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Transgenderism

The transgender debate isn't about washrooms

Or, how to argue like a Christian

Here’s the scenario: there’s a fellow in front of you wearing a little black dress. And he wants to know your thoughts on the transgender debate. You’re considering two possible answers.

1) “This is a debate about what feelings can and can’t do. God says He determines our gender (Gen. 1:27, 5:2, Matt. 19:4, Mark 10:6) but now many people are saying that it’s our feelings that do that. Do feelings have that power? I don’t think so. What we know about our feelings is that they often run counter to reality. We can feel attracted to people we know wouldn’t be good for us. We can feel pulled to do things we know we shouldn’t, or to put off things we need to get done. Sometimes scarily thin girls can feel fat, and bullied boys can feel worthless. We can feel angry when we have no reason to be, or feel happy when the more appropriate response would really be shame or regret. In everyday life our feelings can, so often, prove to be a horrible guide for us. Our feelings don’t shape reality, so we need to shape our feelings and emotions to conform to the world as it is. And that’s what God tells us when it comes to gender too (Deut. 22:5). He chose our gender, and we have to shape our feelings to fit that reality.”

2) “We’re worried that some guys will pretend to be transsexual just so they can get access to the women’s washroom. So, for the sake of the women and children, we can’t let biological males use women’s washrooms. It’s a matter of safety.”

Which answer do you choose?

Most Christians seem to be going with the second answer. It’s not without controversy – Red Sox legend Curt Schilling got fired from his ESPN job for arguing this point – but it’s nowhere near as controversial as the first. The second also has some clear advantages. It is shorter, and when it’s important to say things just so, brief is better. And it focuses on the safety of women and children, which is a hard point to object to.

But it doesn’t mention the Bible or God.

Some might think that another advantage. After all, our country has rejected God, so they don’t care what He says. If we bring up God, aren’t we just setting ourselves up to be ignored? Wouldn’t it be better to present neutral/secular arguments, to increase the odds that we’ll be heard?

Secular arguments can’t stand on their own

The short answer is, no.

The longer answer is “Nooooooooooo!”

Secular arguments might be less controversial, but they have no foundation. They are based on a worldview that is insubstantial. Thus there is a very practical objection to relying on them: they can’t stand on their own.

Already, we can see the shaky nature of secular arguments in our bathroom debates. The US department store Target was hit with a one-million-signature petition protesting their decision to let transgender customers use the washroom of their choice. But as one commentator noted, the vast majority of Target stores have single-stall family restrooms. If we’re worried about the safety of our wife, or our children, then all we need to do is use these single-stall facilities.

A gay legislator from Alabama took down the safety argument a different way. Patricia Todd noted that most sexual assaults occur

“…in locations where children gather, school, church, parks, etc…. So if you really want to protect your children from child predators, don't take them to school, public parks, church or allow them to play sports or use the Internet.”

We can also predict that if we keep talking about safety the other side is going to counter with safety concerns of their own. They are going to start sharing stories about dress-wearing guys who got harassed in the men’s washroom. Or, rather, we’re going to hear stories about dress-wearing boys, and crewcut girls who were hassled. If we’re all about safety, then what about these children’s safety?

Canada’s recent past provides an even better example of the shortcomings of the purely secular argument. During our country’s gay “marriage” debate I did a presentation in one of our churches and asked the audience to list all the best arguments for our side. We came up with a half dozen or so, and some in the crowd seemed to get worried when I rebutted all but one of them. The reason I could do that is because all but one of them were based on secular reasoning. I could slap them down as quickly as they were raised because they were all built on this quivering, crumbling secular foundation.

“Marriage has been this way for thousands of years.”
“Slavery was in vogue for millennia; does that mean it was right? Some traditions need to be abandoned.”

“Most Canadians are against changing it.”
“Sometimes the majority can be wrong. And besides, will you support gay marriage if/when the majority approves?”

“We shouldn’t let judges force this on us.”
“So if we vote it in you’ll be fine with it?”

Christians rose to the defense of tradition, and democracy, and stood against judicial activism, but how often did we speak about God’s perspective?

Not very.

So we lost. And we lost, in part, because the arguments we were relying on simply didn’t measure up. They couldn’t stand on their own.

Secular arguments miss the point

But there is a still bigger problem: secular arguments don’t fight the battle that really needs to be fought.

When a big culture-wide kerfuffle erupts we need to see this for what it really is. Christians need to ask: “What part of God’s truth is being attacked this time?” We have to understand we’re in a war, and the other side’s objective is always to attack God’s people, His Word, and His Truth. So yes, safety is a concern in the transgender debate, but that’s not what the battle is really about. This bathroom ruckus is only a distraction – it’s the enemy trying to get us to direct out attention to the symptom rather than the disease. What they’re coming after – what they want to overthrow – is Genesis 1:27b: “male and female He created them.”

Safety is a concern. We’re already hearing in the news about sick guys taking advantage of these policies to head into women’s washrooms, to peep, or take pictures, or expose themselves. It’s predictable. It’s ridiculous. But what’s the cause of this craziness? God says He made us male and female, and the other side says, “No, we can create our own genders – God lied.”

That’s the real fight. That’s the truth they are attacking, so that’s the truth we need to defend.

Christian arguments have a firm foundation

So how do we get at it?

We begin with God. We lead with Him and His truth. The world doesn’t want to hear about Him, but He’s what they need.

Canada’s gay “marriage” debate provides a good example of how a good Christian defense can look. During the 2004 election a Christian Heritage Party candidate I was working with gave his riding a solid Christian defense of marriage. Ed Spronk sent a brochure to every household that presented God as the Standard-Maker. Spronk explained that if we abandoned God’s standard for marriage then soon enough we would be left with no standard at all. He then shared news items from around the world to show how this was already happening, with people marrying multiple spouses, marrying objects, and even marrying themselves.

Spronk didn’t win the election, but he was heard – his brochure was the talk of the riding.

The structure of his argument went like this:

Here’s what God says on this matter.
What God says is true, so we’ll see supporting evidence in the world.
Here’s some of that evidence.

A few of the illustrations he presented were the exact news items other Christians were using as standalone secular arguments. For instance, many were pointing to the woman who married herself as an example of what would happen next if we let gay “marriage” happen. But the response to this as a standalone argument was mixture of apathy and disbelief: “Who cares?” and, “It will never happen.” Once again the secular argument couldn’t stand on its own.

Spronk used this same incident, with a difference: he placed it on the firm foundation of God’s truth. He started by explaining that it’s God Who defines what marriage is and isn’t. Then Spronk used this self-marrying single lady as an example of the craziness that ensues when we deny God’s standards for marriage.

It supported his main point, but it wasn’t his point. It was simply one bit of supportive evidence and his core argument – his explicitly Christian argument – would continue to stand with or without it.

In the transgender debate

I began this article began with two possible answers. The first might not look all that similar to Ed Spronk’s traditional marriage defense, but it actually has the same basic structure. Sproink's and this first answer are both built on an explicitly Christian foundation, and both then stack supporting evidence on top of that Christian foundation.

This is how that first answer looks like broken down:

Here’s what God says on this matter: your feelings can’t determine your gender; I do.
What God says is true so we’ll see supporting evidence in the world.
Here’s some of that evidence: examples of when our feelings have run counter to reality, without ever changing it.

This is what a good Christian argument looks like. We need more like this.

Does that mean we have to abandon our bathroom arguments altogether? No, but we need to place them on a Christian foundation. That’s the key. They don’t stand on their own, but they can work well as supportive evidence for God’s truth. Here’s how that might look in a letter to your local paper:

Dear editor,

I’m writing regarding the recent article series you had on children who say they are transgender and want access to surgeries and puberty suppressing drugs.

As a Christian I know all of humanity is made in God’s image, so that means we are all worthy of respect. That, of course, includes people who identify as transgendered. That is why I cannot go along with cultural move to treat gender as something that is subjective, tied to how someone feels, rather than an objective reality. Our gender is not something that our feelings can change; feelings don’t have that power. Our gender is determined for us, by God, and is written into us right down to our DNA. And if we won’t recognize that men are men and women are women and the two can’t switch places, then all sorts of craziness will ensue. Craziness will happen because craziness always does when we reject reality. We will see:

Peeping Toms claiming to be women to gain access to women’s washrooms

High school boys showering with high school girls *
Perverts of various sorts taking full advantage
Men applying for spots in women’s dormitories
A demand for women’s sanitary bins in male toilets “for men who menstruate” *
A demand for urinals in women’s washrooms
Men competing on women’s sports teams *
Men obliterating the women’s records in weightlifting, shot-put, high jump, etc. and etc.
Men winning “Women of the Year” awards *
Men attending women’s colleges *
Sexually abused women feeling unsafe in all public washrooms
Women cutting off their breasts and men cutting off their penises
Children being given high doses of hormones to suppress their normal maturation

There will also be others who will extend this same “I am whatever I feel like I am” logic to other areas including age and race (this is already happening) and maybe even height and species (and, yes, this is also already happening). We need to reject that idea that our feelings can remake reality. I respectfully ask you to stand firm against the notion that “wishing does make it so.”

Yours, in God’s service,

Jon Dykstra

Here the bathroom argument serves as just one bit of supportive evidence for our overall argument that God determines our gender, not our feelings (and if we reject God’s sovereignty over gender, then craziness will ensue). The structure is again the same as we saw with Ed Spronk: our foundation is what God says on the matter, and then because we know that what God says is true, we are able to find supportive evidence in the world around, so we share some of those examples.

Conclusion

When we present God’s truth to an audience we don’t need to hit them with a sermon – we can be brief. But God’s truth needs to be our foundation. The battle we’re in isn’t about bathrooms. It’s about God, and how He determines our gender, and all of reality. That’s the truth that’s under assault, so that’s the truth we are called to defend.

May the Lord grant us the courage to fight where the battle rages.

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Transgenderism 101: Share the truth with compassion

Transgenderism is the latest political cause du jour, dominating media headlines, saturating academic deliberation, the subject of new laws and radical educational policies across the country. Lost in the debate, from either side, are the kids themselves. It is important that, in so far as we are able, we ensure our part in this debate isn’t confused as being an attack on the dignity of individuals genuinely struggling with gender identity disorder. As psychologist Dr. Mark Yarhouse notes, in his 30 years of counseling patients struggling with gender identity, most who come into his office are not seeking to tear down the “social constructs” of maleness or femaleness. They are simply looking for help as they navigate these very troubled waters in these times of social change. Today people who believe they were born the wrong gender are being encouraged by the intellectual elite in media, politics and academia to embrace that notion and run with it. That might mean they start identifying as the other gender, or it might mean undergoing surgery to try to resemble the other gender. This must be strongly opposed. Why should Christians oppose it? Because we know it will hurt people! As one Canadian Reformed pastor said at a recent political rally, these new policies require us to love less. They silence genuine concern for transgendered kids, while advocating a celebration of an ideology that, by any measure of science and common sense, will do irreparable harm. What is transgenderism? The term “transgendered” is an umbrella term for the different ways in which some people might experience or express their gender – their maleness or femaleness – differently from people whose gender matches their biological sex. Put another way, transgenderism describes the experiences or expressions of a small proportion of the population who say there is a difference between their mind and their body when it comes to the question of whether they are male or female. One of the debates within the social sciences today revolves around the question of whether we should bring the body into conformity with the mind (via hormone injections, male genitalia removal, breast augmentation, or other surgery) or bring the mind into conformity with the body (via counseling). Perhaps the group that captures the most attention today are those who struggle with gender identity disorder, also known as gender dysphoria, a psychological phenomenon. We might hear them say something like, “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” or vice versa. According to the revised language of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (the DSM‑5), gender dysphoria refers to the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one’s experienced or expressed gender and one’s assigned gender. Gender dysphoria is a rare ailment: according to the same manual, it manifests in only 0.005% - 0.014% of adult men and 0.002% - 0.003% of adult women. However, we can expect those numbers to increase dramatically as the popularity of the phenomenon increases with the fawning media coverage of transgender celebrities like Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner and the gender-bending behaviors of Jaden Smith (the son of actor Will Smith who “challenges gender stereotypes” by regularly wearing dresses and make-up, etc.). The celebration and indoctrination happening more and more in elementary schools across the country only exasperates the problem. A somewhat related but separate condition happens when, due to genes, hormones, or body structures that differ from the norm, a child may have an “intersex condition” (in older literature, “hermaphrodites”). This could make it difficult to identify a child’s gender at birth – we live in a fallen world, and one of the results of that brokenness is that some people are born with malformed genitalia. This is not, however, what we’re talking about with transgenderism. An intersexed condition is a biological disorder, and should be distinguished from a transgendered person’s gender dysphoria, which is a psychological disorder. It is important to note that most intersex people are not lobbying to pass as the other sex or as a third sex, but are simply seeking to discover to which sex they belong. Their biological sex identification can typically be discovered through a chromosomal or blood test. Truth with grace We know from the creation story (see Gen. 1:27 and 2:18) that God created humankind in his image (imago dei) and that the wonderful mystery of that design includes the binary reality of the sexes: we are made either male and female. That means a woman’s femaleness reflects something of the image of God, and that a man’s maleness reflects something of the image of God. The binary nature of humanity is implicitly confirmed in the words of Jesus in his discussions on marriage (see Matt. 19:4 and Mark 10:6) and in Paul’s directions to the new Christians in Corinth and Ephesus and to Timothy on the distinct responsibilities and natures of men and women. (See, for example, 1 Cor. 11:7-9; Eph. 5:22-33; 1 Tim. 2:12-14.) To mar or to diminish the masculine and feminine diminishes our God-given identity as males or females. Both reflect the glory of God. This is probably why God forbade cross-dressing in Deuteronomy 22:5. This prohibition goes beyond whether boys can wear dresses (the clothing of men at the time of the exodus from Egypt probably resembled something more akin to modern female clothing today). The point is not the article of clothing per se; it’s the intentional diminishing or obscuring of masculine or feminine differences, which is an assault on our design. It should be unsurprising that the sciences confirm this binary reality. With the exception of a few simple organisms, all creatures (including humans) are marked by a fundamental binary sexual differentiation: male or female markers are imprinted on every one of their trillions of cells. The testimony of biology, chromosomal data, and social-scientific evidence all confirm the essential biological binary of the sexes. (For more on this point, see my book review of Why Gender Matters.) But the Bible does not only speak to the issue of gender confusion, it also speaks to how we should relate and communicate on this issue. The Bible reminds us that gentle answers turn away wrath, but harsh words stir up anger (Prov. 15:1) and that “gracious words are like a honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body” (Prov. 16:24). Jesus Christ fulfills this in his ministry and example. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1,14). Randy Alcorn calls this pairing of grace with truth a paradox, and one Christians must emulate: our speaking and relating and communing on this issue of transgenderism must be characterized by grace and truth. Where truth is conveyed without love, it is nothing but noise (1 Cor. 13:1). The truth needs love, and the truth communicated in love will be kind, patient, and will not be rude, irritable or boastful. (1 Cor. 13:4,5). But love also “rejoices in the truth” (1 Cor. 1:6) meaning that we cannot let our instinctive compassion run unfettered because that will end up hurting, not helping. Having established this foundation, let’s examine some of the science and policy surrounding this phenomenon. When helping hurts – medical testimony Celebration of transgenderism is seen by some as the best way to assist transgender individuals. There is no evidence, however, that the negative outcomes associated with transgender identification – including higher rates of suicide and attempted suicide, overall mortality, and need for psychiatric inpatient care – are alleviated by accepting and encouraging alternative gender identities in those with gender identity issues. The theory behind this celebratory approach to transgenderism is not scientific – it is political. Gender dysphoria is a psychological phenomenon. Gender fluidity – the idea that we can shift from one gender to another – is a concept that is socially constructed and normalizes gender dysphoria, and thereby impedes its diagnosis and treatment. To leave the dysphoria untreated is to leave struggling individuals without help, and to ignore experienced researchers in this field. Johns Hopkins Hospital was one of the first institutions in the United States to perform so-called “sex change” operations. Dr. Paul McHugh, the chief psychiatrist there in the late 1970s, commissioned a study of the sex change program. Its authors found that In a thousand subtle ways, the re-assignee has the bitter experience that he is not – and never will be – a real girl but is, at best, a convincing simulated female. Such an adjustment cannot compensate for the tragedy of having lost all chance to be male, and of having in the final analysis, no way to be really female. Some 40 years later, Dr. Sander Breiner concurs, explaining that she and her colleagues had to tell the surgeons that “the disturbed body image was not an organic at all, but was strictly a psychological problem. It could not be solved by organic manipulation (surgery, hormones)”. Many Canadian experts in the field of psychiatry, including those who regularly work with transgendered youth, have grave concerns about the politicization of this psychiatric issue. Toronto psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Berger says that some transsexuals “have claimed that they are ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ or . Scientifically, there is no such thing.” Dr. Ken Zucker sees the political approach to gender identity and fluidity as unsound. And Dr. Susan Bradley considers the political moves of some activists “disgraceful.” Dr. Paul McHugh, cited above, points out, “This is a disorder of the mind. Not a disorder of the body.” Canadian policy makers should take these warnings to heart. Apotemnophilia: a comparison Apotemnophilia is a neurological disorder characterized by an individual’s intense and long-standing desire for the amputation of a specific limb. It is a type of Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID). Some with this condition look for surgeons willing to perform an amputation of a healthy limb and some apotemnophiles have purposefully injured limbs in order to force emergency medical amputation. In 1997, Scottish doctor Robert Smith was performing these amputations before a public outcry brought them to a halt. What would the compassionate option be: to accommodate the person’s self-perception by amputating healthy limbs as Dr. Smith did, or to treat the psychological condition itself? The comparisons between gender identity disorder, anorexia, apotemnophilia and other similar conditions are clear. As Dr. McHugh says, It is not obvious how this patient’s feeling that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body differs from the feeling of a patient with anorexia that she is obese despite her emaciated, gaunt state. We don’t do liposuction on anorexics. Why amputate the genitals of these poor men? What ought we to do as a compassionate society? Alleviating the psychic distress of transgendered individuals requires nuanced answers. We hear about the high rates of suicide among the transgendered. Well, if we want to address this, we must distinguish between suicides that result from rejection by family, isolation, bullying, etc., (all of which are unacceptable) and suicides where psychiatric care is offered that seeks to resolve the dysphoria in keeping with their birth sex. This is not to say that bullying, rejection by family, isolation, etc., are not an issue for transgender people. They can be, and that type of behavior must be corrected. But the reality is that family rejection, isolation and bullying increase suicide risks for all youth, not just transgender youth. The unfortunate politicization of this issue results in the condemning of anything less than full affirmation, reinforcement and celebration of the gender incongruence in transgender youth, a “solution” that compounds the problem. Where family and community walk alongside a transgender individual with love and compassion, all with the goal of resolving the dysphoria in keeping with the patient’s birth sex as much as possible, we predict the suicide rates will dramatically decrease, particularly because other coexisting issues can also be properly treated. The way we frame our approach to this issue is of the utmost importance. A compassionate society must recognize the mental illness dimensions of gender identity disorder and reject the dangerous and unhealthy human experimentation of hormone treatments and surgical amputations and modification. A compassionate society gives space for expression of struggles and helps to answer the questions “who am I?” and “where do I belong?” without deconstructing gender. And a compassionate society affirms the inherent dignity and intrinsic value of every human being as either male or female, including those who struggle with confusion regarding their sexuality and gender. Recommendations In terms of scientific and social research, the field of gender identity is still relatively new. Unfortunately, when the State attempts a radically new policy response to transgenderism, it becomes an agent of forced social and cultural change without any standard or criterion of success, and without clearly understanding the possible outcomes. Take just one example that illustrates this concern: in an effort to accommodate transgendered children, the provincial government in Alberta wants every school to work towards eliminating gender differences not only in the classroom, but even on sports teams and in change rooms. This is not the well-reasoned, scientifically-based public policy we should expect of our representatives. Here are a few suggestions for better public policy as it relates to protecting transgendered youth and enhancing social and public policy. State actors must cease to use the phrase “sex assigned at birth” and maintain the scientifically accurate term “sex.” Sex is a biological reality. It is not assigned. To use the language of “assigned” instils a flawed assumption that any incongruence is a biological error, rather than a psychological Provinces must ban all gender reassignment surgery on children before the age of 18. Further, in light of the fact that those who have had sex reassignment surgery have higher rates of attempted suicide, surgical transition should be abandoned as a treatment option even for adults. Provinces must ban all cross-gender hormone treatment on children, including puberty suppressants, due to unacceptably high risks of depression, suicide and sterility. To chemically alter the natural and healthy development of a child with such incredible risks before the child can give their own informed consent is nothing short of child abuse. The State must provide ample room for civil society to respond to this issue. Parents, the medical profession, churches and other community groups must have the freedom to address gender dysphoria in their families and communities without threat of enforced ideological conformity by the State. Provinces must abandon laws that make gender reinforcement illegal. Such laws violate children’s rights and doctors’ conscience rights and interfere with parental decisions regarding the best interests of their children. For example, Ontario’s Bill 77 – which amended the Health Insurance Act and the Regulated Health Professions Act to prohibit services that seek to change the sexual orientation or the gender identity of patients – should be repealed. This law, and others like it, promote an ideological blindness at odds with the best interests of the patient. The terms “gender identity” and “gender expression” should be removed from law because the terms are based on subjective perceptions and cannot be objectively evaluated or measured. There is no consistent policy reason to protect transgenderism, but not protect trans-racism, trans-ageism, trans-ableism, or even trans-speciesism (all of which have manifested in recent years). Further, laws that add the terms “gender identity” and “gender expression” as protected grounds of discrimination such as those passed in Ontario and Alberta and being contemplated federally with Bill C-16 are unnecessary since all transsexuals are already protected in law, no less than anyone else. In the interim, we urge that a better balance of rights occur. In places where a reasonable expectation of privacy exists, (washrooms, women’s gyms, etc.) the biological measure of a person’s sex must be the determining factor for access. Due to the reality that there is no objective means to identify a transgendered person, this measure of preventative access can help protect against devastating consequences. Interestingly, spaces of privacy have become "gender-neutral." Adding different genders has had the pernicious effect of subtracting the difference between the sexes expected in public, and removing the privacy and the shield for natural modesty appropriate to them in certain social contexts. Conclusion Gender matters because people matter. Maleness and femaleness are distinct and complimentary realities that correspond to our biological selves and go to the core of what it means to be human. When governments ignore or undermine this reality they do so to society’s detriment. While some children struggling with gender identity disorder may need exceptional care in their various situations, the State helps no one by “breaking down gender” across the province or country. Canadian politicians must be willing to take a stand for good public policy as it relates to gender and sexuality. With sound public policy, we can help our transgendered neighbors as they navigate these troubled waters in times of social change. Out of compassion for our transgendered neighbors, inspired by our duty to love them as ourselves, we need to speak out against an ideology that harms them. It won’t be easy, but the right thing to do rarely is. This article is adapted from a fully footnoted 2016 Policy Report for Parliamentarians on Gender Identity which is available at ARPACanada.ca. This first appeared in the Nov/Dec 2016 issue....

Culture Clashes

Overpopulation is a myth, and we should have known

While overpopulation fears aren't causing the same panic they once did, this bogeyman hasn't disappeared entirely. The United Nations still has their Population Fund, advising nations on how to handle, as their mandate puts it, "population problems." While China has moved away from a One-Child-Policy – couples were fined, or even forced to have abortion if they had a second child – the government still has a Two-Child Policy. And while India's Supreme Court shut down that country's mass sterilization camps just this past year, the country is still committed to population control. So why does the myth persist? Two reasons: Most aren't familiar with the current state of the world. We don't hear about how things are improving, and how poverty is decreasing even as population is growing. Many still trust these doom and gloom prophets because they aren't familiar with the predictions that were made back in the 60's and 70s. The younger generation, especially, doesn't understand just how outrageously and how disastrously wrong these experts were. The world today Last year Japan’s birthrate fell below 1 million for the first time, while 1.3 million deaths were recorded. Since 2010 Japan’s population has shrunk by approximately 1.2 million (or roughly 1%). And they aren’t the only country shrinking; Russia has roughly 4 million less citizens than it had in 1995. We can see in Europe that population has leveled off, with deaths exceeding births for the first time in 2015, so growth is due only to immigration, not procreation. In Canada, too, we are not having children at replacement levels – whereas we would need 2.1 children born per woman to maintain a stable population (this number is slightly over 2, to account for children who don’t survive childhood), our birthrate is only 1.6. The United States, Australia, and the Western world in general are all under 2. There are problems that come with this, as an aging population doesn't have enough young people to care for it. The overall world population does continue to grow, with the growth focussed primarily in the developing world. For example, Africa's population has just passed 1.2 billion, up from roughly half that in 1990. But even as world’s population increases, we’ve seen not a shortage of food, but an increase in our ability to feed the planet. And poverty continues to decline worldwide – by one measure, extreme poverty has been more than halved over the last 30 years, even as the population has grown from 5 billion to more than 7 billion. Starvation does still occur, but that is due more to government corruption and war than to an inability to produce enough. The predictions of the past But how can things be getting better even as the world population increases? As one of the best-known population alarmists, Dr. Paul Ehrlich, noted, a finite planet cannot sustain infinite growth – at some point the Earth is going to run out of food, room, and resources. That seems to be a matter of basic math. And it's this basic math that had Ehrlich make this prediction in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..." People under 40 may not understand the scope of the disaster population alarmists were predicting. Ehrlich said England wouldn't exist by the year 2,000 – this was end-of-the-world-type rhetoric, and people were taking it seriously. This New York Times video does a good job of capturing just how scared people were. https://youtu.be/W8XOF3SOu8I Clearly Ehrlrich was wrong. But to many it is less than clear as to why. One reason is a revolution in agriculture that was deemed "the Green Revolution." Even as Ehrlich was making his doom and gloom predictions, an American innovator, Dr. Norman Borlaug, was developing new strains of wheat and new farming techniques that dramatically increased crop yield. As Henry Miller wrote in Forbes: "How successful were Borlaug’s efforts? From 1950 to 1992, the world’s grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.70 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland." Ehrlich was about as wrong as wrong can be. The world has not ended; things have dramatically improved. And lest we attribute it simply to luck – Norman Borlaug just happening to come around just when we needed him to save us from disaster – we need to view this from a Christian perspective. Ehrlich, and population alarmists viewed each new baby as being a drain on the planet. They didn't see them as human beings given a task to develop the planet. They didn't recognize that while each human being does come with a mouth that needs to be fed, we are also gifted by our Creator with a brain, and with two hands, with which we can produce. We not only consume, we create (and in doing so reflect our Creator God). That's how more people can mean more, not less, resources - that's why food production has gone up, and poverty down, even as population continues to rise. Not just wrong but dangerous Overpopulation alarmism isn't just wrong, it's dangerous. This end-of-the-world rhetoric had a role in the Roe vs. Wade decision which legalized abortion in America. It has been used to justify government-funded abortion, forced sterilizations, and actions like China’s One-Child Policy, and now Two-Child Policy, under which tens of millions of Chinese babies have been aborted, many against their parents' wishes. Meanwhile, in Africa, where the population is growing, the first annual Africa-China Conference on Population and Development was just held in Kenya and hosted by the Chinese government and the United Nations Population Fund. Mercatornet.com’s Shannon Roberts shared how some of the speakers pointed to China’s coercive population controls as worthy of imitation. And at least one Kenyan media outlet thought that wasn’t such a bad idea. The Daily Nation commented: “With a controlled population, the Chinese economy boomed, benefiting from cheap labour from its many people and rising to be the second largest after the United States. Should Kenyans do the same?” Population controls are not just a problem of the past – they exist and are still being advocated for today. That's why we need to bury the overpopulation bogeyman once and for all, before it kills millions more. Christians falling short The Bible doesn't speak to all issues with the same degree of clarity. But when it comes to the population alarmism, God couldn’t be clearer: children are not a curse to be avoided but a blessing to be received (Gen. 1:28; 9:1, 9:7, Prov. 17:6, Ps. 127:3-5, Ps. 113:9, etc.). Back already in the 1960s Christians could have spoken out against overpopulation alarmism, based on the clarity of these texts. And some did. But the Church is so often impacted by what we hear from the world around us. We let ourselves be muted, we let ourselves become uncertain. We start to ask, "Did God really say?" And then, like the watchman on the wall who failed to give warning (Ez. 33:6) we become responsible for the deaths we might have been able to prevent, if we'd only spoken out. It's back? While the overpopulation hysteria has died down in recent years, this bogeyman is primed for a resurrection. Global warming and concerns about CO2 emissions have some questioning "Should we be having kids in the age of climate change?" The argument, so it goes, is that people can't help but have some sort of carbon footprint, so the only sure way of reducing carbon emissions is to have less people on the planet. Once again we are being urged to have "one and be done." Once again children are being portrayed as a problem rather than as a blessing. The Bible doesn't address climate change as clearly as it does overpopulation alarmism, but what we can be certain of is this: obedience to God is not going to destroy our planet. While obeying God doesn't always lead to a smooth life for Christians here on Earth – following God can lead to a loss of friends, or business opportunities, or result in persecution – when we as a society turn to God then prosperity follows. Then we end slavery, open hospitals, develop Science, create industry. This obedience doesn't even need to be of the heart-felt sort to still reap benefits – even unbelievers, when they follow God's commands for marriage, sex, and parenting will have better results (for a book-length treatment of this thought, see Vishal Mangalwadi's The Book That Made Your World). Our disobedience can be destructive – our self-centeredness, greed, jealousy, and hatred can cause real harm. But not our obedience. That's why the begetting of many children is not something we need feel guilty about, or refrain from, out of concern for the climate. We can be certain that the world’s doom will not be caused by us, in obedience, listening to God and having children. God has spoken out against overpopulation alarmism, so we need to. The next time you hear someone talking about overpopulation, point them to the Bible and share how spectacularly incorrect all the doom and gloom predictions have been. We need to bury this bogeyman....

Pornography

Is Porn more like heroin, or driving a car?

Explaining why it's evil to our non-Christians friends ***** In recent weeks, I’ve come across what seems like a multitude of articles on the subject of pornography, especially articles focused on the fact that more and more teenagers and children are now viewing pornography on a regular basis. The latest piece to catch my eye came from Rod Dreher on The American Conservative website. At one point, Mr. Dreher writes a paragraph in which you can almost hear him weep in sorrow as you read it: “This society has a death wish. I wish I had some idea how it could be saved. What concerns me most of all right now is the horrifying complicity of conservative, even conservative Christian, parents in the spiritual, moral, and emotional ruin of their children and of their moral ecology because they, the parents, are too damn afraid to say no, my kids will not have a smartphone, I don’t care what they and society think of me.” I hope that readers will share his sorrow, and that it might induce parents who have perhaps been blasé to take a long, hard look at their situation and take whatever action they can to protect their children’s innocence. The issue of pornography is a difficult one to even talk about, but we must. I want to consider the societal phenomenon, addressing what I believe is one major way we are being deceived, and how we can communicate the nature of that deception to our non-Christian friends and neighbors. It’s not just a problem for children I would assume that all Christians reading this know instinctively that pornography is wrong. At the same time, I am also aware that we can often fall into the world’s way of thinking on issues, and that this can mean that we accept its solutions to problems and fail to see the real issue. One of the ways we are doing this around pornography is increasingly seeing the major problem as being its spread to children, rather than pornography itself. Of course the spread to children is a massive problem, but it is not the problem. Here’s an example: an article by Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic quotes one of the world’s biggest “porn stars” expressing concern that we’re not doing enough to stop pornography getting in front of children. Yet the same article states that “accessing hard core porn is (properly) legal.” This now seems to be the default position: pornography is fine for adults, but we just need to keep it from children. Now it is of course true that pornography filtering down to children is a very great evil. Young minds are more susceptible to habit-forming from new stimuli in ways which adult minds are perhaps not. Nevertheless, if we concentrate all our efforts on simply stopping pornography getting into the hands of children, we miss the point completely. For the problem is not primarily that pornography is falling into the hands of children, but rather that as a society we have opened the floodgates to allow porn in and normalized it. It is absurd to think that it is possible to normalize something like this, and for it not to filter down to children. Children, by their very nature, want to grow up to be adults, and they often want to do adult things before their time. So if we have largely normalized pornography amongst adults – and we have – then no amount of paywalls and banning of smartphones or anything else is going to make much difference. We have become a pornographic society, and children, who aspire to do what adults do, will generally find ways of getting their hands on it by hook or by crook (though of course responsible parents will take as much action as they can to prevent their children coming into contact with it). Drugs? Or driving? Look at it like this. There are two types of activity that adults seek to protect children from. First, there are perfectly good activities that we want them to grow up into, but for which they need to come of age before we allow it. For instance, driving a car. Then there are activities which are bad in and of themselves, and which we try to protect them from not just because they aren’t old enough to do them, but because we don’t ever want them to do them. Taking heroin would fall into this category. So which category does porn fit into? Is it like driving? Or is it like heroin? Is it something a child should one day be able to do, only not just now? Or is it like heroin; something that no sane parent would ever want their children to get into, no matter how old? If our culture puts it in the same category as driving a car, something to be avoided as a child, but something that is perfectly normal once you turn a certain age, then it can be safely said that we have lost all moral compass and are quite sick. If, on the other hand, we see it in the same category as heroin, then at least we would be acknowledging it as a problem to be dealt with. But why don’t we want kids seeing it? Sadly, I would say that we have moved in the last ten years from treating it in the heroin category to the driving category. “We don’t want you to touch it now, but of course there will come a time when it becomes your right to consume as much of it as you like,” is essentially the message. And yet the schizophrenic nature of this is obvious when you think about why it is we don’t want children seeing it. Isn’t it because we know it pollutes their minds? Isn’t it because we instinctively know that it demeans and degrades them? Isn’t it because we are well aware that it will give them a terribly unhealthy and warped view of the opposite sex? Of course it is, but are we really naïve enough to think that it doesn’t have the same sorts of effects on adults? But they’re adults, and we can’t stop their rights, can we? And, of course, if we did enact a law that bans it all, such a law at the point we currently find ourselves at would be as effective as King Canute commanding the sea to go back. What I am suggesting is that our culture urgently needs to stop looking at the main problem as being one of trying to prevent pornography falling into the hands of children. That is only byproduct of the much larger problem society needs to acknowledge: the normalization of pornography among adults. Rob Slane is the author of “A Christian and Unbeliever Discuss: Life, the Universe and Everything.” A version of this article first appeared on SamaritanMinistries.org and is reprinted here with the author’s permission....

Science - Creation/Evolution

Not all humility is humble

John Marks Templeton wanted Christians to be “humble” about the Bible and look to Science for direction. And his Foundation is handing out millions to groups trying to mesh Science with Religion. ***** Sir John Marks Templeton (1912-2008) is best known as the creator of the Templeton Growth Fund, an investment fund established in 1954, which made him a very wealthy man. Two years before his death in 2008, Templeton found himself in 129th place on the Sunday Times' "Rich List" of the wealthiest Brits. But Templeton was not only an investor and moneymaker; he was also well-known as a philanthropist, through the work of his charitable organization, the Templeton Foundation. Established in 1987, the $3 billion Templeton Foundation offers over $70 million worth of research grants each year. The Foundation is currently headed by Templeton's daughter, Heather Templeton Dill, and it is an important source of funding for organizations that include the BioLogos Foundation and the Canadian Scientific and Christian Affiliation. One of the Templeton Foundation's purposes is to advance what Templeton called "humility-in-theology." This was the subject of his book, published in 2000, Possibilities For Over One Hundredfold More Spiritual Information: The Humble Approach in Theology and Science. Templeton’s humility How would this 100-fold increase in spiritual knowledge happen? He thought we would get it: “…every two centuries…by encouraging people of all religions to become enthusiastic (rather than resistant) to new additional spiritual information, especially through science research, to supplement the wonderful ancient scriptures" (p. 180). "Humility" was an important word for Sir John Templeton, as can be seen from the title of this book, as well as throughout its pages. Templeton's philosophy of humility, and the way it shaped his thinking and his philanthropically efforts, is exemplified in the following extended quotations. In order to present these quotations in context, and in an effort to avoid misrepresentation of Templeton's message, I present this (rather lengthy) representative sample of his thoughts (I must note that throughout his writings, Templeton writes the word "god" without capitalizing the G, so this is not an error in transcription, and likely reflects Templeton's philosophy): 1. Man isn’t that special "Although we seem to be the most sophisticated species at present on our planet, perhaps we should not think of our place as the end of cosmogenesis. Should we resist the pride that might tempt us to think that we are the final goal of creation? Possibly, we can become servants of creation or even helpers in divine creativity. Possibly, we are a new beginning, the first creatures in the history of life on earth to participate consciously in the ongoing creative process" (p. 41). 2. Creeds restrict progress "Do theologians need to be humble and open-minded? Leaders may be tempted to think that conformity and control are required for the orderliness of religion and for faithfulness. Most religions have developed creeds, doctrines, dogmas, liturgy and hierarchies of laypeople and clergy. Order and tradition of course do help groups to live as an organization of people whose ideals are compatible and link together the generations in mutual ideals. However, because of a lack of humility, have we observed throughout the history of most religions a tendency for dogma or hierarchy to stifle progress? If the members and clergy become more humble, could they re-form dogma in a more open-minded and inquiring way as a beginning point for continual improvements?" (p. 41). 3. We should humor theologians and rely on the sciences "Let none of us have any quarrel with any theologian. Let us happily admit that his or her concepts and doctrines may be right. But let us listen most carefully to any theologian who is humble enough to admit also that he may be wrong - or at least that the door to great insights by others is not closed. Let us seek to learn from each other. Let us try to use sciences to help verify or falsify new concepts. Let us always keep trying many methods to discover over 100 fold more about divinity" (p.50). 4. We can be wrong, so we should be humble about everything "Egotism has been a major cause of many mistaken notions in the past. Egotism caused men to think that the stars and the sun revolved around them... that mankind was as old as the universe. Egotism is still our worst enemy. In fact, things are still not what they seem. Only by becoming humble can we learn more... Are those who believe only what they see pitifully self-centred and lacking in humility?" (p. 59). Humble to the point of heresy So where did this understanding of "humility" lead Sir John Templeton? To ideas such as these: "Many religious concepts come directly or indirectly from ancient scriptures. An unavoidable limitation of utilizing such texts as a total basis for contemporary faith is that they were written within a context which may no longer be appropriate for ours today. Recent sciences reveal a universe billions of times larger and older and more complex than the one conceived by the ancients. The creative challenge is to enrich understanding and appreciation for the old with a welcoming of concepts and perspectives which may represent truly new insights and creative improvements, which can leverage the power of the past into a forward-looking adventure of learning more and more about the wonders of god and his purposes through ongoing creativity. Can it be an inspiring challenge to read the Bible in this way, which can help each generation of god’s people to search for far more of divine realities than can ever be contained in the language and thought patterns of any age? Should we not be able to give a fuller and wider interpretation of divine revelation today, now that the range of our understanding of the universe has been so vastly enlarged? Why should we often try to express spiritual truths using obsolete words, limited concepts and ancient thought patterns? If some scholars think that Jesus himself wrote nothing, could this suggest that what he had to teach should not be frozen into words, even in his own age? Thus, he did not limit for future generations their range of spiritual concepts and research" (p. 47-48). Ideas have consequences. While Templeton was an elder in a Presbyterian congregation (Presbyterian Church - USA), and even sat on the Board of Princeton Theological Seminary, he did not "limit" himself to the doctrines of orthodox Christianity. His "humble approach" led him to declare, "I have no quarrel with what I learned in the Presbyterian Church. I am still an enthusiastic Christian," and then to ask, "But why shouldn't I try to learn more? Why shouldn't I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn't I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more." The sad fact is, however much one claims to be "an enthusiastic Christian," believing that the teachings of religions that deny Christ can be positively appropriated by a Christian makes one, for all intents and purposes, anything but. And this unfortunate truth is also clearly revealed in Templeton's book. While Templeton denied being a pantheist (one who believes that the universe is God, and God is the universe), his understanding of the nature of God can only be described as a form of panentheism, which declares that God and the universe are distinct, but that the world is "in" God. Or as Templeton wrote: "Traditional pantheism can serve a useful purpose in suggesting the co-terminacy of spirit and matter and a personal relationship between the creator and creation. But it may not be compatible with the Christian concept of a personal god vastly greater than material things and who loves all of us and numbers the hairs of our heads. Profound mutual indwelling between man and divinity may be better stated by the Unity School of Christianity, 'God is all of me: and I am a little part of him.' Such a notion implies an inseparable relationship between god and us. As even 'a little part of him,' we may realize the mutual unity of god and his creation. We may conceive that our own divinity may arise from something more profound that merely being 'god's children' or being 'made in his image'" (p. 86). True humility is submitting to God’s Word At this point, it must be said that, for all his self-proclaimed "humility," Templeton's foundational beliefs are, in Christian perspective, anything but humble. True humility is expressed in Psalm 8: "O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens... When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man, that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?" (Ps. 8:1,3, ESV). True humility is expressed in humble submission to the LORD, the Creator, who has revealed himself clearly and completely in his Word - those "ancient Scriptures" which we humans have not outgrown, or surpassed, with all of our scientific understanding. True humility is acknowledging our origins as the direct creation of God, acknowledging the reality of the Fall into sin, and its enduring impact on humanity and all of creation, God's provision of a Way of salvation, and the fact that we can do nothing in ourselves to merit that salvation. We are created in God's image. That image has been badly marred by sin. But in Christ, that image is being restored among God's people. True humility is submitting ourselves to Jesus Christ, who declared that he, and only he, is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Templeton's "humility" is, at bottom, and however unwittingly, the height of human arrogance and pride in disguise. In refusing to submit to God's perfect Word, Templeton set a man on the throne in God's place. And now, through the work of his Foundation, Templeton's utopian vision for human society, based in anything but the Word of God, is continuing to be spread. Templeton’s vision looks to science to show the way Templeton foresaw a "glorious" future, and thanks to his great financial savvy, his legacy lives on. His Foundation has three billion dollars in its reserve fund, and that money is being spent to promote that legacy, with a very definite, and very long-term, goal in mind. Templeton's vision of the future is summed up in two citations in his book. He first cites Marceline Bradford: "...Millions of intellectuals the world over have become disenchanted with backward-looking religious institutions... In order to recapture the great thinking minds of the world, the clergy must turn their heads 180 degrees from past to future. With feet planted squarely in the present and eyes directed to the future, leaders can find factual bases in science for viable, solid, dynamic doctrines. For science and rationality are enemies not of religion - only of dogmatism" (p. 47). Next, he cites Ralph Wendell Burhoe, who was awarded the Templeton Prize in 1980: "It is still my bet that at several points in the next few years and decades the traditional theological and religious communities will find the scientific revelations a gold mine, and that by early in the third millennium A.D. a fantastic revitalization and universalization of religion will sweep the world. The ecumenical power will come from a universalized and credible theology and related religious practices, not from the politics of dying institutions seeking strength in pooling their weaknesses. I cannot imagine a more important bonanza for theologians and the future of religion than the information lode revealed by the scientific community... It provides us with a clear connection between human values, including our highest religious values, and the cosmic scheme of things. My prophecy, then, is that God talk, talk about the supreme determiner of human destiny, will in the next century increasingly be fostered by the scientific community" (p. 103). His favorite charities In the conclusion of his book, Templeton lists a number of the "founder's favorite charities," which also provides real insight into Templeton's agenda. Some we might find agreeable. He is interested in the promotion of entrepreneurship, and the enhancement of individual freedom and free markets. Others included supporting research and publications in genetics; supporting education and other help in voluntary family planning; supporting character development research, and also: "Supporting the publication and dissemination throughout the world of the religious teachings of the Unity School of Christianity of Unity Village, the Association of Unity Churches and of closely similar organizations, provided that major support for such organizations shall continue only so long as the Trustees of the Foundation... determine that such organizations adhere to the concepts of: usually pioneering in religion and theology with little restrictive creed, usually teaching that god may be all of reality and man only a tiny part of god and generally accentuating the positive ideas and attitudes and avoiding the negative" (p. 183). With friends like these Such were the goals of Sir John Marks Templeton, and such are the goals of his foundation. A serious examination of Templeton's guiding philosophy, and the philosophy of the Templeton Foundation, in the light of Scriptural principles, should lead us to a sense of genuine concern about any organization that the Foundation chooses to support financially. And it should lead us to question the ultimate motivation behind this support, and the fruits that this foundation is bearing in the numerous organizations that receive its funding. "The Humble Approach" of Sir John Marks Templeton has absolutely nothing in common with the genuinely humble approach of the Lord Jesus Christ. Templeton’s utopian vision has nothing in common with the eschatological vision of God's Word. Follow the money Now, those who receive large amounts of financial support from the Templeton Foundation may do so "with no strings attached," and perhaps some recipients may be unaware of the totality of the Foundation's founder's spiritual vision. But could it be that they are unwitting victims of a larger, and more nefarious, agenda, which has at its base a desire to proclaim a different gospel, by denying the explicit teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ and his exclusive claims? We are warned against keeping company with the wicked (1 Cor. 15:33, Psalm 1:1, Prov. 13:20) and it doesn’t seem that much of an extension to think how this applies to accepting funding from a group with a wicked agenda. Science, science, and more science A little research shows the incredible reach that the Foundation's money has. And an examination of the nature of the grants that the Foundation provides, as well as the purpose behind these grants, is telling indeed. One of the Foundation's main funding areas is "public engagement," and a representative sample of grants (ranging from tens of thousands to millions of dollars) clearly shows the Foundation's goals. Here is a small sample of grants that have been made over the past three years: Vatican Observatory Foundation - "Building a bridge between faith and astronomy" John Carroll University - "Integrating science into college and pre-theology programs in U.S. Roman Catholic seminaries" Union Theological Seminary - "Project to develop a spiritual worldview compatible with and informed by science" Cambridge Muslim College - "Developing religious leaders with scientific awareness" American Association for the Advancement of Science - "Engaging scientists in the science and religion dialogue" Luther Seminary - "Science for youth ministry: The plausibility of transcendence" Christianity Today - "Building an audience for science and faith" Other grants have been made to train Roman Catholic teachers and preachers to engage the dialogue between science and religion, to promote science engagement in rabbinic training, and to measure science engagement in Roman Catholic high schools and seminaries. Further investigation in the nature and purpose of these grants reveals a common thread. For example, La Jolla Presbyterian Church received a grant from the Templeton Foundation for a program that "seeks to engage young adults (college and post-graduate) in a discussion of science and faith with leading scientists who are Christians." The McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame University received a $1.675 million grant for their Science and Religion Initiative, which "seeks to frame science education within the broader context of Catholic theology." According to the Institute's director, "The perceived conflict between science and religion is one of the main reasons young people say they leave the Catholic church... this grant allows us to address this misperceptions and help high school teachers create pedagogues that show that science and religion - far from being incompatible - are partners in the search for truth." Multnomah Biblical Seminary has received a Templeton grant (as well as a grant from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, itself supported by the Templeton Foundation), to "equip pastoral studies majors to become more effective in engaging our scientific age." Among a number of other Christian theologians, Niels Henrik Gregersen, professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Copenhagen, received a Templeton research grant for his work on the constructive interface between science and religion. Another recent recipient of the Templeton Foundation's largesse is Regent College in Vancouver, which this year received a grant funding a program called "Re-faithing Science at Regent College." The program will seek, over the next two years, to address this question: "How can the relationship between Christian faith and scientific endeavour be conceptualized and communicated in a way that effectively engages diverse audiences?" The detailed description of this particular grant on the Templeton Foundation website is insightful: "Sir John Templeton recognized that science and spirituality should be neither sealed in separate boxes nor positioned at opposite ends of a battlefield, yet even a cursory glance at contemporary culture reveals that the supposed incompatibility and even hostility between faith and science is something of a truism in much of Western society. Regent College believes that this widespread perception is a significant threat to the development of theology and science alike, as well as to the spiritual and intellectual flourishing of countless individuals." So, utilizing Templeton's funds, Regent College's project team will "propose an alternative model for the relationship between faith and science: mutual coinherence, or existence within one another." Their goal is to communicate this proposal "in an accessible form" that will encourage and enable further exploration of science, theology, and their interaction, using academic publications, public lectures, graduate-level courses, and an online presence, to "target different audiences with the same basic narrative, a story of one world, created by one God, who can be known and worshipped through both theology and science - and who is best known and best worshipped when theology and science work together." Science in the driver’s seat What can we learn from all of this? If we were unaware of the foundational principles behind the Templeton Foundation, perhaps all of this would appear to be somewhat innocuous. After all, who could argue against Christians being involved in the sciences? Why oppose efforts aimed at developing "scientific awareness"? Certainly we shouldn't want to bury our heads in the sand, and ignore what the sciences have to offer, as if science were somehow "off-limits" to the faithful Christian, should we? But remember this important fact: the Templeton Foundation has a very clear agenda – a utopian, panentheistic philosophy that has an ecumenical goal of uniting the religions of the world around a synthesis of "science" and religion, with "science" seated firmly in the driver's seat in this relationship. This agenda is being promoted by the lavish dispersal of funds to Islamic, Roman Catholic, Jewish, and other religious organizations, including, sadly, many evangelical Christian groups, many of which are making their influence felt in Reformed churches as well. Standing in Templeton’s way Two popular sayings come to mind: "Follow the money," and "He who pays the piper calls the tune." The money trail leads us to Sir John Marks Templeton. And clearly, Templeton's agenda is making headway in many places, although it is also clear that this agenda faces many obstacles. 1. Reluctance among religious leaders First of all, there is reluctance to accept the premises of this movement among religious organizations, as can be seen from the numerous grants being made to support efforts to decrease the resistance of religious leaders and members of religious groups, including evangelical Christians, to this religious/scientific paradigm. But that reluctance is being overcome, as the Templeton agenda makes inroads through a judicious use of funding. Efforts to reach youth, and those who teach the young, are effective means of dissemination for any propaganda effort, whether political, cultural, or religious in nature. Young people are more easily influenced, and they are most definitely being targeted, in a well-funded, concerted effort. 2. Reluctance among unbelieving scientists But there is also resistance from the other side - from unbelieving scientists who reject all religion, any idea of transcendence, and the idea that anything exists beyond the physical. This group is also being addressed by the outreach efforts of the Templeton Foundation, as it works toward fulfilling its long-term goals. Conclusion A spiritual war is being waged against God's people, using that ancient question, "Has God really said?" This is not novel; every generation of Christians faces this reality, in different ways at different times in history. The battle is being played out in a world in which money talks, and a lot of money talks loudly. We cannot afford to be naive on this issue. That’s why we need to be on our guard against the influence of the Templeton Foundation's money, even if it's being spent by organizations that may have been respected among us. That money is being spent to promote an agenda that is radically different from the agenda of God's kingdom. Our allegiance to the One True God must lead us to reject alliances with organizations like the Templeton Foundation, whose agenda is completely incompatible with that of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Rev. Jim Witteveen also blogs at CreationWithoutCompromise.com where this article first appeared in two parts....

Humor

Simply and truly

There once was a man whose parents had given him the highly unusual name of “Amazing” when he was born. They gave him the name hoping th...

Assorted

To appear before the Lord

A young lawyer had a dream. He found himself one morning before a judge at court in a T-shirt and crumpled shorts. The judge asked him how he came to ...

Media bias

Don’t watch the news, read it!

This first appeared in Reformed Perspective in 2000, and yet the thesis of this article is just as relevant for today's Internet Age, as entertainme...

Media bias

Don’t read the news, read a book!

No, you’re not paranoid, the media really is out to get Christians. In his book How the News Makes Us Dumb, C. John Sommerville argues that news by...

Transgenderism

You think feelings can redefine reality? What if I told you I feel like they don’t?

There’s a special sort of tyranny at work these days – it is the sort that not only ignore reality itself, but demands that everyone else do so too…or else. There are many examples of this. For instance: there is the idea that there really are no differences between men and women, and that both can perform all tasks to the same degree. there is an idea that the unborn only become human beings when the mother decides they are human beings. there is the idea that marriage is something that can take place between two men or two women. there is the idea that a person who was born biologically male can transition to become female, and vice versa. How they’re pulling off this trick Transgenderism offers a good case in point. Take the recent Gender Identity Guidance issued by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. According to Eugene Volokh, writing in the Washington Post: “Under Massachusetts law, refusing to use a transgender person’s preferred pronoun would be punishable discrimination. (At least this is true of “he” or “she” — I saw nothing in the document about “ze” and other newly made-up pronouns.) The Massachusetts document … makes that clear in the employment context, and it also makes clear that the antidiscrimination law rules apply to places of public accommodations (including churches, in “secular events” “open to the public”) just as much as to employment.” Now, let’s notice the sleight of hand that has taken place in the whole transgender issue. Take the imaginary case of Bob, who is transitioning to become Carol. He is objectively male, right? That is his factual, actual biological sex. By which I mean that at some point in the past, the midwife present at his birth pronounced him to be a boy, and we can assume that she made this assessment on the basis of objective data, rather than on a personal whim. Indeed, had she pronounced Bob to be a girl, or even non-gender specific, despite the clear evidence to the contrary, Bob’s parents would no doubt have corrected her and, had she still insisted on ignoring the evidence, made a complaint. But at some point after that, Bob came to believe that the objective data was wrong. So he chose to undergo a process of bodily mutilation. Note, however, that the objective data was not wrong. How could it be? It is objective, including physically provable characteristics and XY chromosomes. As a report by two American College of Pediatricians doctors put it: “Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of male and female, respectively – not genetic markers of disorder.” They go on to say that: “No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one.” In other words, while we can state with absolute certainty that biological sex is a demonstrably objective reality, Bob’s decision to transition away is based on a subjective feeling. Indeed, the very fact that Bob needs surgery to make the transition rather proves the point. (As an aside, those arguing for transgenderism need to answer the question of why the body, which is objectively one thing or the other, should be made to conform to a subjective feeling of the mind, rather than the other way around.) But having made this demonstrably feelings-based decision, what happens next? Having taken a decision which is contrary to objective reality, Bob now not only identifies as a sex which is opposite to his objective biological one, but now expects everyone else to accept his feelings as having the power to redefine objective reality. Do you see what has happened? We’ve gone through four stages: Objective reality Denial of objective reality The presentation of a subjective experience The insistence that this new subjective experience is now objective truth to be assented to and obeyed Oh and there is now a fifth stage, which is that if we don’t play along, and also pretend that feelings can redefine reality, we get a label pinned to us – hater, transphobe, bigot etc – and possibly accused of a “hate crime.” If feelings beat facts… Here are a couple of questions that we should be asking those who insist on this: If someone acts contrary to objective reality, what grounds do they then have for insisting that everyone else treat their feelings as objectively true facts? If someone chooses to make their identity a matter of feelings, what grounds do they have for saying that the rest of us cannot do the same, and call them “him” or “her” depending on how we feel? The answer to both these questions is that they have no grounds whatsoever. Having denied objective reality in favor of subjective feelings, they have no grounds to then demand that we all accept their subjective feelings as being objective facts. Secondly, having insisted on their own subjective experience as being the ultimate authority, they have no grounds for denying anyone else the same right to exercise their subjective feelings on the subject. So if someone believes Bob to be a box of breakfast cereal, for instance, I can say that they are wrong, and I can do so on the basis that the objective data shows clearly that Bob is not a box of breakfast cereal, but rather a human being. However, if Bob tries to deny someone the right to believe and openly state that he is a box of breakfast cereal, this flies in the face of the logic he used in the first place to proclaim against his own objective biological sex. Who knows – perhaps denying people their subjective rights to call other people boxes of breakfast cereal might even be a new hate crime. Bransphobia? It’s not going to get better soon And yet despite having no grounds to insist on these things, they are insisting on it in increasingly vitriolic tones, and with the threat of the law behind them. This is how the new sort of tyranny works. It tears up objective reality, then imposes a new subjectivity in its place. But it doesn’t stop there. It then insists that society embraces that subjectivity as now being objectively true, and censure, shout down, and even prosecute those who refuse to play ball. The bad news is that things aren’t going to get better anytime soon. Those who are busy denying reality as God has given it and defined it, are too invested in their delusions to give them up. They aren’t suddenly going to say, “Hey, I guess it is really rather stupid to insist that there are no differences between men and women, or that two men can marry.” No, they will double down, and triple down on it for the foreseeable future. And as they do, there will come more assaults on objective reality, more attempts to force others to embrace their delusion, and more efforts to get us all to put our rubber stamp of approval on this folly. Those who dissent will be stigmatized, penalized and coerced into silence. This is what this newest sort of tyranny does. Our hope and our response? But the good news? It is that the Triune God of Heaven and Earth – not these tyrants – is actually the final arbiter of what is real and what is true, and He will not allow this situation to go on indefinitely. It’s his world and his reality, and He will at some point overthrow those who attempt to overthrow his order. Time and time throughout history, He has risen up to overthrow his enemies and deliver his people. And He will do so again. However, these deliverances ordinarily come when his people truly “cry out to the Lord.” So let me finish up by asking a very searching question. I recently held a discussion group with some Christian friends, where I covered a little of the history of how we ended up with transgenderism, same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, family breakdown, tolerance and diversity, sex education, egalitarianism, feminism, “homophobia” and “hate” crimes. Having gone through it all, and having unanimously agreed that it was all quite mad and more than a little disquieting, I asked the following question: “Put your hand up if you are praying fervently to the Triune God on a regular basis to come and save us and our culture from this mess.” No hands went up. How about you? Rob Slane is the author of “A Christian & an Unbeliever Discuss: Life, the Universe & Everything” which is available at Amazon.ca here and Amazon.com here....

Transgenderism

A is A…except when it wants to be S?

The transsexual debate and the death of logic “Hi A. It is A, isn’t it? I hardly recognized you there. It’s B. Remember me? How are you doing?” “I’m fine. Well I’m … well it’s just … I’m …” “What is it A? Is something the matter? You don’t look quite yourself.” “Look, B. There’s something I need you to know. I’m no longer known as A.” “What do you mean you’re no longer known as A, A?” “I mean I no longer identify as A. In fact, from now on I’d like you to call me S.” “S?” “Yes. S.” “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.” “Look, it’s quite simple. You’ve always known me as A, and all my life everyone told me I was A. But recently I started to question whether that’s really who I am. And the more I questioned it, the more I realized I was just the victim of social conditioning and prejudice. To put it bluntly, I’ve been brainwashed into thinking that I’m A.” “Social conditioning? Brainwashing? But A, you are A. How could you be anything else? Remember the first rule of logic: A = A and so A can’t = non-A.” “Well I simply don’t agree. In fact I believe that’s nothing but an outdated social construct.” “Social construct? But it’s an obvious truth. And it’s true for all times and all places.” “There’s nothing obvious about it whatsoever, and frankly I’m amazed that anyone living in our post-modern culture could still think it is.” “Ah, I thought as much. You’ve been listening to the post-modernists haven’t you? Well frankly I don’t much care what they say about it. It’s self-evidently true that A = A and there’s an end to it.” Do feelings make the man? “You know, B, I had always thought of you as a fairly open-minded letter. But I’m beginning to detect a quite shocking level of intolerance in you. Listen. Maybe this will persuade you. All my life I’ve had this nagging suspicion that I might be different. I’ve never much liked the way I look. That silly pointy bit at the top and that even sillier horizontal bar in the middle. And that’s just the capital “me.” Don’t get me started on the little “me”! But I’ve always admired S. Beautiful curvy letter is S. Well thankfully we’ve moved on from outmoded stereotypes that would have meant that I stayed an S trapped inside an A’s body, and I can now be any letter I want.” If gender, why not species? “But you can’t be an S. Surely you can see that?” “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever come across such a shocking level of bigotry. Why can’t I be another letter entirely, if I want to? Who are you to say what I can and can’t be?” “Why stop at a letter then? Maybe you could identify as a number. I could call you 1. Or 19 if you like. Or maybe even a duck.” “Adding sarcasm to hate speech doesn’t make it any less hateful.” “Hate speech? I said nothing hateful. But A, do you not see what will happen all if you insist on calling yourself S?” “Such as?” You already have a role to fill “Well, I don’t know how we’d get along without an A. I mean, imagine if we tried driving to Alberta without you.” “What do you mean?” “Ever tried driving to Slberts? And what about that fellow who got caught up in the tree after trying to topple his father from the throne. Now what was his name?” “Absalom?” “No. Sbsslom I think it was. Not to mention what we’ll do with the poor old SSrdvsrk. Can’t you see how ridiculous it all is?” “Well I’m not going to stand here all day being lectured by someone who is clearly a Hater and a Transletterphobe.” “You mean ‘someone who is clesrly s Hster snd s Trsnsletterphobe’? You see, all you’ve succeeded in doing by refusing to abide by the simple truth that you are A and that you cannot therefore = non-A is to sow chaos and confusion. Imagine what will happen if T wants to become C, or Y wants to become X.” “As it happens, Y is already well on her way to becoming X thank you very much. She’s a chromosome, you see. She used to be male but now identifies as X. And as for X, he’s sometimes identifying as Y. You have a problem with that?” “Well yes, actually. It’s just a clear denial of objective reality.” “Objective reality? Hah! What you need to realize is that every letter has the right to identify as whichever letter they want, and every other letter ought to respect their feelings.” Why should your feelings win? “Hmm! Fair enough. You win. I will no longer identify you as A.” “Good. Thank you.” “Instead, I shall now identify you as H.” “H? But I just told you I identify you as S, didn’t I.” “Yes you did, but your basis for doing so was based firstly on a denial of objective reality, and then on making subjective opinions and feelings your standard. And, I might add, you said we all have to respect that. Well okay, in my subjective opinion, I no longer identify you as A, or indeed as S, but as H. Are you prepared to respect that?” “But I’m S and you have no right to call me H.” “No right? So let me get this straight. You decree that there is no such thing as objective reality (A = A) and that your feelings are king. Then you insist that I accept your definition as truth and call me a hater, a bigot and a phobe if I don’t. So what you have done is to use your subjective feelings to create your own new ‘objective reality’ and insist that I accept it. Well sorry, I refuse. Two can play at that game and I say you’re an H! Now you’re not going to be a Transletterphobe, a bigot, and a hater and deny me my rights are you? Or is subjectivism taken to its logical conclusion as hard for you to bear as it is for me?” Postscript After this exchange the letter B was hauled off for tolerance training where he is learning that the right to define objective truth is the sole preserve of the Cultural Marxists who denied it in the first place. Rob Slane is the author of "A Christian & an Unbeliever Discuss: Life, the Universe & Everything" which is available at Amazon.ca here and Amazon.com here....

Christian education, Indigenous peoples

No other gods

The Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action #64 is a challenge to Christian churches and schools… and the First Commandment **** Last year Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published its final report as well an accompanying document with 94 “calls to action.” The TRC report resulted from over seven years of hearing abuse allegations from aboriginal Canadians who had been students in the country’s Indian residential schools (which operated from the 1870s until the last school closed in 1996). The exact extent of the abuse that took place may never be known because the Commission heard complaints but had no power to compel testimony. That meant abuse claims could be heard, but not fully investigated – the accused individuals were never brought forward to either answer for or defend their actions. When the TRC released their 94 calls to action the Liberal Party quickly promised to implement every one of them, and reaffirmed this promise after forming the government of Canada. Promoting truth and reconciliation sounds noble, but the conclusions of this report are radical, promoting one culture and religion over all others. This article will limit its focus to a key recommendation that pertain directly to Christian churches and schools. Requiring native spirituality at school Because some of the abuse occurred at Christian residential schools, some of the report’s calls to action were directed towards Christian schools and the churches associated with them today. Call to action #64 states: "We call upon all levels of government that provide public funds to denominational schools to require such schools to provide an education on comparative religious studies which must include a segment on Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and practices developed in collaboration with Aboriginal elders." By “denominational” schools, the report is likely targeting all religious schools, regardless of their formal connection to specific church denominations. Forcing religious schools to promote aboriginal spirituality, even if such spirituality violates the Christian faith, flows from a consistent message in the TRC report that requires churches and religious institutions to “affirm Indigenous spirituality in its own right.” These institutions are being called on to “formally recognize Indigenous spirituality as a valid form of worship that is equal to their own.” Freedom of religion should mean being free from State coercion If someone were to ask me, or the Christian school I’m a member of, to teach that aboriginal spiritual beliefs are equal to my own Reformed Christian faith, I would respectfully point out to them that they are wrong and there is no way I will comply. Doing so violates the first commandment – it is idolatry. Pagan aboriginal spirituality has little in common with the gospel of Jesus Christ and I’m not going to confuse my children by claiming that the competing faith claims are the same. But Natives are free to try to convince me otherwise, just as I will encourage my neighbors to consider the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ. But it is a different matter altogether when the TRC demand that the State compels its citizens to undermine their beliefs by forcing the indoctrination of pagan spirituality. And when the Liberal government promises to follow through, then our fundamental freedoms are at risk. Section 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms lists the fundamental freedoms that all Canadian possess and that must be protected from any actions by the State. They include freedom of conscience, religion, and association. All three are involved here - when Christians come together to form churches and schools, they do so protected by the freedom to associate, and the freedom to live according to their religion. When the State forces these churches and schools to promote a religion that undermines their own, these constitutional rights are violated. Natives don’t want to be treated this way Even aboriginal Canadians should speak up against this assault on freedom. In fact, the very same TRC calls to action includes the demand that all faith groups commit to: "...respecting Indigenous people’s right to self-determination in spiritual matters, including the right to practice, develop, and teach their own spiritual traditions, customs, and ceremonies…" So all faith groups may not interfere in indigenous spirituality, but the TRC report, supported by Canada’s government, demands that interference into the religious teachings of all other faith groups. It is a one-way street. This is the very reason why we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms – to protect citizens from the State including when the State thinks it can tell people what to believe! Conclusion The politicization of the residential schools has made it difficult to get a firm handle of what really happened in these schools. It is indisputable and unjustifiable that abuse occurred. It is also completely inappropriate for the State to require the removal of children from their homes to be placed in institutional care, except in extreme circumstances. Where wrong was done, justice must be served, also when churches or governments are responsible. But we also know that the residential schools were well-intentioned and went a long way towards helping disadvantaged people with education, nutrition, skills, and medical care. When good was done, that too must be acknowledged. Canada’s federal government is not helping anybody, especially Canada’s aboriginal peoples, by endorsing all of the demands from the TRC....

Indigenous peoples, Politics

Looking at two more of the TRC’s Calls to Action

The goal of Canada's Indian Residential Schools – which were run by churches along with the government – was to educate, but also convert and civilize Native children, replacing their culture with a Western one. Starting in 1884, school became compulsory for Native children under 16, and when a local school wasn’t available Native children would often be forcibly taken from their families and sent to these boarding schools. In other instances families were threatened with fines or prison if they didn’t send their children. This practice left the children on their own, away from any family or trusted adults they could turn to for help. That left them especially vulnerable to sexual and physical abuse. For six years, a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" (TRC) traveled across Canada to hear from former students of the schools. More than 6,500 were heard, and their testimony collected. The Commission also issued 94 calls to action, all of which the Liberal government agreed to. But not all of these recommendations were of the same quality. In his article "No other gods," Mark Penninga highlights how #64 would require Christian schools to promote native spirituality. That isn't the only one that's got problems. But lest readers think they are all problematic, I wanted to list one more bad one, but also highlight one that could be great. The bad: #6 Of the Commission’s 94 recommendations some are simply wrong. For example, #6: "We call upon the Government of Canada to repeal Section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada." This is the section that specifically grants parents a defense when they use “reasonable force to discipline a child” – this is a legal recognition of parents’ right to spank their children. The reason the Commission is calling for an end to spanking is likely because of the physical abuse some Native children suffered in the schools. But in making this recommendation they are overlooking the vast gulf that exists between beating up a child and spanking one. The good: #81 One of the best recommendations might be #81, to make a monument to remember the evil done to these children and their families. "We call upon the federal government, in collaboration with Survivors and their organizations, and other parties to the Settlement Agreement, to commission and install a publicly accessible, highly visible, Residential Schools National Monument in the city of Ottawa to honour Survivors and all the children who were lost to their families and communities." We want our country and especially our legislators to be continually confronted with the horror that the government committed in stealing children from their parents to teach them values their parents opposed. In Ontario right now the government is pushing forward on their proposed and hotly opposed Sex-Ed curriculum. Those in power are still eager to force their worldview on other people’s children. So let’s build a monument, make it huge, and place it somewhere in Ottawa that legislators will walk past every day. Stealing and indoctrinating children remains a temptation for lawmakers, so they need to be reminded of past wrongs in the hope that this memory will restrain them from committing future evils....

People we should know

A Rare Principled Politician: Ron Paul

The practice of politics notoriously requires compromise. Every politician must bend at some point in order to be electable. Many politicians are very...

People we should know

A couple friends you should meet: Jay Adams & D. A. Carson

Pro-life - Abortion

An Emergency Room is not the Church

Why “We Need a Law” doesn’t talk about the Gospel but you should ***** One of the questions ARPA Canada has received most often pertains to ...

Homosexuality

One in ten? Alfred Kinsey’s most famous lie

Even if you haven’t heard of Alfred Kinsey you probably have heard about one of his key “findings” – that 10% of all people are homosexual. Dr...

Theology

How are we to read the Bible?

From January 16 to 18, in 2014, the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary hosted a conference on the topic of hermeneutics. It's a big word, but they explained what they meant by it: how does one correctly handle the Word of truth in today’s postmodern world? It comes down to: how are we to read the Bible? Half a dozen professors from the Theological University in Kampen – this institution trains ministers for the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (RCN) – winged their way across the Atlantic to participate in this Conference. Two professors from Mid-America Reformed Seminary in Dyer, Indiana (this institution contributes to the ministerial supply in the URC) braved wintry roads to add their contribution. And, of course, the faculty of our own Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary in Hamilton did what they could to supply a clear answer to that vital question. The Conference included two public evenings, and it was good to see that the host church in Ancaster was packed to the rafters on both evenings. For my part, I took in the two daytime programs too. By the time the Conference was over at 3:20 Saturday afternoon, I was more than happy to call it quits; one can absorb only so much…. Conference Background Many of the members of the Canadian Reformed Churches have a Dutch background. Specifically, our (grand)parents were once members of the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands (RCN). There is, then, a very strong historic and emotional bond between the Canadian Reformed Churches and the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands. At my own church, the two previous ministers both came directly from these Dutch sister churches, and both had their training in the Theological University of Kampen. In the last dozen years or so, concern has slowly grown within our churches about developments we saw happening in the RCN in general and in the Theological University in particular. In fact, our recent Synod of Carman wrote a pointed letter to the upcoming Dutch Synod explaining why developments in the Dutch churches worry us, and urging a change (see Acts 2013, Art 165). The heart of the concern lies in how the professors of Kampen are reading the Bible. Given that we remain sister churches with the RCN, it was considered right before God to do a Conference with these men in order to understand better what the Kampen men are thinking, and to remind each other of what the Lord Himself says on the subject. How does one read the Bible? It was accepted by all that the Bible comes from God Himself, so that what is written on its pages does not come from human imagination or study, but comes from the Mind of holy God Himself. So the Bible contains no mistakes; whatever it says is the Truth. Yet this Word of God is not given to us in some unclear divine language, but infinite God has been pleased to communicate in a fashion finite people can understand – somewhat like parents simplifying their language to get across to their toddler. As we read the Bible, then, the rules common for reading a newspaper article, a book, or even this Bit to Read apply, ie, you get the sense of a particular word or sentence from the paragraph or page in which it’s written, and when some word or sentence is confusing you interpret the harder stuff in the light of easier words or sentences elsewhere in the article. That’s the plain logic of reading we all use. So far the professors of Kampen and Hamilton and MARS were all agreed. Genesis 1 Differences arose, however, when it came to what you do with what a given text says. In the previous paragraph, I made reference to a ‘toddler’. We all realize that the use of that word does not make this Bit to Read an article about how to raise toddlers. Genesis 1 uses the word ‘create’. Does that mean that that chapter of Scripture is about how the world got here? We’ve learned to say that Yes, Genesis 1 certainly tells us about our origin. (And we have good reason for saying that, because that’s the message you come away with after a plain reading of the chapter; besides, that’s the way the 4thcommandment reads Genesis 1, and it’s how Isaiah and Jeremiah and Jesus and Paul, etc, read Genesis 1.) But the Kampen professors told us not to be so fast in jumping to that conclusion. Genesis 1, they said, isn’t about how we got here, but it’s instruction to Israel at Mt Sinai about how mighty God is not the author of evil. Just like you cannot go to the Bible to learn how to raise toddlers (because that’s not what the Bible is about; you need to study pedagogy for that – the example is mine), so you cannot go to the Bible to find out how the world got here – because that’s not what Genesis 1 is about, and so it’s not a fair question we should ask Genesis 1 to answer. 1 Timothy 2 A second example that illustrates how the Dutch professors were thinking comes from their treatment of 1 Timothy 2:12,13. These verses record Paul’s instruction: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve….” This passage featured on the Conference program because a report has recently surfaced within the Dutch sister churches arguing that it’s Biblical to ordain sisters of the congregation to the offices of minister, elder and deacon. 1 Timothy 2 would seem to say the opposite. So: how do you read 1 Timothy 2:12 to justify the conclusion that women may be ordained to the offices of the church? The Dutch brethren answered the question like this: when Paul wrote the prohibition of 1 Timothy 2, the culture Timothy lived in did not tolerate women in positions of leadership. If Paul in that situation had permitted women to teach in church or to have authority over men, he would have placed an unnecessary obstacle on the path of unbelievers to come to faith. Our western culture today, however, gives women a very inclusive role in public leadership. If we today, then, ban them from the offices of the church, we would place an obstacle in the path of modern people on their journey to faith in Jesus Christ. Had Paul written his letter to the church in Hamilton today, he would have written vs 12 to say that women would be permitted to teach and to have authority over men. That conviction, of course, raises the question of what you do with the “for” with which vs 13 begins. Doesn’t the word ‘for’ mean that Paul is forming his instruction about the woman’s silence on how God created people in the beginning – Adam first, then Eve? Well, we were told, with vs 13 Paul is indeed referring back to Genesis 1 & 2, but we need to be very careful in how we work with that because we’re reading our own understandings of Genesis 1 & 2 into Paul’s instruction in 1 Timothy 2, and we may be incorrect in how we understand those chapters from Genesis. So vs 13 doesn’t help us understand vs 12. Confused… I struggled to get my head around how brothers who claim to love the Lord and His Word could say things as mentioned above. A speech on Saturday morning helped to clarify that question for me. The old way of reading the Bible might be called ‘foundationalism’, describing the notion that you read God’s commands and instructions (eg, any of the Ten Commandments), and transfer that instruction literally into today so that theft or adultery or dishonoring your parents is taboo. This manner of reading the Bible does not go down well with postmodern people, because it implies that there are absolutes that you have to obey. The alternative is to disregard the Bible altogether and adopt ‘relativism’, where there are no rules for right and wrong at all – and that’s obviously wrong. So, we were told, we need to find a third way between ‘foundationalism’ and ‘relativism’. This third way would have us be familiar with the Scriptures, but instead of transferring a command of long ago straight into today’s context, we need to meditate on old time revelation and trust that as we do so the Lord will make clear what His answers are for today’s questions. If the cultural circumstances surrounding a command given long ago turns out to be very similar to cultural circumstances of today, we may parachute the command directly into today and insist it be obeyed. But if the circumstances differ, we may not simply impose God’s dated commands on obedience or on theft or on homosexuality into today. Instead, with an attitude of humility and courage we need to listen to what God is today saying – and then listen not just to the Bible but also to culture, research, science, etc. After prayerfully meditating on the Scripture-in-light-of-lessons-from-culture-and-research, we may well end up concluding that we need to accept that two men love both each other and Jesus Christ. That conclusion may differ from what we’ve traditionally thought the Lord wanted of us, but a right attitude before the Lord will let us be OK with conclusions we’ve not seen in Scripture before. Analysis This speech about the ‘third way’ helped clarify for me why the Kampen professors could say what they did about Genesis 1 and 1 Timothy 2. They were seeking to listen to Scripture as well as to what our culture and science, etc, were saying, and then under the guidance of the Holy Spirit sought to come to the will of the Lord for today’s questions. To insist that Genesis 1 is God’s description about how we got here (creation by divine fiat) leads to conclusions that fly in the face of today’s science and/or evolutionary thinking – and so we must be asking the wrong questions about Genesis 1; it’s not about how we got here…. To insist that 1 Timothy 2 has something authoritative to say about the place of women is to place us on ground distinctly out of step with our society – and so we must be reading 1 Timothy 2 wrongly. As a result of deep meditation on Scripture plus input from culture etc, these men have concluded that God leads us to condoning women in office in our culture, accepting a very old age for the earth, and leaving room for homosexual relationships in obedient service to the Lord. This, it seems to me, is the enthronement of people’s collective preferences over the revealed Word of God. Our collective will, even when it is renewed and guided by the Holy Spirit, remains “inclined to all evil” (Lord’s Day 23.60; cf Romans 7:15,18). There certainly are questions arising from today’s culture that do not have answers written in obvious command form in Scripture, and so we undoubtedly need to do some humble and prayerful research and thinking on those questions. But the Bible is distinctly clear (not only in Genesis 1) about where we come from, and distinctly clear too (not only in 1 Timothy 2) about the place of women, and distinctly clear also on homosexuality. To plead that we need different answers today than in previous cultures lest the Bible’s teachings hinder unbelievers from embracing the gospel is to ignore that Jeremiah and Micah and Jesus and Paul and James and every other prophet and apostle had to insist on things that were “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). One questioner from the audience hit the nail on the head: the Dutch brethren were adapting their method of reading the Bible to produce conclusions accommodated to our culture. Where does this leave us? There was a time when the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands and their Theological University in Kampen were a source of much wisdom and encouragement in searching the Scriptures. Given that all the men from Kampen spoke more or less the same language at the Hermeneutics Conference, it is clear to me that those days are past. We need not deny them the right hand of fellowship, but we do need to pray that the Lord have mercy on the Dutch sister churches – for this is how their (future) ministers are being taught to deal with Scripture. I was very grateful to note that the professors from the Canadian Reformed Theological Seminary (and MARS too, for that matter) all spoke uniformly in their rejection of Kampen’s way of reading the Bible. They insisted unequivocally that “the whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men” (Westminster Confession, I.6). Postmodernism does not pass us by. May the Lord give us grace to keep believing that His Word is authoritative, clear and true....

Assorted

A game for every situation

Visitors to my house are often surprised at the number of board games I own. OK, I’ll be the first to admit that I probably have too many games. What’s nice about a game collection, though, is having games for different situations. Besides the obvious variation in the number of players and available playing time, different groups like different types of games. I’m not going to play the same game with my kids as I will with adults. Even adults vary in how much rules complexity and strategic depth they will tolerate in their games. Here are some suggestions for some games to fill those niches in a game collection. Most of these are pretty recent releases. 7 Wonders A quick game with strategic depth This game hit my gaming group’s table for the first time in 2011 and it was a huge hit with all of us. In this card game, each player takes on a particular civilization, with a wonder to build. The game progresses through three ages. In each age, each player has a hand of cards and in your turn you choose one card to play. You can either play that card face up, playing any resource cost to bring the card into play, turn the card face down to build a stage of your wonder, or discard the card for money. What makes the game interesting is that once you’ve done that, you pass your hand of cards to your neighbor and that player chooses a card from the hand you had. This creates some difficult decisions: do I build the card I want to build or do I discard a card to prevent it from going to my neighbor? At the end of the game, players score points for buildings they’ve built, how far they’ve progressed their wonder, the size of their military relative to your neighbors, coins they’ve earned and how far they have developed their science. There are multiple paths to victory and exploring these is part of the fun of the game. What makes 7 Wonders so great is that it’s easy to learn and quick to play. Once you’ve got the rules down, a game of 7 Wonders can be completed in about a half hour, making it a great way to start or close out an evening of game playing, although you’ll probably find that you want to play several games in a row. It also scales very well, accommodating anywhere from two to seven players. Because all of the action is simultaneous, adding more players doesn’t add to the down time. Forbidden Island A game when you’re in a cooperative mood Co-operative games are a nice change of pace in that players work together instead of against each other. Matt Leacock’s Forbidden Island takes the co-operative system he developed in Pandemic and distills it to its essence in a game that’s simpler and faster and more suitable for playing with kids. In Forbidden Island, players are stranded on an island made up of tiles. Slowly, tiles get flooded, making parts of the island inaccessible. Players are racing against time to acquire four treasures before the island disappears into the sea. Each player has a particular skill that allows him or her to break a particular game rule. Succeeding at the game requires players to work together and utilize their particular skills as effectively as possible. What’s terrific about Forbidden Island is the wonderful sense of urgency and tension created by the game. Success and failure are balanced on a knife’s edge. In games where we’ve successfully escaped with the treasures, we just made it; games we lost could have been won with a different card draw. Either way, it’s exhilarating and fun. The game is relatively inexpensive, accommodates up to four players and takes 30 minutes to play. Chicken Cha Cha Cha A game to play with the kids As you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of gaming with kids. But finding games to play with younger kids is difficult; those games either bore adults to tears or are too difficult for children. Chicken Cha Cha Cha is a game for children that hits all the right notes. It has sturdy, kid-friendly components, plays quickly, and relies on a skill that children can compete pretty equally with adults – short-term memory. Players move their chickens around the track by remembering where tiles are hidden. The more tiles you can remember correctly, the further you go. When you pass someone else’s chicken, you get to take their tail feathers. The first player who gathers all of the tail feathers wins the game. You’ll be surprised at how good kids are at this game. Telestrations A game for a party Pictionary is an old stand-by among people who like party games; Telestrations takes this to the next level by combining it with that old classic game of Telephone. In Telestrations, each player gets a card with a word or phrase on it and then has to draw that word. When time is up, every player passes their picture to their neighbor. That player then looks at the pictures and writes his or her best guess as to what that picture is. Players then pass those words or phrases to their neighbors, who draw a picture based on that word or phrase. This alteration of words and pictures happen until each player gets their original pad back. At that point, players go through and everyone gets a good laugh as to how the phrase or word evolved over time through misunderstandings. You could probably play this game with a Pictionary set and some paper, but Telestrations is fairly inexpensive, comes with neat pads and dry erase markers that make the process much easier. It’s a lot of fun and leads to a lot of laughter. I do have to say that the scoring rules provided in the game don’t work very well, but if you’re primarily concerned with games where winning or losing is the point, this probably isn’t for you. The game can handle up to eight players and, as with all party games, the more players you have, the more fun it is. Qwirkle A game for camping Camping is a great time for game playing. There’s no television or other distractions of modern life, so it’s a good time for boardgaming. An ideal camping game shouldn’t have lots of little bits or paper that can get dirty, wet, or lost. In this way, Qwirkle is perfect. It comes with a whole bag of big chunky wooden tiles with colored shapes on them. Qwirkle is an abstract game, played with wooden tiles that have colored shapes on them. There are six colors and six shapes. In a turn, players can play a set of tiles all in one color, as long as all the shapes are different) or a set of tiles of one shape, as long as they’re all different colors. This abstract strategy game feels a lot like Scrabble when you play it. If you don’t camp, it’s still an excellent and accessible game for all ages. In 2011, Qwirkle won the most prestigious game award in the world, Germany’s Spiele des Jahres. Jaipur A two-player game There are lots of times when there are only two of you and you want to play a game. In my house, Jaipur has become the go-to game in that situation. Jaipur is a game of trading and collecting sets of goods represented by cards. In a turn, a player can take one card from the market, trade multiple cards for multiple cards in the market, or sell goods. The clever thing in Jaipur is that the first good of a type sold is worth the most; as the market gets saturated with a particular good, its value decreases. Players can earn bonuses if they trade in larger sets of goods, but trying to build up a large set of goods in your hand might allow the other player to sell off a few goods first for higher prices. To succeed, you have to play close attention to what your opponent is doing. This one is probably the hardest to find of the games on this list; you may have to try an online game store if you want to locate a copy. Dixit A game when you’re feeling creative Most games are decidedly left brain activities, relying on logic and reasoning. Dixit is a right brain kind of game, rewarding creativity over strategic play. The game consists of a deck of beautifully illustrated cards, with no words on them. Every player has a hand of cards. In each turn, one player is the storyteller and chooses a card to play. That player comes up with a word, a phrase or a sentence to describe the card. The other players all chose a card from their hands that they think best exemplifies that phrase. All of the cards are then mixed and the players who are not the storyteller vote on the one they think is the storyteller’s card. What makes the game work is the scoring system. In the case that all players choose the storyteller’s card or none of the players choose it, the storyteller gets no points and every other player gets two points. In all other situations, the storyteller and any player who correctly identified the storyteller’s card gets three points. Furthermore, any of the other players who attract votes get a point. This system encourages the storyteller to choose a phrase that is neither too obvious nor too obscure, a tricky balance to maintain. Dixit is a simple game to play, but I find it taxes it my brain in a way no other game in my collection does. Oh, and in 2010 it also won the prestigious Spiele des Jahres (Game of the Year). Ascending Empires A game when you want to get physical In many ways, Ascending Empires is a pretty classic space empire game. Players start with one planet and expand to nearby planets, colonizing them, mining resources and establishing science stations. Planets come in different colors and in order to advance in technology, it’s necessary to establish a presence on several different color planets. This inevitably leads to conflict with other players and space battles. Here’s what’s different about Ascending Empires: in order to move the wooden disks representing your ships around, you have to flick them with your finger. This leads to a lot of laughter and fun as carefully planned flights go astray. The game manages to strike a near perfect balance between physical dexterity and strategy. Flicking your ships across the board is a blast, but clever strategic play is ultimately going to decide who wins, much to the relief of those of us who are not particularly coordinated. This is another one that may not be easy to find; on-line game stores are probably your best bet. Mouse Guard Role Playing Game A game to indulge your inner storyteller Role playing games are games where players collectively tell a story. One player runs the game; the others play characters in the story. When done well, it’s an incredibly fun and immersive experience. Most of these games, however, are set in fantasy settings with warriors, wizards and dragons. If the idea of role playing is appealing, but these typical games settings are not, Mouse Guard may be for you. Based on David Peterson’s graphic novels of the same name, players take on the role of mice dedicated to protecting their civilization from the perils of the outside world. When you think about how small mice are, there’s plenty of material for compelling adventures in seemingly mundane things. In one mission I played with my children, the mice had to save a mouse settlement from flooding after beavers built a dam near the town. Although an excellent game to play with younger players, it also works well with adults, with plenty of opportunity for interpersonal drama and darker conflict. All you need to play are some dice and the 320-page rulebook, which is readily available from online bookstores. Alternatively, you can opt for the beautiful boxed set, with additional missions and play aids. The game materials are well-written and gorgeous, with hundreds of Peterson’s illustrations. It takes a bit of reading to get a handle on the rules, but it is a more streamlined and easy-to-grasp system than most role-playing games. The book provides lots of guidance in how to structure and run missions, and rewards good role playing, not clever dice play....

Christian education - Sports

Is the good foul good? Playing basketball a different way

The object of basketball is pretty simple. You and your four teammates want to put the ball through your opponent's hoop. This is how you score. The other team also wants to score, but on the opposite hoop, so they will try to take the ball away from you. You must not let them! The winner is the team that manages to put the ball through their hoop the most times, in the time allowed. It's that simple. Simple, but it sounds like things could get kind of violent, right? This is where the rules come in. Basketball is a non-contact sport. There is even a rule that says so. The rules control the violence by punishing players who biff their opponents too obviously. The most common punishments are called free throws, which are free chances to score. Usually allotted in two's, they are given to the player who has been biffed to compensate him for the biffing he received. Biffing is, of course, also known as fouling. With players being punished for fouling, you would think they would do what they could to avoid committing fouls. After all, both the letter and the spirit of the rules are against fouling. But sometimes, late in a game, when one team is behind by only a bit but there doesn't seem to be enough time to catch up, they will foul their opponents on purpose. By fouling they do give their opponents free chances to score, but the clock stops. The strategy is simple. The team that is behind will foul the worst shooter on the other team and stop the clock. After the fouled player takes his shots (which they hope he will miss) they will get the ball back. The clock will start again and they will race down the court and hope they get their shot in. Then they will quickly try and foul again to stop the clock. This way only a few seconds of game time can be made to last a much longer time So it is actually to a team's advantage to foul in this case. This brings up two problems Christians might consider. The first is ethical. Fouling is against both the spirit and letter of the rules, so should Christians commit deliberate fouls? The second problem is also ethical but of a more concrete nature. Late in a game when one team tries to deliberately foul, the refs often won't call it. They know it is to the offending team's advantage so they will only call it if it is very, very obvious. The practical result is that these late, deliberate fouls are often very, very hard fouls. So again, should Christians commit these deliberate fouls? Some would say it's just part of the game. That is a somewhat legitimate argument. Sure the letter and spirit of the rules say that fouling is wrong, but anyone playing the game knows that these type of late game fouls will occur. No one is surprised, so in a way these fouls are a part of the unwritten rules for the game. That is just how it's played. But there is still the potential problem of injury, and the problem we should have with deliberately "biffing" someone. Sure it's a part of the game, but it doesn't have to be. In the Golden Bears' Summer Basketball League almost everyone is at least 6'2" and the average weight is somewhere above 200 pounds. The fouls in this league are already hard fouls and the league's organizers really didn't want to see any harder fouls late in the games. So instead of calling fouls the regular way the Golden Bears did it with a twist. If you committed a foul your opponents got one point and kept the ball. If you committed a foul on a player shooting the ball and he scored, the basket counted, and he still kept the ball. The clock never stopped and you could never regain possession of the ball by fouling a player. There was never an advantage to fouling someone. The end result was a league in which almost everyone had fun, and no fights occurred. It's just one approach, but it's worth considering....

Education

Home education - a way of life

"I get to help bake bread!" "Jason, can I read to you while you paint?" "Let's invite somebody over today. We can make cream puffs." Another day has begun. In our 'school' every day is a new adventure and the children plan their days as much as I do. It's been called "delight-directed learning," and we are enthusiastic advocates of this approach to home-education. The basic idea is to find out what interests your child has, and then to guide him to useful resources and experiences so he becomes an "expert in his field". Because we are not bound to a curriculum, we can use whatever books and resources we believe will be helpful and they can work at the pace which allows them to absorb the subject to the highest degree. Another advantage is that we can wait until our children are ready before teaching them new concepts, and we found this especially beneficial in teaching our son to read. Not everyone follows this approach. In 1997, there were over 6000 families home-educating in the province of Alberta, and each family chose the methods which were best for their children. Many home-educating parents follow a curriculum that provides daily lesson plans, workbooks and textbooks. They like the structure this provides and need the assurance that everything is being covered. Even so, they usually find that because one-on-one teaching is so effective, they can finish all the bookwork in the morning and use the afternoons to pursue other things. What Should They Be Taught? "But how do you know that your children are learning everything they need to know for adulthood??!" This is a question which we are frequently asked. It's true that they won't know everything by the time they turn eighteen, but then again, who does? Education should prepare children for a lifetime of learning, and the best thing we, as parents, can do when our children are young, is instill in them a love of learning and teach them how to communicate effectively, to write well, to be respectful and self-disciplined. These are the kinds of things young people need in the world, and if they don't know who the second president of the United States was, they'll know where to find the answer if they need it! Not that I'm downplaying the importance of history - our children need to know that there was life before they came along! We believe that the most important thing our children need to be trained in is good character. Developing patience, perseverance, diligence, obedience, generosity, self-control, discernment, resourcefulness, orderliness, compassion, deference, and a host of other qualities is a life-long pursuit which is best begun when our children are young. Nobody has a greater interest in our children's character development than we parents do, and nobody has a greater motivation either - we have to live with them! Here's a quick quiz for you: what do Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein, the Wright Brothers, Philip Melanchthon, Leonardo da Vinci, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, and John Wesley have in common? They were all home-educated! I'm not saying that every home-educated child will grow up to be a genius, believe me, but I was very interested to read about these famous home-educated people, and I wonder what curriculum (or lack of it) they used! So how were we introduced to the concept of home-education? A friend of ours, who knew that we were looking into education options, called me up and said, "I heard this guy on the radio talking about home-schooling. It sounds kind of interesting; here's his phone number." And that was the beginning of a whirlwind of phone calls and questions, because this was only two months before our eldest was to start school. We decided to take the plunge and try it for a year, since kindergarten wasn't compulsory, and if it didn't work out we could put her in school for grade one. Instead, it has turned out to be a great source of joy for us to see our children grow and mature, to talk with them often, to have the best hours of the day with them, and to guide them in the ways of the Lord. And our children have the freedom to pursue their interests, to spend as much time as they want on what they are working on, and to be best friends with each other! What About Socialization? This is another thing we are often questioned about. What is "socialization," anyway? Is it not learning how to interact appropriately with others of all ages, having good manners and good habits, and behaving properly? These can all be learned very effectively in the setting of a family and in spending time with friends in the church and neighborhood. Peer pressure is avoided and they are free to be themselves and grow up slowly! So what do our kids do all day? We have three children: Jessica (12), Michelle (9), and Jason (8). Jessica does a lot of reading, Michelle is a craft enthusiast, and Jason plays with Lego a lot. They spend time together outside and get in each other's way occasionally. They have chores to do every day (dishes are a favorite), but a lot of their time is their own. Every so often, I say the word "math" and everyone dives for cover. Unfortunately for them, some things just have to be done, and times tables, borrowing and carrying, and fractions have all had their turn on the table. Spelling, handwriting, and phonics are other non-options. But then there are social and science topics that are theirs to choose. Middle Ages, Australia, bears, South America, seals, tigers, and beavers have all been covered, and the science kit is always available. The little electric circuit with a car wired in is fun to get out once in a while. Scooping creatures out of Grandad's pond and raising tadpoles has also been exciting for some (dad was unimpressed!). We are blessed in Alberta to have very reasonable home-school regulations that allow us the freedom to choose our own curriculum and teaching methods. We are required to register with a school board in the province. Various options are available to fulfill this requirement. The school board keeps records of our children's progress and assigns a facilitator who visits twice a year. They provide tests (government achievement tests, Canadian Test of Basic Skills, and others) if the parents want to make use of these. The board also provides funding for supplies (up to $510 per child per year upon sending in receipts, starting in Grade 1), and group lessons. Art supplies, books, and educational games are all covered by this funding. Where's Your Education Degree? "But you're not qualified to teach your children!" This is a misconception that holds many parents back from home-educating their own children, but studies have shown that even high school dropouts can effectively teach their children. All the parents need is to be literate and to have a love and concern for the overall development of the children that God has entrusted to them. It's true we are not government certified teachers, and it's true we're not experts on all the topics our kids ask us questions about, but some of the most rewarding experiences we have with our children are when we are learning together with them. There are always going to be things that we don't know, but we can show them where to find the answers, and let them discover things for themselves. Books, other people, educational videos, and field trips have been wonderful sources of information for us. We visit the library frequently and request books on topics the children are interested in. Setting an example of enthusiasm for learning is much more of a motivation for our children than trying to give them the impression that we know it all! We are members of a Christian support group in our city consisting of over one hundred families. We meet once per month to exchange ideas, hear about new opportunities, and use the library that belongs to the group. Each year a science fair is organized where the children can do a project and explain it to others. A field trip committee organizes various outings which families can go on together. Some of our favorites have been the John Walter Museum, Safety City, voyageur canoeing, and the Ukrainian Pioneer Village. These field trips are an opportunity to meet with other home-educating families. In the spring one of the families in the support group organized a track and field day, which was great fun! We try to take advantage of opportunities which we feel will advance the academic, social, and character development of our children. On to University Another query that home-educators often hear is "What if they want to go on to college or university?" We are not experts on this, as our oldest is only in grade seven at the moment, but from information which we have gleaned from meetings, conferences, and home-school families with older children, most colleges and universities have become much more open to the "home-school graduate" in the last five or ten years. Applicants from home-school families are not as rare as they once were, and for some colleges the writing of standardized equivalency tests is all that is necessary. For others, the Math and English Departmental exams must be written. In most cases though, it is recommended that students meet with the registrar ahead of time (in grade ten or eleven) to discuss options. It is also possible to qualify as a "mature student" upon reaching the age specified by the college (sometimes as low as 16 if the student has been out of school for one year). Another option students have to learn a trade is apprenticeship. This idea has been growing rapidly in home-school circles as it allows parents to have input into who their child's "teacher" will be. It is usually possible to find a Christian individual who does just what your young person wants to do, and most would be glad to have an assistant who works for free in exchange for being taught the necessary skills. This is just one of the ways that apprenticeship could work. Opportunities abound for motivated young people! As home-educators, we are often told that our children are naive. I must confess when we hear this we are encouraged. Do we really want them to be "worldly-wise," aware of all that goes on in the world around them? Their young minds are not equipped to deal with that kind of information. Should we talk to them about the evil practices of the world so that we can explain why they are wrong? That isn't right. Romans 16:19 says, "I would have you wise unto that which is good, and simple concerning evil." It is our duty as parents to shield our children from wrong influences and ideas. They will hear about it soon enough when they are older, and then they will be better able to deal with it and to stand firm in the faith they were brought up in. We are thankful that we heard about home education when we did. Our children are a gift from our Heavenly Father, and we treasure every day we have with them - they will be grown before we know it! Home education is a wonderful way to stay close to our children, to know what they are learning, and to guide them in the ways of the Lord. The primary responsibility of raising and educating children rests with their parents, and we have chosen to fulfill that responsibility ourselves instead of delegating it to others. It has become a way of life for us, and we are grateful for the opportunity to teach our children at home!...

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