Breakpoint

John and Maria discuss a new reality that over other the past 2 months at least 48 churches have been burned by arsonists in Canada. While some charge the fires are backlash from First Nations members, who have discovered that many in their culture were mistreated by the Catholic church, some are saying the facts don't add up. John and Maria question if there is a growing distrust and violence against the church in Canada. John and Maria also revisit a BreakPoint from James Ackerman, who told his story of finding a sense of redemption after going to an abortion clinic to talk to mothers. They also discuss Simulation Hypothesis, a growing idea in the scientific community that assigns spiritual language to unexplainable realities in Science.

The most common refrain in Genesis about God's creation of the world is that it was good. Down through the centuries, many people both inside and outside the Church have tried to say that the material world is less valuable or important than intangible inner truths. This has been one of the main talking points for the new sexual orthodoxy: telling hurting souls that their bodies are somehow wrong. Kathy Koch has worked for years to undermine this demeaning perception. In her talk at our recent Wilberforce Weekend, she reminded us about the wonderful intentionality in the way God "knitted" us together as male and female. For today's BreakPoint, here's a portion of Kathy's talk. I'm Kathy Koch of Celebrate Kids here in Fort Worth, and I want to talk with you about how God made us good. I think God is good and God is a good Creator. And if children, teens, or adults don't know that, then it doesn't matter to them that they're created in His image. In Psalm 139, verses 13 and 14 declare that we have been formed by God in our inward parts. It says in Psalm 139:13 that Father God knitted us together in our mother's womb. Knitting is a precise skill; the knitter knows before starting what he is making, or he'd better not start. Otherwise he'd have a mittens-scarf-hat-afghan sweater thing with no purpose at all. The size of the stitch and the needle, the color of the yarn, and the design of the creation is known before the knitter begins. Do we praise God? Because we're fearfully made? Do we stand in awe of ourselves now? We're not God. Fear in the Old Testament is fear of God. That we would have this awesome respect for the creation of who we are. The verse that revolutionized my understanding of God's creative intent is the end of Psalm 139:14 where David writes on behalf of God: My soul knows very well that I am a wonderful work of the creative intent of God. A fearfully and wonderfully creation made in His image. I have tremendous empathy for young people who live in confusion in a chaotic, messy culture. I believe that if I was young today being called "sir," I might wonder if I was supposed to be a boy. I have empathy for these kinds of teenagers and young adults. We are privileged at Celebrate Kids to talk with those who do not believe they were created good. They do not believe in a good Creator. They don't understand the image of God and it is not their fault. Generations of young people are trying to change what they should not try to change. And they're unwilling to work on the things they could work on because frankly, the adults around them are weak. God is good. Therefore he made me good because I'm in His image and He is fully good! So there's gotta be something here and I choose to not see it as wrong. I don't see it as a mistake. It is a challenge. I'm surrounded by great people and I'm loved well by God, and by people who love me deeply; without that I would question so much. So I'm not a too-tall-Kathy-with-a-low-voice-who-can't-spell-all-that-well mess of a person. I am who I am, created in the image of God, and He is good. What's your story? And what story are we helping young people who we love live? Kathy Koch is founder and president of Celebrate Kids, reminding the Church and the world of the goodness of our Creator and the enduring beauty of His creation. In her words, we see a path forward to loving—truly loving—our neighbors who struggle with gender dysphoria. As she argued, the new sexual orthodoxy encourages hurting young people to change what shouldn't be changed and discourages them from working on the things that they can work on. While giving lip service to the claim that people are perfect just as they are, our culture's fascination with expressive sexual identities leads proponents to argue that the only way we can be truly ourselves is through a radical rejection of our physicality.

John and Shane field a listener question who has left the faith and didn't consider how that would impact his parents. He writes into John to inquire about a middle ground, seeking to follow his thoughts and convictions in religion while also honoring his parents. After answering that question, a listener writes in asking how to honor her convictions while building a relationship with a new person attending her church. John gives reasoning to help the listener make strong steps in friendship and walk forward in conviction while also building relationship. Shane then asks a question from a listener whose school community is challenging the notion that critical theory is present in their school. The listener asks how they should lead their community knowing that ideologies and doctrines are present in the school system.

A heart is available, the clock is ticking, and doctors are forced to choose between three viable candidates for a transplant: A woman who could live for several more years with a new heart but doesn't want it; a beloved middle-aged father who's chronically overweight; and a young rich kid who might have just overdosed on cocaine but whose dad is dangling a $25 million donation to the hospital if his son gets the heart. All of this is in the plot of the new movie, "The God Committee." The team of doctors and nurses deciding who will live or die are given the nickname The God Committee. But this is a corrupt understanding of God, isn't it? God doesn't work from an algorithm. He doesn't give good gifts like new hearts to those people who will be missed the most, and withhold them from people with bad attitudes or harmful habits, or who are kind of annoying. Nor does he play dice with the universe (no reference to Albert Einstein). A Christian worldview of life and human value is not based on quantifiables such as how many people love a particular person, or how many years someone might go on to live. Every life is endowed by God with His image and likeness. Every life is equally valuable. Human value is not based on any extrinsic categories. It is intrinsic to each and every person, and God doesn't make what He doesn't mean to make. God created people to bear His image and likeness before the rest of the created order. In "The God Committee," doctors accuse each other of "playing God" and it is meant as an insult. But the Book of Genesis describes how within vitally important created and moral boundaries, God actually intended His people to play Him before the Creation. When Adam and Eve were commanded to be fruitful, to multiply, and to fill the earth and subdue it, they were told to do what God had just been doing. Throughout the first chapter of Genesis, God filled and formed an earth described in the second verse as being empty and void. Now, His image bearers are to carry on that work, ruling over the created order by filling it and subduing it. In fact, even after the Fall, that task continues, though now it is complicated by pain and by thorns. The key distinction here is whether we play God as if God actually exists, or whether we play God as if we are God. Whenever we think it's our authority that determines what's right and what's wrong, we're playing God in the wrong way. This was the Enemy's very first temptation for Adam and Eve. This was the temptation of the builders of Babel. This temptation continues today, especially as our technological abilities advance so far beyond our ethics. The irony of "The God Committee" is that doctors don't become gods by deciding who deserves someone else's heart. In fact, does anyone ever deserve another person's heart? Are patients who die before receiving a transplant somehow morally wronged before organ transplants were possible? Mere decades ago? Were the sick then somehow less deserving? No. God made His image bearers with a magnificent capacity to first imagine, and then make these kinds of technologies possible. But as God clearly states as He observed the Babel project, humans ought not do everything that comes into their minds. A culture like ours, drunk on the arrogance of our own technological innovations but without any sort of consensus about the true and the good, simply cannot deal with the moral dilemmas that we ourselves are creating. Our culture makes this mistake often when it comes to scientific discovery. First, we ask whether we can do something. Later we ask whether we should, and then we answer that second question with the first. That if we can do something that's all the reason we need to know that we should do it. That is playing God outside of the limits that He gave us. The confidence that we hold in our abilities is simply misplaced and we overlook the consequences of our decisions. For example, in a global medical community that doesn't even share consensus on the definition of death, not only has a black market for human organs developed, it specifically endangers the global poor. There's a great example of this in a poignant scene in "The God Committee" in which a main character informs his newly pregnant girlfriend that he cannot be a father to their baby because his important medical work is simply too time-consuming. By refusing to honor the people to whom his own actions have bound him, the character now refuses the opportunity to actually image God. To play God as humans (particularly men in this situation) were created to do. We miss this privilege and responsibility whenever we fail to recognize and submit to our created purpose and design.

Recently I talked to my friend James Ackerman who's the CEO of prison fellowship ministries. And he told me a story about when he was younger and how God used him in a special way. What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation I had with James Ackerman: When I was 18 years old, I got my girlfriend pregnant. She had an abortion. I was not in favor of it, but I didn't try to stop it either. Four years later, I gave my life to Jesus at an altar call at Calvary Baptist Church in New York City. Most of my new Christian friends were Upper East Side types who went to Bible studies at DeMoss House. A couple of my friends would regularly chain themselves to the entrance of abortion clinics, spending the rest of their weekends in jail. I was not up for joining them, but the Lord did call me to do something. I learned there was an abortion clinic in an office building on Lower Park Avenue, five blocks from my apartment. It opened at 6 a.m. on Saturday mornings. The Lord put on my heart the need to minister in front of the abortion clinic, not in protest but with a Bible in hand to share the love of Jesus. To let women know they had other options and to offer to pray with them, and to point them to the local crisis pregnancy center. I prayed, "Lord, if this is really from You, You have to wake me up at 5 a.m. every Saturday morning. I'm not going to set my alarm clock. It has to come from You." On Saturday morning at 5 a.m. I was wide awake. So, with a Bible in hand I make my way to Park Avenue South to the abortion clinic. It had a large plaza in front and as women made their way to the building, I would walk backwards from the sidewalk to the entrance saying, "Jesus loves you. There is a better way. Can we talk?" That's it. And every Saturday morning for a year at least one woman turned around. Some were just afraid, saying things like, "I can't afford to have another child." A few even told me they had prayed that God would put somebody in their path that morning, and I was the answer to that prayer. The last Saturday I went, a man became furious as I spoke to his girlfriend. After he got her inside, he came back out, walked to his car, and pulled out a baseball bat. After three or four blows to the head, I was on the ground. The security officers came running out to help me, asking if I wanted them to call the police. "No, it's fine," I said. "I'll be alright." Do you know what? Not once in that year did those security officers ever even talk to me. Not once had they told me to get off the property and stop what I was doing. That very night at a friend's birthday party I was in no mood to attend, bruised and beaten, I met my wife of 31 years, Martha. The next Saturday I woke up at 8 a.m., looking forward to taking Martha out on our first date. Just before Wilberforce Weekend in Fort Worth this spring, I had lunch with a friend of mine who reminded me of that time. He said, "God was redeeming you." I had never thought of it that way. And then I realized something: there are at least 52 men and women alive today, all of them 32 years old because Jesus alarm-clocked me at 5 a.m. Every Saturday morning for a year He said, "Go there." That season in New York City reminds me of another time the Lord called me into His service. He called me in 2016 to take up leadership at Prison Fellowship. My job has been to lead the organization from the era of being founder-led and primarily known by its founder, to being mission-led and known first for the work we do. It's been a very important transition for Prison Fellowship. And it's been an honor for me to lead it during this time. It's even been an honor to lead Prison Fellowship through a pandemic. I was the CEO of four companies before I came to Prison Fellowship, and nothing has given me greater joy and taken me through greater spiritual growth than my season as president and CEO of Prison Fellowship. The Colson Center and Prison Fellowship were birthed under the same roof by the same visionary, the late, great Chuck Colson. I loved hearing James Ackerman's testimony of how God pointed him to do something, enabled him to do it, and then the results were left up to him. What a great testimony for the rest of us to emulate.

Movies such as "The Truman Show," "The Matrix," "Inception," are all based on the premise of humans who were, unwittingly, living in a computer simulation. More recently, quite a few influential and brilliant minds are proposing this so-called "simulation hypothesis" as more than fiction. In some cases, the bizarre theory is morphing into something that looks suspiciously like a materialist spirituality. Back in 2016, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Space-X, speculated to a tech gathering in California that the development of computer simulations that were "indistinguishable from reality" was inevitable. In fact, Musk believes that it's more likely that we live in a simulation than in the real world. And he's not alone. Recently in The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman described the increasing popularity of the simulation hypothesis among thinkers as diverse as "philosophers, futurists, sci-fi writers and technologists." The notion that we are all self-aware software trapped inside computer-generated virtual reality first gained academic credibility in a 2003 paper published by Oxford philosopher and futurist Nick Bostrom. In it, he argued that if we were to extrapolate the progress of current virtual reality and brain mapping technology into the future, the most likely result would be simulations indistinguishable from real life and programs indistinguishable from people. And, if that were true, then it would be unlikely that we would be the first generation in history with the ability to produce such simulations. That line of thinking led Elon Musk to conclude that the chances that our world is "base reality" and that we are not living in a simulated reality, are "one in billions." And it gets even weirder. Rothman suggests that the original programmers of our simulated reality could "find it interesting to watch us fight the battles they have already lost or won." Others have suggested that perhaps thousands or even millions of simulations are running at the same time. Philosopher Eric Steinhart speculates in his book Your Digital Afterlives that simulations are nested within other simulations. Within this "great chain of being," some people could be "promoted" to a higher reality when they die, attaining a kind of immortality or "resurrection." On a darker note, if the "computational cost" on our creators' processors ever becomes too great, perhaps they'll simply pull the plug on all of us. If this all begins to sound a bit metaphysical, Rothman agrees. One of the appeals of simulation theory, he thinks, is that it "gives atheists a way to talk about spirituality," or something like it. It offers "a source of awe." It even brings up similar questions for our simulators that one might ask of God: "Why did they create us? Why did they allow evil in their simulation?" "Why are we here?" And perhaps even, "Do they love us?" Of course, science fiction speculation does little to answer the actual big questions of human existence, and it certainly cannot justify a particular moral code. If none of this is real, including me, why should I care? Why not live, as in HBO's hit show "Westworld" in which people pay to visit a kind of simulated reality, entirely for my own gratification no matter whom it hurts? Simulation theory also makes the massive assumption that consciousness can arise from and be transferred through matter. And yet, it never explains the origin of consciousness in the first place. Where did the programmers, the real beings made of flesh and blood who inhabited what Musk calls "base reality," get their sentience, moral code, and meaning? As a theory of human existence, it only pushes the ultimate questions of existence back a step or two, beyond our reach. The simulation hypothesis is, as Stephen Meyer writes in his book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, one of many complicated "auxiliary theories" proffered to prop up materialism. It's telling how often advocates of this hypothesis utilize religious and spiritual language. Having reduced themselves to computer programs, they still speak of transcendence, resurrection, morality, and eternal life. Sometimes they talk of our supposed programmers in a way that sounds an awful lot like worship. In the end, maybe the best evidence against this bizarre and complicated version of materialism is that those who use it cannot resist simulating spiritual reality, even while attempting to explain it away.

In recent days, thousands of protestors have taken to the streets of Havana, Cuba to protest Covid restrictions and demand both help from the government and more freedom. After initially attempting to crack down on protestors, the government changed course late last week and lifted certain of the restrictions that drove the protests, including those on travelers bringing medicine, food, and toiletries. As a nation, Cuba relies heavily on tourism. As individuals, Cubans rely heavily on friends and family members outside the country sending food, medicines, and hygiene products. The crippling taxes on goods coming into the country, the lengthy power outages, food shortages, and ongoing blocked-access to the Internet — all during a global pandemic — was just too much for many of the people, and this propelled them to attempt a revolution in the streets. Christians in Cuba have joined the throng calling for an end to the restrictions, even to the regime. For years, believers there have faced discrimination and oppression. The Cuban Revolution 60 years ago (in keeping with Communist ideology) established an atheist state in what was, at least traditionally, a largely Christian culture. At various points in the history of the regime, including recently, Christmas celebrations were banned, and Christians were not allowed to run for office. Even so, Castro never fully closed church doors. Overall, religious life in Cuba has mainly moved underground, and is constantly under threat. In the 1990s, in an effort to mend relations between the U.S. and Cuba and to establish a diplomatic relationship with the Vatican, Pope John Paul II visited the island nation. After the visit, Christians were allowed to apply for state jobs and participate more publicly in church life, albeit under the watchful eye and oversight of the government. The movement toward religious freedom in Cuba has been, to say the least, slow and inconsistent. Still, Christian leaders continue to see cracks in the foundation of Communism. As Alberto Pías, a Catholic priest from Cuban descent wrote on social media earlier this week, "Human beings are made for freedom, to the point that even their Creator doesn't violate it. Human beings can be repressed, intimidated, threatened ... and this can make, by a pure survival instinct, the person submit to slavery and even defend the one who is oppressing him, but freedom is inscribed in our genes. Years, even generations may pass, but there comes a time when the soul rebels and says: 'enough.'" And just a few days ago, in what may be the only Communist dictator in history to almost admit some degree of fault, President Díaz-Canel said, "We have to gain experience from the disturbances. We also have to carry out a critical analysis of our problems in order to act and overcome, and avoid their repetition." I wish that the president's critical analysis included the Communist vision of life, social forces, the progression of history, and human value. I doubt that it will. Given Communism's historical track record, it should have long ago been relegated to the dustbin of history. Instead, what is too often claimed, by Communist "presidents'' and Western academics alike, is that the problem lies not in Communism itself but in how it has been applied. We see the same kind of thing when it comes to new technologies, especially biotech. When things go wrong, we think that it's just some rogue, "bad apple" scientists who are to blame for what is, in reality, inherent immorality in certain practices. This "evil man" assumption insists that the real problem with gene-editing technology or Communism are just the "bad apples" employing them, rather than the universal temptation that comes with unlimited power, whether over a nation or over some aspect of nature. We'd like to think that the problem is one particular human, not the human condition itself. Tragically, the only thing that the "evil man" hypothesis accomplishes is ensuring that the evils of history repeat. While recent admissions from President Díaz-Canel are noteworthy, hard repression in Cuba is not over. So, we should continue to pray and advocate for the people of Cuba in any way we can. And, we should take seriously the advice offered by Cuban-American Mike Gonzalez, in a recent interview on a World News Group podcast, when asked how Americans can help. Gonzalez said, "Ultimately, what Americans can do is remain free. We must remain free ourselves. We cannot help anybody, we're not going to be the symbol of anything if we don't ourselves remain free... America must continue to be the beacon of freedom."

John and Maria discuss new data from both the Centers for Disease Control and a report from a number of universities in the UK that reveal problems post-pandemic. Rates of suicide, depression, and a likely increase in pornography addiction are a few problems they unpack from recent BreakPoint commentaries. Maria then provides insightful commentary on the crisis in Cuba. She makes the statement that many will look at the situation and claim the problem with communism is the way it was carried out, not the human heart. John then provides insight on a movie called The God Committee that Maria recently reviewed. John gives a worldview analysis that shows how Christianity is a worldview big enough to handle the important ethical questions of the world. To close, John and Maria discuss a commentary by Glenn Sunshine on why wokeness is a heresy that finds moral grounding and meaning in the Church.

As rescue workers still look for remains in the rubble of the condominium that collapsed in Surfside, Florida last month, the official death toll has topped 95 people, with more missing and presumed dead. While this tragedy will change the lives of those involved forever, it will, as all tragedies do, fade from the news headlines to be replaced by others. This is the awful paradox of life after Eden. For some people, this felt like the very end of the world. For others, this was hard but unremarkable news to hear. How can both be true? Many Christians look at our world of mass shootings, natural disasters, political unrest, terrorism, and moral degradation and conclude that it is worse than it has even been. Others say we're better off than ever, noting advances in medicine and technology, life expectancy, and our unprecedented abilities to prevent and respond to disasters. Global poverty and infant mortality have fallen dramatically in the last two centuries, and continue to plummet. Even so, as J.R.R. Tolkein wrote in The Lord of the Rings, evil "always after a defeat and respite, takes another shape and grows again." His friend shared a similar philosophy in That Hideous Strength, the final novel of his Space Trilogy. "Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse," wrote C.S. Lewis. "The whole thing is… coming to a point, getting sharper and harder." Because time moves only forward, and because Jesus hasn't returned to finally make all things new, we will continue to confront new and different shapes of evil. Trying to decipher which shapes are worse or better than others is as futile as trying to predict which are coming next. What we do know, because Scripture is crystal clear about this point, is that God the Father sits in what N.T. Wright might call the "control room" of heaven. His hand holds back more evil from befalling his creation. A colleague of mine used to note that the four scariest words in the Bible are "God gave them over." The worst evil we can imagine visits humans at our own request. Any moments or eras of apparent respite is either because we've not recognized a new shape evil has assumed, or because God has chosen to graciously withhold what human sinfulness has invited. In moments of great suffering or tragedy, Christians will often say something like, "Don't worry. Christ is still on the throne." This is true and often comforting, but it can be a kind of Romans 8:28 "bomb," aloofly and tritely lobbed over our protective walls with too little empathy; a sort of religious version of saying "well, it could be worse" to someone in pain. In an old episode of the TV medical drama, House, the cantankerous and religion-hating Dr. House confronts a nun suffering from a mysterious illness. "You can tell me you put your faith in God to get you through the day," he says to her, "but when it comes time to cross the road, I know you look both ways." It was meant as an accusation, but believing in a good God who rules the universe doesn't require that anyone deny cars hit people. Christ is on the throne and I might suffer tragedy. Both are true. It's the rest of the story that answers Dr. House (and us). As Pastor Tim Keller writes: Often we see how bad things 'work together for good.' The problem is that we can only glimpse this sometimes, in a limited number of cases. But why could it not be that God allowed evil because it will bring us all to a far greater glory and joy than we would have had otherwise? People are living longer, medicine is advancing, and, sometimes, buildings collapse with people in them. Things in this world are really bad. Other things are really good. Ruling over it all, still on His throne, Christ is renewing our hearts and minds to make His glory our greatest pleasure and somehow mysteriously making us better through our suffering here.

National Public Radio's This American Life aired Tina Dupuy's (doo-PWEE) story recently. Tina had a difficult home life and was prone to acting out as a kid. Her parents eventually sent her to a group home. At 13, she went to her first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. What she heard resonated. People spoke about not being able to control their own bad behavior; about feeling rejected by family and repeatedly getting into legal trouble. By 13, Tina had tried alcohol a few times. But it was in the philosophy — the worldview — of AA that she really saw herself. And for two decades, she (to use AA's lingo) "hung in." For 20 years in AA, Tina learned how to stop pitying herself and to take responsibility. She attended meetings and shared her gritty story openly. But once she was firmly settled in her thirties, with a husband and a steady job, Tina started questioning whether she was actually an alcoholic. So she tried a drink and nothing happened. Now, she says, she's been drinking occasionally for years, with no addiction. So what was it about AA that held so much sway over Tina, and for so long? What does her story reveal about what humans need to get along in the world? Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by Christians in the 1930s. The modern-day organization has distanced itself from those religious roots, but traces remain. Everyone's familiar, for example, with AA's insistence that adherents surrender to a "Higher Power." The official line today is that this Higher Power can be whatever we want it to be. That the practice remains, especially in our cultural moment, is a sign that AA knows that belief in God has a uniquely powerful and motivating influence on our minds and behaviors. AA also requires each member to have a sponsor, someone else who is actively recovering from addiction. Apparently, humans benefit from a mentor who is able to "sympathize with our weaknesses." AA also teaches members that they need community and accountability, because bad habits thrive in isolation. Tina Dupuy told NPR that what first drew her in was everyone's nearly obsessive insistence that she "keep coming back." AA teaches that forgiveness and personal responsibility are paramount. That human beings are capable of terrible behavior even if we don't mean to be. In fact, AA has a name for the addict's real disease: "self-will run riot." Christians have a name for that too: sin. We also know it's an affliction not exclusive to those struggling with substance addiction. Alcoholics Anonymous may have stopped outwardly acknowledging the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but His natural laws are woven into every fiber of the organizations' success stories. That's fine — the Church is happy to share her playbook. Still, going through the motions without knowing the how and the what for, which are by God's grace and for His glory is a terrible waste and a tragic case of settling for less. And even if AA inches right up to the Truth without making the final leap, the group has strengths that many churches might count as weaknesses in their own communities. Tina Dupuy's experience with AA was of a group of people obsessively in each other's business. That culture of unconditional intimacy should exist in more churches. Church isn't a place to hang out with friends we've carefully chosen based on superficial similarities like cultural tastes, or even age. Church is a place of confession and forgiveness as much as it is for the mild, pleasant feelings we mean to evoke with the word "fellowship." Jesus doesn't call us to love the social outcast because social outcasts are all really wonderful people the world has judged wrongly, though that happens a lot. He calls us to love outcasts because He loves them and knows they need community and brotherly love in order to run the race with endurance. Just like we do. If that kind of intimacy isn't happening spontaneously in our churches, maybe we should force it. AA does. Unconditional intimacy is the natural outgrowth of groups whose members don't have to be convinced they're unlovable sometimes, or often. When people walk into an AA meeting, they know they have a problem. That's why they're free to be so patient with everyone else. Church can and should be like that, too.