New study: pro-gay television shows have shifted public opinion on gay marriage

Life Site News reports.

Excerpt:

Ipsos MediaCT, a global market research company, have just released a study…

According to the report, 18 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 said that television has directly contributed to their increasing support for same-sex “marriage.”

That’s nearly double the number (10 percent) who reported television had increased their opposition to marriage redefinition.

“Based on this data, I think we can conclude that TV has, at least in part, moved the needle of public opinion to see same-sex marriage in a positive way,” Ben Spergel, Senior Vice President and Head of TV Insights at Ipsos MediaCT said in a statement.

“With everything from higher profile portrayals of gay characters, to celebrity support of gay marriage, to last year’s groundbreaking endorsement by President Obama, we are seeing a shift in our culture that is being influenced by popular culture,” he said.

Last month, liberal writer Andrew O’Hehir wrote an article for Salon crediting the American movement toward homosexual acceptance to television shows like “Will and Grace,”"Roseanne,” “The Real World,” “Ellen DeGeneres,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Modern Family,” and “Glee.”

“From ‘Soap’ to Ellen DeGeneres to Richard Hatch on ‘Survivor’ to the macho male couple who won season 4 of ‘The Amazing Race,’” O’Hehir wrote, “televisual images of sexual diversity have gradually moved away from victimology and ‘gay best friend’ stereotypes toward a ‘normalizing vision’of LGBT culture.”

“While the startling public shift on gay marriage – something few people of my generation, straight or gay, thought they’d ever see — is not solely the product of TV, it represents the ultimate fulfillment of TV’s vision of sexual equality,” O’Hehir added.

Support for same-sex “marriage” is on the rise in the United States. Recent polls show more than half of Americans support redefining marriage to include homosexual couples, and several states now allow gay nuptials in defiance of federal law.

One reason I don’t have a TV in my house is because television is used as a way to change people’s minds without making rational arguments or showing evidence. It’s easy enough for gay-friendly Hollywood to make TV shows where all the gay characters are funny, hard-working, faithful and moral. But that doesn’t reflect what studies tell us about gay relationships. They are non-exclusive, short-lived, have higher rates of violence and abuse, etc.

If gay marriage were to become legal, then marriage would would no longer be permanent, faithful, or child-centered, as this gay activist recently explained.

It’s a no-brainer that (homosexuals) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. . . . Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there—because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.

The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago.

I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally. . . . I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three. . . . And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.

The purpose of gay marriage is to normalize and celebrate any arrangements that makes adults happy, whether or not it provides for the needs of the children. Evidence from large-scale studies shows that gay relationships are not as good for children as natural marriage. But people who watch TV and don’t read studies will have their minds changed by TV, and then they will vote. And children not yet born will have to grow up without mothers and fathers because of it.

In a very real sense, stupidity and selfishness are destroying the next generation of children. It’s not just the crushing 17 trillion dollar debt being run up by selfish adults for their entitlements. It’s not just that our public schools are insulated from reform by powerful politically connected teacher unions. It’s not just that we liberalized divorce laws so that women can divorce men when they are not “happy” any more. It’s not just that we force employers to ship jobs overseas by raising their corporate taxes and burdening them with nonsense regulations. It’s not just that government pays irresponsible women to have babies out of wedlock. It’s not just that we abort the next generation of taxpayers because we can’t be bothered to get married and make a home for them before having sex. Now, we have to go beyond all that . We have to go even further. Now we have to formalize and normalize the complete supremacy of selfish adults over the needs of children. God help us all.

Filed under: News, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Art, Brainwashing, Children, Children's Rights, Culture, Divorce, Entertainment, Family, Father, Feminism, Gay Agenda, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, Hollywood, Irrationality, LGBT, Marriage, Mother, Ondoctrination, Peer Pressure, Persuasion, Plato, Pop Culture, Same-Sex Marriage, Sex, Television, TV

Six reasons why people reject Christianity

Here’s a post on practical evangelism by Christian scholar Don Johnson.

His list of reasons why people often reject Christianity:

1. Christians behaving badly
2. Disappointment with God
3. Weak or absent father
4. Social pressure
5. Cost of discipleship
6. Immorality (especially sexual immorality)

And here’s the detail on #6:

Of all the motivations and reasons for skepticism that I encounter, immorality is easily the most common. In particular, sexual sin seems to be the largest single factor driving disbelief in our culture. Brant Hanson calls sex “The Big But” because he so often hears this from unbelievers: “’I like Jesus, BUT…’ and the ‘but’ is usually followed, one way or the other, with an objection about the Bible and… sex. People think something’s deeply messed-up with a belief system that says two consenting, unmarried adults should refrain from sex.” In other words, people simply do not want to follow the Christian teaching that sexual intercourse should take place only between and man and woman who are married, so they throw the whole religion out.

The easiest way to justify sin is to deny that there is a creator to provide reality with a nature, thereby denying that there is any inherent order and purpose in the universe.

Aldous Huxley admitted that this is a common reason for skepticism:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless. …

For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was …liberation from … a certain system of morality.  We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom…. There was one admirably simple method in our political and erotic revolt: We could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons. (Ends and Means, 270-273)

Indeed, similar tactics have been used extensively up to the present day. If you are looking for two great resources that document the extent to which the work of the world’s “great” atheistic thinkers has been “calculated to justify or minimize the shame of their own debauchery,” (Spiegel, 72) I recommend Intellectuals by Paul Johnson and Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior by E. Michael Jones. The bottom line is that these skeptical scholars didn’t reach their conclusions by following the evidence where it led. They didn’t “discover” that the world was meaningless and then proceed to live accordingly. They lived sinful lives (usually involving some type of sexual deviancy) and then produced theories that justified their actions.

This connection between immorality and unsound thought is clearly scriptural. Paul tells the Ephesians that they “must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.  Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more” (Eph. 4:17-19) Paul blames futile thinking and a lack of understanding on hard hearts. When we compare this passage with Romans 1, it seems that immorality and bad ideas work together in a vicious cycle that spirals downward. Sin leads to false philosophies which then lead to more sin.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised (Rom. 1:18-25)

So Paul argues that the nature of reality is clear to everyone but people suppress the truth by their wickedness. Rebellious people become fools as they deny the obvious meaning of creation because of their sin. Their foolishness leads them to indulge in more immorality. Thus immorality is very closely linked to skepticism and we need to be aware that sin will almost always be at least an underlying issue in our conversations.

This post is of such high quality and has such practical wisdom in it that I really want everyone reading to click through and read it. I’m sure you’ll really like it. I recognize every one of these types of people in non-Christians that I have known.

Mr. Johnson’s bio seems to suggest that he has a lot of experience as a pastor, but he’s not like many pastors that I’ve known. If all pastors could interact with so many different sources like and weave together an argument like this, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.

Filed under: Commentary, Apologetics, Atheism, Christian Apologetics, Christian Living, Christianity, Disappointment, Discipleship, Ethics, Evil, Faith, Fatherlessness, Hypocrisy, Immorality, Naturalism, Non Belief, Peer Pressure, Postmodernism, Reason, Sexual Immorality, Suffering, Unbelief

One-third of adults under 30 have no religious affiliation

From CBS News.

Excerpt:

One-fifth of American adults have no religious affiliation, and this number is increasing rapidly.

The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a fast pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public – and a third of adults under 30 – are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.

In the last five years alone, the unaffiliated have increased from just over 15 percent to just under 20 percent of all U.S. adults. Their ranks now include more than 13 million self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6 percent of the U.S. public), as well as nearly 33 million people who say they have no particular religious affiliation (14 percent).

This large and growing group of Americans is less religious than the public at large on many conventional measures, including frequency of attendance at religious services and the degree of importance they attach to religion in their lives.

The article notes that “unaffiliated” doesn’t necessarily mean atheist or even agnostic:

Two-thirds of them say they believe in God (68 percent). More than half say they often feel a deep connection with nature and the earth (58 percent), while more than a third classify themselves as “spiritual” but not “religious” (37 percent), and one-in-five (21 percent) say they pray every day.

With few exceptions, though, the unaffiliated say they are not looking for a religion that would be right for them. Overwhelmingly, they think that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in politics.

The lower the age group, the less likely people are to be affiliated.

The growth in the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans – sometimes called the rise of the “nones” – is largely driven by generational replacement, the gradual supplanting of older generations by newer ones.

My personal theory about this is that young people are being neglected by their parents and to a lesser degree by their church leaders. Parents are just too busy with their careers and other diversions, and churches are not presenting Christianity seriously using arguments and evidence. Neither parents nor churches are taking opposition to Christianity seriously from an intellectual point of view. When parents and church leaders step aside, the influence gap is filled by know-nothing peers and by the culture. Peers and the culture are pushing for hedonism, not for a serious search for the truth about religion. And that’s why young people are rejecting the church. If religion is anything to them, it’s about self-fulfillment. It certainly is not about truth. No one has ever presented it to them as true, only as useful for their own happiness and well-being.

Filed under: News, Apologetics, Bible, Christianity, Church, Culture, Family, Hedonism, Parenting, Peer Pressure, Religion, Spirituality, Theology

Fox News: cowardly atheists refuse to debate William Lane Craig

Is this what atheism amounts to?

From Fox News.

Excerpt:

American Evangelical theologian William Lane Craig is ready to debate the rationality of faith during his U.K tour this fall, but it appears that some atheist philosophers are running shy of the challenge.

This month president of the British Humanist Association, Polly Toynbee, pulled out of an agreed debate at London’s Westminster Central Hall in October, saying she “hadn’t realized the nature of Mr. Lane Craig’s debating style.”

Lane Craig, who is a professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, Calif., and author of 30 books and hundreds of scholarly articles, is no stranger to the art of debate and has taken on some of the great orators, such as famous atheists Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Harris once described Craig as “the one Christian apologist who has put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists”.

Responding to Toynbee’s cancellation, Lane Craig commented: “These folks (atheists) can be very brave when they are alone at the podium and there’s no one there to challenge them. But one of the great things about these debates is that, it allows both sides to be heard on a level playing field, and for the students in the audience to make up their own minds about where they think the truth lies.”

[...]Others have refused to challenge Lane Craig, too, including Richard Dawkins, one of the Four Horseman of the new Atheist movement, which include Hitchens, Harris and Daniel Dennett.

Craig has debated Hitchens, Harris and Dennett, and defeated them all easily.

More:

Dawkins, who has labeled the Roman Catholic Church “evil” and once called the Pope “a leering old villain in a frock,” refused four separate invitations, extended through religious and humanist organizations, to take part in debates with Lane Craig during his fall tour.

The controversy wafted into the British press after fellow atheist and philosophy lecturer, Daniel Came, accused Dawkins of simply being afraid, saying, “The absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part.”

Here’s an example of William Lane Craig debating the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, arguably the top popular atheist in the world today.

Here’s a review of that debate fromCommon Sense Atheism, a popular atheist web site.

Excerpt:

I just returned from the debate between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens at Biola University. It was a bigger deal than I realized. Over 3,000 people were there, and groups from dozens of countries – including Sri Lanka, apparently – had purchased a live feed.

Of three recent Craig debates, I was most looking forward to his matchup with Morriston, which has yet to be posted online. I was somewhat excited for his debate with Carrier, which was disappointing. I was least excited for this debate with Hitchens, but it was the only one in my area, so I went.

The debate went exactly as I expected. Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child. Perhaps Hitchens realized how bad things were for him after Craig’s opening speech, as even Hitchens’ rhetorical flourishes were not as confident as usual. Hitchens wasted his cross-examination time with questions like, “If a baby was born in Palestine, would you rather it be a Muslim baby or an atheist baby?” He did not even bother to give his concluding remarks, ceding the time instead to Q&A.

So why isn’t there a British atheist brave enough to face Craig on his UK speaking tour?

Well, what William Lane Craig offers in his debates is a set of deductive arguments that are logically valid, and supported by the latest scientific evidence (which he has published in peer-reviewed scientific journals), and the consensus of academic historians, using standard historical methods. Atheists are ill-equipped to respond to this case, because atheism is not really a rational worldview that is based on evidence. It’s really adopted because people cannot be bothered with the demands of the moral law. They make these faith commitments about there being no evidence, or that religious people have blind faith, or that all religions are the same (especially the ones they haven’t studied), or that religion is unfalsifiable. But the root cause is simply the desire to not have to care about right and wrong.

Consider the famous agnostic Aldous Huxley:

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantegous to themselves… For myself, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” — Aldous Huxley in Ends and Means, 1937

What about the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel?

“In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.

I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”
(”The Last Word” by Thomas Nagel, Oxford University Press: 1997)

The famous philosopher Mortimer Adler rejected religion for most of his life because it “would require a radical change in my way of life, a basic alteration in the direction of my day-to-day choices as well as in the ultimate objectives to be sought or hoped for …. The simple truth of the matter is that I did not wish to live up to being a genuinely religious person.”

As G.K. Chesterton says,”The Christian way has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found to be hard and left untried“. Atheists want to believe that there is no God, so they do. And they carefully avoid studying anything that might threaten what they want to believe – or having to debate people who might challenge what they want to believe. What you will see from atheists instead of a willingness to study science and to debate qualified Christians is things like one-line ads on the sides of buses, lawsuits forbidding people to exercise their right to free speech, and demands that Christians not oppose abortion and slavery – because that cramps their pursuit of pleasure, don’t you know.

Here’s an example of an atheist learning about history from Bart Ehrman, a famous secular historian:

Of course, William Lane Craig has debated Bart Ehrman (video) as well. And defeated him. Badly.

Atheism really isn’t a knowledge tradition. It’s not really something that they think is true – it’s just that they want to be hedonists, and they want you to stop making them feel guilty with your moral superiority and moral judgments and your “unfair” moral prohibitions on bestiality and infanticide. Often, these people believe that the universe is eternal, that there are millions of unobservable universes, and that unobservable aliens can explain the origin of life. Craziness. And yet they are allowed to vote. I’m scared that these people can vote – especially since most of them voted for 1.65 trillion dollar annual deficits, because of “hope and change”. Maybe we should try to reform the education system to help them to get used to arguments, evidence and debates.

Filed under: News, Agnosticism, Apologetics, Atheism, Atheist, Autonomy, Belief, Bible, Blind Faith, Childhood, Christian, Christian Apologetics, Christianity, Crutch, Debate, Ethics, Evidence, Faith, Fatherlessness, Fear, Free, History, Leap of Faith, Logic, Morality, Noetic Effects of Sin, Peer Pressure, Postmodernism, Psychology, Psychology of Atheism, Reason, Rebellion, Relativism, Religion, Religious Belief, Religious Pluralism, Review, Science, Secular Humanism, Secularism, Sin, Sinfulness, Theology, Weakness, Wish Fulfillment

Why do some people not believe in God?

An analysis of the common causes of atheism. (H/T The Poached Egg)

Excerpt:

Most atheists would have us think they arrived at their view through cool, rational inquiry. But are other factors involved? Consider the candid remarks of contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel: “I want atheism to be true …. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I’m right about my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” Could Nagel’s attitude—albeit in a more subtle form—actually be common among atheists?

[...]The 20th-century ethics philosopher Mortimer Adler (who was baptized quietly at age 81) confessed to rejecting religious commitment for most of his life because it “would require a radical change in my way of life, a basic alteration in the direction of my day-to-day choices as well as in the ultimate objectives to be sought or hoped for …. The simple truth of the matter is that I did not wish to live up to being a genuinely religious person.”

Historian Paul Johnson’s fascinating if disturbing book Intellectuals exposed this pattern in the lives of some of the most celebrated thinkers in the modern period, including Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Hemingway, Russell, and Sartre. In their private (and often public) lives, these Western intellectual stars were moral wrecks.

[...]As children of the Enlightenment, we tend to heavily emphasize the impact of belief on behavior. But it also works the other way around. Our conduct affects the way we think. On the positive side, as Scripture’s wisdom literature tells us, obedience and humility lead to insight and understanding. Negatively, as we indulge in immoral behavior, our judgment will be skewed.

[...]External factors may also hamper the natural awareness of God and contribute to a descent into atheism. In his book Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, New York University psychologist Paul Vitz, a onetime atheist, examines the lives of the major atheists of the modern period, including Hobbes, Hume, Voltaire, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Russell, and Freud. He found they had something in common: a broken relationship with their father. Whether by death, departure, abuse, or some other factor, the father relationships of all these well-known atheists were defective. Vitz also examined the lives of prominent theists during the same period (Pascal, Reid, Burke, Berkeley, Paley, Wilberforce, Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher, Newman, Chesterton, and Bonhoeffer, among others). In every case, he found a good relationship with the father or at least a strong father figure.

One more quick quote on the argument that immorality leads to an atheistic worldview:

“I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantegous to themselves… For myself, the philosophy of meaningless was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” — Aldous Huxley in Ends and Means, 1937

This rejection of morality is widely acknowledged by prominent atheists as being a selling point of atheism. People become atheists because they know that atheism will free them from having to do anything simply because it’s “good”.

Consider these prominent atheists:

The idea of political or legal obligation is clear enough… Similarly, the idea of an obligation higher than this, referred to as moral obligation, is clear enough, provided reference to some lawgiver higher…than those of the state is understood. In other words, our moral obligations can…be understood as those that are imposed by God…. But what if this higher-than-human lawgiver is no longer taken into account? Does the concept of moral obligation…still make sense? …The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain but their meaning is gone. (Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), p. 83-84)

The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such an awareness of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate when someone says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, . . . and any deeper meaning is illusory. (Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics,” in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269).

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. (Richard Dawkins)
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1995-05-10nomercy.shtml

And it works in reverse. When I was a young man, one of my reasons for becoming a Christian was precisely because I did not want to be like atheists. I could plainly see the harm they were causing others with their rejection of prescriptive morality, and when I put that together with the cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory, which I learned about in grade 1, the case was sealed. It helped that I had not done anything really wrong at that time, or it would have been harder for me to accept that I was guilty. The more bad stuff you are into, the harder it is to accept that you are wrong, and to turn away from it. Some clean-living atheists are going to have no problem being fair with the evidence. – switching to Christianity would be much easier for them to do.

As for his second point, consider this article that talks about how important fathers are in passing along religious convictions to children.

Excerpt:

In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.

If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.

Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goes up from 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father’s commitment grows in proportion to mother’s laxity, indifference, or hostility.

That is why I find it so odd that so many “Christians” insist on voting more and more wealth redistribution from rich to poor. The more that government programs are seen as a replacement from the protecting, providing and moral/spiritual leading that fathers do in the home, the more atheists we are going to be producing. Fathers are vital for passing on spiritual and moral convictions to children. Fathers are the ones who show that setting moral boundaries is a way to love someone – that love is not incompatible with rules. It is very important that young people see that it is loving for a person in authority to set up rules and boundaries – and that there are reasons for those rules. It’s very similar to the way that boys raised by single mothers are aggressively sexually – because they haven’t seen men loving their wives up close, and getting respect and approval for that love. And girls raised fatherless are similar – they haven’t seen men loving their wives up close, so they aren’t in a position to judge men and hold them accountable. The family is needed to model all kinds of good behaviors at a pre-cognitive level.

You can order Jim Spiegel’s book “The Making of an Atheist” here from Amazon:

And you can also read a sample chapter for free here.

Filed under: Polemics, Agnosticism, Autonomy, Belief, Bible, Blind Faith, Book Review, Childhood, Christian, Christian Apologetics, Christianity, Crutch, Debate, Ethics, Evidence, Faith, Family, Father, Fatherlessness, Fear, Free, History, Jim Spiegel, Leap of Faith, Logic, Love, Marriage, Morality, Mother, Noetic Effects of Sin, Paul Vitz, Peer Pressure, Postmodernism, Psychology, Psychology of Atheism, Reason, Rebellion, Relativism, Religion, Religious Belief, Religious Pluralism, Review, Science, Secular Humanism, Secularism, Sin, Sinfulness, The Making of an Atheist, Theology, Weakness, Wish Fulfillment