1 st. Post: Religious and Cultural Divides.

Worldviews or the way we see the world and the basic beliefs about the world are in conflict. The world is not necessarily divided by geographic boundaries but by religious and cultural traditions.

Will Durant in Ch 3 Worldviews in Conflict said, " From barbarism to civilization requires a century but from civilization to barbarism needs but one day."

WE all are religious creatures and our lives are defined by our ultimate beliefs more sharply than by any other factor. So the culture wars in the West are actually being orchestrated by great Belief Systems. This clash is more important than what is happening in Islam or Asia or the political scene. It is exactly what is dominating the whole globe at the present time.

The Information Age has transported across barriers of geography and national border the ideas of the West. Even Asian and Islamic societies have been flooded with Western books , movies, videos and culture. People around the world are wrestling with the same issues that are being thrown at the western societies in our day. These issues are not always good nor wanted but are flooding across the borders because of cellphones, computers and the Internet.

Read Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, "HOW NOW SHALL WE LIVE? Marshall and Pickering, London

Comments

No.9. How did the whole Universe Begin?

Notes from Colson p.57 -67 Scientists have completely reversed their theories in the past few decades. They thought for ages that the Physical Universe was eternal and therefore needs no 'creator'. Now they postulate that the universe did have an ultimate origin and that it began at a finite time in the past - just as the Bible teaches. Many ancient cultures believed that the material from which the Universe came was eternal. However, today "the indestructibility or permanence of matter" is a scientific fact" wrote a 19th Century proponent of materialism. For many years that is how things stood. Any thought of a Creator and the earth having a beginning was just bare religious faith standing in lonely opposition to established science. Now in the 20th Century several sources of new evidence appeared : the implications from general relativity theory that the Universe is expanding; that some stars exhibit "red shift", implying that they are moving out...

No. 19. Brave New Babies

Notes from 'How Now shall we live', by C. Colson and N. Pearcey. pps 126-128 Why is our thinking so degraded when what I am is determined by what other people think I should be. Man is trying to create the ideal species capable of living in harmony and stability , a species free from all antiquated ideas and encumbrances such as family and child rearing. To ensure the unfettered pursuit of happiness , free sex is encouraged, and all purpose drug will be available. Life will be a perfect bliss. when it becomes burdensome or inconvenient, it is gently and mercifully ended. This is a bizarre fantasy. eugenics juːˈdʒɛnɪks/ noun the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. This resulted in Eugenics - the idea of improving the human race and based upon evolution and the superior species. It was to be brought about by selective breeding. This did not begin in Hitler's Laboratories b...

No.15 Who is this Guy?

How Now Shall We live? By C. Colson and N. Pearcey p. 97. In William Steig's Yellow & Pink. a delightfully whimsical picture book for children, two wooden figures wake up and ask, " Do you know what we're doing here?" So begins the debate between two marionettes over the Origin of their existence. Pink surveys their well formed features and concludes, " Someone must have made us. " Yellow disagrees. " I say that we're an accident," and he outlines the hypothetical scenario of how it might have happened. A branch might have broken off a tree and fallen on a sharp rock, splitting one end of the branch into two legs. Then the wind might have sent it tumbling down the a hill until it was chipped and shaped. Perhaps a flash of lightning struck in such a way as to splinter the wood into arms and fingers. Eyes might have been formed by woodpeckers boring in the wood. "With enough time, a thousand, a million, maybe two million and...

Culture wars in the West.

Search This Blog