On a recent night, I was driving home from a discipleship class in Tel Aviv. The program is for recent Army grads and some who can get off from the Army for a few days. The administrator is a young woman of great spiritual quality. As a group of us rode home, I mentioned my concern that young adults do not seem concerned to seek and find the truth. Or they don’t think there is the truth to be found. What difference from my generation! Just before the Jesus movement, I recall that philosophy classes in universities were packed. Students had to be turned away. This was true at Wheaton. The Philosophy of Religion class of Dr. Stuart Hacket was full every semester. Wheaton was and is an Evangelical Christian Liberal Arts and Science School, but many students had become skeptical. Some took the course to bolster their faith and others to engage a fresh search for truth. What has happened to this generation?
My young friend pointed to devices and the internet as part of the problem. In her view, there is something about the constant focus on devices that deadens people. They cannot give attention to serious reading, conversation. There is a self-focus in their Facebook engagements that does not pursue the outside realities that give meaning. Yes, there is something wrong when we see people not able to walk down the street without being on their devices. It is certainly an addiction.
But that is not all. Many are not capable of discerning when they use the internet. It can become a conduit of demons. How so? It seeds ideas that young people would never have thought of it. For example. Homosexuals have argued that their orientation is a genetic given. This was a reasonable argument though wrong. It has largely been given up since no scientific foundation can be found for it after years of seeking. However, transgenderism is even more far out. At least homosexuals claimed their normal genders of male and female and claimed to be attracted to the same sex. Every cell of one’s body is either an xx for a woman and xy for a man. A transgender cannot experience foundational experiences of the gender they choose in contradiction to their birth gender. The born male cannot become pregnant, have periods, nurse and have other foundational experiences of womanhood and vice versa. He can never have a female sexual experience. Now we also see some sectors of women’s sports destroyed as born men dominate the competition. (In reverse, no problem for the NFL!!). How has this spread? Where do young people get the idea that they are a woman in a man’s body or a man in a woman’s body if they did not have a teacher in school tell them this. The answer is that the internet speaks to young people who are not happy about their identity as men and women. One couple we had known for years had a daughter that was a born female, married and had children. She decided to be a male and is in a sexual relationship with a born male who wants to be a female. He did not get the castration surgery so they do have intercourse. You cannot make this up. I have shared on the philosophical roots of this radical gender choice theory (Frankfort School) But how does this spread so widely? And now it is politically correct to support it. Think of the child abuse when parents give drugs to pre-pubescent children to turn them into the opposite. The physical cost is high according to some leading doctors. In my view the internet should be off-limits to children and then only used with supervision and training on how to avoid sites and discern false information. What a challenge! We are also producing a population that is woefully ignorant. Some surveys in America show that many high school graduates do not know the three branches of the government in the United States. This is a population that can be easily controlled by tyranny. It is given to pleasure and dangerously cut off from truth.