Unprofitable Home Defense, 10

Continued from "Unprofitable Home Defense, 9"

He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad. (Matthew 12:30)

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.  . . . Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen (Romans 1:21, 25)

Does some one say that . . . [the secular school] is teaching some purely secular course, without any such maiming of his subjects or prejudicing of Christianity? If his teaching is more than a temporary dealing with some corner of education, the fact will be found to be that it is tacitly anti-Christian; overt assaults are not made; but there is a studied avoidance which is in effect hostile. There can be no neutral position between two extremes, where there is no middle ground, but “a great gulf fixed. (R.L. Dabney, 19th Century Presbyterian theologian)

In fact the Church does not and cannot repair the mischief which her more powerful, rich, and ubiquitous rival, the secularized State, is doing in thus giving, under the guise of a non-Christian, an anti-Christian training. (R.L. Dabney, 19th Century Presbyterian theologian)

Education is the most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism.  What can the theistic Sunday Schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching? (Charles Francis Potter, signer of The Humanist Manifesto; quote from Humanism: A New Religion)

Okay, so the public school leaves God out of the curriculum. We will teach our children to add Him back in at home and in Sunday school. (An excuse I've heard more than once)

How's that workin' out for ya? (Dr. Phil [see previous post -- link above -- for statistical evidence of how it's working out.]

As you can see in the passages quoted above, a mid-19th-Century Christian theologian (Dabney) and an early 20th-Century Humanist philosopher/educator (Potter) have two things in common:

1. They both agree that secular public education is not neutral;
2. They both agree that the one-hour-a-week Sunday school is in no way equal to the task of countering the indoctrination of all-day, five-day-a-week secular public school.

The fact that so many Christian parents and pastors do not see these truths testifies to the level of their own indoctrination by the system. They stubbornly maintain that children can "learn the facts" in school, and afterward, "We'll just add God in."

Education ain't cake batter, and God ain't no ingredient. (Coined from one of my favorite lines in Quigley Down Under)

It's impossible for schools to take the infinite Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer and Lord out of education without distorting the content of what they teach. Further, they will always replace Him with someone or something else.

Let me give two examples: God as Creator/Sustainer and God as the Fountain of all knowledge.

God as Creator/Sustainer

You may have learned in physics class that "nature" abhors a vacuum. So do systems of knowledge.

In Romans 1 (see above), you will notice that when man refuses to acknowledge God, he puts something in His place. Usually, it's either Nature -- the humanist educator would never call it creation -- or humanity itself.

Since the public school curriculum does not acknowledge God as the Creator and Governor of the cosmos, it must put something else in His place. In general, it replaces God with natural processes. And I'm not just talking about the theory of evolution as taught in biology class.

In the physical sciences, for example, you will learn that mountains and seas came about by natural processes rather than by an act of God's judgment in the days of Noah. Likewise, you will hear everything from the Periodic Table to the Laws of Thermodynamics explained in terms of natural processes rather than God's design and providence.

Math is not neutral, either. Ask a public high school student of probability why a flipped coin has a 50/50 chance of landing heads. If he understands the question, he will most probably say that it's simply the nature of the case.

How many will quote Proverbs 16:33 (Look it up!) and follow it with an explanation that probability -- like statistical analysis -- can only exist because God maintains a predictable regularity in  His governance of creation? Sadly, many Christian school and home school students will also not give the Biblical answer because their teachers and/or curriculum have also been infected with Secular Humanism.

The difference is subtle enough that most Christians indoctrinated in secularism do not even realize that they think of God's creation in essentially anti-Christian terms. Yet the difference is very real, and most churches and Christian homes are both unaware of the problem and unequipped to refute and replace it in the minds of their children.

It's not just the sciences that replace God with natural processes, either. You will find any mention of Providence locked out of history, government, economics and business as well.

And do you think that language classes cite the tower of Babel to explain the origin of different language families? For the public schools, it all comes down to natural processes.

God as the Fountain of All Knowledge

How do you know that something is true and factual? My high school algebra teacher told us, "Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other." She called that statement an axiom and said that axioms are "self-evident truths", basic and unprovable.

As the math test scores of many students will prove, axioms are not "self-evident" to everyone. Ask a high-school student to explain why any mathematical axiom is true. I'm confident that the overwhelming majority will say something like, "It just is," or "That's the way things are," or, "Huh?"

If the student tells you that an axiom is true because God created the world to be consistent with itself and also consistent with the way the human mind perceives and thinks, then you can rest assured that the student in question did not learn his answer in the public school.

The Secular Humanist mantra, "Man is the measure of all things," echoes through public school hallways from sea to shining sea. Thus, Secular Humanist education finds the source of knowledge in the mind of man, his quest for knowledge, and the scientific method.

Conclusion:

Go to any public school in the most conservative state in the Bible belt, and you will find that if a Christian teacher manages to bootleg a mention of God into the classroom, in the long run it will be lost on the students due to the avalanche of repetitive references to natural processes and man's mind as the source of knowledge.

Would you have been able to give a correct, Biblical answer to the questions I posed in this entry? If not, you are infected with Secular Humanist thinking.

You need to click on the link for my book Christian Methodology: The Biblical Process for Advancing Knowledge, order a copy, and study it. Then explain it to your children -- after you pull them out of the godless public school system. Do it now and pray it's not too late.


Continued here