Oh, Brave New World...

My sociology teacher daily cuts out magazine and newspaper articles to display on the front whiteboard for a variety of her classroom discussions. Usually they are about local issues such as the Harley Davidson strike or political issues such as elections. Last week, however, my senses were affronted with a glossy magazine article topped with a full color photo of a girl in her pajamas lying on a bed with a guy in a t-shirt and jeans sitting next to the bed on the floor. "What could this article be about?" I pondered to myself, but upon looking down at the title of the article itself, I was shocked to find it read something along the lines of: "College Freshmen Get Ready...For Coed Dorm Rooms."

You read that correctly -- not coed dorms, coed dorm rooms.

Our teacher did not read the entire article to us, but she ran through some of its main points. "Many" colleges and universities allegedly now offer these coed dorm rooms to students (the only one I can recall her mentioning by name was the University of Southern Maine). When completing housing registration for these universities, all one needs to do is check a box if he or she feels comfortable rooming with a member of the opposite sex. The students who were interviewed for the article were really thrilled with the "opportunity" provided to them, and the article painted the whole situation in a generally positive light.

My teacher's next step was to ask if anybody in the class would be okay with living in a coed dorm room. The classroom turned into a forest of raised hands. She then asked who would absolutely, one hundred percent not live in a coed dorm room. Only two hands went up other than my own. I was in a state of complete and total awe. There are probably somewhere around twenty six or twenty seven students in my sociology class, and only three took a stand against the article's content. Several other students who I have known to be Christians said that they would be absolutely okay with living in a coed dorm room. I was nearly experiencing trauma -- I had no clue that so many people had become so blinded and fooled by "progressive" thinking. I was called on to explain exactly why I felt the way I did on the issue, and all I could manage to blurt out was, "It's just wrong, it just is not right," before I reduced myself to fumbling around like an idiot.

Have we really allowed ourselves to be so poisoned by "free thinking" and liberalized ideas that we no longer even recognize some of the most basic wrongs in our world? Have we finally been conditioned into accepting such things that we now fail to recognize sin in our sexually charged environment? One Christian girl in my class argued against me, "It's not like it promotes having sex. If people want to do it, they'll find some way to do it anyway." That is such pathetic rationalization that it makes my stomach turn. It is brainwashing on behalf of the society in which we live. How can any intelligent, heterosexual person past puberty possibly argue that a college guy and a college girl living together does not help lead to sexual activity? Even if the two do not end up physically engaging in such activity, the mental aspect will most definitely still be there. The temptation will still be there as well (provided one's roommate is not highly unattractive). Why even put oneself in the position to be tempted in such a way?

All physical and sexual aspects of this debate aside, there is still something fundamentally wrong with a guy and a non-related girl living together outside of marriage. Even if the two students never remotely let their minds wander into sinful areas (which is impossible) and always refrain from such practices (which is highly unlikely), it still is not "okay." It just is not the way things are. Part of the joy and pleasure of marriage is being able to finally get to live with your spouse/a member of the opposite sex. That feeling -- that happiness -- would be much less fulfilling once one finally would get married. Think about it. Even if you raised your kids with the utmost moral decency, and you were absolutely sure they would never have sex before marriage, would you still allow your kid to live with a member of the opposite sex through college? I asked one girl who said she'd be okay with coed dorm rooms this very question, and her reply was basically, "It's not the same thing." She said her parents would not approve of her living with a guy in college, and she would not let her kids live in a coed dorm room, but for her it's just "different." Please...

If I only had my copy of Brave New World with me that day in class, I would have probably stood up and threw it at some body's head. Then I would have gone and picked it up and repeated the process until I threw it at every one's head. We are constantly being conditioned by society into thinking of women like "meat" (as Huxley frankly puts it). Women themselves are being conditioned into accepting it and thinking that if they do not succumb to acting like a piece of spare rib, they will not be accepted. Look around at all the people who get plastic surgery and breast implants. Look at all the girls who wear shirts and jeans so tight that no anatomical feature is left to mystery. Look at the skirts so short that -- well, we won't even go there. We are also conditioned to perceive sex as no big deal. It's all over TV. Not only in programs, but in advertisements. The Internet is just absolutely filled with it. Even if you don't go out searching for it, it often times comes looking for you in the way of spam. Sex saturates everything around us. They tell us we are just animals with "primal urges" that we cannot control. They say we can't help ourselves. That really is all that many people think we are: a line on a graph -- something you can measure and predict.

That is simply not the case, however. You can control your impulses and urges. Unfortunately, we believe them when they tell us that we cannot. I know I have gotten somewhat off topic here from my original subject, but the point is that some things are just fundamentally wrong. We do not realize they are sinful, though, because we have been conditioned into accepting them. In the world we live in, Christians do not only need to be careful about what they accept and what they don't accept -- Christians need to be actively fighting against what they know is wrong. I believe that God would agree -- the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

~Tribal

Against The Flow

My youth pastor recently started a blog for our youth group, Against The Flow. You can check it out here.

~Tribal

God - 1, Random Chance - 0

Sitting in physics class today, I was reminded of a concept learned in philosophy last year and on which a large part of the cosmological argument rests. Our physics teacher had us working on the infamous "interactive physics" packets, and we were running a computer program that simulated the orbits of three planets around a star. Our current unit of study deals with the theory of gravitation. In this computer simulation, it was necessary to adjust the distance of each planet from the sun and each planet's velocity (these being the two factors which affect gravity and the way a body orbits another). The usual result of our attempts to make the planets perfectly orbit the star was that they would either collide with the star and burn up or fly off into the vastness of space. No matter how many combinations we tried, we could not find the perfect one that would make all three planets perfectly orbit the star. Eventually the bell rang, and we needed to close the program and continue on with our school day.

So, no matter how many times we tried, we could not find the perfect combination of a.) distance from the star and b.) initial velocity of the planets to get them into orbit. We had problems getting three planets to rotate around one star without them either suffering a fiery death in the sun's flaming brilliance or freezing in the cold grandeur of space. There are nine planets in our solar system alone (ehh, well, give or take a few depending on which position you defend). I can tell you with much certainty, it would have taken us a very long time to figure out how to get nine of those things to orbit. There is certainly more than a single star that has planets rotating around it in our universe. Stars and planets removed, even stars and some galaxies orbit other celestial bodies. So pretty much there are probably billions and billions and billions of perfectly orbiting bodies in existence.

Now the question posed by all of this is that am I supposed to believe that all of these rotating bodies just happened to be the right distance away from the source of gravity pulling on them? They just all happened to be traveling at the exact speed needed so that they neither get sucked in by gravity or fly off again randomly into space? I think that takes a little more faith than I am willing to provide. If that is the result of random chance, I would sure hate to play poker with the universe.

There is a set of approximately 21 different numbers that govern the laws of the universe and that are so finely tuned that if they had been any different, either the universe would not exist or life in our universe would not exist (the anthropic principle). The atomic weight of the proton and the gravitational constant are just a couple examples of these highly important but often overlooked features of existence. The above example also illustrates this well. If earth were moving any slower than it is now, it would fall into the sun. If earth were moving any faster, it would fly off into space. Of course earth's distance from the sun plays a crucial role in this as well. Any closer to the sun and we would likely all burn up from heat (man, that would be what I call global warming). Any farther away and we would all likely freeze. Everything so perfectly exists as it does for no other reason than because it was made that way. The chance of the universe existing randomly and so it could be capable of supporting life at the same time is somewhere around the ballpark of one in ten billion...to the twenty-fourth power (now I really don't want to play the universe in poker). How anyone can claim to be a sound scientist and yet claim that existence exists by random chance is beyond my understanding. It takes more faith than I am capable of possessing.

The more rational and more factual understanding of the order of things must include some sort of intelligent designer. It is much more reasonable to believe in an omnipotent God whose ways and thinking are beyond our own than to claim that everything is an accident of near infinitely impossible proportions. So when it comes down to teaching faith versus science in school classrooms, I am pretty sure I know which side is which now. They need to stop teaching faith and start teaching some real science.

~Tribal

Searching For Charity

My girlfriend recently passed this site along to me, and I feel it worthwhile to share it with all of you as well. It is a search engine just like Google or Yahoo, only for each search you make on it, the website donates one cent to the charity of your designation. While that may not sound like too much of a deal at first, imagine all of the times you have used a search engine to find something -- in your entire life. Now imagine you telling all of your friends about it, and they all use it as well. What if they tell all of their friends about it? You get the picture. You can eventually raise some serious money for the charity of your choice just by using this website to make your internet searches. I personally recommend donating to the American Life League if you would like a suggestion, but the decision is yours. Please pass this along to as many people as you can.

www.goodsearch.com

~Tribal

Racial Profiling Quiz

A fellow groupmember on Facebook posted this website in our racial profiling forums. As funny as it is, it is the truth whether people like to hear it or not.

http://www.mideasttruth.com/profiling.html

~Tribal