Is Everything An Illusion?

Woody Allen once made the remark: "What if everything
is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case I definitely
overpaid for my carpet."

The idea captured by this simple witticism reflects a school
of thought whose existence can be traced down through the
centuries.

An easterner once told me the story of a guru who expounded
the "illusion theory" in relation to pain and suffering. Shortly
after pouring forth on the subject for several hours, he was
seen running for safety while being chased by a wild elephant.

When the guru emerged from his place of refuge, his disciple
asked him why, if pain and suffering were illusionary, did he
run away? Pausing for thought, the guru replied, "The
elephant is illusion, my running away is illusion, everything
is illusion."


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Removing A Mountain, Making A Road

The Ozark Mountains of Arkansas and Missouri are known
for their rocks. I mean they make for some hard farming,
some beautiful views, and some challenging road building.
There's this one stretch of highway from Branson, Missouri,
to Springfield, Missouri, that they widened. As you slowed
down through those construction zones, there were some
pretty impressive changes that were taking place. Some
places were nothing but solid-rock mountain, but somehow
they managed to blast away at those mountains and literally
make a road where a mountain used to be!


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The 'As Soon As' Syndrome

Sylvester Stallone's been in the ring for a lot of rounds.
Even though he's hit the big 6-0 birthday, he's still doing
Rocky - Rocky 6 this time. It's being called, "Rocky's final
round." Sylvester Stallone is one of the millions of Baby
Boomers who have hit a challenge for which some have
not been prepared. It's called aging. I was intrigued with
what Sylvester Stallone had to say about people he knows.
He said, "You see billionaires who have everything, yet inside
they're still the same lonely, insecure people." You think
you've got it all figured out, but then you turn 60 and there's
this little hole inside you. You realize we're always going to
be somewhat half full - or are we.


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Seismographs Of The Soul

"Life is too good," a friend of F.W. Boreham once declared,
"to be allowed, at its conclusion, to pass from sight."

His dictum was followed by the theory that every person
ought to sit down and write his or her autobiography.


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Shifting Demographics Of Western Civilization

Most countries in the Western world have stopped breeding.
For a civilization obsessed with sex, this is remarkable.

Maintaining a steady population requires a birth rate
of 2.1. In Western Europe, the birth rate currently stands
at 1.5, or 30 percent below replacement. In 30 years there
will be 70 to 80 million fewer Europeans than there are today.

The current birth rate in Germany is 1.3. Italy and Spain
are even lower at 1.2. At that rate, the working age popu -
lation declines by 30 percent in 20 years, which has a huge
impact on the economy.

When you don’t have young workers to replace the older
ones, you have to import them. The European countries
are currently importing Moslems.

Today, the Moslems comprise 10 percent of France and
Germany, and the percentage is rising rapidly because
they have higher birthrates. However, the Moslem popu -
lations are not being integrated into the cultures of their
host countries, which is a political catastrophe. One reason
Germany and France don’t support the Iraq war is they
fear their Moslem populations will explode on them. By
2020, more than half of all births in the Netherlands will
be non-European.


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Alternative Operating System

The Ghosts Of The Past

I don't believe in ghosts - for the most part. There's one kind
of ghosts that are all too real. They talked about those "ghosts"
in the movie, "Amazing Grace." That movie told the story of
the 18th century British political leader, William Wilberforce.

He's, really more than any other man, responsible for the
abolishing of slavery in the British Empire. And that was
at a time when African slaves played a critical role in the
British economy and slave-owning interests controlled
many members of Parliament. The battle took twenty
years, but ultimately thousands of slaves went free.

Wilberforce's spiritual mentor was actually the man who
wrote America's most beloved hymn, "Amazing Grace."
In his early years, John Newton had been a slave trader,
capturing and carrying thousands of Africans to slavery
in Britain. Conditions were so brutal that many didn't
even survive the voyage. Then John Newton discovered
how Jesus Christ can forgive and change a man.

In the movie, John Newton is going blind but he's still
pastoring a church in London. And he believed in "ghosts"
you might say. As he dictates what he calls "My Confession"
to a scribe, he says, "I have lived for years with the company
of 20,000 ghosts - those I made into slaves. Their blood is
on my hands."


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Evolution's Problem

Last One Off Earth, Turn Out the Lights

These days, if you want lectures on human depravity
and the looming apocalypse, the best places aren't
churches or Christian book stores—it's prestigious
op-ed pages and science departments of universities.

It's clear that the anti-religion crowd is growing
desperate, the result of all their angry rejection
of the hope of the Gospel.

Oddly enough, there is something almost biblical
in this kind of talk. Almost, that is. This recognition
of the human capacity for folly and self-destruction
is a welcome alternative to the naïve utopianism
and belief in progress that dominated so much of
twentieth-century thinking. But it's only part of
the truth.

What's missing is the solution to what C.S. Lewis
called our "bentness." After all, even if we do escape
the bounds of Earth to colonize new planets, our fallen
human nature will accompany us on the trip and the
cycle of folly will start all over again.


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Eye Of The Kingdom

The first time I left the United States, I was traveling
as a student in the Middle East. Like many who leave
home only to learn as much about their own culture
as the one they've journeyed to, I quickly found myself
a student of much more than language and history.

So often it is in the experience of life outside your
familiar world that the first glimpses of your own
worldview come into focus. I was soon troubled
by the previously unconsidered thought of how
much my environment shaped my understanding
of the world, life, faith, and God. Everything suddenly
seemed so much more complicated than it was before.

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Why Are You Crying?

An article in a psychology journal recently made a case
for the importance of human emotion. Though the
discipline of psychology is certainly grounded in such
an understanding, the author's argument was fairly
pointed: Emotions exist to warn us that there are
specific underlying beliefs or behaviors that are
endangering us. Thus, deeming emotions like fear,
doubt, or despair as negative or unwanted, we distract
ourselves from heeding their warning. We use work,
drugs, food, consumerism, and even positive thinking
to banish these emotions to unutterable depths. Doing
so, the author contends, is like calling our smoke alarms
"negative" and proceeding to attack them with baseball
bats.


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The Crouching Haunt Of Violence

History has a way of provoking life's most basic questions,
sometimes with deadly force. Standing beside ruins and
devastation, newscasters daily relay horrors. As harsh
realities take hold, the irrepressible "why?" often surfaces
in the mind of the beholder. Occasionally, even national
conscience is so aroused as to ask "why?"

Yet in reality, the question of "why?" in a violent act,
as painful as such a mindless atrocity can be, is never -
theless meaningless to raise unless we also ask the
question of life itself--why are we here? But alas! that
question is dismissed as no longer relevant in an academically
sophisticated culture.


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At Home In Mud & Darkness

One day on a walk in the woods, six-year-old Calvin announces
to Hobbes the tiger that he has decided he doesn't believe in
ethics anymore, because, as far as he's concerned, "The ends
justify the means." "Get what you can while the getting is good,"
Calvin reasons, "Might makes right."

At this, Hobbes (who is stuffed in the eyes of all but Calvin)
promptly pushes his human friend into a mud hole.

"Why'd you do that?" Calvin objects.

"You were in my way," Hobbes replies, "and now you're not.
The ends justify the means."

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New Book, Old Lie

What if I promised you that you could make anything happen—

anything!—just by wanting it to happen?

You would think I was crazy, and you would be right. So why
is a book based on this premise selling so fast that bookstores
cannot keep it on the shelves?

Rhonda Byrne's The Secret has been on the New York Times
bestseller list for months, and a DVD version is also selling out
everywhere. Byrne is selling the tempting message that anything
you want is possible and easy to get.

This isn't just about keeping an optimistic attitude to improve
your life—it goes far beyond that. Byrne says a force called the
Law of Attraction guarantees that if you think positive thoughts
about what you want, you will get it. "The Universe" will bend
over backwards to hand you whatever you wish for: money,
a better job, a spouse, anything...



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The Education Of Empty Minds

"We have educated ourselves into imbecility," quipped the noted
English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, as he bemoaned the many
nefarious ideas that are shaping modern beliefs. Venting an identical
disillusionment in his commentary on the American culture, George
Will averred that there is nothing so vulgar left in our experience for
which we cannot transport some professor from somewhere to justify it.

Why this juxtaposing of aberrant behavior with the halls of learning?
The answer is well worth pursuing if we are to deal with our present
cultural malaise by understanding its progenitors, and thwart what
looms as a future with terrifying possibilities.


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Never Too Late

Einstein credited his own extraordinary ability to the
fact that he was a late bloomer. Somehow his childlike
curiosity combined with his mature and exceptionally
fertile mind to give him the scientific intuition it takes
to make great discoveries.


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