The War Against Christianity: Trying to Quantify the Unquantifiable

American ChristianityI am a Christian American Conservative. I make no apologies for that fact.

Depending on which poll you read, Christians comprise 70-75% of America’s Population.

During the Obama Administration, there has been a concerted and very visible effort to limit the role which Christianity plays in the day-to-day lives of average Americans.

This was already done, decades ago, in Europe, and now, they are suffering the consequences of their actions.

The Christian Post reports that

The Church of England is reportedly considering plans to keep some historic village churches across the country opened only on holy days such as Christmas and Easter due to population shifts and the ever-growing decline in attendance and church membership.

A major 66-page report by the CofE’s Church Buildings Review Group noted that many churches are no longer sustainable, and that about one in four parishes have fewer than 10 regular worshipers.

The report proposes turning some parishes into “festival churches” in order to ease the financial burden, suggesting that they will only be used for key dates on the religious calendar, or occasions such as marriage and funerals.

Festival churches are only one of the widespread changes proposed by the review group, which says it is focused on “securing spiritual and numerical growth and serving the common good.”

“We believe that — apart from growing the church — there is no single solution to the challenges posed by our extensive responsibility for part of the nation’s historic heritage,” the group added.

The CofE has had to deal with sharp decline over the past 30 years, as reported in May by NatCen Social Research.

The group’s Social Attitudes survey found that 40 percent of the British population identified as Anglicans in 1983, but that number is down to only 17 percent in 2014. Presently only 8.5 million Britons identify as Anglicans, the survey said.

People of no religious faith now make up close to half of the population in Britain, or 49 percent, which is up from their 31 percent count in 1983.

With the steady rise of immigration, the rise of non-Christian faiths has also been well documented, with Islam making up close to 5 percent of all Britons in 2014, up from 0.5 percent in 1983.

Could this happen in America?

It is a fact that a significant number of Americans have left Organized Religion, frankly, because by embracing Popular Culture, instead of God’s Holy Word, the church they attended LEFT THEM.

For example…

The Episcopal Church continues to experience losses in both church attendance and membership, according to recently released numbers from the denomination’s Office of the General Convention.

From 2013 to 2014, active baptized members in domestic dioceses went from 1.866 million to 1.817 million, representing a loss of nearly 50,000 members. 

The statistics reveal that in 2014 that average Sunday attendance was a little over 600,000 in domestic dioceses, down from approximately 623,000 in 2013.

2014’s numbers are even more telling when compared with 2009, when the theologically liberal Episcopal Church had about 200,000 more members and over 80,000 more Sunday worship attendees.

Jeff Walton, Anglican program director at the theologically conservative Institute on Religion & Democracy, noted in a blog entry last week other aspects of decline for the Church.

“Other measures of Episcopal Church vitality also saw decline: the denomination reported the shuttering of 69 parishes and missions, down from 6,622 in 2013 to 6,553 in 2014,” wrote Walton.

“Children’s baptisms declined 4.8 percent from 25,822 to 24,594 and adult baptisms declined during the same time-frame from 3,675 to 3,530, a decline of nearly 4 percent.”

The losses experienced between 2013 and 2014 are nearly double the roughly 27,000 fewer members between 2012 and 2013.

Why do churches who allow the world’s “Popular Culture” to influence their worship of God, tend to have to eventually close their doors?

Perhaps, it is because, instead of concentrating on the “Divine Mystery” of the Triune God, Liberal Churches are “trying to quantify the unquantifiable”.

Stream.org has posted an article on-line, in which scientists claim that they can change someone’s opinion about the existence of God and illegal immigrants, through the use of magnets.

In Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience Sally Satel (psychiatrist) and Scott Lilienfeld (psychologist) say “the half-life of facts can be especially brief” in this field. New results disprove older ones continuously.After the zapping, all participants were re-asked the same questions. Turns out participants “reported an average of 32.8% less conviction in positive religious beliefs” than those who weren’t zapped. That’s 32.8% and not 32.7%, mind you. In science we demand precision! A wee p-value confirmed that this change was “statistically significant.” There isn’t space here to explain the horror of this statistical approach, but interested readers can learn more here.

This is where it gets interesting. There was, as we have just seen, a small change in the answers to pseudo-quantified questions about positive religious beliefs, but there weren’t any “significant” changes in the answers to pseudo-quantified questions about negative religious beliefs. The same sort of thing happened in the questions about immigrants: Some had wee p-values and some did not. And there were no changes in any of the other questions asked. Yet which “findings” got the headlines?

We still haven’t answered the big question: why. Why did the authors design a study about belief in God and attitudes about immigrants? From their conclusion, written in the impenetrable prose typical of such “studies”:

“History teaches that investment in cherished group and religious values can bring forth acts of both heroic valor and horrific injustice. Understanding the psychological and biological determinants of increases in ideological commitment may ultimately help us to identify the situational triggers of, and individuals most susceptible to, this phenomenon, and thereby gain some leverage over the zealous acts that follow. …The results provide evidence that relatively abstract personal and social attitudes are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, opening the way for researchers to not only describe the biological mechanisms undergirding high-level attitudes and beliefs, but also to establish causality via experimental intervention.”

Did you catch that? These scientists hope that in the future belief in God, or in some other politically incorrect question that might — only might — lead to “zealous acts,” can be treated, maybe even cured, by magnet zappings. And there you have the real danger that follows from believing you can quantify the unquantifiable.

Popular Culture, under the guise of “making the individual feel better about themselves”, actually constrains individual achievement.

These “millennials”, by believing that they are “their own god”, are limiting themselves.

History has shown us, time and again, what happens to a society, when man starts worshiping himself.

As Proverbs 16:18 tells us

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

Right now, you’re probably saying to yourself,

Hold on, KJ, you just said that the individual CAN achieve.

Yes, I did.

Those who have gone before us, such as our Founding Fathers, our military leaders, our civic leaders, and our spiritual and familial leaders, all had one thing in common:

They all possessed a spirit of self-sacrifice.

Not sacrificing their will to achieve for the “good of the State”, but, rather, unselfishly sacrificing their time and talents for the betterment of those around them.

And, that is where the “Progressives” (i.e., Liberals), get it wrong.

It is not “the State”, nor the community-at-large, that drives, or allows, Individual Americans to succeed.

Anytime that man tries to limit God, he sets himself up for failure.

It is that “still, small voice” that resides within each one of us that has endowed us with our “certain inalienable rights” as Americans, of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”, that gives us the strength and discernment to succeed.

For without God, nothing is possible.

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

 

 

 

The War Against Christianity: A Question of Intolerance

 

American Christianity 2

There has been a lot of discussion the past couple of weeks, concerning the Constitutional Rights of Christian Americans versus the hypocritical use of the words “tolerance” and “discrimination” by the American Left.

Napp Nazworth, writing for The Christian Post, makes the following observation…

Businesses should not discriminate, liberals proclaimed loudly in explaining their opposition to religious freedom laws. Three recent actions supported by liberals demonstrate that is not true.

1. Bakeries Should Be Able to Refuse Bible Verses

Christian activist Bill Jack was denied service when he went to Azucar Bakery in Denver and asked for two cakes in the shape of open Bibles. He asked for the words, “God hates sin — Psalm 45:7,” “Homosexuality is a detestable sin — Leviticus 18:22,” “God loves sinners,” and “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us — Romans 5:8,” on each of the “pages” of the Bible cakes.

Azucar Bakery is in the same state where the bakery Masterpiece Cake was successfully sued for declining to make a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding.

In a January interview with The Christian Post, Jack explained that he supports Azucar Bakery’s right to deny him service because they oppose the values he wanted written on the cakes. He only made the requests to find out if Colorado would be hypocritical. It was.

In Colorado, if a customer wants a cake with Christian values written on it, bakers are allowed to decline service if they disagree with those values. If a customer wants a cake for a same-sex wedding, bakers are not allowed to decline service if they disagree with same-sex marriage.

2. Pharmacists Should Refuse Death Penalty Drugs

The American Pharmacists Association approved a policy last month discouraging its members from participating in death penalty executions by providing the drugs required for lethal injections.

The move was encouraged by a letter sent to the group signed by 31 anti-death penalty and liberal organizations, including Amnesty International, the NAACP, National Council of Churches, SumOfUs and the United Methodist Church.

Liberal websites, such as The Huffington Post, Democracy Now and Think Progress, wrote positive reports about the move. There were no critics mentioned in their reports arguing that pharmacists should not have the right to decline their customers.

These reactions contrast sharply with liberal reactions to the notion that pro-life health care workers should not be forced to choose between participating in an abortion and losing their job.

3. Businesses Were Right to Boycott an Entire State Because of a Religious Freedom Law

In reaction to a religious freedom law passed in Indiana, Liberals were not only supporting, but praising Apple, Angie’s List and Salesforce for threatening boycotts in the state over the new law.

These liberals appreciated these companies making business decisions based upon their moral convictions. This exposed a glaring contradiction in their position: those companies opposed the law because it could (in some circumstances) let businesses make based upon owners’ religious convictions.

At its core, the issue was about wedding vendors, like Masterpiece Cake mentioned above, who declined service for same-sex weddings due to their religious convictions. Essentially, this means the companies were opposing a law that could (but not necessarily would) give small business owners the right to decline business for a particular event, by declining business with an entire state.

More than that, Angie’s List, Apple and Salesforce were much more extreme in their position than the wedding vendors. While wedding vendors opposed to working same-sex weddings would have no economic impact (because there are plenty of vendors willing to work same-sex weddings), boycotts by large companies would hurt local economies and workers — even those workers who agreed with their position. Yet, to hear liberals tell it, those companies were heroic while same-sex marriage opponents are bigots.

In a Thursday article for The Federalist, The Acton Institute’s Jordan Ballor put it well: “The problem in this instance, then, is not that companies like Angie’s List threaten economic sanction, …. The problem, rather, is that the freedom to discriminate is claimed by such companies for themselves but not extended and recognized for others. Boycotts against discrimination as such thus depend on the very thing they oppose. In this sense, the discriminatory actions of businesses ought to be judged alike, whether they are based on religious convictions or secular morality.”

So, what is it that American Liberals want Christian Americans to do, concerning the fact that our Holy Scriptures, God’s Word itself, condemns homosexuality?

According to Dr. Michael Brown, writing for The Christian Post, one  for the New York Times, believes that there is a simple solution to the “problem.”

Simply rewrite the Word of God.

How can the religious community live in peace and harmony with the LGBT community? New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has the solution. Just rewrite the Bible.

In his April 3rd column, “Bigotry, the Bible and the Lessons of Indiana,” Bruni, himself gay, recognizes that Christian beliefs are not necessarily grounded in hatred. The problem, he claims, is that, “Beliefs ossified over centuries aren’t easily shaken.”

Bruni, for his part, wants to shake us free from our fossilized faith.

According to Bruni, who evidences little or no understanding of how believers view the Scriptures (namely, as God’s inspired Word), if we hold to the view that homosexual practice is sinful, this is our “decision” and “choice.”

So, ironically, whereas homosexuality was once considered a choice, now what we believe about homosexuality is a choice.

After all, he argues, the belief that homosexual practice is sinful “prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.”

So, Bruni thinks he can simply dismiss the Scriptures as “ancient texts,” explaining “all writings reflect the biases and blind spots of their authors, cultures and eras.”

But for devout Jews and Christians, the Scriptures are not just any writings, full of biases and blind spots.

If that were the case, there would be no basis for our faith whatsoever and no absolute moral foundations of any kind.

Forget about homosexuality. We would have no reason to hold to any of the fundamentals of our faith if Bruni’s description was accurate.

Not only so, but Bruni wrongly claims that for those of us who hold to the authority of the Bible, “the advances of science and knowledge” mean “nothing.”

To the contrary, all the scientific advances in the world cannot determine what is or is not moral, and there’s nothing we know today that changes our view that God did not design men to be with men and women to be with women. The new interpretations of Scripture that the “progressive” Christians are touting (and which Bruni applauds) are not based on new textual or archeological or linguistic discoveries. They are based primarily on emotional arguments, since there is nothing in the Bible that supports homosexual practice.

Bruni also repeats the common misconception that there are just a handful of “scattered” texts that deal with homosexual practice.

To the contrary, every law dealing with marriage and family, every positive example and precept, every illustration in the Bible about sexuality morality is based on heterosexual relationships (see, for example, Genesis 2:24; Exodus 20:12; Matthew 19:4-6; Ephesians 5:22-33).

That’s why there was not a need to condemn homosexual practice on every page. Everything in Scripture was against it. (To be perfectly clear, the Bible plainly teaches that God loves every human being, that all of us are fallen and in need of redemption, and that Jesus died for heterosexual and homosexual alike. The issue here is the meaning of marriage and the standard of sexual morality.)

Bruni cannot countenance this for a moment. Instead, he claims that our biblically-based faith “elevates unthinking obeisance above intelligent observance,” which is why “our debate about religious freedom should include a conversation about freeing religions and religious people from prejudices that they needn’t cling to and can indeed jettison, much as they’ve jettisoned other aspects of their faith’s history, rightly bowing to the enlightenments of modernity.”

So, those of us who hold to biblical morality are “unthinking” and “prejudiced” people who need to be “freed” from our antiquated beliefs.

It’s high time, Bruni opines, for us to catch up with the 21st century. How utterly primitive of us to believe that there’s anything wrong with homosexual relationships or acts!

Bruni, however, sees positive trends, pointing to a number of books by Christian authors who advocate a reinterpretation of the Bible, claiming that we have outgrown other biblically based views over time, like the justification of slavery or the nature of gender roles.

…Bruni cites with approval a quote from Mitchell Gold, a furniture maker and gay philanthropist who says, “church leaders must be made ‘to take homosexuality off the sin list.'”

And Bruni means it when he says “made to” – as in pressured to or forced to or coerced to. As he writes at the end of his column, “His [namely, Gold’s] commandment is worthy — and warranted. All of us, no matter our religious traditions, should know better than to tell gay people that they’re an offense. And that’s precisely what the florists and bakers who want to turn them away are saying to them.” (Of course, Bruni misrepresents the positions of these Christian business owners as well, but why deal with truth when caricature is so much more effective?)

So, rather than follow the biblical commandments, which are explicit and unambiguous when it comes to both the heterosexual nature of marriage (“from the beginning,” as Jesus said) and the sinfulness of homosexual practice, we should follow the new “commandment” of Bruni and Gold and simply rewrite the Bible.

Well, here’s a note to Mr. Bruni and The New York Times: A billion years from now, when the names of Frank Bruni and Mitchell Gold and the Times itself are long forgotten, the words of God will still stand (Isaiah 40:7-8; Matthew 24:35), and those florists and bakers whom you ridicule in this world will be highly esteemed in the world to come.

The fact is that churches and denominations and religious groups may come and go, but the Word of God is here to stay.

We do not sit in judgment on the Scriptures; the Scriptures sit in judgment of us. And while they call us to love our neighbors as ourselves, they also forbid homosexual practice.

That is not about to change.

As I wrote earlier this week, the Far Left, have proven that they cannot stand Christian Americans. It is evident from their condescension toward us and derision of our traditional values and ethics in their propaganda. Our Constitution gives us Religious Freedom in its very First Amendment.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Please note that this amendment does not say “in some circumstances”.

I have said time and time again, that I find it funny that those among us who claim to be the most tolerant are actually the least tolerant of all.

However, this attack on our faith as Christian Americans, is not funny at all.

This Media Blitz, concerning the fact that Christian Americans refuse to support “Gay Marriage”, which was the impetus behind the President’s scolding Christian Americans about “not being loving enough” is not about discrimination, it is about control. Control of American Christians’ daily lives.

It is a rewriting and an attempted negating of God’s Word by those who cannot win a political or spiritual argument and are now trying to win a culture war by claiming that this law is something that it is not, and by rewriting Christianity by leaving out Individual Salvation through repentance of sin.

Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler ‘ s Minister of Propaganda, once said that

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

The current lie that Obama and his sycophants are telling the American Public is that, somehow, the less than 24% of Americans who feel the same way as the Progressives in the Far Left do, somehow outnumber the 74% of Americans who proclaim Jesus Christ as our Personal Savior.

And, that overestimation just doesn’t add up.

Not even in Common Core.

Until He Comes,

KJ