The Shaping of Things to Come?

I'm reading this book by Frost and Hirsch, and they want me to embrace the roots of events like the Burning Man and the movie Fight Club. They want Christianity to be able to offer a greater adventure to people who have this kind of life and expression as a frame of mind.

Sorry. I'm just not buying it. Here's what these people need to do: they need to repent.

The Church's job is not to cater to the whims of an indulgent generation. The Church's job is to be the pillar and grounding of truth. Jesus said "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Rob Bell says that the Church has always been a reflection of the culture, and uses this as a justification to shift the Church into a post-modern paradigm. If we start "getting with the program" of the post-modern paradigm, then we would simply be falling into another kind of supply-and-demand consumerism. That's been the problem all along. The Church is too busy following the dictates of the current perceived culture rather than just obeying Jesus and doing what He said.

Here's a tid-bit for the Post-modern Emergent: The heady mucky-mucks in college campuses around the world have moved beyond Post-modernity. It's passe. It's already a dead philosophy. And once again, the Church is 10 years behind the times and still thinks its being hip and trendy by jumping on a band-wagon with no wheels.

The Church must be the influence for the World. Not Vice Versa.

Rational Response Debate

I was just listening to an excerpt from Brian Sapient's argument in his tv debate with Ray/Kirk. It's kinda funny actually, and if I am misrepresenting his line of logic, please someone correct me and I'll remove this post...

He starts off by saying that Christians have a bad habit of citing the Law of Cause and Effect to deduce that creation proves the existence of a Creator, but that Christians are unwilling to consider the possibility that maybe the Creator was also created. And then in the very next breath Brian claims exactly the same line of logic, but his "ultimate cause" is that all the matter in the universe has existed in eternity past and has led us by natural processes to this point in time.

He seems to be grasping for an explanation how this planet is teeming with life in a solar system/galaxy/universe that has thus far yielded little if any redundancy of observable biological phenomenon, but his argument is self refuting on 2 levels, briefly:

1) The laws of physics defy an infinite past. Observation reveals a universe in decay. So if we trace the timeline back infinitely then the amount of energy in the past would be infinite, which is a logical absurdity since you can't add to a group and eventually end with an infinite set. And if you start with only a potentially infinite amount of energy in an eternal past then the universe would have run out of steam a long time ago. Also an eternal universe would contain an infinite amount of time which is also a logical absurdity for reasons mentioned above.

2) Brian is replacing one Ultimate Stopping Point for another. He is not willing to believe in an All-powerful God as the source of the universe, but he is willing to ascribe to the physical universe the same qualities of deity necessary to bring about an amazing "big bang" with the endgame being an increasingly ordered and complex universe. Well we know that observation reveals a universe in decay, but besides the point, Brian is willing to put a lot of faith in the idea of an infinite all-powerful and purposeful singularity but he's unwilling to call it God*. Just like in the Epistle to the Romans, he is worshiping the creature rather than the Creator.

These and other arguments have been dealt with a long time ago. But somehow every generation seems to think they've discovered the ultimate trump cards against the claims of the Biblical worldview. It's funny... and sad... God say that if you seek Him you will find Him.

*please don't misunderstand: I am not a pantheist nor a panentheist.