Culture
Lying to a Generation: What I Learned at the Fair
Shirley and I recently enjoyed a day at the eighth largest fair in the world–The Puyallup Fair. Located in Puyallup, Washington, thirty miles south of Seattle, the “Western Washington Fair” sports a delightful twenty acres filled with carnival rides, animal shows and displays, a rodeo, stadium concerts, and numerous buildings filled with art, hobbies, flowers, and every consumer good imaginable (all at unbeatable fair prices!)
We “ate our way” through the Fair enjoying corn-on-the-cob, elephant ears, smoothies, ice cream swirls, and famous country scones. It was a memorable day filled with delicious sights and sounds and many reminders of our illustrious western history and way of life.
But I also learned something else at the Fair. I was reminded of two spectacular lies that were told to the Baby Boom Generation in the 60s and 70s that haunt us to this day:
- The lie of creation without a Creator (evolution), and
- the lie of love without God (lust).
We, as a generation, are still reeling from the impact of those untruths.
First, the lie of evolution.
This subject was on my mind because of some reading I’ve done recently on a new evolutionary book. Written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, Grand Design is the latest atheistic attempt to explain the origins of the world through the lens of godless evolution. In the book, Hawking and Mlodinow brazenly state:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
Really? The universe just creates itself? Like gravity?
Uh huh.
Grand Nonsense would be a more fitting title.
Back to Puyallup. How can you attend a fair of this type and not be struck by the wonder of God’s design on earth? As we walked around the hundreds of displays at the Puyallup Fair, we were amazed by both the incredible beauty of God’s creation as seen in the animal and plant worlds, and also in the unique creativity of human beings.
Watching the draft horses do their amazing stunts, seeing the hundreds of different species of foul and poultry–and gazing upon one of our favorites–a mother pig feeding her eleven little piglets–all these sights scream at the top of their lungs that a marvelous Designer made these things after their own kind. There is no other plausible explanation.
Macro-evolution says that time plus matter plus chance equals life as we know it. After seeing the glorious varieties of plants and animals at the Fair, that idea seems preposteous. Time plus matter plus chance equals dust–nothing more. It takes a very skilled Creator to shape elements and chemicals into the array of animal and plant life that our eyes feasted on.
And then there is the matter of man’s creation. Evolution also says that time plus matter plus chance equals you. A friend of mine summarizes this amazing process as “from goo to you by way of the zoo.”
No way. Human culture is amazing–from writing, to painting, to sculturing (even with chainsaws), to inventing products and tools (on sale everywhere at the Fair), to music, language, and invention–the creativness of man has no equal. No animals create tools or culture. Only man–made in God’s image–carries that unique spark.
No–if you look at the Fair with clear eyes, you must breathtakingly admire God’s glorious creation in the animal and plant worlds and also marvel at man’s unique creative abilities due to being made in the image of God.
My generation–the Baby Boom Generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) was raised on the lie of evolution. We were the first generation that accepted its erroneous conclusions in our textbooks and later, acted like animals in our individual lives.
Yet, every aspect of the Fair refuted that lie at every turn. God made the world and he made each one of us. We are responsible and accountible to him. We should worship him for what he’s made and do our part to create culture that benefits others and glorifies his name.
Then there is the lie about love.
One of the shows that Shirley and I watched at the Fair was a tribute to the Beatles by a group called Imagine. (I consented to listen to them to humor Shirley.) The “Fab Four” impersonators wore sixties suits, spoke with British accents (sounded fake to me) and really did look a lot like John, Paul, George, and Ringo. They were excellent musicians. During their ninety minute performance, they rattled off about twenty past Beatles hits.
It was very instructive to watch the crowd. Most of them were Boomers like us who were raised on this stuff. (I actually saw the Beatles in person in Seattle in 1964 when I was eleven years old. All I remember was their bright green suits.) There were also younger people in the crowd. Throughout the cascade of familiar songs, you could see the mouths of our generation singing along and enjoying the nostalgia of years gone by.
At the end of the performance, I was reflecting on the power of music. Even though I hadn’t heard most of these Beatles tunes for over forty years, I realized that I and an entire generation could remember every word to every song. Wow! Talk about power to affect the mind.
Then I started thinking about the actual words we had heard in the 60s. Most of the Beatles songs were about two themes–love ( i.e. I Wanna Hold Your Hand, She Loves You, Please Please Me etc.) and a smaller group about relationship break ups (i.e. Ticket to Ride, Yesterday etc.).
The closer I listened to the lyrics, the more I realized that the words were not really about “love” as the Bible defines it–pure, self-sacrificing devotion to another person. Rather, the words described sexual attraction or lust for another person.
Love and lust are very different things. Love leads to lifetime commitment. Lust leads to break-ups.
I remembered reading a sad biography of John Lennon some years ago. It chronicled his well-known sexual promiscuity, deep involvement in drug addiction, broken marriage with Cynthia (she came home one day to find John in a drug stupor and in bed with Yoko Ono) and his generally debauched life. The book also described the quartet’s first foray to Hamburg, Germany in 1960 where they frequented prostitutes, and John, Paul, and Ringo gleefully watched as George lost his virginity with a stripper.
The Beatles sang about lust, not godly love. Our generation bought the message and dove into the “free love” scene hook, line, and sinker. Our carnal, selfish pursuit of “love” brought the same consequences of broken marriages and numerous relational break-ups.
As I looked around the aging crowd, I wondered how many had been poisoned by these lyrics that led to the ruin of their marriages or the break-up of numerous relationships. The Beatles taught us a lie and we fell for it. Its results have been staggering in the life of the American nation.
But the song that spoke most deeply to me may have been the Beatles “autobiography tune.” It was called Nowhere Man. Here are some of the words to jog your memory:
He’s a real nowhere man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
for nobody.
Doesn’t have a point of view,
Knows not where he’s going to,
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere Man please listen,
You don’t know what you’re missing,
Nowhere Man,the world is at your command!
He’s as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere Man can you see me at all?
The words above point to the world the Beatles and many others gave us in our youth. They took us “nowhere” where we couldn’t see our own “blindness” and empty pursuit of lustful pleasure.
“Isn’t he a bit like you and me?”
The Beatles were Nowhere Men that influenced a Nowhere Generation. How sad.
The lie of evolution and the lie of human lust are very similar. One says you can have creation and culture without God–and the other says you can have love and relationships without God. The Baby Boom found out the hard way that these ideas are painfully false.
Fortunately, many of the Baby Boom generation are finding their way home. At the conclusion to our evening, Shirley and I visited a booth that displayed hundreds of hats. All were emblazened with messages like “I Love Jesus,” “God is My Co-Pilot,” and the one that I purchased, “Jesus is My Rock.” The owner told us he had sold eighteen hundred of them.
A Nowhere Generation can be transformed into a generation that loves and serves Jesus Christ.
That’s what I learned at the Fair.
The Ground Zero Mosque and Obama’s Faith
Islam seems to be much in the news these days.
Of course, there is a reason for this. Islam is on the rise in the West and is now coming into close contact with our Judeo-Christian civilization. That never happened during America’s first two hundred years, and it was not on anyone’s radar screen during my childhood either.
However, the 1970s saw a resurgence of Wahhabiism (radical Islam) that has placed Islam on a collision course with other nations and cultures. In the Western World (Europe and America), an epic worldview battle is being raged between three worldviews.
One of them is true faith, another is false faith and the third is no faith. Europe and America’s choice of “faith” will determine their fate in the next generation.
Let’s quickly examine these worldviews in tension.
True faith is trust in Christ, which is the true way to God, life, liberty, and loving relationships. Our founding fathers spoke candidly and clearly about true religion and false religion. Christianity is the truth about God and life.
No faith is secularism–faith in man–that leads to moral anarchy and ultimately Big Government (man as his own Savior). Our founders did not respect the fruits of atheism (i.e. French Revolution).
For fourteen hundred years, the West rightly labeled the Muslim faith as false religion. It is false in that it misrepresents the God of love and forgiveness, denies the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for our sins, and creates political theocracies that are often violent and deny basic human (God-given) rights.
This is not to say that there aren’t any decent Muslim folks. There are. But the religion is false. Islam has always been based on violence (Mohammed himself led nineteen bloody raids) and deception (erroneous teachings that produced, among other things, sharia law).
Islam is essentially codified religious tyranny. And for decades, now, it has ambitiously exported that form of control into many nations in the world through terrorism.
That’s why it’s in the news every day. We’re fighting a worldview that brings tyranny.
Both America and Europe are caught in the cross hairs of the battle. Both were once Christian-based civilizations who have drifted into secularism due to spiritual apathy and the nrestrained pursuit of affluence. Europe is more advanced in abandoning its godly foundations, but the United States is not far behind. Because of declining birthrates in Europe and massive Muslim immigration, Islam is gaining the edge over secularism on the Continent, with many predicting that Europe will become Eurabia (Islamicized) by 2050.
That could happen in your lifetime.
We are not much better off in America. Our birthrate–which helps preserve a culture and its beliefs about itself–is 2.11–the bare minimum necessary for cultural continuity. This is due primarily to the high immigration rate of Hispanics. Many Hispanics are Catholic or evangelical, but their cultural worldview goes back to Spain which was under Muslim control for four hundred years. Thus Latin nations have experienced more tyrannical leadership and human injustice than the United States. Worldviews, no matter how subtle, have enormous consequences.
By the way–I didn’t learn the difference between the Latin worldview and the US worldview from white textbooks. I was taught it from Hispanic leaders in Latin America. Many of them want to cast off the past baggage of Islam and come into the freedom that Christ can bring to nations.
Which brings us back to our headline. For a few days now, the news has been loaded with the controversial mosque in New York and more recently, Barack Obama’s faith.
Let’s begin with the mosque. As has been stated by many, including my favorite analysis by Charles Krauthammer, the building of the Cordoba House mosque near Ground Zero was never a legal question. America was founded as a Christian nation where property is viewed as an extension of one’s personal rights. When I combine honest labor with intellectual capital, it often produces “property” that I possess as a God-given right to use and enjoy.
A Muslim developer in Manhattan acquired such property. He has a right to use it in any lawful way. But we have other Christian principles in our American heritage. These include honor, respect, sensitivity, humility, deference, and love for others. These responsibilities or moral principles are just as important if not more important than our rights. In fact, in our Christian-based society, moral responsibilities are more important than personal rights.
The Muslims should respect our Christian sensibilities and move the mosque elsewhere.
Of course, this stand-off is not really about a mosque. There are one hundred mosques in New York. There is already a small mosque near Ground Zero. But the Cordoba House mosque is not planned as a small or insignificant structure. The developers want to erect a thirteen story, 110 million dollar edifice–a monument–that can only symbolize Islam’s desire for triumphant dominion.
It doesn’t belong near the hallowed ground of Lower Manhatten where twenty Wahhabbists cruelly killed 3,000 of our fellow citizens. We must continue to morally fight it.
As for Barack Obama’s faith, the polls have been interesting. The TIME poll reported 24% of Americans thought Obama was a Muslim and 47% said he was a Christian. The Pew poll had it 18% Muslim (up from 11% in March). 34% Christian with 43% saying they didn’t know.
We can help them those who are confused. First of all, for the record, let’s state the facts that are known:
- Barack Obama was born into a divided household where his father was Muslim and his mother was an atheist.
- His second home and father, in Indonesia, was more decidedly Muslim. He attended a Muslim school and his “religion” during the time was listed as Muslim. That was his father’s choice.
- When he became an adult, Barack Obama says that he became a Christian under the spiritual mentorship of Jeremiah Wright, who espouses Afro-centric liberation theology.
Those are the facts. After the polls came out, the White House scrambled to let everyone know that Obama was a Christian. To be fair, we have to accept his word. Only God knows the human heart.
But there is another gauge of a person’s faith: People are known by their deeds, not what they profess to believe. Jesus Himself said “You will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).
You can call yourself anything you like. However, your life choices speak more clearly than your words. To use African-American parlance you can’t just “talk the talk; you’ve got to walk the walk.”
Barack Obama doesn’t walk like either a Christian or a Muslim. He attends neither mosque or church, be often plays golf on Saturdays and Sundays. He refused involvement in the National Day of Prayer. He doesn’t use a prayer mat five times facing Mecca. He’s pro-homosexual marriage and pro-abortion. He’s a strong proponent of Big Government.
By his actions, Barack Obama’s worldview is obvious: It’s secular–with some Muslim sympathies and a Christian veneer thrown in. In some ways he represents all three of the worldviews in tension.
But in his actions and policies, Barack Obama is a secular man–a statist–a man of no practicing faith.
Let’s pray that he and many other Americans will find and demonstrate true faith during this important season of choosing.
Things Are Not as They Seem
Sometimes things are not as they seem. They appear to be one thing, but in reality they are something far different from how they project themselves.
The United States is currently facing two immense cultural battles that fit in this category of intended deception. What’s an “intended deception?”
That’s the dictionary meaning of a LIE. So what are some areas where we are being lied to–where things are not as they seem?
HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE
Seattle’s staunchly liberal newspaper, the Seattle Times, which is in business because it wasn’t as blatantly liberal as the now-defunct Seattle P.I., is in the forefront of pushing the acceptance of homosexual marriage in the state of Washington.
On November 3, Washingtonians will have the opportunity to REJECT Senate bill 5688 through Referendum 71 which would elevate homosexual marriages to equality with marriage through expanded domestic partnerships. On the support side, the Times has been running one-to-two articles a week for some time championing the homosexual cause. An October 4, 2009 front-page lead article on the issue was entitled “Stakes High in Fight over Gay Rights.” To their credit, the article fairly quoted people on both sides of this monumental 21st century debate.
The Times’ Opinion Page was another story. It’s lead editorial said, “The Times recommends Promote Families: Approve Referendum 71. The article went on to applaud homosexual “unions” with the following semantical posturing:
- They called homosexual-led “families” simply “ordinary people with ordinary family lives.”
- They said SB 5688 was about “equal treatment for all Washington residents going about their private lives.”
- They said their cause was about “responsible adults in committed relationships.”
- They said passage of the new law was about “loving couples–our relatives, friends, and neighbors–who own property,, operate businesses, and take care of their children.”
I think you get the idea. This is all about loving, committed, ordinary folks who, by the way, simply want to change the five thousand definition of marriage–and have the state pay for it in benefits.
But on this paramount issue of our lifetime, “things are not as they seem.”
Homosexual marriage is not about family, marriage, love, or commitment. It’s about using legal means to permanently change the moral code that undergirds our civilization. It’s about full acceptance and promotion of homosexual behaviour–which according to every religion on earth is immoral, unnatural, and destructive to people–both in this life and in the next.
For five millennia–and especially two thousand years of Western culture, wise civilizations have accepted the truthful premise that the only responsible form of sexual behavior, designed specifically by our Creator and Savior was between a man and a woman in a covenant relationship we call marriage. All other forms of sexual choice are immoral–and include fornication (sex by unmarried people), adultery (sex with some else’s spouse), homosexuality (men with men or women with women), pedophilia (adults with children), and bestiality (humans with animals).
Homosexuality is not singled out in this list. It is just one form of sexual perversion–“making crooked something that is straight”–which is where the words “pervert” and “straight” originate. The only difference in our world today is that it is the homosexuals who are demanding that civilization change its tried and tested moral code and allow them to be viewed as “normal.”
But homosexual behavior is not normal. It’s lowers your lifespan (to an average of 42 years), it is one of the most promiscuous forms of sexuality (four times that of heterosexual perversions), it doubles your chances of depression, it is often grossly ugly and vile in its forms, and in terms of a person’s relationship with God–separates them from his forgiveness and grace through a refusal to turn away from sexual sin. Never mind that homosexuals cannot produce children, and so they must get them from others–often breaking up real families when one of them comes “out of the closet.”
No, this issue is not about “loving, normal couples.” It is about permanently condoning and legalizing immoral behavior. And because I love people, I cannot accept the lies that will destroy people and our civilization in the name of tolerance.
That’s why I’m encouraging all Washingtonians to not accept this charade of fairness and decency and vote to REJECT Referendum 71.
GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE
The Obama administration is pushing radical legislation in our nation that would permanently alter the way health care is received and practiced in the United States. The progressives and their allies would have you believe that this issue is about:
- Compassionately providing health care for all American citizens.
- Cutting the costs of health care and not adding to the nation’s deficit.
- Providing better healthcare than the current system which is the best in the world.
- A right to qualitative healthcare that we all deserve and should demand.
- Not providing for abortions, giving coverage to illegal citizens, nor increasing rationing for health services.
- Not limiting benefits for Seniors via cuts in Medicare.
But again–when it comes to the truth about the health care bills now being voted on and discussed in the United States Congress, “things are not as they seem.”
Though I’m sure some well meaning people might believe the ideas listed above, the real force behind the move to government health care is the power to control–not the desire to provide. This health care debate is all about government power to squelch freedom in our beloved nation.
Here’s the plain and simple truth:
- Government run health care will decrease innovation and service and greatly multiply deficits.
- It will not be better than private care–it will enforce mediocrity on all.
- There is no right to healthcare–only to life (they can’t murder you), to liberty (they can’t enslave you), and to happiness or property (they can’t heavily tax you.) Everything else is a privilege and differs among human beings due to their gifts, choices, and circumstances in life.
- The bills being considered will include abortion (they say it’s just a medical procedure), provide for illegals (it’s all about votes!), and will lead to rationing (there aren’t enough doctors who will remain at their posts).
- The only way the government option (control) will work is to sqeeze $500 billion dollars out of Medicare.
The essence of this debate is not about health. It’s tyranny versus liberty, control versus choice, government further perverting its role from being rightful protector of God given rights to assuming the role of God in “providing” an all powerful Nanny State to its slaves, er, citizens.
There’s that word perversion again. Perverting marriage and perverting government’s role in our lives.
Things are not as they seem.
I pray to God that our eyes will be opened.