Daily Archives: February 15, 2022

You could cut this tension with a knife!

Season two of Love Is Blind, hosted by Vanessaand Nick Lachey,premieres Feb. 11 on Netflix. And before we get to see 30 singles from Chicago take a stab at pod dating, in an E! News exclusive clip, we get a sneak peek at what's in store for us. In the clip, Kyle, a 29-year-old glazier and Shaina, a 32-year-old hair stylist, discuss their religious views while on a dateand to Shaina's dismay, she finds out that Kyle is an Atheist.

"I'm not religious at all," Kyle says to Shaina during their pod date.

"I'm like trying to be calm," a jaw-dropped Shaina responds. "Are you Atheist?"

"Yeah," he replies. "However you're feeling I can understand."

"We need to talk about it!" Shaina says. "Let's say we get married, what if we have babies, right?"

"You're asking me if I'm okay with you instilling religion into our children?" he asks. "That's fine, ultimately the kids will get to decide just like I did."

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Religious Differences Cause Tension in the Pods in Love Is Blind Season 2 Preview - E! NEWS

Mark Lanier is a remarkable person on numerous counts. He is both a devout Christian and a world-class lawyer. One wonders how he feels about what Jesus said about lawyers. All kidding aside, Mark writes as well as he argues in court, with the same wit and wisdom that also shows up when he teaches an enormous Sunday school in a Baptist Church in the Houston area. Not only so, he has set up a remarkable study center, which has at its heart a huge theological library, the Lanier Collection. Ive not only been there, when I got there, they asked me to sign a huge pile of my own books for their collection. That took a while.

Atheism on Trial (March release, IVP, about 200 pages) is in a sense a sequel to Christianity on Trialand in various ways it is Marks most important book, thus far. The burden of Marks argument is that arguments that there is no God do not best explain a whole host of things that are part of reality. For instance, why are human beings so hard-wired to demand justice and fairness in all areas of life, if there is no moral arc to the universe, as MLK once called it. If there is no absolute right and wrong, why exactly would racism be absolutely wrong, or for that matter molesting a child, or for that matter cannibalism? If human beings are just stardust, or a bag of chemicals, and frankly the cry for justice cannot be said to be a result of evolution or survival of the fittest, isnt the best explanation that there is a righteous God who created us in his image such that we too have been hard-wired to care about absolute right and wrong on many fronts. I would say yes.

Mark spends a fair bit of his time debunking the rather flimsy arguments numerous atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris have trotted out numerous times, for example since you cant prove there is a God, therefore there must not be a God. Mark not only rightly asks what counts as proof ( and he is right that proof in a scientific lab sense is one thing, proof based on historical evidence or proof in a courtroom is another), he points out that atheists if they were really arguing properly would have to prove the negative, not merely cast doubts on the positive arguments for Gods existence. Exactly right. And the real issue here is which set of arguments best explains reality as we have.

Mark does not dodge the big issues in this book, like for example, what about suffering and evil in the world? If there is a Biblical shaped God in this world why is their suffering and evil. Marks answer is severalfold 1) God has created human beings and angels with a measure of freedom of choice, and God has created a world of cause and effect, including moral cause and effect. Most of the evil in this world and suffering can be laid at the door of human beings behaving badly, In addition, the result of human sin is we live in a fallen world. Even the creation has been subject to the futility of fallenness; 2) God is unchanging and the fact that he is the most powerful person and force in the universe doesnt mean hes the only one with power in the game of life. Gods almightyness doesnt mean there are not various things he cannot do for example he cannot lie, he cannot be tempted, he cannot, in his divine nature, sin, he cannot change his own righteous, holy, and loving character, and so on. Human beings are capable of doing wicked things that God cannot do since his character is unchanging and he remains faithful to who he is and what he says. There is more, but you get the flavor of the argument.

There are chapters on whether there is well-grounded meaning and significance to human life if there is no absolute truth, no God etc. Lanier argues that the logic of arguing there is meaning in life just because there is frankly is not a logical argument. But if there is a God, a God who has endowed us with purpose and our lives actually matter and have significance, well then we dont need to keep singing Bette Midlers song Is That All There is? If Thats All there is, then lets keep dancing.

Laniers chapter on Science is well worth reading and he is right science and faith are not antipodes. They need not be at odds with one another. Go read Francis Collins The Language of God. Science is a tool to help humankind, and by the way many of the greatest scientists then and now are devout Jews and Christians. Perhaps less satisfying is the final chapter on Evolution, though Lanier is right that equally devout Christians can take different views on how to interpret Genesis 1-2, vis a vis the issue of evolution.

Mark Lanier is not afraid to take on the tough issues, and indeed to show the illogic of arguments for atheism and agnosticism. This book is however written in a way that most anyone can grasp his case, and overall its a very strong case. Lanier is well read in all the atheist literature, both the more technical and the more popular literature, and he does not shy away from the tough questions. You will have to evaluate his arguments for yourself, but as for me, I think this is the best book of its sort to deal with atheism and agnosticism and it should be in every pastors and educated lay persons library.

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Atheism on Trial by Mark Lanier | Ben Witherington - Patheos

Famed author and former atheist Lee Strobel is turning his latest book into a documentary film that explores what awaits us after death.

In The Case for Heaven, Strobel seeks to answer questions about the afterlife, heaven and hell, and what really happens during near-death experiences.

"The pandemic has a lot of people pondering what happens after people close their eyes for the last time in this world," Strobel said in a statement about the movie. "This film provides compelling evidence from both inside and outside the Bible to show that we will, indeed, continue to live on."

WATCH the trailer for The Case for Heaven below:

The documentary is based on his book The Case for Heaven: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for Life After Death. It was inspired by Strobel's own near-death experience andincludes interviews with world-renowned pastor Francis Chan, best-selling author John Burke, Evangelist Luis Palau, and more.

During an interview with CBN's Faithwire, Strobel recalled details of his brush with death.

"It started several years ago when I almost died. My wife found me unconscious on the bedroom floor," Strobel told Faithwire. "She called an ambulance. I woke up in the emergency room and the doctor looked down at me and said, 'You're one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying,' and then (I) went unconscious again and lingered between life and death for a while until the doctors were able to save me.'"

Something happened after Strobel found himself "hovering over that blurry line between life and death" he became more intensely interested in exploring the realities awaiting humans after death.

There are many skeptics of these near-death experiences, especially when people claim to have died and visited heaven. Strobel said he, too, was once a skeptic of these stories until he realized how much research and documentation exists around these accounts.

"I was a skeptic about near-death experiences until I found out we have 900 scholarly articles that have been written and published in scientific and medical journals over the last 40 years," he said, calling it a "very well-researched area."

Strobel's incredible transformation from atheist journalist to one of the most impactful Christian apologists of our time has inspired millions.

The release of The Case for Heaven was announced by Sandoval Studios and K-LOVE Films. It will debut in theatres on April 4, 5, and 6.

To find out more about the film, click here.

***Please sign up forCBN Newslettersand download theCBN News appto ensure you keep receiving the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***

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'The Case for Heaven': Lee Strobel's Investigation About the Afterlife, Near-Death Experiences Comes to Theaters This April - CBN News

Rather a lot rides on the answer.

The strident American atheist and physicist, Lawrence Krauss, thinks it can. He wrote a philosophically muddled book called A Universe from Nothing in which he speculates that it is possible for a universe to come from nothing, provided some parameters (such as quantum fields and the physical laws that govern them) are already in existence to allow it. He wants to call the empty space of the cosmos nothing whilst also insisting that this nothing is actually a cauldron of virtual particles which can pop into physical existence when interacting with powerful fields.

Krauss great mistake, of course, is to fail to understand what nothing really means.

In all human scientific endeavours, scientists have never exhausted the beautiful mathematical order that has underpinned their discoveries. This is even true for the non-intuitive world of quantum physics, and this, I submit, is hugely significant. The esteemed English astronomer and mathematical physicist, James Jeans (1877 1946), said in his book The Mysterious Universe: The universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician.[i]

But does God actually exist?

Whether or not he does depends on which sequence of events is true concerning the building of the universe.

Did matter give rise to information (as atheists believe), or did information give rise to matter (as theists believe)?

What do I mean by this? Atheists believe that somehow, as the result of nothing (or because the universe has always existed without reason), a universe existed. In other words, matter came to exist. Then, over time, various evolutionary processes took place resulting in this matter generating sophisticated information that allowed life to develop.

Lawrence Krauss is one who believes that matter gave rise to information. He does so by championing the idea that there are an infinite number of universes, each with a different set of physical laws. And because there are an infinite number of universes, we should not be surprised that one universe eventually stumbled on a set of physical laws that allowed life to develop. The significance of our ordered universe can therefore be dissolved in a sea of infinity.

However, if one universe is hard to explain, it is even harder to explain the existence of an infinite number of them. As such, the multiverse hypothesis does not explain anything. It merely lifts the conundrum up to the next level.

Another principle atheists appeal to in order to explain the existence of our universe is to say that a fundamental physical principle a theory of everything exists that makes the development of a life-friendly universe inevitable. (It seems to me that by doing this, they have simply crossed out God, and replaced him with a theory of everything which doesnt appear to be much of a step forward!)

The other trouble with this thinking is that there is no hard evidence of a theory of everything existing.

A third option available to atheists, is to believe that our universe has always existed and has done so without reason and without purpose. This, of course, is simply a faith statement. It also suffers from the fact that there is no precedent for anything existing without a cause. In fact, the very idea shatters the law of cause and effect which underpins all of science.

Lets now explore the idea that information gave rise to matter. What do I mean by this?

By suggesting that information gave rise to matter, I am suggesting that creation was an intelligent act. The mathematics we see in the cosmos and the codes contained within living cells have their genesis in a mind in the mind of God. As such, the information in Gods mind resulted in matter (in the form of the cosmos) existing.

Whats the evidence?

Nothing in the long history of human experience has ever caused complex ordered information to exist other than rational thought. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that rational thought has given rise to a rational universe.

So, what can we say in conclusion?

All science relies on ultimate rationality existing. Christians call this ultimate rationality, God. And whilst it is important to understand that God is more than cosmic rationality, it is nonetheless a very good place to start!

[i] James Jeans, The MysteriousUniverse, (Cambridge University Press, 1930 edition), 134.

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Things I'm Asked: Didn't the universe always exist? - Eternity News

The Kerala nun rape case was in the news recently where Bishop Franco Mullakal, who headed the Roman Catholic diocese of Jalandhar, was accused of raping a nun on a number of occasions between 2014 and 2016. He was charged with wrongful confinement, rape, unnatural sex and criminal intimidation. In 2004, another well-known religious head, Swami Jayendra Saraswathi, then pontiff of the Kanchi Mutt, was accused in the murder of Sankararaman, a manager of another temple in the same city of Kanchipuram. There are many other cases where religious figures were and are tainted by such charges.

In both these cases, the accused were acquitted by the respective courts. Though the courts have absolved the accused of the charges, it is nevertheless discomfiting to note that the dark cloud of criminality hangs over custodians of religious institutions. The very idea of these custodians even to be associated with such a taint of profanity should be disconcerting to the apologists of religious practice and institutionalised religion. The very association mars the sacredness usually associated with religion. It also disturbs and distorts the commonly-held received view that the domain of religion extends over morals, meaning and value.

Though this is a commonly-held view, ethics and deliberations on meaning and purpose of life constitute independent domains of discourse and questions in these domains need not have their source in religion. Douglas Cowan, a scholar of religious studies, terms the erroneous but remarkably widespread belief that goodness, morality and decency are essential characteristics of religion, that they help us define what religion as the good, moral and decent fallacy. Further, he notes that there is precious little historical or sociological evidence to attribute goodness and morality to religion.

One can be moral, think of morality and theorise on justice and meaning of life, independent of ones religious attitude. It is more than possible for an atheist to be moral and examples are legion of religious people being unethical.

Also read: The Truth of the Ill-Defined Hindu Rashtra, as Narrated by Golwalkar

Therefore, both these points on the domain of religion and the above mentioned taint of profanity associated with the custodians of religious institutions raise the larger axiological question about the value-impact of religion as practice as well as an institution. The revolutionary freedom fighter Bhagat Singh and the rationalist Narendra Dabholkar raised questions of this sort on religion and appealed to reason to argue for the valuelessness of religion.

Bhagat Singh wrote a pamphlet Why I am an Atheist in prison in 1930. The notion of godhood is very much central to most religions. Such an idea is pervasive in the public consciousness and also well entrenched. In fact, in different forms, the meaning and nature of godhood, gods existence and its relationship to man constitute an important part of the default religious discourse. These are, Bhagat Singh says, popular feelings. Criticisms of such popular feelings, he remarks, are never answered in a rational way.

He, it must be said, was very polite to people having such feelings as he considers them only unable to engage in critical thinking because of their mental insipidity but not violently harmful. Coming to Dabholkars time, such people are no more harmless. In fact, it his criticism in the form of a rational view of the valuelessness of religion that led to his murder by extremist elements.

The very thought of dismissing the idea of godhood and gods existence, also as something unreasonable to hold, would be regarded by believers or the so called theists as some kind of vanity and pride and invites wrath from them. Thats what exactly happened to Dabholkar when this wrath took a violent form in some vengeful extremists who shot him dead.

Bhagat Singh strongly advocates an atheistic position. Atheism, according to him, is not to have belief in an Almighty, Supreme Being who created, guided and controlled the universe. Such an idea had no sound foundations.

He, in the beginning of his pamphlet, states that some of his friends construed his atheism to be a result of his foolishness and an outcome of vanity. Believers, influenced by faith peddlers of god and religion, often criticise atheists for their vanity. He goes on to dispel this idea of there being any connection between atheism and vanity and concludes:

Society must fight against this belief in God as it fought against idol worship and other narrow conceptions of religion. In this way man will try to stand on his feet. Being realistic, he will have to throw his faith aside and face all adversaries with courage and valour. That is exactly my state of mind. My friends, it is not my vanity; it is my mode of thinking that has made me an atheist. I dont think that by strengthening my belief in God and by offering prayers to Him every day, (this I consider to be the most degraded act on the part of man) I can bring improvement in my situation, nor can I further deteriorate it.

Also read: What Is the Rationalists Way to Frame an Argument?

The mode of thinking, one that is based on experience, reasoning, perception and inference, seems to have shrivelled away when it comes to matters of belief in god and religion. The origin of the idea of god, as Bhagat Singh opines, is that man created God in his imagination when he realised his weaknesses, limitations and shortcomings. An exactly similar idea is echoed by the famous scientist Albert Einstein in what is now known as the God letter that he wrote to the German philosopher Eric Gutkind: God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses. This letter of the scientist was sold in the year 2018 for $2.9 million at Christies auction.

In that mode of thinking, Bhagat Singh poses two questions on the belief in an Almighty, Omnipresent, Omnipotent God who, according to the theists, created the universe. The questions are a) why, in the first place, did god create the universe and a follow up question b) If it be said, as the theists say drawing upon the scriptures, that he is bound by the law to create then he in no more omnipotent.

Further, the omnipotent god lacks the potency, argues Singh, because he does not stop a man from committing sin. He could not save the humanity of many a great calamity. Why does god not infuse humanistic sentiments into the minds of the Britishers so that they may willingly leave India?

These questions of Singh reflect a more philosophically polished atheist philosopher Bertrand Russells response to a question he was asked in a dinner meeting as follows: suppose your stand on the whole idea of gods existence turns out to be wrong and that god does exist; suppose after your death you are face to face with god; how would you respond? Russell replied, Well, I would say that you [god] did not provide much evidence. Going by his argument where Bhagat Singh questions the potency of god it would be even more appropriate to say that not only is there no evidence of gods existence but there is also evidence to the contrary.

The Case for Reason: Understanding the Anti-superstition MovementNarendra DabholkarTranslated by Suman Oak, Published by Westland/Context, September 2018

In a similar mode of thinking, but more articulate, Dabholkar wrote a a two-volume book The Case for Reason originally published in Marathi as Timiratuni Tejakade. In the first and second essay (titled The Concept of God and Religion) of the second volume of the book Dabholkar presents lineaments of the form of religion. There he states that it is imperative for a rationalist to be critical of religion and that a key component of Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samitis (MANS) activities at the grassroots level has this responsibility of criticism. MANS is an organisation founded by Dabholkar to eradicate blind faith and superstition.

Why is such a criticism warranted? He notes that every religion boosts the glory of ones own faith and such endeavours assume the form of hatred and contempt for other religions. He contends that there has been rampant commercialisation of religion and the involvement of antisocial elements in organising of religious festivals. These engender parochial religious sentiments that trample upon all the values (moral and cultural) projected by, what he terms, a public version of religion (The recent Dharma Sansads in Haridwar and Raipur where hate speeches were made calling for Muslim genocide are an illustration of this point). To counter such ill effects of religion the Samiti engages in the constructive criticism of religious sentiments.

Dabholkar, on similar lines as that of Bhagat Singh, raises questions in his essay on the concept of god as the creator of the universe: If god has created the universe, does the process of creation continue or has it stopped? Whats the next step after the creation of the universe? He says, Nobody has any answers to these. Dabholkar also maintains that the concept of an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent god is full of contradictions.

By framing these questions, both Bhagat Singh and Dabhokar present a rational view of the valuelessness of religion and its associated idea of godhood. They also discuss about the hidden agenda of religion where the privileged class invents false theories within a religious framework and brings about an exploitative system.

It is the tendency of the common man to subscribe to faith that religious institutions exploit unabashedly. Matters of faith become too sensitive to be touched by reason and rationality. Thanks to faith that such irrational beliefs are held by the naive to the advantage of devious opportunists to further their commercial and other interests.

Upton Sinclair in his Profits from Religion An Essay in Economic Interpretation (1917) distinguishes between the two senses of religion; i) an honest sense and ii) the institutionalised sense. It is the latter sense that prevails today and it is the thesis of Sinclairs book that religion in this sense is a source of income to parasites, and the natural ally of every form of oppression and exploitation.

We need the likes of Bhagat Singh and Narendra Dabholkar to rehash these questions in the public sphere to drive home the point of the irrationality and the irrelevance of religion and, in particular, the institutionalised and communal form of religion.

However, Dabholkar had to pay a price as some fanatical elements could not accept his stand on anti-superstition. He was shot dead in 2013 by youths belonging to a section of a religious denomination. These elements were against his fight against superstition. His murder at the hands of religious extremists should prompt one to think whether, at a deeper level, the nature of such an opposition to anti-superstition actually betrays the view that religious tradition itself is, in some strong sense, nothing but superstition and, therefore, valueless. Further, the taint of profanity on custodians of religious institutions is another point to ponder over the value-impact of religion.

S.K. Arun Murthi taught Philosophy in the Humanities and the Social Sciences department, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, Punjab.

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How Bhagat Singh and Narendra Dabholkar Argued for the Valuelessness of Religion - The Wire

HBO's Raised By Wolves lacks nuance, but it's still worth watching.

Science fiction is didactic. Its no secret that the genre attracts those with big ideas they just cant seem to squeeze into a parochial British village or a Lower East Side apartment. Ursula K. Le Guin and Frank Herbert used the genre to explore environmentalism, Philip K. Dick wrestled with global capitalism in short story after short story, and L. Ron Hubbard built an entire religion on the back of the terrible Battlefield Earth.

No matter their specific hangup, though, every author of the genre seems to follow a concerning pattern. Look, man, a friend of mine once told me, once a sci-fi writer reaches a certain age, all of his books end up being about sex and God.

The more Freudian among us might argue that all fiction boils down to these timeless topics, but he has a point. Just try reading Herbert or Asimov toward the end of their careers and tell me they dont have a fixation. When you tell an author that sci-fi gives them the freedom to explore the controversial or the taboo in relative safety, it eventually goes to their head.

Screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski might be new to sci-fi, but his HBO show Raised By Wolvesis hellbent on following in the footsteps of the greats, at least as far as subject matter is concerned.

The show takes place a little over a hundred years in the future after a new monotheistic religionbased on early Christianitys historical rival Mithraismforcibly converts a majority of the world using technology encrypted in their ancient scriptures. Eventually, the war between this religion and the atheist forces resisting them destroys the world, giving both sides no choice but to flee to a distant uncolonized world. The church sends an ark full of cryogenic faithful, while a rogue atheist scientist ships a clutch of frozen embryos with two androids programmed to raise them.

The plot centers around these two androids, one named Mother and the other Father, as they raise their embryos to found the perfect atheistic society and clash with the Mithraic faithful. Along the way they begin to unravel the secrets of the planet, which may not be as uncolonized as they first believed.

The shows main conceit is steeped in the arguments currently raging in bioethics. Raised by Wolves goes out of its way to tackle questions like the legitimacy of artificial wombs, surrogacy, and fringe ideas like artificial intelligence as parents. This isnt new to sci-fi and might even be behind the curve, considering the trends at industry soirees like the Hugo Awards, and as a result comes across as hackish. After a compelling and competent first two episodes directed by executive producer Ridley Scott, the show turns into a bioethics sitcom. Mother and Father awkwardly argue about gender roles while the primary conflict of the episode rages around them until things wrap up and they reconcile. Imagine you took an episode of Family Mattersand dipped it in a vat of whatever H.R. Giger was drinking. The result is a hamfisted look at the complicated world of parenthood in the 21st century.

The familial themes reach fever pitch when its revealed that a young Mithraic is pregnant with a child conceived in rape. Mother, who is unable to have children as an android, tries to convince her to keep her baby. You can imagine what happens next. The Mithraic girl claims mother cant possibly understand her position. Mother retorts that she has been given a great gift. The girl renounces her religion and tries to kill herself and resents Mother for saving her life. Eventually, what should be a very serious and legitimately complicated situation goes off the rails when (spoilers) Mother conceives of a child through supernatural means.

This leaves the viewer wondering how Guzikowski imagines they should take this.

Despite all of the intellectual groundwork that pro-life scholars and activists have laid, Guzikowski is under the impression that an unexpected pregnancy can complicate the worldview of even the most ardent advocates. And on cue the typical HBO audience member, used to a steady diet consisting of shows featuring oversexualized teens with depression, nods their head in agreement.

The pretension continues into his treatment of the God portion of the infamous duo.

In one of his more creative moves, Guzikowksi revived an obscure Roman cult to serve as his monolithic church. However, the Mithraic are little more than a parody of faith that more closely resembles whatever Neil deGrasse Tyson imagines religion is than any actual worldview. They routinely refer to unbelievers as impure, relish the blanket genocide of unsaved souls, and latch on to every unexplained phenomenon as if Sol (their god) himself is speaking to them. They galivant around the planet like peasants following a goose on crusade and are easily swindled by a pair of atheist infiltrators who mutter simple aphorism and claim that Sol is talking to them directly.

In an interview on the official Raised By WolvesPodcast, Guzikowski claimed that he finds science and religion equally suspect. And one does get the feeling that he views himself as an opponent of dogmatic belief more than any particular worldview. But in his quest to critique the religion half of that equation, he builds a straw man. When the dust settles and both religion and atheism fail to produce a utopia, he can stand back and laugh because they might have reached that utopia if they just saw that both sides have problems. You can hear I went to twelve years of Catholic school in every line of dialogue.

Despite all of this, I still recommend Raised by Wolves.

Is the show good? Not really. Middling performances and painful writing drag it into mediocrity. But theres nothing else like it on television. Sex and God are well worn topics that America isnt really concerned with right now. Well, maybe sex, but certainly not God. And anything related to the eternal questions warrants attention. Even though I cant help but scoff with every clunky line delivered by a child actor, I keep watching. And now that the show is back for its second season, Ill be watching every week. Its so rare to find a show that handles the issues youre concerned with, even if it goes out of its way to make your worldview look like a joke.

In the spirit of the genre, Raised by Wolvesis didactic. And even if its less War And Peacedidactic and more Animal Farmdidactic, at least its trying to teach something worthwhile. Thats all we can ask for right now.

Shadrach Strehleis a freelance audio producer and hesitant young professional.

Editors Note: This piece has been updated to correct a misidentification of L. Ron Hubbards Battlefield Earth.

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Raised By Didacts - The American Conservative

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(THE CONVERSATION) In America, the demographic circumstances of a childs birth substantially shape academic success. Sociologists have spent decades studying how factors beyond students control including the race, wealth and ZIP code of their parents affect their educational opportunities and achievement.

But one often overlooked demographic factor is religion. The U.S. is the most devout wealthy Western democracy. Does a religious upbringing influence teens academic outcomes?

Over the past 30 years, sociologists and economists have conducted several studies that consistently show a positive relationship between religiosity and academic success. These studies show that more religious students earn better grades and complete more schooling than less religious peers. But researchers debate what these findings really mean, and whether the seeming effect of religiosity on students performance is really about religion, or a result of other underlying factors.

My latest research underscores that religion has a powerful but mixed impact. Intensely religious teens who some researchers call abiders are more likely than average to earn higher GPAs and complete more college education. By religious intensity, I refer to whether people see religion as very important, attend religious services at least once a week, pray at least once a day, and believe in God with absolute certainty. Theological belief on its own is not enough to influence how children behave they also need to be part of a religious community. Adolescents who see an academic benefit both believe and belong.

On average though, abiders who have excellent grades tend to attend less selective colleges than their less religious peers with similar GPAs and from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds.

The takeaway from these findings is not meant to encourage people to become more religious or to promote religion in schools. Rather, they point to a particular set of mindsets and habits that help abiders succeed and qualities that schools reward in their students.

Religious landscape

People of any religion can demonstrate religious intensity. But the research in my book God, Grades, and Graduation: Religions Surprising Impact on Academic Success centers on Christian denominations because they are the most prevalent in the U.S., with about 63% of Americans identifying as Christian. Also, surveys about religion tend to reflect a Christian-centric view, such as by emphasizing prayer and faith over other kinds of religious observance. Therefore, Christian respondents are more likely to appear as highly religious, simply based on the wording of the questions.

Based on a 2019 Pew survey and other studies, I estimate that about one-quarter of American teenagers are intensely religious. This number also accounts for peoples tendency to say they attend religious services more than they actually do.

The abider advantage

In my book, I examined whether intensely religious teens had different academic outcomes, focusing on three measures: secondary school GPA; likelihood of completing college; and college selectivity.

First, I analyzed survey data collected by the National Study of Youth and Religion, which followed 3,290 teens from 2003 to 2012. After grouping participants by religious intensity and analyzing their grades, I found that on average, abiders had about a 10 percentage-point advantage.

For example, among working-class teens, 21% of abiders reported earning As, compared with 9% of nonabiders. Abiders were more likely to earn better grades even after accounting for various other background factors, including race, gender, geographic region and family structure.

Then working with survey measurement expert Ben Domingue and sociologist Kathleen Mullan Harris, I used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to see how more and less religious children from the same families performed. According to our analysis, more intensely religious teens earned higher GPAs in high school, on average, even compared with their own siblings.

But why?

Scholars like sociologist Christian Smith have theorized that increased religiosity deters young people from risky behaviors, connects them to more adults and provides them more leadership opportunities. However, I found that including survey measures for these aspects of teens lives did not fully explain why abiders were earning better GPAs.

To better understand, I went back to the National Study of Youth and Religion, or NSYR, and analyzed 10 years of interviews with over 200 teens, all of whom had been assigned individual IDs to link their survey and interview responses.

Many abiders made comments about constantly working to emulate and please God, which led them to try to be conscientious and cooperative. This aligns with previous research showing that religiousness is positively correlated with these traits.

Studies have underscored how habits like conscientiousness and cooperation are linked with academic success, in part because teachers value respect. These traits are helpful in a school system that relies on authority figures and rewards people who follow the rules.

Post-graduation plans

Next, I wanted to know more about students college outcomes, starting with where they enrolled. I did this by matching the NSYR data to the National Student Clearinghouse to get detailed information about how many semesters of college respondents had completed, and where.

On average, abiders were more likely to earn bachelors degrees than nonabiders, since success in high school sets them up for success in college as also shown by my analyses of siblings. The bump varies by socioeconomic status, but among working-class and middle-class teens, abiders are more than 1 to 2 times more likely to earn a bachelors degree than nonabiders.

Another dimension of academic success is the quality of the college one graduates from, which is commonly measured by selectivity. The more selective the institutions from which students graduate, the more likely they are to pursue graduate degrees and to secure high paying jobs.

On average, abiders who earned As graduated from slightly less selective colleges: schools whose incoming freshman class had an average SAT score of 1135, compared with 1176 at nonabiders.

My analysis of the interview data revealed that many abiders, especially girls from middle-upper-class families, were less likely to consider selective colleges. In interviews, religious teens over and over mention life goals of parenthood, altruism and serving God priorities that I argue make them less intent on attending as highly selective a college as they could. This aligns with previous research showing that conservative Protestant women attend colleges that less selective than other women do because they do not tend to view colleges main purpose as career advancement.

Grades without God

Being a good rule follower yields better report cards but so can other dispositions.

My research also shows that teens who say that God does not exist earn grades that are not statistically different from abiders grades. Atheist teens make up a very small proportion of the NSYR sample: 3%, similar to the low rates of American adults who say they dont believe in God.

In fact, there is a strong stigma attached to atheism. The kinds of teens who are willing to go against the grain by taking an unpopular religious view are also the kinds of teens who are curious and self-driven. NSYR interviews revealed that rather than being motivated to please God by being well behaved, atheists tend to be intrinsically motivated to pursue knowledge, think critically and be open to new experiences. These dispositions are also linked with better academic performance. And unlike abiders, atheists tend to be overrepresented in the most elite universities.

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What do students beliefs about God have to do with grades and going to college? - The Edwardsville Intelligencer

Are sleeping disorders and anxiety/overthinking, signs of depression?

Yes, they can be. Depression-related ruminations often result in insomnia and anxiety. But it also important to realise that there are many other causes for anxiety (e.g. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, phobias) and sleep problems (e.g. sleep apnea) besides depression. Treating depression can sometimes relieve all these associated symptoms.

Depression affects both theists and atheists but initial studies do suggest prayer can be an effective treatment for depression. And there is growing evidence that spiritual lifestyle practices improve not only our psychological feelings but may also impact our genes, stress response, immunity and chromosomal biology. If you are an atheist, then try finding an activity like volunteering that gives you meaning and purpose in life or practice meditation these can also be equally protective.

When life doesn't seem worth living anymore, it may seem that the only way to find relief is through suicide. When you're feeling this way, it may be hard to believe, but you do have other options. Take a step back and separate your emotions from your actions for the moment.

Recognise that depression and hopelessness can distort your perceptions and reduce your ability to make good decisions.

Realise that suicidal feelings are the result of treatable problems.

Act as if there are other options instead of suicide, even if you may not see them right now.

Dont hold yourself back and share your concerns with your loved ones.

Get immediate help if you feel youre having troubles coping with these thoughts.

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I wrote this article about fifteen years ago, and it first appeared in the May/June 2007 issue ofThis Rock magazine (now called Catholic Answers Magazine). It was one of three articles on the theological virtues and apologetics, the other two being An Apologetic of Hope (Oct. 2006) and Why Believe? An Apologetic of Faith (Dec. 2007). Consider it a Valentine for all those who believe and all those who are skeptical.

Love and the Skeptic

The greatest of these, wrote the Apostle Paul, is love (1 Cor. 13:13). Many centuries later, in a culture quite foreign to the Apostle to the Gentiles, the singer John Lennon earnestly insisted, All we need is love.

Different men, different intents, different contexts. Even different types of love. You hardly need to subscribe to People magazine or to frequent the cinema to know that love is the singularly insistent subject of movies, songs, novels, television dramas, sitcoms, and talk showsthe nearly monolithic entity known as pop culture. We are obsessed with love. Or love. With or without quotation marks, its obvious that this thing called love occupies the minds, hearts, emotions, lives, and wallets of homo sapiens.

Yet two questions are rarely asked, considered, contemplated: Why love? And, what is love? These arent just good questions for philosophical discussionsthese are important, powerful questions to use in talking to atheists and skeptics, for the question of love will ultimately lead, if pursued far and hard enough, to the answer of God, who is Love.

What is This Thing Called Love?

One man who spent much time and thought considering the why and how of love was Pope John Paul II. Man cannot live without love, he wrote in Redemptor Hominis, his first encyclical. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it (10).

That is a statement both St. Paul and John Lennon could agree with, for it states something that is evident to the thoughtful person, whether Christian or otherwise: I need love. I want to love. I am made for love.

But what is love?

Many profound worksby luminaries including the Church Fathers, Aquinas, John of the Cross, Karol Wojtyla, and Pope Benedict XVIhave considered this question at great length and with intense detail. They have plumbed the depths of the various types of lovefamilial, sexual, and agape. Ill start with the basic brushstrokes of a definition of love between humans. The Thomist Josef Pieper, in his essential book On Love, wrote that this love is personal, active, and evaluating. It gauges what is beautiful, right, andespeciallygood, and affirms that it is such. Love, Pieper states, in articulating a philosophical understanding, is therefore a mode of willing. To confirm and affirm something already accomplishedthat is precisely what is meant by to love (On Love II).

How Wonderful that You Exist!

But what is willed by loving? When we say to another: It is good that you exist, that you are!what do we mean? The question is not nearly as abstract or obtuse as it might sound, for it does serious damage to the flippant claim that man is able to make a meaning, for love is not about making something ex nihilo, but the recognition and affirmation of what already is. Or, put another way, in seeing the good of another, we choose to embrace and treasure that good.

So Pieper makes an essential distinction: For what the lover gazing upon his beloved says and means is not: How good that you are so (so clever, useful, capable, skillful), but: Its good that you are; how wonderful that you exist! (On Love II). This seemingly simple point has profound ramifications, for it is an affirmation of what is. It involves the recognition that something outside of myself is objectively good and worthy of my love. Because reality is knowable and has objective meaningnot shifting, subjective meaninglove is possible and can be known. This, of course, raises the question: Where does the objective meaning of love ultimately originate from if not from myself? It is a question routinely ignored by skeptics, but worth asking of both those who deny Gods existence and those who reject the existence of objective truth: If your love for your spouse or family is subjective and of a here today, gone tomorrow sort, what meaningful, lasting value does it really have?

The true lover, Pieper argues, intuitively understands, even if not with precise logic, that an affirmation of the beloveds goodness would be pointless, were not some other force akin to creation involvedand, moreover, a force not merely preceding his own love but one that is still at work and that he himself, the loving person, participates in and helps along by loving (On Love II).

Human love, therefore, is an imitation, a reflection, of the divine love that created all that is, including each of us. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, in Deus Caritas Est, there is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternitya reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence (5). Even Sartre, who is not known for being happy about much of anything, remarked in Being and Nothingness, This is the basis for the joy of love . . .; we feel that our existence is justified (3.I).

Grateful to No One in Particular

It is here that Pieper makes a significant connection, proffering (as even Sartres remark suggests) that all love must contain some element of gratitude. But gratitude is a reply, he argues, it is knowing that one has been referred to something prior, in this case to a larger frame of universal reference that supersedes the realm of immediate empirical knowledge (On Love II).

This is noteworthy because there are atheists and skeptics who insist that it is perfectly logical, even laudable, to be grateful. Recently, The Philosophers Magazine ran a piece titled, Thank Who Very Much?, written by Ronald Aronson, Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wayne State University. It opened with a rather honest and blunt assessment of the situation faced by atheists and agnostics:

Living without God today means facing life and death as no generation before us has done. It entails giving meaning to our lives not only in the absence of a supreme being, but now without the forces and trends that gave hope to the past several generations of secularists. . . . By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern faith that human life is heading in a positive direction has been undone, giving way to the earlier religious faith it replaced, or to no faith at all.

So, what to do? Aronson maintains a stiff upper lip, exhorting his fellow disbelievers to shape a satisfying way of living in relation to what we can know and what we cannot know and so forth. Noting that Christianity and Judaism tend to be filled with gratitude since they believe in a personal God, he offers a rather startling suggestion, worth considering at length:

But there is an alternative to thanking God on the one hand and seeing the universe as a cosmic lottery or as absurd on the other. An alternative to being grateful to a deity or to ignoring such feelings altogether. Think of the suns warmth. After all, the sun is one of those forces that make possible the natural world, plant life, indeed our very existence. It may not mean anything to us personally, but the warmth on our face means, tells us, and gives us a great deal. All of life on Earth has evolved in relation to this source of heat and light, we human beings included. We are because of, and in our own millennial adaptation to, the sun and other fundamental forces. My moment of gratitude was far more than a moments pleasure. It is a way of acknowledging one of our most intimate if impersonal relationships, with the cosmic and natural forces that make us possible.

Why Does It All Exist?

We can be grateful, I suppose, for Aronsons suggestion but still find it unconvincing. His notion of an intimate if impersonal relationship is, at best, paradoxical, and at worst, illogical. It is an attempt to assign meaning to something (creation) whose value has already been denied (since the world and our lives are the accidental offspring of molecular chaos). If I understand his proposition correctly, man should extend personal, relational reaction in response to a reality that is not only impersonal, but possessing no personal basis or value. And then we are stop there, without contemplating, Where did all of this come from? Why does it even exist?

Aronson recognizes this problem and appeals not only to our gratitude to larger and impersonal forces, but to mans dependence on the cosmos, the sun, nature, past generations of people, and human society. Which still does not explain why the cosmos, the sun, and nature exist, or why they exist so as to sustain human life. Strip away the sincere intentions and we are still left with a simple fact: Its not enough. The vast majority of people down through time have never found it enough to extend an intimate and personal note of gratitude to impersonal, biological forces that do not care about us or love us. Responding in gratitude to the sun, the fallow earth, the dewy meadow, the complexity of DNA is either sentimental neo-paganism or points to mans natural knowledge that Someone must be responsible for those lovelyand love-revealingrealities. Here, then, is another possible point of discussion with skeptics of every stripe and type: Are you grateful to be alive? If so, does it make sense to be grateful to immaterial forces and objects that dont care at all about your existence?

The novelist and essayist Walker Percy, a former atheist who believed in his youth that science would provide the answers to all questions and problems, impatiently dismissed the grateful, but to no one position in his rollicking self-interview, Questions They Never Asked Me:

This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, Scientific humanism. That wont do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight; i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything else. (417)

Aronson, like many skeptics, puts on a brave face, but ultimately settles for too little. His philosophical approach is merely a more sophisticated version of the skeptics crude belief: Create your own meaning. Yes, he essentially says, I readily admit that the universe is diverse and full of unbelievable phenomena, but at the end of the day I conclude it still has no meaning other than that which I give it. Ironically, it is the skeptic who takes an illogical leap of faith. Fortunatelyor rather, providentiallyfaith does not have to be the enemy of reason, as long as it is faith in the right Person.

Love is of God

The most convincing explanation for human love is divine love. As Benedict explains so well in Deus Caritas Est, Christianity carefully distinguishes between divine love and human love, but also recognizes that the latter results from the former. On one hand, man cannot know and grasp the theological virtue of love by his natural powers. Yet by his nature man is drawn toward God even through human loveespecially through human love. And it is the Christian storythe Christ storythat makes sense of mans hunger to love and to be loved. The great surprise is that Gods love is most fully revealed in the death of the God-man, Jesus Christ, on a cross, which was the culmination of the great scandal of the Incarnation and was validated by the great mystery of the Resurrection.

In the mystery of the Cross love is at work, wrote Pope John Paul II in Dominum et Vivificantem, that love which brings man back again to share in the life that is in God himself (41). This love allows man to participate in the life of the Triune God, who is love (1 John 4:16). The perfect love in and of the Trinity is the source of love and the home of love. The Sons redemptive work of love unites us to himself, the Holy Spirit perfects our will in love and makes us more like the Son, and both guide man toward the loving heavenly Father. Such is the path of divine life and love, the joy of divinization. God himself, the Catechism summarizes, is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange (CCC 221).

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new, wrote Augustine in his Confessions. As a young man he had sought love in many places, things, and people. Why? Because he knew that he was made to love and be loved. Everyone, in the deepest recesses of their hearts, has the same knowledge, no matter how scarred and distorted it might be. Some have even made love their god, failing to see that we cannot love love, nor can we worship love. Lennon sang, All we need is love. More accurately, all we need is the One Who is Love. Now that is a lyric worth singing for a lifetime and beyond.

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