.
c. Every culture ultimately speaks from the agony of its wounds.
d. How can you privatize your most valuable belief? We’re doing this to our own damage. When privatization has run its course, you end up without meaning.

Secularization = no shame. Relativism = no reason. Privatization = no meaning.

The loneliest moment in life is that in which you experience that which you thought was the ultimate, and it has let you down.

We must look to an answer that looks beyond this world.

Jesus, when tempted in the wilderness, was tempted to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
1. We are not material, but spiritual. “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every world that comes from the mouth of God.”
2. You can’t use God as a slot machine for your life. “Why don’t you jump and see if the angels will save you.”
3. If you’re looking for an absolute, you will only find it when all the diversity within in you is bound up in the coherence of the worship of the living God, who is the truth.

The diversities of your life, if they move into an angular form, you will find yourself fragmented within. There has to be a worldview that binds these diversities into a

Life is sacred, your word is sacred, property, sexuality, relationships, are all sacred.

Starting with the Renaissance man was artistic being, then rational, then skeptical, existential, volitional and desperate, and now, in post-modernism, man is the defining being, or non-being. Instead of God doing the defining, we are doing the defining, and the deluge is coming.

Each of those movements and ideas has its place, but only God blends them all together and brings unity and says, “I have fashioned you in my image,” and when you worship him with honor, everything is joined, because there is a transcendent reason for your being.

“Whoever told you that life had to be coherent?” a woman shouted at him once. He asked her if she wanted his answer to be coherent or incoherent.

Only God is the eternally coherent being that gives us our definitions.


Greatest desire after listening to this:
Karl: to be able to think like that.
Chris: to be able to decide if there really is just a black and white or if there is a gray. “I believe that Christianity and the way of God is the only way, and with that I believe there is only one reality to a cetain extent, but I think there are other ways of viewing life and other paradigms, because the world is a fallen world. I feel like he’s saying there is only one reality, only one way of viewing the world. There is one true way to do that, but we can’t expect everyone to see it our way.”

I said, “The bible says that you should see it that way.”

Chris talked aobut Ravi’s point about coherence. He seemed to think that Ravi was addressing people like Ghandi, but I said that he was not, but instead was addressing people who think that there are no answers.

Karl said we should look at other worldviews through the lens of Scripture.

Chris said he was “not necessarily convicted,” but when he was discussing privatization, “I have to wrestle with that….secularization at school, and separation of church and state.” Said he still “thinks there is something to privatization.” “If I were to be in politics, I would still make laws for a secular world from a secular mindset.”

Chris made an interesting point about universities’ discussing the hope of pluralization spread around the world, erasing ethnic and geographic and theological differences, and bringing world peace. I’ve seen this perspective articulated by David Fishback, the chair of Montgomery County’s citizens advisory committee on student health and reproductive education. He says, “Theology does not have a place in schools, unless it is the golden rule of loving others like yourselves.”

Meeting #2

3/12/05

Agenda
-Read Washington Post article, “Antiabortion activist on Trial in D.C.,” Friday, March 11, 2005
-Review Ravi Zacharias talk, “Defending Absolute Truth,” given at the University of Utah on Nov. 13, 2004.

Homework
-Listen to Ravi’s talk, “Who is Jesus? Defending Jesus Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life,” given at the Mormon Tabernacle on Nov. 14, 2004.
-Listen to Ravi's talk, "The Loss of Truth: Crumbling Morality," given at Weber State University, Nov. 15, 2004.

Books I would like us to read: DO WE HAVE THE COMMITMENT TO READ ENTIRE BOOKS IN A MONTH??
• Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman
• Deliver us From Evil, by Ravi Zacharias

Present: Rob, Karl, Chris, Jon

We read Washington Post article, “Antiabortion activist on Trial in D.C.,” Friday, March 11, 2005
Chris encouraged me to write an article about it.

More group names:
• The Inklings
• Small Group of Intellectuals (SGI)
• Intellectually Small Group (ISG)
• Really, Really Smart and Good-Looking
• Intellectual Opposition
• The Garage Scholars

Guys said they are open to books, and Rob suggested we do some writing in response to our reading.

Meeting #1

2/19/05

The inaugural Garage Scholars meeting was held in the home of the absent Robert Grange, on a sunny and brisk Saturday morning. Below are notes on preliminary conversation and then discussion of the talk we listened to.

Agenda

• Discuss mission statement
• Create name for group
• Listen to Glenn Sunshine, “How We Got Here: Medieval, Pre-Modern, Modern and Post-Modern Worldviews"
• Discuss

Present: Mike, Chris, Karl, JD

I asked what the guys were looking to get out of this group.
-Better understanding of different worldviews.
-Understand the world around us through discussion and argument.
-Creating a knowledge base of worldviews.

Group Names:
• Super Cool and Secret and We Know Things and We Don’t Tell Anybody
• Bad-Ass M-F'ers (But We’re Christians)

Discussion of Sunshine talk:
-Mike said it was good.
-Karl said it was a good overview, and makes sense how one view leads to another.
-Chris said, “Ummm, I don’t know,” and started to say that there might be some merit to saying each person can have their own ideas. He also said he has heard a lot of different definitions of post-modernism.
“We don’t live in a Christian world, and with that I think that…well my brain’s kinda fuzzy right now. I just think that since we live in a fallen world, there is certain things that are right for these people, that they’re going to do, and it’s just part of living in a fallen world. I’m not sure what I think about saying that…I don’t know.”

Mike said, you can find things in it that are good. Chris said it can help you understand other cultures, other perspectives. “It makes you look at all these different angles.”

Mike: “People look at anything that’s dogmatic as wrong. The church has made its mistakes…The church has done a lot of good, but non-Christians are not going to talk about that. They’re going to talk about the Salem Witch Trials, and the Crusades…If you’re dogmatic about something, you’re simpleminded and you’re being led, or you’re trying to lead other people and that’s dangerous.”

Chris: “I kind of see post-modernism, it’s not really new…I just look at it as our human nature outside of pursuing God. We want what’s best for ourselves…The thing I didn’t agree with is that meaning’s up in the air.”

Mike: He definitely is like, they’re the bad people…He kicked some stuff that wasn’t true. Like, Newton was not a Christian. He did not believe that Christ was divine. I hate it when Christians do that.

Debated whether the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation.

Mike: Christians say things that come out as stupid to people who are historically informed.
He recommended that we listen to Sproul’s overview of philosophical history.

Karl talked about the fact that everybody assumes that people in the past when things were closer to a Christian worldview had better morals…There’s nothing new under the sun.

Karl wants progressive Christians. Mike said there have always been progressives and conservatives.

Karl wants to see them use “a progressive mentality to spread the truth…Use what the progressives are using to spread the truth.”

Mike: Liberals, what they believe right now, I don’t believe that’s progress.

Chris: Progress as I understand it is the more immoral you can become. Used the example of Rome and their ascent of power and then into degradation, decay and eventually destruction.

I made the point that to know what truth is, you have to look to the past, and to know how to

Mike: You can be a Christian and be an existentialist. It’s a philosophy of existence. Kierkegaard: If you take God out of it, what you have is…not much different from postmodernism. It’s all about me. All of life is where I’m at, how I feel. There is no God, no next life. Enjoy what you can get.

Mike: It’s been hard for me for a while to figure out what I believe about social matters…It’s like I can’t generate the belief.