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Amber Petrovich argues that too many old people are in charge and that they should stand aside to make way for the young . The point is simple: Older people know less about what life is like now than younger people. Since government is about the present, younger people are better equipped to be in charge: "too many of our politicians are too out of touch to be making crucial policy decisions that affect millions of lives every day...I will never claim to know what adult life was like in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, but I do know what adult life is like now. So why are you still making decisions for people like me who are becoming adults in this century?...The world now is drastically different … so why aren’t our politicians?" Oddly, I have recently been saying exactly the opposite: Older people have had more opportunity to experience life and ought to have gained much wisdom from those experiences. Thus, it is better to be governed by older people than younger. I even th...

What is the point of citing Bible verses when making moral arguments? Since not everyone believes the Bible to be true or authoritative, surely we need to make arguments based on something else, something we have in common. But Christians use the Bible all the time. Why? To get to an answer, one has to consider a range of issues in ethics. Once one has reasoned through these questions, it becomes clear why many Christians find that the Bible has an essential role to play in most moral reasoning. Thus, when engaging in moral debate, we often use the Bible. The first relevant issue is whether moral statements are translatable into factual statements. For example, can one translate "it is wrong to murder" into a factual statement? Some suggest that this is not possible, that concepts such as 'good' and 'wrong' are not analyzable in terms of anything else. Christians, however, are likely to say that "it is wrong to murder" can be translated into th...

Last week, Bible teacher, Beth Moore, tweeted this : "Spending time with God and spending time with the Bible are not the same thing. The Bible is the Word of God, crucial to knowing Him, but it’s not God. We can study our Bibles till the 2nd coming and leave God completely out of it. We can grow in facts and never grow a whit in faith" I can think of two ways to take Beth Moore's statement. On one interpretation, Moore says that a person can read the Bible without having any relationship with God (I take it that this is what she means by 'spending time with' and 'leaving God completely out of it') and never 'grow a whit in faith'. More technically, she means that though reading scripture is the  necessary  condition for knowing God personally and growing in faith, it is not the  sufficient  condition. Alternatively, one might interpret Moore to be making a point of emphasis, suggesting that Christians should not rely solely on an intellectu...

A couple of weeks ago, Pastor  John MacArthur told Ben Shapiro that he intends to offend everyone  with the gospel. That's because the good news about Jesus is offensive. It tells us that we are sinners in need of a savior. The gospel makes us sad, but there are two kinds of sadness, a godly sadness and a worldly sadness, one leading to salvation, the other to death. In his second (or, more probably, his third) letter to the church in Corinth, Paul rejoices over the sadness his previous letter had produced in its reader. In his previous letter, Paul lambasted the members of the church for their arrogance and sin. His harsh words evidently had some effect producing sorrow and grief: For even if I made you sad by my letter, I do not regret having written it (even though I did regret it, for I see that my letter made you sad, though only for a short time). Now I rejoice, not because you were made sad, but because you were made sad to the point of repentance. For you were made...

Jason Lisle argues that we have a moral obligation to be logical : "Thinking rightly is not optional... It is something God requires of us." His argument is as follows: To think logically is to think – in a sense – like God thinks. And, by definition, to be logical is to reason correctly. This makes sense when we consider that God always thinks correctly. God is the ultimate standard of correctness. So if you want to think about a particular topic correctly, you must think about it in the same basic way that God does. The argument depends on what it means to think about something 'in the same basic way that God does'. Presumably, this does not mean that we think about some topic in exactly the same way. After all, God does not arrive at conclusions. He does not infer to the best explanation. His knowledge is comprehensive. Thus, he already knows the conclusion and  the explanation. So, what does 'basic way' mean? It is temping to think tha...

Whenever Christians cite the their faith in support of some unpopular moral view, objectors often turn to a well worn argument. I call it the 'if you don't teach this, you can't teach that' argument. The argument turns on a comparison between the objectionable view in question and some other Christian view or Biblical text. The objector accuses the Christian of cherry-picking his beliefs. One version of the argument suggests that the Christian obeys only parts of his faith that support the objectionable view while not obeying those that appear to support the objector's moral view. The longer the list of Christian beliefs that the Christian does not support, the more effective the argument. And as long as the reader thinks those beliefs are what the Christian  ought  to believe, the objector remains persuasive. To be sure, a Christian who only seeks to fulfill some of his obligations while ignoring others is not consistently practicing his faith. Although we ...

I once went to a Don Fransisco show. I am now old enough to admit that I enjoyed it and persuaded my mother to buy a copy of  One Heart at a Time . Somehow a memory of the concert sprung to mind recently so I started following him on facebook. Apparently, Don has no time for facebook. His wife runs his social media for him. Recently, Wendy Fransisco went on the attack against the doctrine of inerrancy. She gave a number of arguments that struck me as being common fare among those who deny the doctrine. First up, Wendy presents the following: ...we are not inerrantists. The reason is that 4 decades of international itinerant travel demonstrated the vast variety of the body of Christ, many churches claiming inerrancy, NONE of them agreeing on what scripture says or means, and NO two churches having the same doctrines even within the same denomination.  The argument is as follows: If the Bible is innerrant, then there would be no disagreement about what it says...

Possible Democrat presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, recently tweeted the following: "Children are our nation’s future. We must listen to them about what they care about and give them a voice in our government." I am sure Harris didn't mean that children's opinions should the the basis for actual policy, but her words betray an increasingly common view of the opinions of youth: that their importance ought to be elevated. Children are our nation’s future. We must listen to them about what they care about and give them a voice in our government. pic.twitter.com/buBBTj1MNc — Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 24, 2017 Harris' sentiment is not new. I heard this kind of thing all the time when I worked in youth ministry in the UK. I even expressed something like it myself. "You are the generation that will change the world!" we told them.  Children can indeed be amazing. But sometimes this leads to the idea that they would do a better jo...

It only takes two people to start a bar brawl. Someone knocks over a beer, the guy hits him, and soon everyone is fighting.  Violence always spreads and there is only one thing that you and I can do that stops it:  We must not join in.  No matter how angry one might feel about a situation, joining a violent gang is not the answer. Yet many will be tempted. Fueled by foolish rhetoric, irresponsible journalism, and insecure governance, some will go from spectators to participants. And what began as an isolated scrap will turn into a national brawl.  The only way to stop the spread is not to join in.  Solomon addresses the temptation to join a violent gang in the first chapter of the book of Proverbs. His advice is simple: don’t! My son, if sinners entice you, d o not consent. Solomon knows that a gang will tempt us with all sorts of enticements. He tells us that if they try to entice us, we should ignore them. Listen to his imagined gang ...