Posted on 01/07/2024 1:46:34 AM PST by spirited irish
Our society is in the midst of a massive cultural shift. According to the Barna Group, “rates of church attendance, religious affiliation, belief in God, prayer and Bible-reading have been dropping for decades. Americans’ beliefs are becoming more post-Christian and, concurrently, religious identity is changing.”
This is the environment in which Generation Z is growing up.
(Excerpt) Read more at patriotandliberty.com ...
Christianity succeeded in making life comfortable for everybody. By removing consequences, people started living the life they wanted.
God will not be mocked.
Because church has become more than just a well oiled money machine. It is more business than anything centering around God.
I stopped giving and attending our church once they had a service basically bashing the predominantly white congregation as being racist.
You insert anything political or agenda driven into worshiping God, expect to lose parishioners.
Do I believe in God? Yes. I’m His little toy that He screws with over the course of decades, ensuring that I’ll not get ahead, that the bad guys always win. Sure I believe but I’m more inclined to believe he’s evil. “But you haven’t realized Gods path for you yet, yea BS.
The authors don't describe exactly what they mean by that. (Would a devout Catholic describe themselves as "adhering to a Biblical world view"?)
Another point: Gen Z birth years go from 1997 to 2012. The oldest Gen Zers (aka Zoomers) are 27, the youngest 12. The Alphas are the younger cohort now.
America isn't culturally a Christian place nearly as much as it was. Almost everything was closed in Michigan on Sundays. You couldn't buy booze. You saw a lot of people with ashes on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday.
The current best case is people are raised secular, but with religion from a young age. Thats quite different from being raised religious.
This trend seems unlikely to be reversed.
We spared the rod...
That is how we got here. Everyone wins, everyone gets a trophy, etc.
At no point in the last 40 years have we required discipline of or from the children. Raise up your children in the ways they should go and when they are old, they shall not depart from it.
But wait turn by the hands of time 60 years and I was just a babe, not yet even a yearling. I grew up in the age of ‘women can do anything,’ war riots in the streets, the drug culture being born, hippies were my elder siblings. God was proclaimed dead.
Nay, go back another generation and we witness the birth of the post war communist/socialist. There were many educated elites who embraced this idealic philosophy and many more who dared dream of such a utopia...even after witnessing the failures of Stalin, Mao. And yet, decades later the fall of the USSR is just a blip in this history.
That failure was not because they worshipped another god, it is because they declared there was No God. When one declares there is no God, one surrenders to the Nothingness. But...where there is nothing demons rush in.
One cannot have Freedom without Natural Law and Natural discipline as documented in the Bible. The free people must have some form of moral discipline or moral code. In all situations that require this God is the one sure answer and one sure path.
One nation under God, Flag Day 1954, that 4 word prayer was barely questioned until less than a decade later a generation was declaring God is dead. 20 years later they were pulling prayer out of schools, and soon you didn’t even need to participate in the Pledge. You see, God isn’t suddenly gone from our Nation, many have just started to really notice the effects of His Holy absence.
"That failure was not because they worshipped another god, it is because they declared there was No God. When one declares there is no God, one surrenders to the Nothingness. But...where there is nothing demons rush in."
Mystery Religions always consist of two circles. The largest circle is exoteric and consists of what the masses believed as taught by the inner or esoteric circle. Thus, for modern masses 'God is dead,' and nihilism reigns. But for 'Christian' esotericists, going back to the Renaissance, Jesus Christ was not the Son but the Christ Consciousness existing in their brains, making them illumined 'Pure Elects.'
Moving forward, today's global Transhumanists are the Pure Elect because:
"Within the philosophy of holism, all existing things can be described by a single system since mind and matter are formed from and reducible to the “ghost” (evolution/divine energy) operating the machine. With Darwinism for instance, God, mind, and spirit are reducible to the ultimate reality (energy field). In this scheme of things, divine energy emanating from the energy field operates within the neural complexity of the brain, meaning that divine consciousness (God reduced to divine energy) operates within the brains of the “enlightened” or “illumined” Elect, or Pure. This idolatrous way of thinking is in direct contrast to the Biblical teaching that though men are made in the spiritual image of God they do not partake of God’s being or “ghost operating the machine.” (Gen. 1:27)." Why the Technocratic World Order Rejoices in Evil and is the Spirit of Antichrist"
If interested in reading that essay, it is posted in the Religion Forum
Back in the 60’s the Pope threw open the windows, “modernized” the convents, real Nuns left, many Catholic schools closed. God, Ten Commandments
was taken out of schools. Sad.
Did they abandon church? Or did the “churches” abandon them?
The second trend was the rise of dispensationalism among Bible believing Christians. This movement started with the Irish minister, John Nelson Darby, and was popularized in this country by a former attorney, Cyrus Scofield. The dispensationalist interpretation became dominant in Baptist, Pentecostal, and charismatic churches as well as Bible churches that largely derived from Dallas Theological Seminary. Dispensational Christians, while being Bible believing and orthodox, did not believe that the Christian faith was supposed to reform and improve the culture. Because of the belief that the end times were imminent, they saw little benefit in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
In the 1960’s leftists became clergy to avoid the Vietnam War draft. So there arose a generation of godless clergy.
You have may have borne false witness against dispensationalism. I will leave the final conclusion up to your own conscience.
Please evaluate your comments against Chafer’s book “Dispensationalism” in PDF at the link below.
http://bartimaeus.us/pub_dom/dispensationalism.html
Fear of Covid instead of God seems to have sealed the deal IMO.
But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.
Television.
Romans 1:18-32
Romans 1:18-32 NIV
[18] The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, [19] since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. [20] For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities-—his eternal power and divine nature-—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. [21] For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. [22] Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools [23] and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. [24] Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. [25] They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator-—who is forever praised. Amen. [26] Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. [27] In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. [28] Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. [29] They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, [30] slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; [31] they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. [32] Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. …
But on second thought, maybe you are absolutely correct.
Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again.
Jesus didn’t tell that to the “culture”.
So, maybe you are correct.
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “BUT THE RIGHTEOUS man SHALL LIVE BY FAITH.”
https://nasb.literalword.com/?q=Rom+1%3A16-17
If the gospel redeems a man’s heart, he will change his own “culture” as a result.
Jude 1:1-25 NIV
[1] Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James, To those who have been called, who are loved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ: [2] Mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance. [3] Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people. [4] For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord. [5] Though you already know all this, I want to remind you that the Lord at one time delivered his people out of Egypt, but later destroyed those who did not believe. [6] And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling-—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day. [7] In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire. [8] In the very same way, on the strength of their dreams these ungodly people pollute their own bodies, reject authority and heap abuse on celestial beings. [9] But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, “The Lord rebuke you!” [10] Yet these people slander whatever they do not understand, and the very things they do understand by instinct-—as irrational animals do-—will destroy them. [11] Woe to them! They have taken the way of Cain; they have rushed for profit into Balaam’s error; they have been destroyed in Korah’s rebellion. [12] These people are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm-—shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted-—twice dead. [13] They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever. [14] Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones [15] to judge everyone, and to convict all of them of all the ungodly acts they have committed in their ungodliness, and of all the defiant words ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” [16] These people are grumblers and faultfinders; they follow their own evil desires; they boast about themselves and flatter others for their own advantage. [17] But, dear friends, remember what the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ foretold. [18] They said to you, “In the last times there will be scoffers who will follow their own ungodly desires.” [19] These are the people who divide you, who follow mere natural instincts and do not have the Spirit. [20] But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, [21] keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. [22] Be merciful to those who doubt; [23] save others by snatching them from the fire; to others show mercy, mixed with fear-—hating even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh. [24] To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy-— [25] to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen …
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