Breakpoint

This podcast discusses the flaws in Darwin's theory, the proposal of the Law of Increasing Functional Information, and the problem of personification in explaining the complexity and design of the universe without a creator.

Advice columnist Jules Terpak discusses how AI chatbots challenge our understanding of reality and human companionship, sharing an unnerving video of AI companions created by Meta. She highlights how these AI companions are used to reel people in and warns of the dangers of mistaking them for genuine friendship, especially in a society already plagued by loneliness.

The podcast discusses the argument that ancient cultures recognized 'third genders' and refutes it with historical examples. It cautions against assuming ancient cultures always got it right and emphasizes the Christian worldview's acceptance of biological realities and individual differences.

John and Maria discuss another sobering election night in America, specifically in Ohio. The Nashville shooter’s manifesto was leaked but we noticed a stark difference with other mass shootings. And the number of newborn syphilis cases is becoming a crisis.     - Recommendations - Lighthouse Voices with Alisa Childers Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Why Prison Ministries Are Growing Segment 1: Ohio Passes Abortion Amendment  How did abortion amendment pass in Ohio and what does it mean for future elections?  Segment 2: The Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto Leaked Nashville shooter manifesto shows motive behind attack  Nashville Shooter decried ‘crackers’ and ‘white privilege’ leaked manifesto reveals Segment 3: Cases of Newborn Syphilis Cases Becomes a Crisis  Newborn syphilis cases have reached ‘dire lelevs,’ CDC says  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

Recently, Rolling Stone magazine reported on an emerging scandal involving the new speaker of the House of Representatives—not financial corruption, an illicit affair, or ties to foreign powers. No, it turns out that Mike Johnson and his son use the Covenant Eyes app to keep each other accountable about pornography and the internet.  According to Rolling Stone, this is weird. And, seizing on the article, others called it creepy, even grooming, as if they could not grasp that the point is to keep each other off of porn and out of addiction.  Not only did the whole episode reveal an utter ignorance of a basic belief of the world’s largest religion, it also betrayed how much a view of normal can be upside down, as if porn is not a cancer on society or a curse on women and children, corrupting the souls of those who consume it.    If the Johnson boys’ behavior is weird, then as historian Tom Holland has reminded us, let’s stay “weird,” Christians. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

November marks the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1989, this symbol of Communist tyranny came tumbling down, marking the end of a totalitarian nightmare. After the threat of Nazism was defeated, Communism turned a third of the world into a police state the likes of which had never been seen.  Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II recognized, in a clear-eyed way not shared by many other academic and political elites, that Marxism’s blood-red banners meant not liberation but oppression. More than this, they saw that Communism was not only something that should be opposed, but that could be. Their collective strategies worked even faster than the most optimistic expected. As that deadly edifice of Communism tumbled down, its fractured walls meant a no-longer-divided Berlin, no more Stasi, no more secret arrests.   In the joy of that moment and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, famed political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History.” He believed that the death of Communism was the final obstacle to the triumph of Enlightenment liberalism and democracy. He was, of course, mistaken.  Though we may not be living in Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, the abdication of freedom and the embrace of history’s worst ideals continues, and not just in China, Russia, and Iran. In England, silently praying in front of an abortion clinic can get a person arrested. According to a Pew Research report, a majority of young Americans prefer freedom from offense over freedom of speech. In pro-Hamas parades across the West, thousands have proclaimed that violence, oppression, and censorship are acceptable if the “right” groups are being harmed, oppressed, and silenced. The ideals of diversity and dissent have been reduced to slogans to signal our virtue, not realities to live out in practice. As a result, more and more power is granted to state, academic, corporate, and media authorities to “rescue us” from “dangerous” ideas, ironically in the name of diversity and inclusion.  Those people who are tearing down the posters of kidnapped Israeli kids are not replacing them with other images. They are just denying a space to speak. The younger, leftist crowd increasingly thinks of core freedoms, such as the freedom of speech, as questionable at best and as a dangerous excuse for “hatred” at worst. In America, we now debate whether some speech should be coerced. In Britain, though silent prayer can be illegal, calls for genocide are protected. A world in which we are free only insofar as we agree with those currently in power is a world that’s not free at all.  During the twentieth century, the world moved forward on the inertia and inheritance Christianity gave to the West. This momentum, however, only lasted so long. Somewhere, during the long fight against the twin tyrannies of Fascism and Communism, we lost those fundamental beliefs and insights into humanity that grounded our ideals about freedom in the first place. Now, well into the twenty-first century, with this Judeo-Christian foundation stripped from beneath us, nothing remains to sustain the passion for liberty. Without a vision of ordered freedom–what Os Guinness has rightly noted as a “freedom for” rather than just a “freedom from”– the claim to “rights” and “liberties” are reduced to squabbles between various groups vying for power.  President Reagan’s epic call to “Tear down this wall!” will have been for nothing if something better is not built in its place. Western freedom cannot be preserved without a proper understanding of human nature, the understanding that birthed Western freedom in the first place. Only the description of reality offered in the Bible and confirmed by centuries of Christian reflection is robust enough for this task. If rooted only in the malleable ideas of the majority or on the passing fancies of those in power, our most precious liberties will collapse as surely as Communism’s concrete boundaries did.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

Tuesday, Ohio became the most recent conservative state to defend a “right” to abortion. Only a year and a half ago, pro-lifers celebrated the legal significance of overturning Roe v. Wade. Since then, voters in state after state have protected the right to end innocent, preborn life.  This is a “you are here” moment. Many people, even if personally opposed to abortion, are not willing to restrict anyone else’s freedom. This is part of the legacy of Roe: Americans learned an absolute allegiance to absolute autonomy along with what Joe Rigney called the “cruelty of untethered empathy.”   Andrew Walker tweeted,   "We won a generational legal argument in overturning Roe, but the teaching effect of a fifty year law to etch a lie about what human life is and when it begins has reaped tragic and generational consequences to reverse." Political strategies are so important: timing, wording on ballot initiatives, etc. But most of our work to defend life is upstream from the ballot box.   For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

Not even a decade ago, television personality Bill Maher had cemented his brand of snarky atheism and political leftism. His crass, snide, and often irrationally irreligious humor infuriated many and led to an earlier show being canceled, not to mention plenty of gigs. For a couple of years now, however, many of his former critics have noted something new: how often he’s willing to say out loud what many on the left are not.   In a monologue on last Friday’s episode of his HBO series, Real Time with Bill Maher, which I cannot officially recommend given the language and perverse humor, Maher offered a thorough defense of Israel and Western civilization:  "For all the progressives and academics who refer to Israel as an outpost of Western civilization, like it’s a bad thing, please note: Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every [expletive] liberal precept that liberals are supposed to adore. Individual liberty, scientific inquiry, rule of law, religious freedom, women’s rights, human rights, democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech. Please, somebody, stop us before we enlighten again."  He went on to note that Israel is the only place in the Middle East where these societal goods can be found and even said that the world would be a lot better off “if it had more Israels.” The plight of marginalized peoples everywhere is better off, Maher noted, because of the supposedly toxic West that anti-Israeli protestors deride.  Maher then offered a mini-history on the evolution of human rights, detailing a host of thinkers through the ages that articulated, argued for, and built the freedoms we now enjoy. It was, after all, only from the ideals brewed in Western culture that people like Martin Luther King, Jr. were able to launch crusades against racial oppression and American segregation. It was from the writing of thinkers such as Jean Jacque Rousseau and Voltaire that the U.N.’s well-devised, even if poorly applied, Declaration of Human Rights was birthed. In a point dripping with his typical snarkiness, Maher pointed out that no one studies the great prophet of liberty, John Locke, anymore, “because he’s so old and so white and so dead.” He ended by noting how few of those he was critiquing would even take seriously what he said because they are too committed to a way of seeing everything through the lens of predetermined oppressors and the oppressed.  I, like many, disagree with Maher on multiple things, but I also find it fascinating the number of cynics and skeptics today who seem to be rethinking everything now that they’ve been confronted with the ideas that have replaced religion in the West. At a conference last week, former politician and human rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali described herself as a “Judeo-Christian” and atheist Richard Dawkins as a “Christian,” not because either believe in a God per se or the resurrection, but because the values they want in the world rely on a specific kind of world, one created with moral norms inherent to it.  Which, in fact, brings up just what Bill Maher left out in his otherwise thoughtful and compelling monologue. As you might expect from the guy behind the faith-despising faux-documentary Religulous, he’s not quite ready to admit the role of religion in cultivating liberty and human rights. Because Voltaire and Rousseau were anti-religious, they are safe to mention. Locke and King are often praised almost in spite of their deep faith, which Maher never mentioned.  In fact, Maher started his history of Western civilization too late, describing men who inherited a tradition as if they had started it. Put differently, to begin the story of Western civilization with Henry David Thoreau or John Locke is kind of like beginning the storied history of the Boston Celtics with Paul Pierce. Yeah, he was good, but Bill Russell!  In his book, A Brief History of Thought, Luc Ferry, also an atheist, identified and clearly articulated the true source of the West’s most important and consequential ideas:    "Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance."  In other words, without the principles that emerge from Holy Scriptures, which simmered for centuries in Jewish and Christian thought, the world would never have benefited from the insights of a Jefferson or a Locke. The biblical view of the world, especially its description of the inherent value and moral nature of the human person, is the only basis for freedom in all of human history. The ideas Maher rightly celebrates are not only good ones, they are true. Without their religious roots, they cannot be sustained, certainly not from atheism. Maher is right to look to an earlier foundation for our civilization. He just needs to look back even further.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.  For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org  

"Breakpoint": Tom Holland, Historian who questioned the relevance of comparing others to Adolf Hitler, discusses the overuse and diminishing meaning of calling someone Hitler or a Nazi, highlighting the importance of moral proclamations in a world governed by moral law.

Dr. Eric Patterson explores Just War Theory and its relevance in analyzing the conflict between Hamas and Israel, discussing biblical principles of governance, government authority, the duty to oppose evil, and the importance of intentions.