Greeks, Pagans, and the Olympics

Gary responds to a few recent news topics, especially people saying Christians shouldn’t be involved in the Olympics because it was started by pagans.

Paul’s Athenian encounter on Mars Hill (Acts 17) is quite modern. All the elements of skepticism, ignorance, and arrogance are present today among those who worship the same ancient idols dressed up with new religious slogans. Just like in Paul’s day, the biblical faith is dogmatic. It makes absolute assertions about fundamental concepts: God exists, man was created, sin has infected this world, man is accountable to God, and Jesus Christ is our only hope in life and in death. These declarations are not acceptable to the secular mind-set which does not acknowledge the premise of absolutes that would make man accountable to God.

The goal of the secular worldview is to strip self-proclaimed Christians of their absolute worldview by relegating it to its cloistered domain. If religion does have a part to play in contemporary life, its part is narrowly focused and limited to unscientific areas. Stephen Jay Gould, professor of geology at Harvard and New York University, states that “no factual discovery of science (statements about how nature ‘is’) can, in principle, lead us to ethical conclusions (how we ‘ought’ to behave) or to convictions about intrinsic meaning (the ‘purpose’ of our lives). These last two questions—and what more important inquiries could we make?—lie firmly in the domains of religion, philosophy and humanistic study.” Science cannot tell us how to live. Only religion can do that. And since religion is not scientific, we cannot assume that its ethical conclusions are legitimate because they function outside the realm of science.

Thinking Straight in a Crooked World

The nursery rhyme “There Was a Crooked Man” is an appropriate description of how sin affects us and our world. We live in a crooked world of ideas evaluated by crooked people. Left to our crooked nature, we can never fully understand what God has planned for us and His world. God has not left us without a corrective solution. He has given us a reliable reference point in the Bible so we can identify the crookedness and straighten it.

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Gary responds to a few recent news topics, especially people saying Christians shouldn’t be involved in the Olympics because it was started by pagans. As expected, Gary has a few things to say about the topic, as well as a few movie recommendations.

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American Vision’s mission is to Restore America to its Biblical Foundation—from Genesis to Revelation. American Vision (AV) has been at the heart of worldview study since 1978, providing resources to exhort Christian families and individuals to live by a Biblically based worldview. Visit www.AmericanVision.org for more information, content and resources