Josh McDowell and the "atheistic" Internet

[Rev. Rye]

It looks like it's dissection time!

“What has changed everything?” asked the apologist from Campus Crusade for Christ International as he spoke on “Unshakable Truth, Relevant Faith” at the Billy Graham Center in Asheville, N.C., Friday evening. His answer was, the Internet.

Um... I don't think you can blame the Internet for making kids less Christian. People have been blaming the new things of every generation for the degeneracy of the young since the days of Plato. Your parents' generation (McDowell is 78, by the way) blamed television and rock and roll for the same thing. His parents' generation probably blamed the movies for the same thing, and you can keep going back until you have Socrates complaining about the written word itself.

“The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not,”

Well, they have a lot of doors open to them. Some are good, some suck. And when your youth pastor and you are out of their lives, that's going to be the case anyway, with or without the Internet.

While 51 percent of evangelical Christians did not believe in absolute truth in an earlier survey, the percentage escalated to 62 in 1994. In 1999, it jumped to 78 percent. “You know what it is now?” asked McDowell. “One of the most staggering statistics in history of the church… 91 percent said there is no absolute truth apart from myself.”

Well, you fuck with the text enough, giving it meanings that are plainly an accurate representation of neither the real world nor the text itself, you kind of end up encouraging it, and that's how you get 81% of your group to accept a presidential candidate that encourages the use of "Alternative facts."

Moreover, less than four percent of evangelical born-again Christians believed the Bible was infallible in every situation, and 63 percent of them believed He is “a” Son of God and not “the” Son of God, he added.

Yeah, about the Son of God thing, it turns out that even in the Bible, the title "Son of God" isn't exclusively used for Jesus. Indeed, the Old Testament uses the term to refer to King David multiple times. It's used a bunch of other times, including in Jeremiah 31, where it's used to refer to The entire Jewish people. In the OT, it is NEVER used to denote literal parenthood. It would appear plausible that when Jesus is referred to as "The Son of God," it's not meant to be literal there, either.

“Now here is the problem,” said McDowell, “going all the way back, when Al Gore invented the Internet [he said jokingly], I made the statement off and on for 10-11 years that the abundance of knowledge, the abundance of information, will not lead to certainty; it will lead to pervasive skepticism. And, folks, that’s exactly what has happened. It’s like this. How do you really know, there is so much out there… This abundance [of information] has led to skepticism. And then the Internet has leveled the playing field [giving equal access to skeptics].”

This is actually fairly true, but it's both a good thing and a bad thing.  It's good because, in a lot of issues, there's multiple sides that have legitimate points, and it's good to see that things aren't always what they seem. On the other hand, we have people online who use their time on the Internet to spread false information, whether it's deliberately false or simply mistaken belief. Unsuspecting people get turned onto it, believe it, and create an echo chamber of stupidity, promoting beliefs that are demonstrably false, and insisting on it.

McDowell, who lives in southern California with his wife Dottie and four children, said atheists, agnostics and skeptics didn’t have access to kids earlier. “If they wrote books, not many people read it. If they gave a talk, not many people went. They would normally get to kids maybe in the last couple of years of the university.” But that has changed now.

Tell that to Robert Ingersoll, famed orator and atheist who, in his heyday in the 19th century, spoke to large crowds which paid upwards of a dollar to see him (bear in mind, this was the 1800s, and this was a significant portion of a day's wages).

The Internet is weakening Christian witness and “we better wake up to it because it’s just beginning.” McDowell added that his greatest asset, value-wise, used to be his time until a year and a half ago. “My greatest asset now is my focus. There is so much out there just one click away, what am I going to focus on?”
McDowell, who considered himself an agnostic before accepting Christ, warned that the sexual immorality through the Internet was “marginalizing the maturity of the witness of Christ…all over the world.” It’s an “invasive, intruding immorality… that is all just one click away.” He said the majority of questions young people ask him are about sex, mainly “oral sex.”

Or it could be that your worldview staying the same when the world is changing radically isn't a good strategy; fun fact: one blogger I follow was formerly an evangelical Christian (but still a damn enlightened one; just read his articles about Christian Patriarchy on it). He recently broke with Evangelicalism because of Trump's pandering to hate groups and the churches just eating it up. He still identifies as a Christian, but it's still a good case study for why people are leaving Christianity (or at least his version thereof) behind.

The majority of all the 2.2 billion people who go to the Internet daily are between 15 to 25 years of age, he said. And there are 4.2 million pornographic sites. “Do you know how many pornographic emails would be circulated just today? 2.5 billion…just one click away.”

Cyberporn works more as downloads than emails, Josh.

The Campus Crusade staff also said around 90 percent of the 16-year-olds, according to the latest statistics, had viewed pornography. And 80 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds had had exposure to hardcore pornography. In a recent study, teenagers were asked if pornography was acceptable, and 67 percent of the men and 59 percent of the women said “yes,” he added. “For 47 percent of Christian families, pornography is a major problem. Association of Divorce Lawyers came out and said that over 50 percent of divorces were directly related to pornography.”

Okay, I just looked this up. I could find no "Association of Divorce Lawyers," but I did find an "American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers," and while I can't find the exact study they did, I did find that they did conclude that 67.5% of divorces boil down to this issue:



Whether it's because of arguing, inability to understand your significant other, or a total lack of communication, it would appear that this is the #1 cause of divorces. But, given that evangelicalism tends to lean towards assuming that the husband knows best and is, short of the Church and God, the final authority in a woman's life, it makes sense they don't prioritise that issue.

McDowell proposed three ways to deal with the problem. “First, we have to model the truth. If you don’t model what you teach your kids, forget it. If they don’t see it, they won’t believe it… Second, we have to build relationships.” Just as truth without relationship leads to rejection, rules without relationship lead to rebellion, he said. “Kids don’t respond to rules. They respond to rules in the context of a loving, intimate relationship.” And third, he said, we have to use knowledge. “You better arm yourselves to answer your children’s and grandchildren’s questions…no matter what the question is…without being judgmental.” Kids’ greatest defense, he said, was the knowledge of truth.

Well, that might be good, but at least some relationship between the truth and observable reality is also pretty damn important.