The Most Effective Lies
Are subtle
Once in a while I will sit down to write something with the intention of publishing it to you the next day — and then something happens.
For some usually unexplained reason the writing takes a turn. It’s like a miner digging for gold in a certain direction and all of a sudden a new vein is discovered that calls you to follow.
So then you have a choice. Continue on and finish what you started or stop and start over going in a new direction.
There is no right answer, only the one you choose to take and the one you choose to leave behind, and like Robert Frost’s poem about the two roads, usually you don’t go back later to check out the path not immediately traveled.
I am working on my talk to give in ten days (keep praying) and today I was thinking through a particular event in my childhood. I got to thinking about how my life’s course through public school still had some remnants of a public belief about God. Today there is less of this as evidence in the loss of a general understanding of what a guilty conscience is all about. In fact this term “guilty conscience” may now be an archaic one.
Back then I did something wrong and I did it knowing it was wrong. I was eight years old and in second grade. The net result was I learned about my conscience. This wasn’t God or the Holy Spirit working in my life in some direct mystical way (at least I didn’t and still don’t see it that way). It was a human emotional response to a failure to do what is right.
Now days I wonder if the guilty conscience in public education is even a thing.
How can it be explained when the general accepted secular position is that there is no such thing truth? If truth is simply one’s opinion then no one can claim to be right, only feel is if it’s so. This results in the elimination of conscience.
Once I began to see this I then saw something even deeper that goes against the accepted secular societal norms of our present age.
Religious education is more important than public education even for those who are educated in public schools because public schools cannot teach right and wrong anymore.
Attempting to get them to is the same as attempting to get them to teach seriously about God. The only allowable way God can be taught in a public school setting, whether it is in primary, secondary, or at the college and graduate school levels is in a comparative religion or sociology class where the official position is that all ideas are equally valid (a subtle lie).
The Faith Journey is caught more than taught. Behind all of it are questions about who God is that can only be clearly explained by those who have experiences they are willing to share. God can’t be understood as just a theory. Testimony is called for.
Misapply who God is when reading the Bible and you will not get much out of your efforts to understand him.
To Sum Up
One of the most effective lies is that education is complete when you earn any and all secular degrees.
For this reason, don’t neglect your most important education. It is the one that is impossible to learn in secular schools and one that should continue throughout life — it is to seek to know God better every day.
This is such an obvious truth about the schools. But I never thought of it in such a concrete way -thank you for your insights.