The following article is an opinion piece and reflects the views of only the author and not those of AllOnGeorgia. It has been provided as part of a partnership with AllOnGeorgia and Creation Ministries International.
Creation Editorial Staff
Some people refer to TV news reports as the ‘death and bruise reports’. It’s easy to see why. A gunman massacres young schoolchildren. A pregnant mother is brutally bashed and left for dead as she waits for a bus. Youths break into a house late at night and viciously rape a 12-year-old girl during a horrendous two-hour ordeal …
Drug deaths, suicides, terrorism, AIDS … alcohol’s victims, gambling losses, street kids, domestic violence … the list of tragedies in each day’s news is enough to bring you to tears.
The saddest fact is that many of these problems could be avoided, because they are simply the result of a society that has lost its way. Our nations have strayed from decent values, high ideals, and any sort of self-control. Biblical values, if put into practice by each individual, would build a nation of law-abiding citizens and decent families who work together, help each other, and endure adversity through God’s strength. Yet these have been discarded in the false belief that behaviour and codes of conduct are arbitrary.
Society is reaping what it has sown.
A high-school teacher wrote to a newspaper after there had been calls to decriminalize marijuana in her State. She said she was distressed to see large numbers of students in her classes who were regularly intoxicated by marijuana.
‘Every day I am confronted with “stoned” students,’ she said, ‘and am expected to teach them English.’ When she confronted the students they replied their parents grew and smoked the drug, so they did too.
Governments that decriminalize such drugs are saying to people, ‘It’s OK for your kids to be spaced out in school. It’s OK if you’re late for work, and productivity drops as a result of your self-inflicted hallucinations, anxiety, depression, mood swings, and psychoses lasting for hours.’
Everyone knows we’ve got enough problems from other vices already.
Alcohol is responsible for the majority of motor vehicle accidents among 17 to 24 year-olds. Tens of thousands of adults die annually from smoking-related diseases. Poverty from compulsive gambling has reached epidemic proportions in some areas, as governments endorse more casinos and gambling avenues to balance their budgets and boost Treasury coffers.
It is easy to see how a nation can grind into decline when biblical values are ignored.
If we elect godless or unscrupulous politicians, we suddenly find we have education chiefs who oppose any hint of Christian values being taught in schools. We get health department heads who distribute condoms to schoolchildren and promote the flawed concept of ‘safe sex’ instead of God’s only fully workable and proven method of moral sex — between husband and wife only.
If governments give handouts for immoral acts, they are sending a message to teens that it’s all right to sleep around, because if you get pregnant the government will pay for your abortion or give you single-mother benefits.
If we teach the students in our schools that they have evolved from animals, perhaps it should be no surprise if they eat like pigs, breed like rabbits, or attack their victims like a pack of wolves.
Even critics of conservative values can no longer pretend that children are turning out the way our nations want.
It’s way past time for Christians to fearlessly stand up for God’s values, as given in His Word the Bible. Sadly, many of our churches are white-anted by the idea that you have to compromise one part of the Bible (Genesis) because of evolutionary ‘science’. They are therefore unable to boldly and authoritatively expound the moral absolutes of Christianity.
People need to know there is a better way to run society than by the humanistic, anti-God, evolution-centred way they increasingly encounter. We learn helpfulness, kindness, generosity, and trust in God not by debating morality, but by practising it. And we can learn to build a nation of decent, godly families by teaching our children that God created them, and that the best way to live their lives is to follow the Creator’s rules as given in the Bible.
It may seem difficult to correct a nation, or even to turn a city to God. But Jonah succeeded when he preached to Nineveh, because God was in it, and if God is once more in it, it can be done today if we build on the right foundation. This foundation is Jesus Christ, the Creator of the universe and the Redeemer of mankind, who one day will also be the Judge of all the earth.
Nathan Zamprogno
August 24, 2020 at 1:04 am
Your usual columns by Creation Ministries International – the poor cousin of Ken Ham’s Answers In Genesis (and largely because the latter stole the magazine subscription list from the former – no honor among thieves it seems), at least carry a byline – some token denoting enough conviction on the part of the author to be willing to put their name to it. Not today though.
These instalments at AllOnGeorgia have been insipid at best, representing both a poor understanding of science, and an active misrepresentation of the message of Jesus Christ. So no wonder that no soul is willing to put their name to this week’s column, which is egregiously bad even by CMI’s low standards.
Just who are the “Creation Editorial Staff”, and why are you ashamed of your authorship?
AllOnGeorgia – you’re not benefitting from this association.
So what’s so awful about this week’s column?
To start, it’s the yawning gulf between its diagnosis of the ills besetting American society, and the leap to a causal link to an alleged abandonment of “Biblical values”.
Academic studies have shown that non-religious people inflict as much domestic violence on their partners as religious ones (but male, protestant occasional church attendees are more likely).
Similarly, there is a causative and long-term correlation between the ten least peaceful U.S states (in terms of violent crime) and their status as among the most pious states, and the ten most peaceful states and their status as among the least religious states – a lesson we can readily verify in extension to largely secular European countries which enjoy less crime, and fewer of the social ills described in the article, so say nothing of less religious English speaking countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, who all show less of the teen pregnancy, drug abuse, compulsive gambling, and youth delinquency than the U.S, which, by the way, appears to outsiders like me in Australia not as less religious, but as hyper religious, and very much at the core of your social ills.
In short the agitprop from our anonymous Creation Ministries stooges assert what the statistics specifically refute. I’m sorry to tell you this, but, American friends, but your fundamentalist religious fringe are the problem, not the solution.
Second, and worse in my mind, it seeks to co-opt universal social virtues, such as the nuclear family unit, as the exclusive province of the Christian church, when this is simply not true.
Prudence, temperance, kindness, and moral goodness are to be found in non religious people just as they are in non-religious societies. To suggest otherwise, as Biblical fundamentalists always do, is insulting.
Lastly, to link the scientific fact of Evolution and the great age of the Earth – which is as proven as any scientific theory ever has been, independently and from scores of disparate disciplines, to current social ills is as tired, bankrupt and closed-minded as it was when identical debates were settled conclusively a century ago.
I don’t know why the editorial staff of AllOnGeorgia tolerate such poorly written polemic under their masthead, but the readership will march with their feet and well they ought to.