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Month: April 2014

The Marvelous Millennials

FedEx Shooting
The 19-year-old who shot up the FedEx facility about 50 miles away from where I sit, exhibited the precise characteristics that make “Millennials” problematic in the workplace.

Watching the news video, you see that his friend said he shot 6 people and COMMITTED SUICIDE because he wasn’t given a day off he had requested.

HUH?

This is how you react when your boss can’t give you the day off? Reading a little about Millennials and the workplace will tell you that this man’s reaction is extreme but in character, because Millennials have always been told they are special. They’ve always gotten a trophy for showing up.

His friend also says he didn’t feel appreciated on the job. That’s because Millennials feel like they need to be rewarded beyond their paychecks for simply doing routine tasks that are part of their job descriptions. So just doing your job should be cause for huge rewards, and if you don’t get them, you have been disrespected.

Add that to the teen who last week murdered the girl who rejected his prom invitation and you have downright scary goings-on.

We always knew the culture of not keeping score and everybody-gets-a-trophy would come back to bite us and it is.

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Everything Old Is New Again

Every few days you see in the news where some atheist group is suing a governmental body or even an individual over some reference to religion that the atheists deem a violation of civil liberties as expressed in the First Amendment. If it seems that atheists have been more visible and vocal in recent years, it’s because they have been.

They are calling themselves the “New Atheists”, meaning they are more vocal, more militant, etc. Of course, “there’s nothing new under the sun” so they largely parrot the Old Atheists, sometimes to their embarrassment.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately on the New Atheists. Mind you, I’m not reading the works of the New Atheists, but I’ve been reading people who have read them and actually had formal debates with them.

Here’s the list of what I’ve read so far:

  • God and Science, Coming Full Circle?, by James Molben
  • Science and Creation, The Search for Understanding, by John Polkinghorne
  • Quantum Leap, by Dean Nelson
  • Gunning For God, Why the New Atheists Are Missing the Target, by John C. Lennox
  • Seven Days That Divide the World, also by John C. Lennox

I recommend all of them, but I’m particularly enjoying Gunning For God, by Irish mathematician John Lennox, which takes on the New Atheists and their ideas head on. When I started down this track I expected to find that the naturalists, as the New Atheists might prefer to call themselves, would present formidable and reasoned arguments from science against Christianity, their main target, that would be a challenge for Christian apologists to answer. What I’ve discovered instead is that New Atheists led by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) offer almost nothing that is new and in fact are largely ignorant of the current state of research into the historicity of the New Testament, for example. Dawkins and Hitchens are dismissive of the New Testament, asserting, without chapter and verse as it were, that it is unreliable and largely myth.

Gunning For God demolishes this position with quotations from atheists, agnostics, theologians and historians who alike agree that the authors of the New Testament, especially Luke, are historians of surprising accuracy and precision whose veracity you challenge at your peril.

I’ll probably say more on this later, but I do recommend these books for anyone who, unlike Dawkins and Hitchens, is interested in actual evidence.

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