Christianity

Digitally Dangerous, Rewiring Our Minds

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
12/13/2010 – Chuck Colson –
Spending too much time in the digital world, which hurts our ability to focus, is going to make it hard to engage in spiritual disciplines, which require concentration. And our minds will not develop as God intended them to. […]

Vishal is a bright high school senior who hopes to study filmmaking in college. There’s just one problem: Vishal is rewiring his brain in such a way that he may never enjoy the career he dreams of.

As Matt Richtel reports in the New York Times, like many teens today, Vishal spends a big chunk of his day on his computer–on Facebook, playing video games, creating digital films, or sending text messages to friends.

Richtel writes that the digital world—cell phones and computers—may actually be changing how developing brains work. He notes that many kids do homework at the same time they’re texting friends. Others talk on the phone while texting other friends at the same time. And they all spend many hours every week surfing the Internet. [Read more…]

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American Freedom and Religious Morality

American Freedom and Religious Morality12/5/2010 – Andie Brownlow –

Liberals and conservatives both believe that as Americans, we should be moral people. The major difference is where their morality intersects with their politics. Most conservatives believe that our morality should come from religion, separate from government. Most progressives incorporate moral guidance as a function of government.

The humanistic tendencies of the political left assume that morality can be governed by state laws and dismiss religion as an origin and arbiter of moral law. Therefore, government must become a humanist’s ultimate authority to address and regulate human nature. [Read more…]

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Happy Holydays

Saint Nicholas - Bishop of Myra, Defender of Orthodoxy
Saint Nicholas - Bishop of Myra, Defender of Orthodoxy

12/6/2010 – Lisa Fabrizio –
The conclusion of Thanksgiving, originally a day of solemn acknowledgement that all that we have that is good is a gift from God, brings us to the celebration of the greatest gift from our Creator: the incarnation of our Savior, Jesus Christ. And just as many have seen fit to ignore the giving of thanks to God on Thanksgiving Day, so too have countless others deigned to divorce the birth of Christ from Christmas.

The reasons for this disturbing disconnect vary, but the main one seems to be that the worship of the deity recognized by the great majority of those in this country might be the cause of offense for a few; God himself excepted of course. And so in a few weeks we will commence the season of attempts at discrediting Christianity and its founder while distancing Christmas from any connection with him.

One of the most common ploys will be to claim that the date itself is nothing more than a pagan observance. Most scholars have agreed that the date of December 25 derived from pagan Rome’s celebration of the Natalis Invicti; birth of the deity, Mithra, the Sun God. But this should not, as has become fashionable, justify the notion that Christianity is an offshoot of paganism, even though Scripture is filled with literary allusions to the Sun of God. [Read more…]

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Finding a Church

Orthodox Church 12/5/2010 – Vasko Kohlmayer –

As we are entering this holiday season at this time of turmoil and uncertainty, scores of spiritual seekers will visit Christian places of worship in search of hope, solace, and love.

Most of them are bound to encounter the same problem Robin did last year: How does one know which church to choose given the great variety that exists among them? There are churches, for instance, where priests in swishing white robes lead tightly structured services that revolve around prescribed rituals. On the other hand, there are churches where meetings are informal, free-flowing, and emotionally supercharged. And then there are churches where jeans-clad pastors read from and expound on the Bible for hours on end.

So how does one know which church to pick? How is a seeker to determine which ones reflect the truth of the Christian faith? [Read more…]

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Knowing God, Crucial to Living as a Christian

Knowing God Packer
Eminent Christian theologian J.I. Packer’s best known book is Knowing God. In the book he emphasizes that a lifelong pursuit of knowing God should embody the Christian’s existence. According to Packer, however, Christians have become enchanted by modern skepticism and have joined the gigantic conspiracy of misdirection by failing to put first things first.

11/30/2010 – Chuck Colson –

According to Packer, studying the nature and character of God isn’t, as many Christians suppose, abstract and theoretical, but, instead, the most practical project we can undertake. This knowledge is crucial to living as a Christian.

In fact, attempting to live the Christian life without this knowledge isn’t only foolish, it’s a kind of self-cruelty—denying ourselves the riches of our own faith. [Read more…]

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The Lost Lesson of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Communism Failureby John Stossel –
Had today’s political class been in power in 1623, tomorrow’s holiday would have been called “Starvation Day” instead of Thanksgiving. Of course, most of us wouldn’t be alive to celebrate it.

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. But the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn’t happen.

Long before the failure of modern socialism, the earliest European settlers gave us a dramatic demonstration of the fatal flaws of collectivism. Unfortunately, few Americans today know it.

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally. That’s why they nearly all starved. [Read more…]

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Curing the Human Condition

Regis Nicoll
Regis Nicoll

11/22/2010 – Regis Nicoll –

Albert Einstein, a man who was often ambiguous about his religious views, once admitted that he rejected the God of his Jewish heritage for that of Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher.

For Spinoza, “God” was not a supernatural Being but an omnipresent principle of cosmic order and harmony. His universe was one of matter and motion in which every outcome was pre-determined according to that primal physical essence. It was a thoroughly naturalistic worldview, leaving no room for free will.

Enamored of the ideas of Spinoza, Einstein rejected the notion of free will in favor of the belief that everything obeys the deterministic laws of nature. For folks who similarly take naturalism seriously, a human being is not an autonomous agent acting upon nature, but a biochemical machine ruled by Nature. [Read more…]

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Death Dignified by Christ

11/19/2010 – David Mills –
He was a dignified man suffering all the embarrassing ways cheerful young women the age of his granddaughter deal with the body’s failure as cancer begins shutting down the organs. Dying in a hospice, you lose all rights to modesty as you lose control of your body.

Few men could have found the indignities of those last few weeks more excruciating than did my father. But this was what dying of cancer is like, and my father, being the man he was, took it like a man. It was the hand he’d been dealt, and he was going to play it, as bad as it was. [Read more…]

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The Glory of Humility

St. John the Baptist
St. John the Baptist

11/15/2010 – Deacon Douglas McManaman –
The word ‘human’ comes from the Latin ‘humus’, which means ‘dirt’ or ‘soil’. Man is from the earth.

I often tell my students that what they learn in the course of a semester, in their math class, for example, or in their chemistry classes, or physics, etc., took centuries for the most brilliant human beings to uncover. Once it has been uncovered, however, it appears to be so simple. Why did it take so long? This is true especially for philosophy. It takes years and years to dispose the intellect to learn such abstract truths, and from these truths it is possible to go on to demonstrate, through reason alone, the existence of God, and it is also possible, through reason alone, to show that God is one, eternal, the source of all that is good and beautiful, that He is Beauty Itself, Goodness Itself, and Truth Itself. And when we finally come to see it, we inevitably think: “This is so clear and simple; why did it take years to get this?”

The reason is that human beings, by nature, are slow. We are the highest beings on the hierarchy of material beings, but we are the lowest beings on the hierarchy of God’s intellectual creatures. [Read more…]

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Science-Based Morality?

Regis Nicoll
Regis Nicoll

11/12/2010 – Regis Nicoll –

Each of us believes that certain things are wrong, not because we believe they are wrong, but because they really are wrong. And that applies to the moral relativist as well.

If you want to see a relativist sink into a sophistic seizure, ask him about the “virtues” of cruelty, rape, cheating, bigotry, or exploitation. Even the most liberally minded among us believe such things are wrong, even if they don’t know why.

Take the University of Maryland professor who recently engaged a member of the Genocide Awareness Project. In a ten-minute exchange on moral ethics, the professor exhibited great difficulty with the concept of morality, including the terms of the debate: human essence, value, and rights. Nevertheless, she had no difficulty calling her interlocutor’s reference to “mankind” offensive and “wrong.” [Read more…]

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