Friday 4 October 2019

Does God mind if we teach our children bilge?

Influential blogger Tim Challies posits that, as long as you get the other parts of your life right, it really makes no difference whom you choose to educate your children for 35-40 hours a week. Whether their teaching is based upon truth, untruth, Christianity or secularism, he says in his view, God doesn't care. (Please read it - I'm not caricaturing; that's his intended point).

The most efficient way I can think of to respond to that is to juxtapose it with another story that's been doing the rounds recently, concerning how the wholesale corruption of humanities and arts by relativism, the sexual revolution, hyper-individualism, identity politics and various related anti-Christian ideologies is now being extended into other fields that were previously thought to be either largely safe or completely immune. Who would have thought that someone would dare, to advance ideas like mathematical truth is a tool of Western oppression and that the field of mathematics is in need of liberation?

So, I think we should juxtapose Challies' piece with this article by Douglas Murray, a homosexual atheist, bemoaning the inflicting of endless lies on children in the name of "education" and the consequent impoverishing of their lives as a result. Please read that article too, and especially - it's much more truthful and wiser than that written by the Christian.

What strange times we live in. People with no love for God can see that the presuppositions and content of children's education matters and that the current direction of government-led education in the West is down into the pit. But evangelical Christians, commanded above all things to love God with all their minds, heart and soul and strength, commanded to consciously and actively seek the transforming of their minds rather than their conforming to the world, are trying to tell us that there's really nothing to worry about. Bible believers, with verses like Deuteronomy 6:4-6 that instruct us to raise our children in an environment explicitly saturated by God's truth, can still keep this commandment if we send them along to be taught an unending flood of bilge. It's yet one more sort of evangelical Gnosticism ... the belief that as long as we keep the "spiritual" requirements out-of-hours, what we actually do with our flesh-and-blood bodies, hours and brains doesn't really matter or make an important difference.

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