World Views

"Faith and Reason are Mutually Reinforcing," says Clarence Thomas.

Oxford Dictionary, Dictionary.com and Merriam Webster all recently announced their word of the year for 2019, and they are: (drum roll please) Climate Emergency, Existential and They, respectively. 

MY TAKE

Hello, Oxford, that's two words! The last time I had a climate emergency was when my furnace conked out during a cold snap last year. Other than the aforementioned, I don't think I would have too many uses for climate emergency in my vocabulary. How about existential? Now there's an interesting word! Dictionary.com blew the dust off of that word to make it their word of the year. The story behind its selection was that it was inspired by Toy Story IV character Forky, the plastic spork who wanted to be a toy. Forky said he was having an existential crisis. This explanation is right off of their website. If I were Dictionary.com I wouldn't have admitted to that. Instead of watching Toy Story cartoons for vocabulary words they could have just watched ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC news casts and their respective talking heads, who have continuously repeated for the last 3 years, that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. And now for the coup de gras, good old Merriam Webster comes up with the preposition 'they' as their word of the year. 'They' refers to someone whose gender identity is nonbinary. I can think of a better word for that: how about stupid?

Don't Believe in God? Lie to Your Children

Erica Komisar a renowned psychoanalyst has written an opinion piece in the WSJ with the above title. Citing a 2018 study from the American Journal of Epidemiology, Harvard researchers found that children or teens who attended a religious service at least once a week, scored higher on psychological well-being tests and had a lower risk for mental illness. In addition, it was noted that weekly attendance was associated with higher rates of volunteerism, a sense of mission, forgiveness and lower probabilities of drug use and early sexual initiation. Ms. Komisar is often asked by parents in her clinical practice why depression and anxiety is so common among children and adolescents. Her answer in large part she states, is due to the lack of religious or spiritual beliefs. A 2018 American Family Survey showed that nearly half of adults under 30 do not identify with any religion, a sad fact that one can easily extrapolate from, that the children of these parents will be raised without beliefs. 

What happens when a loved one dies and your belief is that they turn to dust and cease to exist, and your child asks you where did grandpa go? How do you tell a child this? Well because of all the above benefits as outlined above you don't, you lie to them. This is the professional advice of Ms. Komisar. 

I believe that this a great disservice to her patients. If a parent is pricked in the heart by the thought of telling their young child that once you die it's lights out and that's all there is, are they not admitting that they want better for their children and what they have to offer makes them feel guilty? What a perfect time to tell them they need the God of truth to fill that void,  and not a lie.

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Thanking God at Thanksgiving: 100 Years Ago and Today

An article by Paul Kengor points out the differences of Thanksgiving today and 100 years ago during the aftermath of WWI. Thanksgiving is not about just being "thankful," but to whom we are thankful to. 

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