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Monday 18 March 2019

Who is teaching your children (and who is teaching you)?

Tragic stories in the News
Not many months pass by without news of yet another teenager who has lost their way or even lost their lives due to influences unknown to their parents.

A child disappears to some militant group and the parents are absolutely shocked and totally unaware of how radicalisation took place.

Another teenager commits suicide and it is discovered that they took how-to "advice" from a website. Once again the inconsolable parents are totally mystified.

Less noticed, but just as tragic are sceptical doubts and philosophies placed in the minds of vulnerable teenagers through watching YouTube and the like.

Who teaches our children?
The question every parent must ask is "Who is teaching my child?" Or, perhaps before that, "Who do I believe is responsible for teaching my children?" If the answer to the second question is that parents bear the primary responsibility (not YouTube or the state) for the education for their children, serious action needs to be taken.

Christian parents are responsible for their children
There is no doubt, from a Christian point of view that parents are responsible for the training and education of their children, with the overall responsibility resting squarely, if not politically-incorrectly, on the shoulders of fathers:

"Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord." (Ephesians 6:4)

We may delegate the task of education to the state, but never the responsibility: that is always ultimately always the prerogative and responsibility of the parent.

That being the case, we are responsible, as parents, for knowing who is teaching our children, and this is where the smartphone comes into court.

FACT: It is impossible to know what our children are looking at, reading, or watching without some kind of accountability software on their phones.

Parents who trust their kids to watch only what is suitable, out of a menu of infinite, are kidding themselves if they think their child will only go where it is safe. A child is born curious and there is a big wide world out there with good and evil both equally available.

A Pastor's Advice
My advice is to encourage parents to have an open conversation with their kids about the blessings and dangers of the Internet. Then come up with clear guidelines which arise out of good reasons, well-explained and sensible.  And make sure that one of those guidelines is accountability software such as Accountable2You or CovenantEyes or the like.

But - of course - a parent that insists on accountability software on their kids' phones must load the app on their own phone.  It would be hypocrisy to demand the one and overlook the other.





Who teaches you?
The problem of who teaches our children is not limited to children, there is a much wider discussion to be had in the churches, as to who teaches adults. It is now possible for a Christian to gather around himself or herself "a great number of (Internet) teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear." (2 Timothy 4:3). This will lead to folk turning "their ears away from the truth (through local pastors and churches) and turn aside to myths." (verse 4).

The local church alone is the pillar and ground of truth. The Lord has appointed shepherds to watch over the local flock, and to feed it and care for it. It is our local pastors and elders - and brothers and sisters around  -  we should listen to and pay heed to, not internet preachers who are unknown, distant and potentially - for all we know - dangerous.

Tuesday 12 March 2019

Born Believers - why children naturally believe in God

Against the Grain
Books that run against the grain of contemporary thinking are not easy to find, so when this book came out in 2012 it stood out among the approximately 2 million volumes published each year.

In a nutshell, the author says that little children are born hard-wired to believe in God. 

The author's case can be summarised as follows:

Step 1: Children are able to distinguish between agents and non-agents. Children know if "something" can organise, initiate, and bring order out of chaos - it knows if something is an "agent". A rolling ball is clearly not an agent, but the human being who rolled the ball is.

Step 2: Everything in the world is made by agents. Children realise that everything they come across in the home, shopping mall, grandma's house and playgroup, is made by an agent. Cars, prams, cups, ipads, chairs, absolutely everything is "made".

Step 3: Humans can't make everything. Little children realise the limits of human agents. Humans can only make artifacts, small things, limited things, relatively simple things.

Step 4: Therefore there must be a God. Because there are mountains and stars and planets and plants and trees and animals - which clearly weren't made by humans - there must be Another Agent who made them - there must be a God who made them.

Eminently reasonable and perfectly automatic!

The human brain comes pre-wired with forensic software
This "forensic" thinking is not taught to a child, it is prewired and perfectly naturally. God has given to every human being the forensic software which comes to all sorts of reasonable and logical conclusions such as the one above.

What happens when children grow up?
If this is the conclusion of little children, how do we explain the fact that as children grow up some of them reject God?

Some might argue that the simple forensic software of a child gives way to the more sophisticated software of the adult mind.

The Scriptures teach something very different. They teach that adults all know there is a God in exactly the same way that little children do. From the created world around them, their minds continue to automatically deduce the existence of a powerful and glorious God.

But they do turn away from that Creator God. They don't turn away from "gods" for they still feel the deep need for greater things in their lives, a greater "Something" that makes life worth living. This new replacement "Something" becomes family, money, hobby, pleasure, career - anything, in fact, "higher" which makes life worth living.

People do not turn away from "gods" - their lives are filled with "gods" - which the Bible calls idols. But they do turn away from the Creator God they know made the heavens and the earth. Why?

Here's the reason: to acknowledge that there is a Creator would have vast implications. They would have to obey him, they would have to thank him, they would have to consult him. And that is what they do not want to do. Their lives are in rebellion against God. The Bible calls this rebellion "sin." Because they do not want to change their lives, grown up men and women suppress the knowledge of God refusing to acknowledge him any more.

(This, of course, is dangerous to their brains, because they are damaging the logical faculties they possess. If you suppress the truth in one area of reality it is likely you will suppress the truth in other areas. If you wilfully deny the truth, you damage your ability to process any truth. Sure enough "Professing themselves to be wise they became fools." An amazing example of this is the widespread western view that chimps are clever. So determined are some people to prove that humans are just next in evolutionary line to chimps, they force themselves to believe that chimps are clever  in spite of all the evidence that chimps are chumps - or more to the point - that human beings rise infinitely above chimps in absolutely everything: only the wilfully blind cannot see this.)

Do adults believe in God? Yes, their reasoning faculties cry out just as much as when they were kids - in fact even more so. But they suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

The limits of apologetics
For this reason, apologetics - the art of defending Christian truth - is very limited. It is necessary but limited. Only the almighty power of God can change the human heart from one of unbelief to belief.