Sexual indoctrination in every subject of the curriculum, from age 5

https://vfjuk.org.uk/news-updates/suffer-the-little-children-sneaky/

The long-anticipated day is now here, when everybody's children in UK state schools will always be being indoctrinated in sexual immorality, in every subject, from infancy.

The UK evangelical church has had so many years to be ready for this day. The sexual revolution was in the 1960s, not in 2015. Years - a couple of generations - to be ready to make sure no child in a Christian family would be subjected to this; and to make sure that we were in a position to be "salt and light" to other children too. The Bible is clear that it's the church's job to teach the world, not just the church. The birds of the air should be coming to rest under our branches. Light should be going out, not hid under a bushel.

But now we are in a situation where, for the larger part of Christian families, the world teaches the church. May we mourn this as we ought to, and may the Lord have mercy and move us to action.

The sexual dissolution

One of the blessings of my mathematical training was that it pushes me to analyse things back beyond the symptoms. To look at systems and structures and fundamentals. Patterns in thinking, patterns in society.
For some years I have been lamenting that it's much too rare to identify the 1960s "sexual revolution" as the outward moment when Western society irreversibly (in the sense of, if we don't reverse this, there's no other way) chose and set itself on the road to ruin.
As such, I'm pleased to see this blog, and the book it draws attention to, getting some attention. You should read it! Note that all the dots join up. And note the implications. All the monumental mistakes detailed in the article are connected. If you oppose one (e.g. identity politics) but not another (e.g. feminism), then you're not thinking straight.

Grooming vulnerable young women in the TV and movie industries

What is it called when vulnerable young women are taken through a process of gradual persuasion that they should take their clothes off for the twisted pleasure of strangers? When they are led through a gradual process that prepares them for the idea that doing such things is either normal or good? That's called "grooming". Thankfully, it's increasingly recognised as something that should be treated as a serious crime.

Generally the word "grooming" conjures up the idea of seedy middle-aged blokes on the Internet trying to persuade young teenagers. Or alternatively, pimps in seedy back-allies or theatres hawking those whom they have a hold over to all-comers. But if you apply a little thought, you'll realise that the problem is vastly more widespread than that. It's everywhere. Sexualisation of young people is a common-place in our society. One place where it is rampant is in Hollywood and television and other visual media. In particular, young actresses are persuaded by middle-aged seedy males ("producers", "directors" or "agents") that it's in their own interests to show their young flesh for the viewing pleasure of the afore-mentioned males, and to all the people they can hawk that flesh to for profit.

On which note, here's a report of an interview with an actress from "Game of Thrones" speaking about how she was led through a grooming process to show her naked flesh (under the pretence that it was the naked flesh of her "character"), in various sexual acts, for the pleasure of the viewers of that show, and the profit of its producers (and her own career): https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-50485264

You'll note that she doesn't use the word "grooming", or describe those who groomed her as perverts or criminals. But does she describe anything else? What is the real difference in what's happened if those who groomed you wore suits and aftershave instead of smelly tracksuits? The most effective groomers are those whose victims don't realise what's going on, even afterwards. Those who are exploited end up confused about the process. Even when the evidence is crystal clear to world plus dog, they still wonder if they were truly loved, appreciated, etcetera, and only see the abuse as something that was a part of a larger, more important whole - rather than as at the heart of everything that happened to them. So, she describes her innocence as a new actress of the depravity she was being asked to enact; describes her shock at seeing the scripts; talks about the crying and trauma before the scenes; the pressure to go through with it to not harm her career; and speaks of it at a distance under a fictional abstraction of "Khaleesi's nudity", rather than it being her own exploitation.

Someone will tell me that she was not groomed or exploited - that it was "empowering", a powerful statement of her femininity. Well, read the article - she disagrees, even if she's not yet at the point of identifying it for exactly what it was. Things that are empowering and honour the glory of the feminine don't leave the females involve scared, traumatised or trying not to vomit. The parading in public to everybody willing to pay a few pennies of what all young women instinctively feel is precious and to be protected - i.e. their nudity - is not empowering, but degrading. Exploiting young actresses for pornographic purposes is grooming, and is depraved, whether it's performed by smelly men in tracksuits in back allies, or men with sophisticated grooming in suits in television studios. It's exploitation, whether it's for the twisted pleasure of the unsophisticated at a low-grade porn club, or the supposedly sophisticated watching it in their nicely decorated lounges in suburbia. What it is is what it is, regardless of the labels that are stuck upon it. I hope that, if you love God and love the Lord Jesus, you refuse to take part, at any level, in supporting such things. Turn it off and throw it out.

Lamb of God

Does music this side of heaven get any better than this? A ridiculously
talented father and daughter singing about the Lamb of God who takes
away the sins of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIrhABg0QgQ

How your taxes are spent to prevent parents understanding or influencing what their children are taught

I post about this sort of thing a lot (relative to other topics). Why? Because the UK church urgently needs to wake up. It needs to take back control of its children's education from those they've currently handed it over to: https://anglicanmainstream.org/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-england/

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.

The disease of punditry

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax/kanye-west-justin-bieber-make-celebrity-conversions/

The above article from the Gospel Coalition unfortunately, through its omissions, perpetuates and encourages a very common mistake in our hyper-connected age. It is the mistake of believing that we ought each to have an informed opinion about people and events that in practical terms have nothing to do with us.

You have rights... when it suits us

The Guardian newspaper has published a long-form article, arguing that it is "urgent" to recognise the rights of the unborn.

Yes, you read that rightly. The Guardian! In fact, they don't just mean the unborn; they include the not-yet-conceived.

But wait... what rights are these? According to the article, the right to require present governments to implement a particular political program regarding the environment. No, not the right to not be chopped up, or vacuumed up, prior to birth. Not the right to continue a life that has already begun. Not that kind of right. The Guardian regularly makes clear that such an idea would be an abomination, despised by everyone except, supposedly, those who detest females (don't ask them about the females who get chopped up).

In other words, for the Guardian, the unborn don't have the right to not be slaughtered; but they do have the "right" to, by proxy, promote the sort of political programmes that the Guardian already favoured.

Could you make something of this level of hypocrisy and callousness up if you tried? Would it sound plausible if you did?

Human abortion is the most evil and depraved practice that currently goes on in the world, and we must keep saying so, and keep pointing it out wherever we can.

Fighting against harmful RSE

A resource for parents from Christian Concern:
https://christianconcern.com/action/stop-children-from-being-taught-harmful-rse/

Plucking the tree up by its roots

I read this with interest, since I have known Matthew personally in different capacities for a long time: https://www.evangelical-times.org/52204/thinking-the-unthinkable-parents-withdraw-children-from-a-week-of-school/. This post is not really about them personally, but I'll use their story to frame some of what I have to say about Christian and secular education.

Firstly, I applaud and thank the Lord for Matthew and Naomi for their clear-thinking and courage in seeing an issue, analysing it Biblically, and then being willing to take action upon it. Unfortunately, I think a large number of mis-steps that evangelical Christians in the UK are making in recent years fall down on those basic steps (and I do not exempt myself from that).

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the recent controversies over PSHE - which do at least have the benefit of pushing some people over the line who wouldn't have been pushed before - are ultimately a controversy over whether or not we should eat every last piece of the rotten fruit of post-sexual-revolutionary secularism, no matter how many maggots it has and how rancid it takes. If we get to this stage, has not something very important gone wrong a lot earlier? Ought we not to be aiming somewhere down at the roots? If such obvious and gross wickedness can be promoted, how did we get into that situation, and what other damage is it doing?

UK state schools generally provide a comprehensive, year-round education in secularism, by secularists (dogmatic/intentional or functional), and unsurprisingly succeed in churning out legions of secularists (whether dogmatic/intentional or functional). As Christians, our aim is to bring every thought into captivity to Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). We think that all children should be given a godly - that is to say, non-secularist, but rather Christian - education. We don't want to just avoid the most rancid fruits of secularism; we want to pluck up the whole tree, replacing it with an entirely different one. The fact that, as documented in the link above, Matthew and Naomi met such a barrage of resistance to reasonable attempts to question and investigate something off-the-scale in its depravity tells you that the new PSHE regulations are not an unfortunate blip. They are not a surprising aberration or freak event. They are utterly predictable, and in that sense, banal. They are part and parcel of the everyday world-view being assumed, practised and promoted within the system.

The fact that one of the most conservative evangelical newspapers (the Evangelical Times) titles a piece on removing your children from this sort of "education" (an education in radical wickedness) for one week as "Thinking the unthinkable: Parents withdraw children from a week of school" tells us how far things have gone. Really? This is unthinkable? This depends upon your frame of reference, does it not - upon what you've previously been thinking?

Wikipedia offers the following definition: "The Overton window is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse, also known as the window of discourse". This is a known phenomena whereby what is thinkable depends largely the number and positions of people pushing ideas. To pick an example, in 2019, we have professed, proud Marxists leading Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, a short step away from the most powerful political positions in the country. And this is something we're now accustomed to. It wasn't long ago that it would be thought "unthinkable". People who professed such doctrines were generally thought of as loonies, thankfully far from any real power, doomed to failed attempts to sell their strange magazines on street corners wearing dirty anoraks on Saturday mornings, and nothing too much more harmful than that. From my point of view, what ought to be unthinkable, is that, after UK schools have become so thoroughly humanistic, and after the baneful effects of this have been seen for so long, that the evangelical Christian church is still doing so little to make provision for the comprehensive education of its children in the ways of God. That so many Christian parents feel that they don't have many real choices. (In reality, thankfully, in 2019, the options are many, with resources from near and far; but because of the "Overton window" being where it is, a lot of them are still very new to very many, even whilst to others they are "part of the furniture").

Let me finish with an anecdote. Many Christian educators such as myself are used to hearing that it makes no difference; that education is education, and that the errors of secularist education are few, minor and peripheral and easily compensated for with a little extra Christian teaching on the side. Well, recently I started studying using Cambridge University Press (i.e. one of the most highly esteemed academic publishers) text books with a couple of my own children. It took only a few days before they noticed how strongly these - in quite incidental things, of no relevance to the actual subject topics - were pushing a different world-view. The contrast with the Christian text books (no, there are no perfect textbooks, no straw men please!) was stark and obvious. I thanked God that my children discerned this without prompting, and the difference it made. May the Lord open more of my fellow believers' eyes to see the same.

Three times fourteen generations (Matthew 1:17)

This is a very puzzling verse, very early in the New Testament:

So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.

All Bible students soon learn that this verse is not to be interpreted in the most obvious sense that a Western reader would choose. In Matthew's list, some names have been omitted. The 14-14-14 pattern is only achieved through means of those omissions. If we add in the missing individuals, the symmetry (and divisibility by seven) disappears.

Read more about how to understand this verse in the article on my website.

Should expressions of Christian belief be career-ending?

Should expressions of Christian belief, spoken anywhere vaguely outside of our own bathrooms or anywhere else where nobody else will hear them, be career-ending?
That is, unfortunately, no longer a theoretical question in the UK. Read here to find some of the extracted arguments of the lawyer of Sheffield University - a university, still thought of by many as a bastion of free thought and inquiry - arguing that such expressions should be automatically career ending, across a whole swathe of careers. The lawyer was arguing that such expressions in this case justified expelling a student from a course related to social work, on the grounds that said student had disqualified himself from such a career by expressing Christian thoughts on Facebook.

Christ is risen

Matthew 28 - "1 Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. 2 And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. 4 And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. 5 But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here, for he has risen, as he said."

Christ is risen, and the gospel is preached. Results?

• The trained elite of the world's mightiest empire, dedicated to keeping him in the tomb, are utterly powerless.
  
•  Two women, two "nobodies", who simply were seeking to honour Jesus, hear the glorious announcement, meet the risen Saviour, and begin the multi-millenia, triumphant process of taking that great news to the nations, beginning with his apostles.

There's the history of the world since, in miniature. To some, those great in the world, focussed upon this world, seeking to suppress the truth of a new Lord of Lords and King of Kings, his resurrection of the stench of death leading to death. To others, those who in the world's eyes are nothing, he is the beautiful savour of life, bringing life, and they form part of the great chain of life: those whom death can never touch. Jesus is risen: hallelujah!

"Fast, pain-free divorces? They are slow agony for our children"

Peter Hitchens has, for at least the last couple of decades, been in the painful position of being right about a lot of important things, but continually been treated as not even worth listening to (most recently: before June 2016, he was telling us that "Leave" would win the EU referendum, and that a massive constitutional crisis would result because the promises begin given that the result would be implemented were incredible). He was no-platformed before his time, largely for his conservative social views.

A lot more people are now becoming used to this concept, i.e. of counter-arguments to the prevailing "progressive" orthodoxy, especially on social matters, simply being ignored or treated as unsayable, instead of debated. The culture has now been shifted to the extent that idea of "no platform for bigots" (where "bigot" means "person who doesn't agree with us") is being mainstreamed, promoted as virtuous and, yes, anyone who disagrees with it is probably a bigot who shouldn't be listened to (see what they did there?). There should, it is being said throughout our universities and beyond, be "no platform" for anyone whose ideas aren't part of revolutionary left-wing politics. Society should belong only to left-wing revolutionaries; anyone else must become an UnPerson, and their existence should disappear down the Memory Hole, never to be referred to by any civilised person.

Peter Hitchens was, as I say, no-platformed before his time, from at least 1997 onwards, as he valiantly sought to ask (among many other things) why it was of absolutely no apparent interest to the British media how many prominent "New Labour" figures had been, as he was before recanting and openly detailing his errors, members of revolutionary Trotskyist organisations.

Well, here he is, telling us what the consequences of further divorce liberalisation will be: https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2019/04/fast-pain-free-divorces-they-are-slow-agony-for-our-children.html. He poses a question: why is marriage a unique area in which, if you break the contract, the law sides with you, instead of against you? This is the fast road to accelerating our societal ruin - but where are the voices rising in opposition against it?

The compulsory grooming of children - will you be signing up?

From a Christian point of view, the new "Relationships and Sex Education (RSE)" regulations amount to compulsory, immoral grooming of an entire nation's children. Children will be indoctrinated in the teachings of the sexual revolution, encouraged to experiment, taught about sexuality in an amoral context, and in some items taught definite immorality and that it is wrong not to be open to all kinds of harmful, damaging at extreme ideas (the ideas themselves, not just kind to the people misled by them). And, for some of this (and all of it for some), opting out will be forbidden. And this teaching will go on at their most vulnerable ages, throughout the whole process of turning from an infant into an adult: drip-feed indoctrination from infancy, offering of perversion and confusion as live options as they go through adolescence, puberty and sexual awakening, etcetera.

Again I ask, what are Christians planning to do about this? The crunch comes. Are we going to voluntarily send along our children to be groomed week by week? Do we intend just to turn a blind eye, or trust in a cunning plan to undo this out of hours? We're going to immerse vulnerable young minds throughout the day, throughout the working week, in a context in which they're continually bombarded with messages (carefully crafted, with large amounts of funding behind them) that we're wrong, that and then tell them it's wrong, and hope for the best? Is that our idea of what it means to "bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4), and to surround them with discussion and encouragement in the good law of God throughout their childhood (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)?

The hour is late. But it's never too late to do the right thing, and entrust ourselves to God. For churches and church leaderships, that means coming together to make sure that there is full support available - including, if there are none available, Christian schools - for the Christian education of our children. Their raising in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, rather than grooming in the doctrines of depravity. (Those two things really are different, and the difference matters). For parents, that means not sending your children along to compulsory grooming. If not sending them is against the rules, then break the rules. We must obey God rather than men. You'll get invited to speak to the headmaster, you'll get fined for truancy: pay the fines, or don't pay them, but don't send your children for compulsory grooming. If they escalate it, withdraw your children (or withdraw them first before giving them an (unfair) stick to beat you with). Educate them in a school, a co-op, or a home (or a combination of all three) where there's no compulsory grooming, and where there is godly teaching.

Will you have to pay a cost? Of course you will, you will have to take up your cross daily, and follow Christ. Are you signed up for that, or not?

$1 eBook sale from Ligonier

On for a week:

https://www.ligonier.org/store/collection/reformation-trust-ebooks/

Saying what the Bible says, as the Bible says it

This is well worth reading:


https://warhornmedia.com/2019/01/31/itching-ears-demand-precious-language/

God graciously gave me a realisation some years ago that affects all subjects, not just ones controversial in the culture. It was this: our position on an issue is not Biblical unless we can not only affirm what the Bible says, but also would naturally say the same thing in the same way. i.e. The structure of our own thinking is such that we not only tick the box "the Bible says X, so I agree with it", but that we have the same overall world-view in general and consequent approach to an issue in particular that we have the same framework and would find the Bible's way of expressing things a most logical and reasonable way to do so.


By this, I don't of course mean that we culturally become 1st century AD or 10th century BC Israelites. I don't mean that where there are cultural illustrations or backgrounds that we pretend that those are the very same backgrounds or illustrations that are immediately accessible to us. I'm talking about the inner logic and worldview of a way of thinking. The steps that lead through from premises to conclusions and applications. Nor am I denying the need for pastors to explain things to people in a way that is understandable and accessible. I am not saying that we should adopt archaic or incomprehensible patterns of speech. What I am saying is that it's not just the formal content of our practical affirmations and denials that matter, but the routes we take to get there.


The above link quotes an example of an absolutely wrong sort of way of affirming the Bible's teaching. It, on the surface, ticks the box of being able to say, "yes, I affirm the Bible's teaching". But it is far, far from a statement that flows naturally from the Bible's overall revelation of the truth about God our Creator, the world, man, our relationship to God, and human sexuality. And that is why - of course - you don't find any statements of that same flavour in the Bible itself. It is why you do find things like Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6. Again, I'm using the issue of sexual immorality used in the above article. But is applies in all sorts of areas. Do we think, reason and conclude like the Bible does? Then - and only then - is our thinking actually (and not just notionally) Biblical.

The wholesale corruption of medical research

http://fullmeasure.news/news/cover-story/fake-science-08-06-2017

Why is this of interest? One of the tenets of atheist propaganda is that such things aren't possible; that scientific journals mainly print objective, verified truth. That wholesale corruption of any area of the scientific establishment isn't possible, because all the checks and balances make it impossible. So - and here we come to the bit they're most interested in - if the leading scientific journals promote molecules-to-man evolution, then the only possible explanation is that molecules-to-man evolution is a fact. Science, they claim, isn't like other human endeavours where all the normal features of fallen human culture like self-interest, fiefdoms, political power-plays, gate-keepers, empires, financial/funding and career prestige/reputational considerations etc., are in play.

Reality, however, shows the reverse; that across all the scientific disciplines, the same factors are in play as in the rest of human life. Inconvenient truths are suppressed, and convenient untruths are promoted, when it suits people to do so. This isn't a conspiracy theory; there's no allegation that some secret octopus overlords are synchronising mind-control of all the main institutions. Rather, it's an argument that arguments from authority, such as "X % of scientists who are published in the top journals agree on assertion Y" is no more valid a proof of assertion Y than any other naked appeal to authority. It's no more valid than appeals to accept a truth on the basis of the Pope's infallibility are, given the reams of proof that no such infallibility exists. So, "the leading scientific journal Nature (to pick an example) promotes molecules-to-man evolution, and therefore you should accept their expert opinion" in itself, means nothing, a) absent an impossible prior logical proof that that journal is immune to normal human behaviour and b) given that reams of evidence to the contrary exist.

The year of our Lord 2019

5 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, being in the form of God, did not consider it [robbery to be equal with God, 7 but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. 9 Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, 11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. - Philippians 2:5-11