Os Guinness On Why Christians Need To Stand For Truth Today (Video)

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Why hasn't Christianity had more influence on major intellectual institutions?

"One reason Christianity has failed to exert much influence on the major intellectual institutions of America is that too many Christians hold their beliefs in an uninformed and precarious fashion. Instead of pursuing answers to the toughest questions an unbelieving world can marshal, they attempt to preserve certainty through ignorance and isolation, relying on platitudes rather than arguments."-Douglas Groothuis (Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith)

In short, a faith founded on unstable feelings and blind irrationality will not make much of an impact on the unbelieving world. Maybe that's also why this kind of faith has so little impact on the believing world too.

We can do better. I lay out a vision for how Christians can cultivate a thoughtful faith in chapter 5 of my latest book. You can learn more about it here.

Exiled from Vanderbilt: How Colleges are Driving Religious Groups off Campus (Video)

Please take 9 min. and watch this important video.



This is not a secondary issue...religious liberty impacts all of us. Please share this and consider standing up for religious freedom by reading and signing the Manhattan declaration.

Want to learn to navigate all of the opportunities and challenges of college life? Consider reading Welcome to College: A Christ-Follower's Guide For the Journey

What Christians Can Learn From A Bible-Belt Pastor Who Became An Atheist Leader

"All he had ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea what I’m going through?” DeWitt told me.

As his wife slept, he fumbled through the darkness for his laptop. After a few quick searches with the terms “pastor” and “atheist,” he discovered that a cottage industry of atheist outreach groups had grown up in the past few years. Within days, he joined an online network called the Clergy Project, created for clerics who no longer believe in God and want to communicate anonymously through a secure Web site.

DeWitt began e-mailing with dozens of fellow apostates every day and eventually joined another new network called Recovering From Religion, intended to help people extricate themselves from evangelical Christianity. Atheists, he discovered, were starting to reach out to one another not just in the urban North but also in states across the South and West, in the kinds of places­ DeWitt had spent much of his career as a traveling preacher. After a few months he took to the road again, this time as the newest of a new breed of celebrity, the atheist convert. They have their own apostles (Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) and their own language, a glossary borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Bible and gay liberation (you always “come out” of the atheist closet).

DeWitt quickly repurposed his preacherly techniques, sharing his reverse-conversion story and his thoughts on “the five stages of disbelief” to packed crowds at “Freethinker” gatherings across the Bible Belt, in places like Little Rock and Houston. As his profile rose in the movement this spring, his Facebook and Twitter accounts began to fill with earnest requests for guidance from religious doubters in small towns across America. “It’s sort of a brand-new industry,” DeWitt told me. “There isn’t a lot of money in it, but there’s a lot of momentum.”

Not long ago, the atheist movement was the preserve of a few eccentric gadflies like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, whose endless lawsuits helped earn her the title “the most hated woman in America.” But over the past decade it has matured into something much larger and less cranky. In March of this year, some 20,000 people marched through a cold drizzle at the “Reason Rally” in Washington, billed as a political debut for the movement. A string of best-selling atheist polemics by the “four horsemen” — Hitchens and Dawkins, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — has provided new intellectual fuel. Secular-themed organizations and clubs have begun to permeate small-town America and college campuses, helping to foot the bill for bus and billboard ad campaigns with messages like “Are You Good Without God? Millions Are.”

The reasons for this secular revival are varied, but it seems clear that the Internet has helped, and many younger atheists cite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment of disgust with religious zealotry in any form. It is hard to say how many people are involved; avowed atheists are still a tiny sliver of the population. But people....(read the rest of this article here)"

There is a lot here. But I just want to make a few observations:

• The problem of personal evil and suffering was a huge factor in his de-conversion (this was the case for Bart Ehrman as well).
• He had no one who shared his Christian convictions to honestly share his doubts with and that could help him process intellectually or emotionally.
• The article assumes that once he started "reading more broadly" and being 'rational', he began to move away from Christianity and lose his faith. The implied assumption is that thinking more means believing less. This is simply not true.
• He came from a highly emotional stream of Christianity. Emotions aren't bad; bud neither are they the appropriate foundation of faith. There is a difference between emotional doubt and intellectual doubt and they are not treated or resolved in the same way. (for more on dealing with doubt)
• The new atheism is not going away anytime soon. Christians need to be ready to engage and understand why they believe what they believe. Faith is not blind. But the Christian life does allow for honest doubts. However, we must have the courage to doubt our doubts and invite others who share our convictions in to help us process--not just let the darkness grow in isolation. Sean McDowell and I wrote a book to help Christians young and old to engage the honest questions raised by the new atheists. You can learn more about that here. Our prayer is that this resource will help you or a friend / family member on the journey of faith.

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I, Smartphone and the Common Good (Video)

This is a creative way to communicate a very important truth if we care about serving and loving our neighbors (locally and globally).



"There are five primary lessons that we can learn from this video...

• Markets bring people together without any one person in charge.
• No one person has enough knowledge to create the things we use every day.
• Markets allow people to use their gifts to serve others.
• Each one of us has a role in serving the common good.
• The innovations which markets bring can benefit all society.

We believe that how and why we work is directly connected to overall stewardship. God has gifted us with scarce resources in our mental capacities, our skills and talents, and our physical resources. Understanding how markets help us to best harness those scare resources for the common good is critical.

There are two other important implications from this video:

1. Markets are the best form of global poverty alleviation known to date. Allowing markets to operate across the globe in the 20th and 21st centuries has lifted millions if not billions out of poverty. According to the World Bank, embracing market reforms has helped lift 400 million people out of abject poverty in China alone, because people were allowed to work. For most of us, our work takes place within the market setting, so markets are critical for allowing people to use their talents.
2. Markets embrace the dignity inherent in our creation by allowing us to unleash our creativity. Markets allow us to be innovators, to take risks on ideas, to be entrepreneurial. Markets have made it possible for us to have electricity, air travel, indoor plumbing and even the smartphone. Those creative innovations, through the market, can make our lives easier, more efficient and less costly."

For more see this excellent website. (IFWE)

To read my interview with Institute for Faith, Work & Economics fellow Dr. Jay Richards on economics and Christianity see my book Think Christianly: Looking at the Intersection of Faith and Culture.

Let's Talk About Reality...Not Religion

Recently I had the honor and pleasure of speaking to the students at Summit Ministries worldview camp in TN. It was a blast! First it was so encouraging to meet young men and women excited about understanding, defending, and living out the Christian worldview. Second, this experience fires me up to keep doing what I am doing--the next generation needs to be encouraged and equipped to Think Christianly! (2 Tim. 2:2; Jude 3). They ARE the future.

In today's post I want to share a conversation I had with some of the sharp young men during lunch. It had to do with how we talk about Christianity with our friends, family, and coworkers. Most of the time, well meaning Christians talk about Christianity in the context of religion…not reality. Is that a problem? Yes, and here's why. Religion is understood as a personal and private feeling that is not accessible by everyone else. You can't question, challenge, or investigate it; you must simply be tolerant of it (and by tolerant, I am using the modern misunderstanding of tolerance which believes that all religious views are equally valid simply because a person sincerely believes them). That's why having a conversation about Christianity as a religion is a dead end. It's a non-starter.

That's why I encouraged these students to talk about Christianity in the context of reality where terms like truth, knowledge, reason, and evidence apply. Any claim about reality is either true or false (it can't be both). If Christianity is not the kind of thing that can be true or false…the battle has already been lost and the Gospel cannot be seriously considered. We need to talk about Christianity in the same way we talk about having a prescription filled at the pharmacy or receiving instruction from a Doctor.

In today's society, religion is a fuzzy (i.e., socially constructed or psychologically projected) category that makes little difference in everyday life. But if Christianity is true, then it speaks to ALL of life. It makes a comprehensive claim on reality. Jesus didn't intend to merely address two hours of our week. As Christians we need to have more conversations about reality and less about religion.

Have you found this blog helpful? You can have it delivered right to your inbox by signing up here. As always, feel free to share it others by using the share options below.

How do you thoughtfully analyze culture from a Christian perspective?

John Stonestreet's video this week is a GREAT example. As Christians we must engage this area of brokenness.



Did you miss last week's video? Watch it here.

Please consider sharing this post with friends using the share buttons below to Twitter and Facebook. We need to get the word out about this so we can engage well.

I develop a biblical theology of sexuality here.

Is America A Christian Nation?

This is a question that shows up whenever Christianity and politics are discussed. Here is a thoughtful answer to this often heated question:

“It’s easy to get bogged down in a debate about whether the United States is a “Christian nation.” The problem is that the phrase means different things to different people. If we’re talking about the views of most Americans, then certainly we are a Christian nation. About 78 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christians of some sort. All other religions combined make up less than 5 percent, and about 16 percent are unaffiliated (though not necessarily atheist). So just as we talk about “Muslim countries,” where most of the citizens are Muslims, we could refer to the United States as a “Christian nation.” The phrase also makes sense if you’re talking about American history. The original American colonies were overwhelmingly Christian. In fact, most started as Christian charters. Moreover, our laws and political traditions come largely from the Judeo-Christian culture of Europe, and especially Great Britain. But when some people hear talk of America as a “Christian nation,” they envision a country where Christianity is mandated, or where non-Christians are viewed as second-class citizens, or where atheists are herded out of the political process. So unless you explain what you mean by the phrase, talking about the United States as a Christian nation is liable to create more heat than light.”—Jay Richards and James Robison

That is fair and sound analysis of the facts. However, in a culture governed by soundbites and slogans, facts and qualifications are often hard to inject into the conversation. Also, perception is often reality. So if someone hears a negative, exclusionary tone when "Christian Nation" is brought up, then it ceases to be helpful (even if accurate).

For more on a sober view of Christianity and politics, see Indivisible:


I also discuss how Christianity ought to interface with politics here.

Stay up with the latest by following on Twitter @thnkchristianly

Will the Faith of Your Kids Survive College?

As I shared in a previous post, I am passionate about preparing students for the challenges and opportunities facing them on campus. This past week I was honored to be on Breakpoint and Breakpoint this week talking about Welcome to College. Chuck Colson, the founder of Breakpoint, was one of my heroes and an example to all Christians everywhere. I felt a significant sense of responsibility to carry on his passion for worldview training in the kind words he used to endorse my book Think Christianly. John Stonestreet and Eric Metaxes are doing a phenomenal job picking up the torch of Breakpoint and I would highly encourage you to tune in daily and listen.

In the conversation I had on Breakpoint this week with John Stonestreet we talked about how to help students not only survive college but thrive there. We also talked about the crisis of knowledge that Christians are facing today.

"...contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints" - Jude 3

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What do you think is the greatest challenge facing students today? Please share your perspective below.

How to Test a Worldview in 3 Easy Steps

There are so many different worldviews and belief systems out there...how can we make a wise choice? In this video, I share 3 tests you can apply to any worldview.




I just released a new podcast about preparing students for college, you can subscribe to the latest Think Christianly podcast here (iTunes / RSS).

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I'd love to hear what you think. For you, what is the most compelling thing about the Christian worldview? Feel free to leave a comment below.

New York Times' Columnist Ross Douthat Talks About the State of American Christianity

Interesting interview:

"In his new book “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,” Ross Douthat, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times, writes about how Christianity lost its central place in American life through a variety of factors, among them the religion’s failed attempts to accommodate secular trends; a strong identification of the church with strictly conservative politics; a lack of great religious-inspired art; and the appeal to a “God within” that tailors spirituality to the citizens of a self-help age. I recently spoke with Mr. Douthat about the book via e-mail. Below are excerpts of the conversation.

“Bad Religion”

Q.

Does the book presume that a widespread, mainstream Christianity is necessary to have a thriving United States?

A.

It depends what you mean by “thriving.” I’m not arguing that if we don’t all repent our sins tomorrow, we’re going to be conquered by the Chinese or collapse into a Balkans-style civil war. I’m quite confident that America will remain rich, powerful and relatively stable even if the religious trends I’m describing continue apace. But I do think that institutional Christianity has offered something important to our nation — sometimes a moral critique of our excesses, sometimes a kind of invisible mortar for our common life — that today’s heresies are unlikely to provide.

Q.

What do you mean by the words “heretics” and “heresy” in the book?

A.

I mean expressions of religious belief that are no longer traditionally Christian, but remain deeply influenced by Christianity — and fascinated, in particular, by the figure of Jesus of Nazareth — in ways that are hard to describe as post-Christian or non-Christian or secular. It’s a loaded word, obviously, but I think it’s the best way to describe the religious landscape in America today: Diverse, fragmented, polarized, and yet Christ-haunted all the same.

Q.

Evangelicals and Catholics united with each other “in the cause of culture war.” You argue that culture war is not the best use of Christianity, but is it the strongest glue left to it?

A.

Sometimes it seems to be. In an era of weakened religious affiliation and intensified partisanship, the zeal that’s associated with political combat can supply believers with the feeling of cohesion and common purpose that the institutional churches aren’t always able to supply. The danger here is obvious: If American Christianity is just one expression of the identity politics of conservative America, then it isn’t really much of a Christianity at all. But at the same time, it isn’t enough to say that believers should just stay away from politics entirely. Like all Americans, Christians have an obligation be engaged citizens, and to bring their beliefs to bear on the great debates in our society. If they shirked that duty, you wouldn’t just lose Jerry Falwell or Al Sharpton – you’d lose Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King.

Q.

You write about current religious popular art feeling “middlebrow, garish and naïve” or “ingenuous and tacky.” How might that change, and how important is it that it does?

A.

One of the striking things about the post-1960s era is how unimportant sacred art and architecture have become in our culture. Obviously some of that reflects the secular biases of our artists and intellectuals. But some of it reflects the straightforward failures of believers to write the novels and make the films and build the cathedrals that would testify, more eloquently than any polemic, to the Christian view of God and man. The critic Alan Jacobs observed to me once that much of what remains of highbrow Christian culture in the West is sustained not by theologians or bishops or pastors, but by poets and novelists and memoirists — C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton and W.H. Auden and Flannery O’Connor and so on. He’s right, and we need more like them."

Read the rest of John William's interview with Ross Douthat here.
Here's my perspective and what Christians can do to better engage culture.
How do you think Christians are doing? What do you think needs to change?

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Remembering the Life of Charles "Chuck" Colson

Like thousands of people all over the world, I listened to Chuck Colson's Break Point program as he engaged the issues of our day from a Christian perspective. I learned from what he said and equally important--how he said it. Chuck Colson was a hero of mine and I am sad that I will never again hear his distinctive voice lovingly contending for truth coming through my radio. I'll never forget receiving his endorsement for my book Think Christianly: Looking at the Intersection of Faith and Culture last fall. I was humbled that he would take the time and deeply challenged to faithfully live up to the words he wrote: "As someone who has devoted many years of ministry to teaching Christian worldview. I am thrilled to see dynamic and faithful worldview leaders like Jonathan Morrow stepping to the fore. Think Christianly, in a compelling and accessible way, equips Christians young and old to engage the culture winsomely, intelligently, and with confidence.” Chuck Colson fought the good fight, he ran his race and has finished well. Now it's my turn...now it's our turn. May God give me the grace to invest my life in the next generation for the glory of God and may my life make just a fraction of the impact for eternity that Chuck Colson's did during his 80 years on this earth.

“One of the most wonderful things about being a Christian is that I don’t ever get up in the morning and wonder if what I do matters. I live every day to the fullest because I can live it through Christ and I know no matter what I do today, I’m going to do something to advance the Kingdom of God.”— Charles Colson



More on the powerful life of Chuck Colson.

A moving interview in which Chuck Colson talks about the what the good life is really all about (30 min).

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Why Are Christians So Defensive?

There are several factors. But I think lack of knowledge is a big one. Nancy Pearcey explains how this works, “Generations of churched youngsters have been encouraged to shore up their religious commitment by sheer will power, closing their eyes and ears to contrary ideas. This explains why so many churches are full of people who are closed-minded, dogmatic, harsh and judgmental. Only people who understand that Christianity is true to the real world are capable of the relaxed confidence that allows them to be open, patient, and loving toward those who differ from them."

We need to raise up a new generation of Christians who know what they believe, why they believe it, and why it matters in life (1 Peter 3:15; Col. 4:5-6; 2 Cor. 5:20). Christians need a holistic vision for life that is integrated and compelling. Here is one place to start.

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Isn’t it better for a child to be adopted by a gay couple than to not be adopted at all?

Alan Shlemon is back to our tough questions series on Homosexuality. This week's question: Isn’t it better for a child to be adopted by a gay couple than to not be adopted at all?

I often hear this question loaded with two scenarios:

• Scenario A: The child lives in an institution, is routinely neglected, given poor nutrition, and often physically and sexually abused.
• Scenario B: The child lives with two loving women who are lesbians, who have stable jobs, live in a house, and have lots of family in the area.
• The question: Wouldn’t it be better for the child to be adopted by the lesbians and grow up under scenario B?

Well, sure, I guess when you construct the options that way, who will argue with you? I guess the child would be better off with the lesbians. So what’s that prove? Nothing.

I could construct two scenarios in a different way. What if the lesbians didn’t have a stable relationship, couldn’t keep steady jobs, experienced domestic violence in their home, and often used drugs. The other adoptive option was a married heterosexual couple (one a doctor and the other a teacher), who lived in the same home for 18 years, and who had already adopted a child.

Given those two options, wouldn’t it be better for the child to be adopted by the heterosexual couple? Sure, but what’s that prove? That you can construct any combination of scenarios designed to prove that a certain set of people would be better parents.

But you don’t determine public policy based on the exception or extreme case. For example, there might be some instances when it’s justified to run a red light – like rushing a dying person to the emergency room – but that doesn’t mean we should make running red lights legal. That’s bad public policy.

It reminds me of Zach Wahls, the 19 year-old University of Iowa student who made an impassioned appeal for same-sex marriage and parenting to the Iowa House of Representatives. His YouTube video went viral (more than 16 million views) after he argued that his lesbian mothers did a fine job of raising him. Maybe they did, but you can’t generalize one’s person’s experience for an entire group of people. Just because two homosexuals were able to raise a healthy, well-adjusted child (assuming they did), that doesn’t mean homosexual couples – as a group – make the best parents.

Many single fathers have to raise children by themselves. They do the best they can given their circumstances. I’m sure some of these children will declare themselves – like Zach Wahls – to be just fine. But does that mean we should promote single male adoption?

The real question is whether a child who needs to be adopted is best served by a heterosexual couple or a homosexual couple – all things being equal. The question focuses on the needs of the child, not the wants of homosexuals who are politically motivated to normalize same-sex marriage and parenting.

The answer is straightforward: decades of published research in psychology, social science, and medicine demonstrate that children do best when raised by a mother and father (especially the biological parents) in a long-term marriage.[i] That’s because a mother and a father each provide a unique and important contribution to their role as parents. Children who are raised – for example – in fatherless families suffer, on average, in every measure of well-being. They have higher levels of physical and mental illness, educational difficulties, poverty, substance abuse, criminal behavior, loneliness, and physical and sexual abuse.[ii]

Homosexual adoption, by design, will deny a child either a mother or father every time. By legalizing same-sex parenting, society declares by law that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. That means a mother offers no unique contribution to a child. A man could provide all the benefits of a woman.

Besides being counterintuitive, this deprives a son or daughter the distinctive benefits of being raised by both sexes.[iii] A compassionate and moral society comes to the aid of motherless or fatherless children. We don’t intentionally design families to deny children a mother or father. But that’s the result of same-sex parenting.

Lesbian parent Rosie O’Donnell confessed to Diane Sawyer in an ABC interview that her six-year-old adopted son, Parker, said, “I want to have a daddy.” Rosie answered him, “If you were to have a daddy, you wouldn’t have me as a mommy because I’m the kind of mommy who wants another mommy.”[iv] Notice the attention is shifted from the needs of children to the wants of couples. Although Parker asked for a father, his request was trumped by Rosie’s personal desire to be a lesbian parent.

Do Rosie and her lesbian lover know how to raise Parker to become a man? Do they know how to teach him how to treat a woman or his future wife? How will they be his role model?

Glenn Stanton and Bill Maier explore this idea and the suggestion that merely two loving adults are all that’s needed to raise kids: “The two most loving mothers in the world can’t be a father to a little boy. Love can’t equip mothers to teach a little boy how to be a man. Likewise, the two most loving men can’t be a mother to a child. Love does little to help a man teach a little girl how to be a woman. Can you imagine two men guiding a young girl through her first menstrual cycle or helping her through the awkwardness of picking out her first bra? Such a situation might make for a funny television sitcom but not a very good real-life situation for a young girl.”[v] And these are just a few of the absurdities that arise when you jettison the commonsense notion that men and women are both unique and valuable in their role as parents.

Same-sex parenting doesn’t make sense and that is why it must be forced on the people by the state. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse explains: “Marriage between men and women is a pre-political, naturally emerging social institution. Men and women come together to create children, independently of any government...By contrast, same-sex ‘marriage’ is completely a creation of the state. Same-sex couples cannot have children. Someone must give them a child or at least half the genetic material to create a child. The state must detach the parental rights of the opposite-sex parent and then attach those rights to the second parent of the same-sex couple. The state must create parentage for the same-sex couple. For the opposite-sex couple, the state merely recognizes parentage.”[vi]

The price of homosexual adoption is too high. For it to work, the state must redefine marriage, create parentage laws for homosexual couples, and deny the unique role that mothers and fathers play. In the end, children lose and we lose. Children are harmed, which in the end affects everyone in our culture. For this reason, I believe even homosexuals should oppose homosexual adoption.

---

[i] This is supported by multiple studies including Mary Parke, “Are Married Parents Really Better for Children?” Center for Law and Social Policy, Policy Brief, May 2003, p. 1, and Kristin Anderson Moore et al., “Marriage From a Child’s Perspective: How Does Family Structure Affect Children, and What Can We Do about It?” Child Trends Research Brief, June 2002, p. 1.

[ii] Much of this research is referenced in David Popenoe, Life Without Father (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

[iii] See Yale Medical School’s Dr. Kyle Pruett, Fatherneed: Why Father Care Is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child (New York: Free Press, 2000), 17-34.

[iv] PrimeTime Thursday, March 14, 2002.

[v] Glenn T. Stanton and Bill Maier, Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-sex Marriage and Parenting (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 71.

[vi] http://www.ncregister.com/site/article/15099

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Are you preaching a trivial Gospel?

"Many people are rejecting our gospel today not because they perceive it to be false, but because they perceive it to be trivial. People are looking for an integrated worldview which makes sense of all their experience."-John Stott

Preaching the simple gospel isn't as simple as it used to be. To be sure the Holy Spirit is still actively convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:7-11). But the plausibility structures of this generation have drifted farther away from theistic categories. So our job is to help them connect the dots. Help them connect the questions they are asking with the explanatory power of the Christian worldview. That's what everyday ambassadors do. Not only is there good evidence that Christianity is true,  it also best explains our experience of reality. In my new book Think Christianly, I try to paint a vision for what that looks like at our intersection.

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You Were Not Designed To Be Alone...Check Out The New "Welcome To The Family" Documentary

A new documentary featuring Christian hip-hop artist PRo (along with Lecrae and others) makes a compelling case for biblical community. I had the opportunity to be interviewed in it and am excited about helping spread this important message. Check it out!



Also, PRo's new album comes out March 27th - you can get it here.

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Six Key Questions to Ask an Atheist in a Conversation

Ravi Zacharias offers a very helpful list of questions, here are a couple of them: "Many times, as Christian theists, we find ourselves on the defensive against the critiques and questions of atheists. Sometimes, in the midst of arguments and proofs, we miss the importance of conversation. These questions, then, are meant to be a part of a conversation. They are not, in and of themselves, arguments or "proofs" for God. They are commonly asked existential or experiential questions that both atheists and theists alike can ponder.

1. If there is no God, “the big questions” remain unanswered, so how do we answer the following questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? This question was asked by Aristotle and Leibniz alike – albeit with differing answers. But it is an historic concern. Why is there conscious, intelligent life on this planet, and is there any meaning to this life? If there is meaning, what kind of meaning and how is it found? Does human history lead anywhere, or is it all in vain since death is merely the end? How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier? If these concepts are merely social constructions, or human opinions, whose opinion does one trust in determining what is good or bad, right or wrong? If you are content within atheism, what circumstances would serve to make you open to other answers?

2. If we reject the existence of God, we are left with a crisis of meaning, so why don’t we see more atheists like Jean Paul Sartre, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or Michel Foucault? These three philosophers, who also embraced atheism, recognized that in the absence of God, there was no transcendent meaning beyond one’s own self-interests, pleasures, or tastes. The crisis of atheistic meaninglessness is depicted in Sartre’s book Nausea. Without God, there is a crisis of meaning, and these three thinkers, among others, show us a world of just stuff, thrown out into space and time, going nowhere, meaning nothing.

3. When people have embraced atheism, the historical results can be horrific, as in the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it? In other words, what set of actions are consistent with particular belief commitments? It could be argued, that these behaviors – of the regimes in question - are more consistent with the implications of atheism. Though, I'm thankful that many of the atheists I know do not live the implications of these beliefs out for themselves like others did! It could be argued that the socio-political ideologies could very well be the outworking of a particular set of beliefs – beliefs that posited the ideal state as an atheistic one...."

Read the rest here.

Sean McDowell and I respond to the 18 most challenging questions atheists raise here.

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Is Piers Morgan Tolerant of Christians? Should He Be?

CNN's Piers Morgan is passionate about tolerance...but what does he mean by that? And is he being tolerant towards people with whom he disagrees? How should Christians respond to controversial issues? I address these and other issues in our new podcast.

You can listen and subscribe to the new Think Christianly podcast here.

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What is Theology?

Theology is all about knowing and loving the true and living God.

“Thus says the Lord, “Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” declares the Lord.” - Jer. 9:23-24 

“Knowledge without devotion is cold, dead orthodoxy. Devotion without knowledge is irrational instability. But true knowledge of God includes understanding everything from his perspective. Theology is learning to think God's thoughts after him.”- Erik Thoennes

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Can Gay People Change? Is It Psychologically Harmful to Make Them Try?

Our tough questions about homosexuality series with Stand to Reason speaker Alan Shlemon continues. Up this week? “Gay people can’t change. In fact, it’s psychologically harmful to try to make them.”

You may have seen the sign, “Some people are gay. Get over it!” But I’d like to modify it: “Some people used to be gay. Get over that.”

It would, unfortunately, be met with a dismissive response because many people believe the discussion is over. The “experts” have spoken. Sexual orientation is an inborn and immutable trait like eye color. Change is not possible. Case closed.

But this is an incredible assertion. If it can be demonstrated that just one person has changed, it would falsify the claim. It turns out that not only is change possible, but there are multiple and independent lines of evidence to warrant such a belief.

First, it should be noted that people reported change was possible thousands of years ago. The sixth chapter in the biblical book of 1 Corinthians states that some of the inhabitants of the city of Corinth were homosexuals. But the passage goes on to say, “Such were some of you…” indicating that some of them were able to change (1 Corinthians 6:9-11).

I realize that some people will dismiss this account, claiming they don’t believe the Bible is the word of God. But one doesn’t have to believe in the divine authorship of scripture in order to accept this account of changed lives. The epistle to the Corinthian church is, at the very least, a first century letter to a community of people in a city which still exists in modern Greece. It is a historical correspondence between Paul of Tarsus and the Corinthians. It is highly unlikely that Paul could get away with making false claims about the changed lives of people who live in the city where the letter was publicly read.

Second, many reputable scientists who are experts in the field have testified that change is possible. Dr. Robert Spitzer, who has been called the most influential psychiatrist of the 20^th century (more than 275 publications to his credit), published a peer-reviewed paper in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The purpose of his study was to evaluate the claim that homosexual orientation is immutable and, consequently, change is impossible.

Spitzer indicated that of the 200 people in the study, many of them increased in the frequency and satisfaction of heterosexual activity. He also noted that, “Almost all of the participants reported substantial changes in the core aspects of sexual orientation, not merely overt behavior.” More significantly, 11% of the men and 37% of the women reported complete change. Spitzer said that these results go beyond, “anecdotal information and provide evidence that reparative therapy is sometimes successful.” Moreover, he concluded that, “This study provides evidence that some gay men and lesbians are able to also change the core features of sexual orientation.”[i]

But what about the claim that this kind of therapy is harmful? According to Spitzer, there wasn’t evidence of harm. “To the contrary,” he said. The participants reported that therapy, “Was helpful in a variety of ways beyond changing sexual orientation itself.”

The obvious response would be to dismiss Spitzer as an anti-gay homophobe. But this is a man who has fought for homosexual causes. Spitzer was the architect behind the movement in 1973 to remove homosexuality as an illness from psychiatry’s manual of mental disorders (referred to as the DSM). This was a monumental milestone in the history of gay rights spearheaded by Spitzer himself.

Dr. Nicholas Cummings is another researcher who affirms that change is possible. He was the past president of the American Psychological Association (APA) and served as Chief of Mental Health at Kaiser Permanente for 20 years. While serving in that capacity, he personally saw over 2,000 patients with same-sex attraction (SSA) and his staff saw another 16,000. You can read more about his impeccable credentials here. I met him in November 2011, where he told an audience of clinicians that he personally saw hundreds of people change their sexual orientation and estimated that 7% of the 16,000 patients his staff saw experienced successful reorientation. Many of them went on to marry and live heterosexual lives.

Dr. Cummings is another clinician that can’t be dismissed. He has been a champion of gay rights and, while serving as President of the APA, appointed the APA’s first Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Issues.

But these two researchers are just the tip of the iceberg. There have been clinicians and other scientists who have known that change is possible and have been reporting it for over 100 years! Jean-Martin Charcot, known as the father of modern neurology, wrote about how “the homosexual became heterosexual” through his treatments back in 1882. Sigmund Freud would later report change in sexual orientation using psychoanalysis in the 1920s. Researchers continued to report these findings throughout the 20^th century: Wilhelm Stekel in the 1930s, Frank Caprio and Albert Ellis in the 1950s, Russell Monroe and Edward Glover in the 1960s, Irving Bieber in the 1970s, Karolynn Siegel in the 1980s, and Houston MacIntosh in the 1990s to name just a few.

With this long history of evidence, it’s not surprising that a recent psychiatry textbook, Essential Psychopathology & Its Treatment, concluded that homosexual orientation can be changed and that therapy isn’t necessarily harmful. The section addressing this topic states:

While many mental health care providers and professional associations have expressed considerable skepticism that sexual orientation could be changed with psychotherapy and also assumed that therapeutic attempts at reorientation would produce harm, recent empirical evidence demonstrates that homosexual orientation can indeed be therapeutically changed in motivated clients, and that reorientation therapies do not produce emotional harm when attempted (e.g., Byrd & Nicolosi, 2002; Byrd et al., 2008; Shaeffer et al., 1999; Spitzer, 2003).

Given the existence of this clinical research, it would follow that there should be thousands of people who have personally experienced change. And there are. Every year more individuals come out and publicly declare that although they lived as homosexuals for significant periods of time, they no longer are today. This might not constitute peer-reviewed research, but it is worth noting the sheer number of people who claim they have changed.

How can anyone deny that change is possible given all the evidence from psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, peer-reviewed studies, and personal testimonies? I’ll tell you how. One would have to believe that every clinician who treated homosexuality during the 19^th and 20^th centuries has lied about their professional work and deceived the readers of their published studies. Therapists around the world who treat homosexuality today would also have to be dishonest about their patient outcomes. Every religious and secular organization that provides counseling to homosexuals would be fraudulent about their results. Every homosexual – thousands of them around the world – who is now living as a heterosexual is just faking it. And every friend and person I’ve met over the years who has claimed to have changed has been misleading me. This would entail a massive and well-orchestrated scheme to deceive vast numbers of people around the world. One would have to believe all that deception is occurring in order to believe that homosexuals can’t change.

Does everyone who tries to change succeed? No. In fact, most people fail. Is it an easy process for those who achieve a measure of change? Absolutely not. Does change always entail complete transformation? Rarely. Do some people return to homosexuality? Of course. But is it possible for some to experience substantial and enduring change? Yes. That’s good news, given that there are many people with unwanted SSA. They have hope.

The bad news is that there are many advocates that are extremely hostile towards these change efforts and would deny some homosexuals the right to self-determination. These are the same people who allegedly champion diversity. But ironically, not only do they deny that change is possible, they deny those who have changed even exist.

Though homosexuality is nothing new, neither is the ability of some people to change. I’m not suggesting we try to change every homosexual, but we can give hope to those with unwanted SSA. It’s a hope that many have realized and, as a result, have turned to others who want to change and offered them the truth and compassion they desperately need.

Read the previous 10 posts in this series here.

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[i] Spitzer, R. L., “Can some gay men and lesbians change their sexual orientation? 200 participants reporting a change from homosexual to heterosexual orientation,” in Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 32, No. 5, 2003, 403–417.

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