Brad Green, in Shaping a Christian Worldview, recounts the court case Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) in which an Amish witness was being pressured to admit that the purpose of education was fundamentally secular. The prosecuting attorney asked Mr. Yoder, “The principal purpose to attend high school is to get education, is it not? Isn’t that the primary purpose?” The Amish gentleman replied, “Yes, but I think there is a great deal of difference what education means—education for what?” The attorney pressed his point, “To put it bluntly, education so the child can make his or her place in the world.” Mr. Yoder then astutely observed, “It depends which world” (89-90).
Read MoreFROM THE ARCHIVE
Can freedom survive in a society in which most citizens believe that human beings, who are supposed to have inalienable rights, are merely material beings inhabiting a universe of purely material and efficient causality?
John Adams famously said that our Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Was he right?
Read MoreI wanted to mention the Spiritualist Worldview as a serious competitor to Christian Theism generally and, in particular, to New Testament Christianity. But, moving past this challenge, I want to discuss what has become a wildly pervasive philosophical movement known as “Postmodernism.” Modernity, generally speaking, is understood in the West as the naturalism that developed since the 1600s in the Enlightenment. Postmodernism is a wholesale rejection of the almost total deification of the scientific method within modernity.
Read MoreFollowing the Dark Ages, two very powerful cultural forces emerged in Europe. One movement was the Protestant Reformation while the other was the Renaissance. The great figures of the Reformation are noted in most courses on Western Civilization. However, in most secular institutes of higher learning, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and especially the success of the Natural Sciences, are more closely studied. Modernity is essentially understood as the triumph of Naturalism as a worldview (cf. Baumer)1.
Read MoreThe use of Marijuana for medical treatment has been under consideration for several decades. However, within the past ten years, the push has intensified, and a number of states have legalized Medical Marijuana. The push has not gone through the normal evidence-based scientific research where the substance is tested under many conditions in order to identify and minimize any side effects and the research ends with an approval by the Food and Drug Administration. The process to legalize Marijuana for medical use has taken the legislative route with persistent public advocacy and media advertisement. The process might create the appearance that the legislation was written for a segment of the society already self-medicating. Such a reversal of roles leaves the need for serious research to be conducted to examine the true benefits and risks of Marijuana issues over various periods of time among differing populations (Fitcharies and Eiserberg). Nonetheless, in 2017 West Virginia became the 30th state to legalize Medical Marijuana, and New Hampshire voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of the drug.
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