The Southern Baptists Are On The Right Track

According to a story posted by Allie Martin of Agape Press, the Southern Baptist Convention will be presenting resolutions supporting an "exit strategy" from public schools.

Those who know me personally know that I have been promoting something similar to this for quite some time. The public school system is broken beyond repair. Not only are the children of America not being properly educated; they are being actively indoctrinated into a secular, humanistic, narcissistic worldview that is completely antithetical to a Christian worldview.

Why Christian parents continue to send their little lambs to the slaughter is completely beyond me. Various reasons and excuses are given, such as finances, convenience, or just plain ignorance. Regardless of what the reasons are, the bottom line is that the children are still poorly educated and heavily indoctrinated.

Christian parents must realize that they are directly responsible for the education of their children. At one time in our nation's history Christian parents could send their children to a public school and still fulfill their parental responsibilities, because the schools were considered extensions of the home. School teachers were directly accountable to parents for what they taught the children. This is no longer the case, and it has not been for many, many years.

Many Christian parents began noticing the problem in the public schools back in the late seventies and mid-eighties, and the modern home school boom was started. Those parents took their responsibilities seriously, and in many cases paid a high price for their convictions. All home schooling parents today owe a debt of gratitude to those early pioneers of the movement.

It will be interesting to see what develops in the Southern Baptist Convention regarding the public school exit strategy. Will the church put their money where their mouth is, and begin subsidizing private and home schools? The public schools receive federal and state tax dollars for each child that attends, sometimes on the order of $5,000 to $10,000 per child per year. Parents who take their children out of the public system still have to pay those taxes, and do not get the benefit of the money.

What American Christians need to do (ALL Christians in America, not just parents of children in school) is to 1) begin supporting private and home school education in deed, not just in word; 2) lobby the state and federal government for tax breaks, educational vouchers, or a combination of the two; and 3) support the initiatives of the Southern Baptists as they take seriously the biblical mandate to educate their children in the ways of the Lord, providing them with a solid, well-rounded education in the process.

Three Hundred Million?

http://www.vdare.com/misc/061012_carter.htm

There was much media excitement recently as American celebrated the birth of her 300 millionth American - or did she? Maybe not, if Dr. Virginia Abernathy of Vanderbilt University is correct in her recent paper, “Census Bureau Distortions Hide Immigration Crisis.” According to this paper, the real population of America is now closer to 327 million, and America passed the 300 million mark about six years ago. Whether or not the Census Bureau is “fudging the numbers” to hide immigration statistics is beyond my ability to prove or disprove, but Dr. Abernathy’s report is worth reading.

Regarding our population, however, I would like to draw attention to something. Regardless of whether the current population is 300 or 327 million, what would our population be if we had not destroyed over 50 million of our own children during the past thirty-three years?

Only God knows the impact those children would have had on our society, for good or ill. I sometimes wonder how different our country would be now, with an additional 50 million inhabitants. Would we be a better nation? Would one of those children have grown up and discovered the cure to cancer, heart disease, or diabetes? Only God knows.

Hitler’s Third Reich put nearly twelve million people to death. Stalin’s purges killed upwards of thirteen million. The Khmer Rouge slaughtered millions in the killing fields of Cambodia. Mao Ze-Dong’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” resulted in the deaths of nearly fifty million, and only God knows how many babies have been, and continue to be, murdered in China due to their “one child only” policy.

We Americans like to take pride in the fact that we are a “Christian” nation, a “shining city on a hill.” Compared with the number of innocents killed by other countries, we do not look quite so shiny. In fact, we have just as much, or more, blood on our hands as do the despotic regimes of the twentieth century.

The Real Cause of School Violence

With the recent wave of violence against children in schools, people at all levels of society are clamoring for someone to find a quick solution to the problem. Gun-control advocates are demanding laws to restrict the private ownership of firearms. Others are calling for armed security guards to patrol the hallways and playgrounds. Still others have suggested arming schoolteachers.

These are not really solutions, though; they do they address the root problems that lie beneath the violence. We need to identify the real problems, because only when the root causes of violence are recognized can we begin to develop real solutions.

We live in a culture that glamorizes and extols violence. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to be entertained by violence and immorality. We indoctrinate our children from infancy and desensitize them to violence by using the television as a babysitter. According to research abstracts posted on the web page Children and Television Violence, by the time the average American child reaches the age of thirteen, he or she will have witnessed over 100,000 acts of televised violence, including over 8000 acts of murder! On average, children’s television shows contain about twenty acts of violence each hour. Psychologists Eron and Huesmann, after following the viewing habits of a group of children for decades, found that watching violence on television is the single factor most closely associated with aggressive behavior - more than poverty, race, or parental behavior. For more information about the harmful effects of television violence, see Media Violence is Hazardous to Your Health.

Research has linked pornography with violence against women and children. Consumers of porn view women and children as objects to exploit and victimize, not as human beings deserving of honor and protection. Although we have hundreds of laws against pornography on the books, no one is enforcing them. The citizens of America must not care enough about this issue to make our law enforcement establishment do its job.

The mass media, especially television, has done more to contribute to violence in our society than any other factor. However, recent history has shown that Americans do not really want to deal with the issue – we just want to keep on being entertained. Until Americans turn off the televisions, stop buying the violent video games, quit watching violent and sexually explicit movies, and start demanding enforcement of existing pornography laws, this country will continue to experience more and more violence.

How is it that the Amish community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was able to respond to such horrific violence with love, peace and forgiveness? They have been practicing those virtues for hundreds of years. At the same time, they have refused to be indoctrinated by “American pop culture.” I am not advocating an Amish lifestyle, but I am advocating a lifestyle that says “No!” to Hollywood, the mass media and the purveyors of porn.