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Internet

How to stay sane in an overstimulated age

Reconnect information and action

*****

In today’s hyperconnected world, information comes at us fast and furious, from every direction, 24-7. We wake up to news alerts about a major earthquake in Japan or a political assassination in Ecuador. We open our social media feeds and, within the first minute of scrolling, see the latest grim headlines about war or rumors of war, the latest anger-inducing missive in this or that culture war debate, and the latest foolish oversharing from this or that uncle or college friend.

Because we are human and emotionally wired, it’s natural that these things provoke us and inflame our hearts to want to do something. Yet what can we do with this abundance of troublesome information aside from being informed about it? We are overstimulated but underactivated. Information bombards us but action is elusive. I’m convinced this dynamic is one of the major sources of anxiety and mental unhealth in today’s information age, and it’s something Neil Postman warned about.

More info than we can do anything with

Postman talked about it in terms of what he called the “information-action ratio.” For most of human history, there was a high correlation between the information that filled human brains and the tangible actions they could take in response. “News of the world” was inaccessible to most people. The information that concerned them was closer-to-home realities of family, farm, or community: information with direct bearing on the actions of everyday life.

But this all changed, Postman argued, with the invention of the telegraph. Suddenly, the “news of the world” was much more accessible to average people, who found it an amusing novelty. The problem, however, is that this influx of far-flung information “gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.” As Postman observed, “For the first time in human history, people were faced with the problem of information glut, which means that simultaneously they were faced with the problem of a diminished social and political potency.”1

If Postman’s observations about “information glut” were accurate forty years ago, how much more are they today, when we’re speeding down the “information superhighway” faster than ever via our ubiquitous smartphones and ever-present Wi-Fi? And the resulting problem of impotence is even more pronounced than it was in Postman’s era.

In today’s world, it’s not just occasional televised traumas that burden our souls; it’s the constant feed. “Breaking news” is no longer the alarming verbiage that signals a rare calamity; it’s the everyday parlance of twenty-four-hour news and social media publishers skilled at the art of clickbait. These media publishers are eager to garner eyeballs by any means necessary. Another school shooting. A salacious scandal. An election “shock poll.” A helicopter-filmed police chase. An Amber Alert for a missing child.

But what are we to do with all these alarming headlines and triggering dings of “breaking news”? Media outlets don’t care about this question. Their only interest is that we have tuned in, clicked, and fallen for the pseudo urgency of the Important Information they’ve put on our radar. Making audiences “aware” – at best, helping them become “informed citizens” – seems to be the chief value proposition the news industry can offer in its defense. But awareness to what end? Is this tidal wave of chaotic information informing us merely for the sake of us “being informed”?

Awareness as an end unto itself

We’ve come to a point where, yes, the primary goal of most information mediated to us is that we should be informed and aware of it. Not educated or activated about important things happening in the world, mind you; merely aware. The benefits of an informed citizenry have long been trumpeted as a valorous purpose of the free press (and indeed, the benefits are real). But we also need to talk about the liabilities that come with an overinformed or trivially informed citizenry.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman argued that TV had altered the meaning of “being informed” by “creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation.” This is not the same as outright misinformation, he said. It’s rather misleading information, which “creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”2

In Postman’s view, mass media (led by television) created a world of dilettante experts whose absorption of vast amounts of information – packaged to them as entertainment – gave them a false sense of know-how about the happenings of the world. Referencing this know-how (e.g., “I saw this news story about ____” or “I read this Atlantic article about ____”) became status markers. Information awareness took on a cultural cachet quite apart from its actionability.

Fast forward four decades, and we now take it for granted that “awareness” is a value in its own right. The conversation starters might be different today (“I saw this TED Talk on YouTube about ____” or “I saw this TikTok about ____”), but the status it brings has only increased. Our ability to cite, allude to, or summarize secondhand information about a breadth of things (even if our grasp of the “thing” is actually wafer thin) turns information into a means of signaling our claim on that most coveted virtue, relevance.

For digital natives who’ve lived their whole lives in a hyperaware, globally connected information ecosystem, it’s understandable that a word like woke would come into prominence as a shorthand for social justice. In the twentieth century, social justice “activism” involved tangible actions like volunteering or picketing in a real physical place; in the twenty-first century, someone can be an “activist” without ever getting off his or her phone. Activism (or “slacktivism”) moves from being primarily about doing to largely about saying: participating in the correct lingo, hashtags, and accepted speech (e.g., preferred pronouns) becomes the means of activism more than, well, actions offline. “Doing justice” becomes a discursive activity more than a tangible one.

In this upside-down world, people can – and often are – accused of apathy and inaction for being silent (“silence is violence”) on social media, even if their offline, unpublished activities are thoroughly oriented around addressing the injustice they’re being accused of ignoring. So it goes in a world where discourse about a problem (talking about it publicly) occupies a higher social standing than actual efforts to solve the problem.

This is problematic.

Problem of being overinformed

Five years after publishing Amusing Ourselves, Postman gave a speech to the German Informatics Society that elaborated on the information-action ratio. In the talk, titled “Informing Ourselves to Death,” Postman described how, for the average person in 1990, “information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.” The way he described it could just as easily describe the average person in 2025:

The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one’s status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don’t know what to do with it.... Our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don’t know how to filter it out; we don’t know how to reduce it; we don’t know how to use it.3

Remember, Postman observed this “information glut” problem in the pre-internet era. How much more are we glutted with information today? If we didn’t have good “information immunity” defenses back then, we’re even worse off now – especially in the age of ChatGPT, deepfakes, political misinformation campaigns, and the resulting epistemological crisis. The information crisis we face is at least threefold: too much information that moves too fast and is algorithmically tailored to be too focused on me.4 In a sense, “being informed” is more of a liability than an asset in today’s world. The quality of digitally mediated information is simply too untrustworthy.

What happens to us when we’re overinformed but underactivated? From my experience and observations, some common side effects occur.

  • We become anxious – When a world’s worth of “breaking news” calamities, injustices, and apocalyptic headlines steadily feed our souls, we naturally feel anxious and on edge.
  • We become angry – Rising blood pressure and seething anger follow when we’re constantly exposed to partisan clickbait, triggering troll provocations, and other forms of foolish talk.
  • We become addicted – Algorithms easily figure out what types of information each of us can’t resist. Soon we’re scrolling and clicking like addicts, unable to resist the intoxicating allure of our favorite genres of “news,” trivia, or juicy gossip.
  • We become numb – A diet of information disconnected from tangible action makes information abstract and surreal, disconnected from our real life. Eventually, headlines about a horrific mass shooting become things we scroll past as casually as we glance at a friend’s vacation photo.
  • We become lonely – When we spend large segments of our lives binging on digital information far removed from local, embodied communities – even if it’s information we debate or discuss with others online – we become lonelier. The online influencer we listen to, or the interlocutor avatars we fiercely debate, are hardly substitutes for the know-and-be-known community we really need.
  • We become delusional – Because of the algorithmic shape of information today, no two of us live in the same information universe. We all see things differently, in ways tweaked to please our preferences and biases. Naturally, this further entrenches us in echo chambers, deepening our confidence in our own rightness (however wrong we are).
  • We become detached from reality – The cumulative effect of all the above is that an overinformed life becomes a pseudo real life. When awareness trumps action and we’re more compelled by narratives than by reality, our sense of the world becomes ever more surreal.

Perhaps C. S. Lewis sums it up best in this letter to a friend, when he laments the dynamics of an information-action disconnect:

It is one of the evils of rapid diffusion of news that the sorrows of all the world come to us every morning. I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. (This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know.) A great many people do now seem to think that the mere state of being worried is in itself meritorious. I don’t think it is.5

Not only is Lewis right to challenge the social merit attached to “the mere state of being worried” (i.e., the social capital of awareness), but he hits the nail on the head when he says we should avoid fixing our minds on problems we can’t solve. This not only burdens us in all the ways described above but tends to distract us from the local problems we can help fix.

Neglecting the local

With all the energy we devote to keeping up with the goings-on of the world, we might neglect the people we can love and the problems we can address in our own backyards. For Christians called to love our neighbors and tangibly pursue mercy and justice, this is the crux of what’s wrong with an imbalanced information-action ratio.
Such is the state of our mass-mediated information environment that your average twenty-first-century young person can tell you far more about national politics than local politics. He develops strong opinions about presidential candidates and Supreme Court cases but couldn’t tell you the name of the mayor or a city council member in his city, nor identify the most pressing challenges facing his proximate community.

Of the millions of Gen Zers who posted a blank black square on Instagram in June 2020 (#blackouttuesday) to protest police brutality, how many have ever had a conversation with a police officer in their own neighborhood? Of the millions who changed their social media avatars to the Ukrainian flag in February 2022, how many have tangibly helped refugees or immigrants from war-torn nations in their own cities?

Online hashtag actions are well intentioned. And maybe the viral power of such “collective online action” makes some difference. But as Lewis points out, the danger is that such actions “become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know.” There are many reasons why everyone should strive for a more balanced information-action ratio. It’ll help your mental health and ground you in local life and embodied community. For Christians specifically, it’ll remind you of your creaturely limits and deepen your trust in a sovereign God who is omniaware in ways you can never be. And it’ll present more fruitful avenues for loving your neighbor and being a faithful witness in the particular place where God has situated you.

Bringing balance to the ratio

Christians should be countercultural by striving to reconnect information and action, modeling a healthier way of living for a world out of balance. How can we do this? Here are ideas for individual Christians and ideas for churches and leaders.

For Individual Christians

  • Audit your news and information diet – Make intentional efforts to reduce your intake of national and global information while increasing your intake of local information (which has more potential to be actionable). Don’t turn your ears off to the cries of the world. But listen more eagerly to the cries closer to home.
  • Embrace your limits – As you become more “unaware” of the steady hum of information in the news that might be making others anxious, angry, and stressed, see this as an opportunity for resting in God’s sovereignty and praising him for his power. A world’s worth of burdens is too much for you – but not for God. Contemplating our limits in contrast to God’s unlimitedness is a fruitful path toward wisdom (see Ps. 90).
  • Rejoice in how God designed you – You are an integrated mind and body. What comes into your brain has a natural outlet in your physical activities. You weren’t made to just be aware of faraway problems and global chaos about which you can’t do much. You were made to bring order to the chaos in your immediate vicinity. You weren’t made to be a gawker but a gardener (Gen. 2:15).
  • Pray – Prayer is an important action we can take. When you inevitably encounter information about an injustice or tragedy in some far-flung part of the nation or world, don’t let the information sit idly in your troubled brain. Take it to the Lord in prayer. As much as our secular culture demands more than “thoughts and prayers,” Christians know prayer is actually potent and crucial. If we can’t do anything else in response to troublesome information, we can pray to the one who can.

For Churches and Church Leaders

  • Disciple people in media habits – Information intake should be a subject addressed in discipleship – not in a legalistic sense but as part of wisdom. Help the people in your church think through the amount and type of information they consume and how it’s shaping their souls.
  • Promote localism – Church leaders should lead people (especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha) to prioritize the local, proximate, and offline as much or more than the distant, disembodied goings-on of the online world. Make the case for why a balanced ratio of information and action is not only a recipe for improved mental and spiritual health but conducive to a more effective Christian mission.
  • Gather people for prayer – When some national or global calamity does occur, in such a way that most in your Christian community will be aware of and troubled by it, prayer is an appropriate communal response. Both in the regular church gathering and in impromptu meetings, the church can and should take the action of prayer. It’s an “action” in the truest sense, and one we should never neglect.
  • Call people to take action – Churches should regularly organize opportunities for people to tangibly solve real problems in the community. Often this works best by establishing long-term partnerships with organizations already doing specific work that aligns with biblical neighbor love: crisis pregnancy centers, foster and adoption agencies, homeless shelters, food distribution centers, and so forth. There is no end to the needs in your own backyard. And if a national news headline happens to be about something happening in your city or community, then your church should spring into hands-on action. This is a rare opportunity for burdensome information about calamity to directly translate to tangible community service, in partnership with local organizations and civic authorities.

Beauty of activated Church

For much of my adult life, I was an overinformed news junkie. The onset of social media amplified this addiction – and my soul suffered as a result. Thankfully, I found a healthier way to live, in no small part because I rediscovered the beauty and necessity of the local church.

Once I gave myself wholeheartedly to local church life, I came to see that the burdens and griefs of ten people in my small group were far more important for me to carry than the burdens and griefs of countless sufferers on social media. Not only could I see the actual tears on actual faces as they shared, but I could hug them and know them in their suffering – and help them through it.

I also came to see that the tangibly activated local church is a far more satisfying and functional community than the virtually aware community of social media. Whether they’re distributing food in partnership with local food banks, mobilizing volunteers for a local foster and adoption agency, or simply rallying the congregation around the needs of the community (single moms, meal trains for sick families, house cleanup for elderly members, and so forth), a church’s localized, tangible action is beautiful to behold.

And when troublesome news from distant places does reach our corner of the world – as it invariably will – the local church is where I go first to process and pray through it, even if no other “action” is possible in response. For centuries, the church’s “prayers of the people” liturgies have borne witness to the fact that in those instances where we can’t “do” anything with our hands to help, we can always drop to our knees and pray.

Christians can model a different mode of living in an over-informed, underactivated world. It’s a mode that isn’t numb or ambivalent to the countless problems that plague our world but realistic about our limited scope and where we can best be used. It’s a mode that leads to calmer minds, more focused souls, and more engaged bodies. It’s a mode that syncs up with how we were created and resists the digital era’s many temptations toward god-like limitlessness.

Content taken from “Scrolling Ourselves to Death” by Ivan Mesa and Brett McCracken, ©2025. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, crossway.org.

Endnotes
1 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 20th anniversary ed. (1985; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2005), 68.
2 Postman, Amusing Ourselves, 107.
3 Neil Postman, “Informing Ourselves to Death” (address to the German Informatics Society, Stuttgart, Germany, October 11, 1990), https://web.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101 /informing.html.
4 I devote chapters to each of these three challenges in my book, The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), chaps. 1–3.
5 C. S. Lewis, letter to Dom Bede Griffiths (1946), quoted in Paul F. Ford, ed., Yours, Jack: Spiritual Direction from C. S. Lewis (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 119.



News

Faded road lines symbolize faded Christian values

Having a hard time seeing the lines on the road? You aren’t alone. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities is lobbying for changes to a rule from the federal government that has resulted in road lines that wear out after just a few months.

The edict, which first came from the federal government in 2012, and was updated by the Minister of “Environment and Climate Change” in 2023, pronounced that chemicals in the paint called volatile organic compounds (VOCs) had to be significantly reduced. They made this decision because VOCs contribute to smog. Smog can irritate eyes and throats.

But decreasing the VOCs meant that the paints simply don’t work like they used to. “It doesn’t stick as well, it’s not as reflective, and you can only paint in certain temperatures,” explained Tim Tierney, the chair of the city of Ottawa’s Public Works and Infrastructure Committee. And as Clark Somerville, councillor for the Town of Halton Hills explained to the Globe and Mail:

“As the road painting is disappearing quicker, we are now spending taxpayers’ dollars to go out and repaint the roads more than what we had to before,”

But it isn’t just a matter of money. The current rules “create a dangerous, dangerous situation – not only for drivers, but pedestrians in intersections” noted Tierney.

In 2012, the year that the change took effect in Canada, the BC trucking industry saw a spike in complaints about line visibility. ”Drivers reported more difficulty finding roadway centre and edge markings — not a great situation for a loaded semi weighing up to 35,000 kilos,” explained John Ducker, writing for the Victoria Times Colonist. He also noted that the faded lines became the top complaint from motorists in the province.

So why is this being covered in Reformed Perspective? Because it is another example of how everything is fundamentally a worldview issue. God entrusted the civil government with the duty of restraining lawlessness and promoting good order (Belgic Confession, Article 36). Keeping lines on the road keeps vehicles on the road and protects human life. But our federal government doesn’t have any objective standards for what constitutes justice and good order. Reducing smog, even in the majority of the country where smog isn’t an issue, trumps safety on the road.

In many ways, the faded lines are an apt symbol of the faded Christian norms that this country isn’t interested in reviving, even to our own harm.


Today's Devotional

June 16 - Jesus, mediator of a better covenant (II)

“But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, insomuch as He is also Mediator of a better covenant, which was established on better promises.” - Hebrews 8:6

Scripture reading: Hebrews 8:6-13

After this tragic incident of the golden calf, Moses the mediator of the Old Testament intercedes on behalf of the people that God would turn His wrath away from this sin. Moses >

Today's Manna Podcast

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Facing life's Emptiness: Ecclesiastes

Serving #875 of Manna, prepared by Ian Wildeboer, is called "Facing life's Emptiness" (Ecclesiastes) and is based on Ecclesiastes 1.



















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Culture Clashes

Are you “blessed” or “privileged”?

They might seem close synonyms but the Devil is in the details **** A couple of years back a viral video showed a large group of older teens getting ready to race for a $100 bill. It was men and women, blacks and whites, athletic sorts and not so, and all things being equal, we’d expect one of the long lean guys to run away with the money. But the point of the video was to explain that things are not equal. The leader of the group, Adam Donyes, had a series of eight statements to tell the students before the race got started. The teens were supposed to take two steps forward for each one that applied to them: “Your parents are still married.” “You grew up with a father figure in your home.” “You had access to a private education.” “You had access to a free tutor growing up.” “You never had to worry about your cellphone being shut off.” “You never had to help mom or dad with the bills.” “It wasn’t because of your athletic ability that you don’t have to pay for college.” “You never wondered where your next meal was going to come from.” Doynes was trying to make a very specific point. He told the group that each of his statements had “nothing to do with decisions you’ve made.” The students up front were there not because of anything they had done, but because of the position they had been born into, or their parents had put them in. He told those students: “…if this was a fair race, and everybody was back on that line I guarantee you some of these black dudes would smoke all of you. And it is only because you have this big of a head start that you’re possibly going to win this race called life. That is a picture of life, ladies and gentlemen. Nothing you’ve done has put you in the lead that you’re in right now.” Then he shouted “go!” and the race was on. Drawing out biblical truths There are some clear biblical truths that could be drawn out of this video. Luke 12:48b might come to mind: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be required; and to whom they entrusted much, of him they will ask all the more.” Or we might think of how the three servants were given different amounts of money in the Parable of the Talents in Matt. 25. It’s important for us to understand that for those who have been blessed with more, God has raised expectations for us. The video also lines up well with 1 Cor. 12 where Paul notes our different gifts, comparing them to parts of the body. One person might be a hand, another a foot, and another an eye. And just like the "eye cannot say to the hand 'I have no need of you'" so too we shouldn't look down on those with different gifts than our own. That's an important lesson, and Doynes tries to make that specifically to those out in the front. But in this same chapter Paul also makes another point that would have been an important one for all those farther back. We are all part of the body, and we shouldn't overlook what God gifts has given us: "...the body does not consist of one member but many. If the foot should say, 'because I am a hand I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body....there are many parts, yet one body." Guilt vs. gratitude So there was a lot to love in this video. But what made it go viral was how it seemed the perfect illustration of “privilege,” and specifically “white privilege,” since blacks were clustered in the back, and the very front was populated with whites. The way the term privileged is used it can seem like a close synonym to blessed. One person says, “I’m blessed to have always had a roof over my head” and another says, “I was privileged to never have to worry about being homeless.” Just a matter of tomato/tomatoh, right? Two terms for the same idea. But there’s an important sense in which the two words are actually opposites. Blessed is an inherently positive word. When we say we are blessed in this way or that, it is a note of appreciation to our “blesser” whether that is God, or maybe our parents, spouse, friends, or children. But whereas we celebrate the ways in which we are blessed, one admits to being privileged – we’re supposed to “check our privilege.” Being blessed makes us grateful, but being privileged brings guilt. Parents stayed together? You got to go to a basketball camp last summer? Lucky you, but not all of us are so privileged. There's more to privileged than just guilt. Often times it is shorthand for something like: "You're privileged so you don't know me – you haven't lived through what I've had to endure." There's truth to that – if we've been sheltered from some of the world's harshness that can bring with it a naivety. And that might leave a gulf between us and others who haven't been so blessed. But even in this usage privileged is a negative word. Noting differences can be a step to understanding, to beginning to know one another. But the way privileged is used it is not a conversation-starter. This is a putdown used as a conversation-stopper. While Donyes didn’t use the word privilege in his video, there was a reason so many others thought it fit – his video wasn’t a celebration of blessing; there was a touch of shame instead. If the difference between blessed and privileged is still muddy consider this: when we are blessed and others are not, what do we want for them? Don’t we want them to have what we have? But when we admit to being privileged, is that a state we’d wish on anyone else? Being privileged isn’t something you aspire to. This is part of the “victimhood culture” where the worse off you are, the less guilt you have to feel for what you have. But when it’s good, or at least less shameful, to be hard off, then it’s bad to become more “privileged.” A wise man once said that the battle we're in is over the dictionary, and this is an example. These two words – blessed and privileged – seem almost synonyms, but whereas the first takes us to gratitude and God, the second leads to unremitting guilt and stagnation. Inequality vs. poverty Inequality and poverty are also used interchangeably. When we see people who don’t have a warm bed to sleep in, or don’t have money for needed medical expenses, then we’ll quite naturally wish their situation wasn’t so unequal. We want them to have what we have, and wish that they could live like we do. But what we’re really lamenting here is not inequality but poverty. If inequality was our concern, we could be happy as long as everyone was equally needy. But that’s not what we’re after. Our real goal is for the poor to be raised out of poverty.  So here, too, there’s a sense in which this is all just tomato/tomatoh– we might use different words, but we all want to help the poor. But once again there is an important sense in which two seeming synonyms have dangerously different meanings. Whereas “fighting poverty” is focused on helping the poor, fighting inequality is sometimes about tearing down the rich. That shift of focus happens whenever we start believing that one person’s success happens at other people’s expense. That’s what Donyes taught in his video. Donyes told students that his $100 race was like “this race called life – this is a picture of life ladies and gentlemen.” But his race had only one winner. And that winner could only succeed if others failed. In this setting every two steps someone got to take forward diminished the chances of winning for all those left behind. If that’s how you thought the world operated, what sort of attitude would you have towards millionaires and billionaires? If you believed they got their wealth by impoverishing the rest of us, what would you see as the best way to help the poor? Just that quick, concern for the poor becomes “Let’s get the filthy rich!” The world’s wealth isn’t fixed and limited. If it was, would the Tenth Commandment (Ex. 20:17) make sense? There God tells us it’s none of our business what our neighbor has, but if our neighbor could only get wealthy by keeping others poor, wouldn’t we all have a legitimate interest in making sure he didn’t get too much? The truth is, life is not a winner-take-all-race. We can thank God that’s true spiritually, with God’s children numbering as the sand on the seashore – God has made us all champions, and there are too many of us to even count. And it’s just as true materially. Even if someone beats me out for my dream job, that doesn’t mean I have to go jobless. There are other careers. I can succeed too. And if I start a successful business, yes, I might grow wealthy, but I’ll be making my money by creating a product that others find useful enough to pay for. I won’t become wealthy at my customers’ expense. They’re only buying my widget because they think it is worth more than I am asking for it (or they would never buy it). In a very real way in all the countless merchant/customer exchanges that take place around the world both sides are the wealthier for it. That’s why both customer and merchant will say thank-you at the conclusion of a sale – both have become richer...and at no one’s expense. Of course, robbers do exist – some people do become wealthy only by taking from others. But that’s not the rule. God has so made our world that we can work together to each other’s benefit. That’s why the Tenth Commandment makes sense. And when we realize that our neighbors’ wealth isn’t making anyone poor, then we can get back to fighting poverty in fruitful, rather than covetous ways. Conclusion Does that mean we should shake our finger at anyone who speaks of being privileged or uses the word inequality? Not at all. We can put some care and attention to what terms we use, but we don’t need to stress it when others use something else. Rather than going all grammar-nazi on them we can listen in humility, try to be understanding, and use context to hear what they are saying. What’s actually important is seeing through the Devil’s gambit here. Many a best-of-intentioned Christian loves the Lord with all his heart, but there’s a reason God also demands our minds (Matt. 22:37). The Prince of Perversion loves to misdirect what is good and right to his own completely different ends, and our guard against Him is knowing God’s Word, and learning how to apply it. Otherwise, the Devil might have us, in the name of helping the poor, casting covetous eyes at the wealth of our neighbor. And if he could, he’d love to rob God of the praise that is His due by making us feel guilty, not grateful, for all the blessings our Father showers on us. Thankfully, in the great blessing of the forgiveness of sins, we can put away all guilt and all envy, and instead respond in wholehearted, full-throated gratitude to our great God....

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Saturday Selections – January 11, 2020

If conversion therapy is bad why is "sex reassignment" good? It's been said that our culture wars are really just a battle over the dictionary. "One trick of LGBT activists is changing the meaning of words. We see this in the way they celebrate 'sex reassignment' as 'gender affirmation' but condemned conversion therapy as 'sex reassignment.'" Impeachment: Quid Pro-choice Christianity Today's editor, Mark Galli, sparked controversy last month when he came out in favor of US President Donald Trump being impeached. Is the President guilty? Galli acknowledged the process wasn't fair: "No, Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment. But the facts in this instance are unambiguous..." Two Scripture passages leap to mind – Prov. 18:17 and Matt. 7:1-2 – and the question, is Galli judging here by a standard that he'd want directed his way? Carl Trueman and Peter Jones weigh in. Untangling the theology of Star Wars This 300-word read gives a quick overview of the confusing and empty theology of George Lucas' space trilogy². Evolutionists are playing word games Both evolutionists and creationists believe animals change over time – we all believe in that sort of "evolution." The controversy is over how we got from molecules to man – i.e. how simple early cells gained information over time to eventually produce the incredibly complex creatures that we are. When evolutionists demonstrate wolves can beget Chihuahuas if you break the right genes – when they show change over time that involves a loss of complexity – and then pretend this is evidence for the molecule-to-man sort of evolution, we need to recognize this for the dishonest word game that it is. As evidence of evolution, they are presenting devolution.  And as the author writes, much of the changes we see in animals comes from broken genes, not new genes. "Behe... learned that one of the favorite examples of evolution — the change from the brown bear to the white polar bear — was also an example of breaking genes: 17 genes in this case." US Park to remove all "glaciers will be gone by 2020" signs Turns out things are "much more complex" than they knew... Extreme poverty in a historical context "On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, 'The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday.'” But you haven't seen those headlines, have you? Why not? Because it's harder to foster envy and ingratitude when things are getting objectively better. God has blessed us materially, and we're being tricked into believing that our rise in population is dooming more and more to poverty. Don't be fooled. This article has charts and diagrams, and while not a difficult read, it is a somewhat dry one. But it is one well worth reading, or even skimming if that's all your time permits....

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Saturday Selections - Sept 30, 2017

This edition has been brought to you by the number 6: six items, six actions, and six surprises.... God painted ants on fruit fly wings Some things are just too cool not to share: God has crafted detailed pictures of ants on the tiny wings of a particular fly. Why? Because it is brilliant! Lots of astonishing pictures here. 6 actions to take when grieving the death of a loved one Thought this is a very short post, it has helpful suggestions summarized from the twice-widowed missionary-wife Elisabeth Elliot. 6 surprises every premarital counselor should cover Even the apostle Paul speaks of marriage as a mystery. To minimize some of the surprises, this is a good article for engage or newly married couples to read together. And it's a good reminder for all couples. More on why euthanasia safeguards can't work From the article: "Safeguards are ineffective to prevent slippery slopes. As British moral philosopher Dame Mary Warnock has put it in another context, 'you cannot successfully block a slippery slope except by a fixed and invariable obstacle.' In governing dying and death that obstacle is the rule that we must not intentionally kill another human being." The only flaw in this article is that the Christian ethic, serving as the foundation to Margaret Somerville's argument, is never acknowledged. So we need to take her point as to the weakness of "safeguards" but then be explicit as to the eternal standards we are appealing to. Or, in other words, don't just tear down the lie, as Somerville does here, but also present the full Truth, as founded on God's Word and his Law. How to avoid poverty Everyone wants to reduce poverty, and in the West, the way to do so is clear. But the in the West, our culture doesn't want to hear it if it involves doing what God wants. Now this article doesn't present it quite that way, but the prescription – finish high school, then get a job, then get married, then have kids – lines up nicely with God's will for marriage, and his commandment Don't commit adultery. Around the world, capitalism has helped raise millions out of poverty, but why? Perhaps because at its ideal (ie., not the crony capitalism type) it also lines up with God's commands not to steal or covet. On social justice I've only had a chance to dip my toe in this free resource, but this video series looks fascinating, and solidly Christian. It addresses questions like: "What is social justice today?" and, "What sort of social justice should Christians pursue?" (This does require you share your email address with them.)...