NOTE THAT THIS BLOG PERTAINS TO WORLDVIEW AND IS ALSO POSTED ON MY OTHER BLOG @ www.christ-centeredworldview.blogspot.com/ IT IS A SAMPLE OF MY WORK IN THIS FIELD.
"Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred..." (1 Chronicles 12:32, NASB).
"... [A] people without understanding shall come to ruin" (Hosea 4:14, ESV).
C. S. Lewis, the literary apologist who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity, said we must defend our worldview and not lose by default or neglect---in other words, we must have the answers and be prepared for spiritual battle. Lewis also says "[we] must show our Christian colours, if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. We cannot remain silent and concede everything away." We must dare to be "Daniels" willing to get into the action and not stand aside and merely passively observe. We cannot remain neutral, for that is a stand against Christ and His truth. Matthew 12:30 says: "He that is not with Me is against Me."
The Judeo-Christian mindset has not failed, it has not been defended, but abandoned. The dual problem is that many do not know why they believe, nor even what they believe! Our mission: Get the truth out there and propagated in a culture that is convinced that "truth is a short-term contract," but there is absolute truth! But it is not all relevant. We must all be responsible to disseminate what light God has given us. The ramifications of being remiss or negligent are a nation devoid of divine viewpoint and being hijacked by fanatical or fringe movements, using God to promote their agenda, and possibly even the ultimate surrender to secular thinking, and the elimination of Christian input in toto into the public square could transpire, i.e., be muzzling our freedom of speech!
What is a worldview (commonly referred to as Weltanschauung, the German terminology)? Opinions are something you hold, while convictions hold you: It is the sum total of your convictions and why you see a life worth living or something worth dying for. It has been said that it usually answers the queries: "Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?" Your worldview helps you explain God (or explain Him away), your world, and the relationship between the two as to how they relate individually and as a society. In sum, your outlook on life. In essence, we have a theory of the world and God, and how we relate to them, according to the dictionary. This is a vital discipline because kids are going to college ill-prepared when there's a war of ideas going on, and too many need to get their thinking straightened out (cf. 2 Cor. 10:5: "... [Bringing] every thought [or viewpoint] into captivity to the obedience of Christ"). So how do you interpret reality?
To answer these questions from the viewpoint or perspective of Secular Humanism, they leave God out of the equation and explain away the supernatural, only believing in the observable and rational, and leaving the universal language of science and consensus to figure out all the answers. Science has become a religion--or "scientism" and making value judgments, (as Carl Sagan, the 1981 recipient of the Humanist of the Year award, according to my source, said, "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be"--this is out of the realm, scope, and domain of science). More people believe in the theory of evolution (which is unproven and "unprovable") as religious dogma and scientific fact, and this is the Big Lie. Dr. Karl Popper says that evolution does not fit the definition of a scientific theory.
But Evolution is the building block of Secular Humanism and this belief system has no place for God in the Picture. This is the predominant worldview today in academia and we cannot remain silent and concede everything away, according to C. S. Lewis, again. Humanism has been around since antiquity and was known as "man as the measure of all things" (define and begin all reality with man, not God) and it was called Homo mensura--deifying man and dethroning God. They see all religion as just chasing some "pie in the sky," and believe in living for the "here and now," without living in the light of eternity.
You either must begin with man and explain the cosmos, or begin with God and explain the cosmos. This begs the question: What was in the beginning? "In the beginning God," or "In the beginning matter." Which created which? Do matter and energy have inherent power and intelligence to fix all the more than 50 constants in our cosmos and make life suitable for us, known as the Anthropic Principle, or the fine-tuning of our planet for human life? Athanasius, one of the Church Fathers, said that the only system of thought that Christ will fit into is the one where He is the starting point. The false assumption that science makes is that Christianity is anti-science: In fact, it made possible modern science in the first place and is the "Mother of Modern Science! Many good scientists have been and are Christians.
Shakespeare said it well, concerning our meaning in life apart from God in Macbeth as he mused about the entirety of living: "...['Tis] a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." R. C. Sproul said in the same vein: "With God we have dignity and without God we have nothing." When you insert God into your thinking you can explain reality and find meaning to it. Bertrand Russell restated it well, "Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless." Life is nonsensical without reference to God!
The biggest challenge Secular Humanism faces is the word "purpose" (and its corollary "meaning"), or the study of it known as teleology (from telos for a purpose). The word seems almost theological to them in nature. There is indeed a war of "isms" and the battleground is the mindset of a whole generation that is apathetic toward them in their interpretive framework. The bottom line is that these "isms" have consequences.
It was the proponents of Secular Humanism that bemoaned the fact that children's minds weren't kept open when evolution was a forbidden subject in school; now they refuse to even let Creationism have equal time, though there is plenty of evidence, so that lack of evidence presents no excuse for denying it. We need to keep God in the public arena and defend the Christian worldview in the public square wherever possible, not letting Secular Humanism eradicate it or make it irrelevant. (They believe religion is acceptable as long as it is "privatized.")
"If there is no God," Fyodor Dostoyevsky's dictum goes, "everything is permissible," and up for and up for grabs, and we are without a moral compass--if we are animals, why not act like them? (Morals are then subjective and only a matter of personal conviction.) Some believe values are just a matter of public consensus--justifying Nazism and Communism! Listen to the New Age definition of it: "Morality is a nebulous thing; listen to the God within!" And if it feels like the truth, it is. Postmodernists say that it can be right for you, but not someone else. They dodge the morality issues. Compare this idea to the situation described in Judges 21:25 (ESV): "... [Everyone] did what was right in their own eyes." All we need to know is that God is the moral center of the universe! A theologian Karl Barth, focused on Christians who are religious, but not righteous--and decried this as a natural fruit of this way of thinking.
We need to separate the wheat from the chaff, ascertaining the truth from the fiction. "My people perish for lack of knowledge" (Hosea 4:14). Note well: "Knowledge is power," said Sir Francis Bacon (cf. Prov. 24:5). "For lack of knowledge My people go into exile" (Is. 5:13). 1 Chronicles 12:32 says we need people who can interpret the times and know what to do. Our faith is "defensible" and we must meet the challenge and not lose by negligence or default. If we are versed in our worldview we will realize it outshines every other one. Soli Deo Gloria!
"Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred..." (1 Chronicles 12:32, NASB).
"... [A] people without understanding shall come to ruin" (Hosea 4:14, ESV).
C. S. Lewis, the literary apologist who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity, said we must defend our worldview and not lose by default or neglect---in other words, we must have the answers and be prepared for spiritual battle. Lewis also says "[we] must show our Christian colours, if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. We cannot remain silent and concede everything away." We must dare to be "Daniels" willing to get into the action and not stand aside and merely passively observe. We cannot remain neutral, for that is a stand against Christ and His truth. Matthew 12:30 says: "He that is not with Me is against Me."
The Judeo-Christian mindset has not failed, it has not been defended, but abandoned. The dual problem is that many do not know why they believe, nor even what they believe! Our mission: Get the truth out there and propagated in a culture that is convinced that "truth is a short-term contract," but there is absolute truth! But it is not all relevant. We must all be responsible to disseminate what light God has given us. The ramifications of being remiss or negligent are a nation devoid of divine viewpoint and being hijacked by fanatical or fringe movements, using God to promote their agenda, and possibly even the ultimate surrender to secular thinking, and the elimination of Christian input in toto into the public square could transpire, i.e., be muzzling our freedom of speech!
What is a worldview (commonly referred to as Weltanschauung, the German terminology)? Opinions are something you hold, while convictions hold you: It is the sum total of your convictions and why you see a life worth living or something worth dying for. It has been said that it usually answers the queries: "Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?" Your worldview helps you explain God (or explain Him away), your world, and the relationship between the two as to how they relate individually and as a society. In sum, your outlook on life. In essence, we have a theory of the world and God, and how we relate to them, according to the dictionary. This is a vital discipline because kids are going to college ill-prepared when there's a war of ideas going on, and too many need to get their thinking straightened out (cf. 2 Cor. 10:5: "... [Bringing] every thought [or viewpoint] into captivity to the obedience of Christ"). So how do you interpret reality?
To answer these questions from the viewpoint or perspective of Secular Humanism, they leave God out of the equation and explain away the supernatural, only believing in the observable and rational, and leaving the universal language of science and consensus to figure out all the answers. Science has become a religion--or "scientism" and making value judgments, (as Carl Sagan, the 1981 recipient of the Humanist of the Year award, according to my source, said, "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be"--this is out of the realm, scope, and domain of science). More people believe in the theory of evolution (which is unproven and "unprovable") as religious dogma and scientific fact, and this is the Big Lie. Dr. Karl Popper says that evolution does not fit the definition of a scientific theory.
But Evolution is the building block of Secular Humanism and this belief system has no place for God in the Picture. This is the predominant worldview today in academia and we cannot remain silent and concede everything away, according to C. S. Lewis, again. Humanism has been around since antiquity and was known as "man as the measure of all things" (define and begin all reality with man, not God) and it was called Homo mensura--deifying man and dethroning God. They see all religion as just chasing some "pie in the sky," and believe in living for the "here and now," without living in the light of eternity.
According to scholar and theologian Carl F. H. Henry, Christianity speaks to all academic disciplines and is relevant to all facets of life, not just having a personal relationship with God. There is a struggle for student allegiance in the school system and atheism has been declared a religion by the Seventh Court of Appeals in 2005. Humanism was defined in a book Religion Without Revelation by Julian Huxley. In A Common Faith, John Dewey sees the Secular Humanist movement as having the elements of a religion. They say that children's minds should be kept open, but they proceed to brainwash them. A. Solzhenitsyn has said that "man has forgotten God," and Friedrich Nietzsche (the patron saint of Postmodernism) said "God is dead." meaning that He is "no longer believable." Will Durant has well said, "The greatest question of our time is whether man can live without God." A current politician has said he would "keep God out of it."
You either must begin with man and explain the cosmos, or begin with God and explain the cosmos. This begs the question: What was in the beginning? "In the beginning God," or "In the beginning matter." Which created which? Do matter and energy have inherent power and intelligence to fix all the more than 50 constants in our cosmos and make life suitable for us, known as the Anthropic Principle, or the fine-tuning of our planet for human life? Athanasius, one of the Church Fathers, said that the only system of thought that Christ will fit into is the one where He is the starting point. The false assumption that science makes is that Christianity is anti-science: In fact, it made possible modern science in the first place and is the "Mother of Modern Science! Many good scientists have been and are Christians.
Shakespeare said it well, concerning our meaning in life apart from God in Macbeth as he mused about the entirety of living: "...['Tis] a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." R. C. Sproul said in the same vein: "With God we have dignity and without God we have nothing." When you insert God into your thinking you can explain reality and find meaning to it. Bertrand Russell restated it well, "Unless you assume a God, the question of life's purpose is meaningless." Life is nonsensical without reference to God!
The biggest challenge Secular Humanism faces is the word "purpose" (and its corollary "meaning"), or the study of it known as teleology (from telos for a purpose). The word seems almost theological to them in nature. There is indeed a war of "isms" and the battleground is the mindset of a whole generation that is apathetic toward them in their interpretive framework. The bottom line is that these "isms" have consequences.
It was the proponents of Secular Humanism that bemoaned the fact that children's minds weren't kept open when evolution was a forbidden subject in school; now they refuse to even let Creationism have equal time, though there is plenty of evidence, so that lack of evidence presents no excuse for denying it. We need to keep God in the public arena and defend the Christian worldview in the public square wherever possible, not letting Secular Humanism eradicate it or make it irrelevant. (They believe religion is acceptable as long as it is "privatized.")
"If there is no God," Fyodor Dostoyevsky's dictum goes, "everything is permissible," and up for and up for grabs, and we are without a moral compass--if we are animals, why not act like them? (Morals are then subjective and only a matter of personal conviction.) Some believe values are just a matter of public consensus--justifying Nazism and Communism! Listen to the New Age definition of it: "Morality is a nebulous thing; listen to the God within!" And if it feels like the truth, it is. Postmodernists say that it can be right for you, but not someone else. They dodge the morality issues. Compare this idea to the situation described in Judges 21:25 (ESV): "... [Everyone] did what was right in their own eyes." All we need to know is that God is the moral center of the universe! A theologian Karl Barth, focused on Christians who are religious, but not righteous--and decried this as a natural fruit of this way of thinking.
We need to separate the wheat from the chaff, ascertaining the truth from the fiction. "My people perish for lack of knowledge" (Hosea 4:14). Note well: "Knowledge is power," said Sir Francis Bacon (cf. Prov. 24:5). "For lack of knowledge My people go into exile" (Is. 5:13). 1 Chronicles 12:32 says we need people who can interpret the times and know what to do. Our faith is "defensible" and we must meet the challenge and not lose by negligence or default. If we are versed in our worldview we will realize it outshines every other one. Soli Deo Gloria!
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