The Right Opinion
Taking on the Spaghetti Monster: Ratio Christi
Folks, do your college kids know that when it comes to faith, reason is on their side?
On March 24th, the masses are expected to descend on the Washington Mall for what is being labeled as "largest secular event in world history." The ill-named "Reason Rally" will celebrate atheism, complete with live music, food, comedians, and a speaker line-up that includes famed atheists like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers.
I don't know about you, but it strikes me as strange that people -- like the members of Missouri State University's atheist club known as the "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster" -- are gathering to revel in their shared bond of not believing in something.
It might sound like nonsense to you or me, but maybe not too many Americans in the under-30 crowd. While there are no hard facts on how many young Americans don't believe in God, we do know that atheist -- or non-theist -- groups are on the rise on college campuses, filled with kids who grew up in Christian homes.
According to the Barna Research Group, three in five "Christian" kids abandon the church after the age of 15. Eighty-four percent of 18- to 29- year olds who call themselves "Christians" admit that they have no idea how the Bible applies to their occupation.
It's no understatement that the church has done a poor job in teaching our young people that reason and faith are not opposites, and that atheists are far from being on the side of reason. You can find on our website a chart which I use to demonstrate the various worldviews work out, and which one, Christianity, is rational. Many kids, however, who grow up huddled in a Christian environment find themselves in the university setting completely unequipped to defend the rationality of the Christian faith against the secular humanist worldview so prevalent on college campuses.
Well, there are several Christian groups doing something about it. Last September, I heard about a new group called "Ratio Christi" -- Latin for "The Reason for Christ" -- that is starting up student apologetics clubs to reclaim the intellectual battleground on college campuses.
The first club began at Appalachian State University in 2008; it has since grown to 65 chapters, including one in South Africa that draws over 200 students. By coming alongside campus ministries, not starting their own, these grassroots groups are filling a very obvious need. At weekly meetings, students can interact with trained apologists who give them with credible answers and deal with the crucial questions of life, like "Does God really exist?" and "Is Christianity consistent with science?"
Let me share what one student said after participating in a Ratio Christi club at North Carolina State:
"Ratio Christi has given me something that I did not know exists -- a rational and logical defense for my faith. When I dialogue with atheists, they are shocked I have a defense. When I run into skeptics, they are overwhelmed by the amount of evidence supporting creation. Last but not least, when I talk to Christians with questions about this, they find that their belief has a strong, historical foundation that cannot be shaken."
Folks, this is music to my ears. A young, bright, college kid who gets it -- and who is willing to defend the faith and make the case that Christianity is truly the only reasonable worldview there is.
Come to BreakPoint.org to learn more about Ratio Christi and other organizations like Veritas. We'll link you to them.
16 Comments
ARL
Monday, February 20, 2012 at 12:06 PM
Duh. Since the religious right organizes to influence public policy, it is only rational to organize the atheists and freethinkers to do the same. If you all would stop trying to put god(s) into the government, we wouldn't have to fight so hard to keep the government from putting religion into law.
Joe
Monday, February 20, 2012 at 2:23 PM
ARL,Have you read the founding documents lately? The founders put God in govt. These rights that we are losing today are not granted by govt, but by God at birth. How then do you take God out of govt? Oh, it must be happening, because we're losing our freedoms EVERY DAY!!!
Capt. Call
Monday, February 20, 2012 at 2:58 PM
ARL: The atheists, freethinkers, and agnostics have already been organized; their organization is called liberalism, with the falsehoods of naturalism and secular humanism as their religion. Atheism is the natural result of liberalism as much as steam is the result of boiling water. Their is no neutral ground. We are either on God's side or Satan's. If you reject God, then you are automatically choosing Satan, whether you know it or not, whether you believe it or not. The correct use of logic confirms that the Christian world-view is correct. I suggest you look at the following information: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/aid/v2/n1/atheism-irrational.
Howard Last
Monday, February 20, 2012 at 9:24 PM
Who are Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, I never heard of them? Must be some movie or TV program I never watched.
Tom
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 8:31 AM
Joe, Capt Call, - god is not in the constitution. Read it again. That document allows you to believe in whatever you want. Memo to you and your christian friends, we ALL have that right. Respect the rights of others, and it's all good. The default position of our country is to leave god out of everything. Why do you think that god doesn't appear in our constitution, or on our money or in our pledge per our founding fathers? Do you think they forgot? "God was placed on those things by ornery religious groups who apparently can't stop themselves from shoving their beliefs and religion down our throats. Therein lies the problem.
Joe
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 10:06 AM
Tom, WRONG!"that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" Declaration of Independence"and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" ConstitutionAnd read in the Federalist papers which mention a belief in a higher law of God and law of Nature which is devine.OWNED!!!
Tom
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 11:01 AM
Joe, Our founding fathers were Deists - they believed in god as creator of the universe, not as a god who involved itself in the daily affairs of man. I never said or intimated otherwise. Once again, god does not appear in the constitution which is the law of the land, except to establish that we can ALL believe in whatever we want, free of government infringement. But, I'll let the founding fathers speak for themselves:"What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not." ---James Madison"In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot ... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose." --- Thomas Jefferson“We should begin by setting conscience free. When all men of all religions … shall enjoy equal liberty, property, and an equal chance for honors and power … we may expect that improvements will be made in the human character and the state of society.” John AdamsBefore you think that you've schooled someone, may I suggest that you try to understand what was written before pronouncing someone "wrong". I never said the founding fathers were atheists (although some may have been), I said they left "god" off of our money our pledge and elsewhere. Which they did. You don't have to take it from me, Read.
Marcus
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 12:34 PM
Calling the adults 18 and over who attend post secondary education "college kids" is part of the problem too. We perpetuate youth/childhood in this country to the extreme.I think that children who leave the church do so in part because of the childish presentation of their belief system. Young adults of the ages described in the article, 15 years of age or so, want real answers to real questions and yet we continue to treat them as younger children instead of either 1)Accepting them into the adult groups where they can participate in church activities on a higher level and/or 2)The adults in the church are woefully unprepared to bring teenagers into adulthood because they, the adults themselves don't have answers to anything and are simply going through the motions.This hypocrisy and incompetence is what I encountered several times in various churches here in the South. Kids have for the last 50 or more years been exposed to more "real world stuff" in the schools and information sources than they were before. They expect more in the way of logical real world answers.It sounds like this ratio Chrisi thing has started in the right direction. I don't believe that any god or idol has a place in government anywhere. However, until we manage to come up with and live by a useful human moral code we need to stick with what works, whatever its origins.
Tom
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 1:30 PM
Joe, so some of the founding fathers were deists - I never said they were atheists - big deal. The constitution is a secular document where god is not mentioned anywhere other than to affirm that we ALL have a right to believe in any god, gods, or not as we desire, without infringement by government. That is it.The phrase, "in god we trust" was added to our money and our pledge in the 20 th century some 150plus years after the ratification of the constitution and bill of rights because some religious zealots have trouble respecting the rights of others to believe what they wish.SCHOOLED!The federalist papers have zero to do with the law of the land - which is solely within the realm of the constitution, which despite your mis-directed quote above is silent on the issue of god other than what I wrote two paragraphs prior.
searchlight
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 4:52 PM
@Tom:"some of the founding fathers were deists" is not true at all. One of our LEAST religious Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, said that "... the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men." This is exactly the OPPOSITE of your so-called "Deism," which states that God created but is not involved in the affairs of man. Please read more of your history books and less of the loony-left web sites. Otherwise you come off as a useful idiot.
Tom
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 6:14 PM
searchlight, I didn't come here to fight. I came here to share ideas in a respectful manner. SOME of the founding fathers WERE deists - Jefferson, for example. Thomas Paine for another and even Madison - the father of the constitution."Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." ----James MadisonBtw, I teach history. You should try to understand what other people are trying to communicate before you label or insult people.Maybe you'll learn something in the process.
Diane L Asp
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 6:51 PM
"At weekly meetings, students can interact with trained apologists who give them with credible answers and deal with the crucial questions of life, like "Does God really exist?" and "Is Christianity consistent with science?"""who give them with" ???
Boomer8
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 8:35 PM
Oh, I just love the disinformatists who want to proclaim that the founders were all Deists and wanted nothing to do with religion, God, or Jesus Christ or the Bible!How poorly informed and prejudiced they are!!Perhaps we should take Thomas Jefferson's condemnations of Newspapers and extrapolate that to mean the government should control the Press!The Founders were uniquely Protestants from many different denominations, and when they were castigating"priests" they were clearly condemning the actions of the Catholic Church, which was disdained and not allowed in America at the time!!!Imagine that! Makes one wonder how they would react to Islam in America, doesn't it??Also, you people who are so certain that they despised religion should know that our representative model of government was taken directly from the Hebrews of the Old Testament, particularly the Book of Numbers. Put that in your atheist hat and smoke it!!
Samantha
Wednesday, February 22, 2012 at 12:06 PM
Tom,I just thought that you might like to know that there are Christian believers who are in agreement with you that we either respect the rights of all, or we respect the rights of none. Most of the founders were Christians, however, it really is irrelevant as you are also correct that their intent was to establish a completely secular government. It was because as the scholars of history that many of those men were knew full well, any time the government controls the church or the church the controls the government the end result is always tyranny. I hold this truth to be self-evident, that the entire human race is equally created in the image of God, and that we have been endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. We, the entire human race, have the right to our lives, liberty, and our property. As this thread is dealing directly with the subject of liberty, my following statement will address that issue alone. I believe that the only being in all of existence with the moral authority to govern the lives of man is man’s creator. This understanding has led me to the conclusion that neither I, nor anyone else, is morally justified in dictating to another how he or she may live. How one chooses to live is a decision that is between that individual and God. Some argue that because man is imperfect it is necessary to use coercion, backed with the threat of violent force, to ensure a stable society. However, there is a hole in this argument. Arming human beings and granting them the authority to use coercion and violence does not magically transform them into morally superior beings. In fact, the historical evidence proves just the opposite. It is in the nature of man that once having gained power, he seeks to expand it and will not stop at oppression, violence, and tyranny in violation of our God given rights to achieve that goal. Because I believe that the only being in all of existence that has the moral authority to govern the lives of man is man’s creator, I cannot support a government of men, who will always seek to violate the right to life, liberty, and property of other human beings. God has given us the freedom to choose to accept or reject Him, and if we are to accept Him in truth, we MUST have the liberty to reject Him. As C.S. Lewis, in his book mere Christianity once stated, "God created things that had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature, which had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata-of creatures that work like machines-would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that, they must be free" (52). Brothers and sisters in Christ, if you want your liberty to practice our beliefs absent the interference of government, then you MUST be willing to extend the same respect to the rights of those with whom you disagree to theirs.
Mike Schuerger Sr.
Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 8:38 PM
Well Boomer8, not quite.Maryland was a State that started out as a Catholic colony. (You can see hints if you examine the flag.)My Catholic relative, Charles Carroll, signed the Declaration of Independence representing Maryland. (He was cousin to Bishop John Carroll, the guy JCU in University Heights, OH is named for.)BTW, Rhode Island was the first one which guaranteed the "Freedom of Religion" we revere in the 1st Ammendment. The rest had either official religions supported by taxes and/or suppressed certain religious groups. Note that all the acclaim of religious freedom did not prevent discrimination against other religious groups. Those who fled discrimination in Europe were often the most discriminatory once in power here. Note that in 1882, one of the purposes for the founding of the Knights of Columbus in New Haven, Conn. was to fight discrimination against Catholics. Read history and see how there was great concern when JFK ran for President because of anti-Catholic bias that still existed in 1960. (He "solved" the problem by running away from his faith, the liberal commentary not withstanding. Pity that he didn't have the spine to stand up. Turned out to be a character flaw exposed, if only we had recognized it for what it was.) Anti-Catholic still exits today - "the last acceptable bigotry" it has been called.Note that the "Establishment Clause" in the 1st Ammendment was about prohibiting the naming an official religion and supporting it with taxes - as was the case in over 1/2 the States at the time of Ratification. It is not about supressing public displays of faith or celebrations. Note that the origin of the word "holiday" is "holy day."Note that the "Free Exercise" clause is routinely ignored by those who wish to suppress religious practice. Note that "freedom to worship" as mentioned by the Obummer and his Secretary of State is a lesser, restricted "freedom."