Thinking to Believe

That was the headline of the Daily Mail.  While I am fully aware that not all conservative Christian teens practice abstinence, I was stunned at the idea that there is virtually no difference in the rates of premarital sex between Christians and non-Christians.  According to Relevant magazine, a 2009 study revealed that 80% of evangelicals between 18-29 years of age had sex, compared to 88% of their peers.

Do you find this statistic shocking?  Do you have reason to doubt the validity of these findings?  Assuming the stats are accurate, I’m not too surprised myself.  In a sex-crazed culture like our own, it takes a lot of moral fortitude to abstain from sex before marriage.  And when you couple that with a culture that discourages young adults from marriage until their late 20s or early 30s, it’s no wonder so many young Evangelicals are succumbing to this sin.

UPDATE: Kevin DeYoung provides some good reasons to trust the accuracy of this report.

There has been an on-going and interesting exchange between Sam Storms and Michael Patton at Parchment and Pen on the issue of the charismata.  Storms has written a good article giving 10 bad reasons for being a cessationist and 10 good arguments for being a continuationist.  Patton has responded with his case for cessationism.  Unlike most traditional cessationists, Patton doesn’t claim that the Bible teaches cessationism per se.  He admits that his primary reasons for holding to cessationism are experiential in nature: both his own lack of experience of the charismata, as well as the general lack of the charismata throughout church history.  He calls this a de facto cessationism.  This differs from traditional cessationism in that it claims the gifts have ceased as a matter of fact, rather than because of a matter of necessity.  While he finds Biblical support to show reasons for this de facto cessation of the charismata, he does not believe the Bible demands that the charismata cease.

Storms also has a great treatment of tongues, clearing up many of the misconceptions about the gift, as well as demonstrating how so many of the non-charismatic criticisms of the gift miss the Biblical mark.  Patton also addressed tongues, which Storms’ responded to.  I would highly recommend reading through the dialogue.

PETA knows no end to their antics.  They are known for their “holocaust on a plate” and naked celebrity “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaigns.  Now they are suing to free five killer whales from Sea world on the grounds that they are persons, and should be protected by the 13^th Amendment’s prohibition against slavery.  According to one of PETA’s lawyers, Jeff Kerr, “By any definition, these orcas are slaves – kidnapped from their homes, kept confined, denied everything that’s natural to them and forced to perform tricks for SeaWorld’s profit.  The males have their sperm collected, the females are artificially inseminated and forced to bear young which are sometimes shipped away.”

If the court grants these whales personhood, then I hope authorities will immediately arrest one of the whales, Tilikum, for murder.  After all, we have video footage of him dragging a Sea World trainer under water in 2010, and held her there until she drowned.  And this wasn’t his first victim.  He killed two other people as well.  Tilikum is a mass-murderer, and I believe justice should be served.  What would a jail cell look like for a whale?  It would have to be small and full of water.  Hey, Sea World sounds like an ideal place for that.

UPDATE: On February 8, 2012 a federal judge in San Diego dismissed this lawsuit.