The Battle For Our Children...

As followers of Jesus, we know that we are supposed to train up our children in the ways of the Lord because we are commanded to in scripture. For example, Paul tells us so in his letter to the Ephesians:

Ephesians 6:4: “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”

King Solomon taught us the importance of raising children in the training and instruction of the Lord:

Proverbs 22:6: “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.”

 Even Moses understood the importance of this, and commanded the Israelites to do the same:

Deuteronomy 6:4-9: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

We know what we have to do as Followers of Jesus, but we are told all the time by our society in these modern times that it is not ok to indoctrinate your children into your religion; in other words, you're not allowed to train up your children in the way of the Lord because they are not in a position to know whether it is true or not.

In her article Do Parents Have The RightTo Force Religion on Their Kids? that appeared in The Washington Post, journalist Leslie Morgan Steiner wrote the following:

“So I wonder: Does religious freedom apply within the nuclear family? Other than tradition passed down within male-dominated cultures where wives and children were considered chattel of men, why do modern parents believe we hold the right to force our children to practice certain religious beliefs? Why don't we expose our children to multiple religions without picking one, and them let them decide for themselves as adults -- as we do with most important decisions, such as careers, spouses and where to live?

Most Western civilizations no longer force women or children to marry against their will or follow orders from the patriarchal forces in the family. Why does religion, at times, seem to be an exception? Or is sharing your religious beliefs with your children simply part of being a loving, supportive parent?”

In her blog post Stop Inviting My Kid to Church: Religion is Not For Children, blogger and presumably atheist MsJoyFG wrote the following:

“This part will be touchy for people who do not believe the same as we do and I respect that; I'll raise my kids and you can raise yours. I do not think religion is for children. I think that they should be exposed to the beliefs of all people, and while I will tell my children 'this is what Mommy and Daddy believe,' I do not expect her to believe the same thing. I'll ask Miss N what she thinks -- and she has some really amazing thoughts on the matter -- but I will not tell her she is wrong if she disagrees with me about the big beliefs.

I do not tell her she is going to hell if she does not believe as I do, that she ought to live in fear for the people in her life who do not because it is unfair to expect a child to live like that. It is not right to speak in absolutes with children because they will believe anything and everything you tell them and they are still developing the cognitive ability to sift through the logic of some claims. Case in point: Boy honestly thinks Batman is a viable career choice (after Miss N encouraged him to come up with a back up plan, he's settled on police officer/Batman).”

It's funny that MsJoyFG claims that we can't speak in absolutes about religion to children because they will believe anything you tell them, because that is exactly what our society does when it comes to Evolution and homosexuality, and people like her don't even bat an eye towards society when that happens.

In the article Why Evolution Should Be Taught to Kids that appeared in Newsweek, Mary Charmichael wrote the following:

“Britain has just made evolution a mandatory part of the curriculum for even its youngest students, and American states ought to follow. Without evolution, biology isn't really science—it's just memorization—and our kids, even the littlest ones, deserve a more interesting introduction to the natural world than that. It's time we gave it to them.

The Concord Consortium is already working on one way to teach evolution to kids—an interactive, technology-driven fourth-grade curriculum called Evolution Readiness. The group is testing the approach in classrooms in Massachusetts, Missouri, and Texas. It's purposely keeping things simple, but it's not talking down to its students. "When you're 10 years old, the time to your next birthday is a long time, so it's really hard to understand things that take place over millennia," says Horwitz, who leads the project. "So we're looking at adaptation over a few generations, not a few million years." The group is also keeping things at the macro level, leaving out discussions of the genetic change that drives evolution—which, of course, is how Darwin did things, too, since genetic science hadn't been worked out in his time.” 

You hear that? Learning about biology through purely observation is no fun, so they have to introduce this imaginative fairy tale called evolution in order to make things more exciting! On top of that, when you read the whole article, Carmichael writes that we should be teaching evolution to our children because Charles Darwin taught his children about evolution. 

Therein lies a BIG problem: If they can teach our children about evolution because Charles Darwin did, then why can't followers of Jesus train up their own children in the ways of the Lord, especially when the Lord clearly commands his followers to do so? To advocate this position is total intellectual hypocrisy.

It gets even more disturbing when we look at the article Labour’s plan to introduce LGBT education to five year olds is the best idea they’ve had, written by Eleanor Margolis for the NewStatesman:

“Labour’s plan to introduce LGBT-oriented sex education to five-year-olds is simply one of the best ideas they’ve had. Liberal parents may shrug and say, 'cool', Daily Mail readers may reel off the usual Hallmark conservatism stuff about 'loss of innocence'. But for me and all the millions of other LGBT people who know first-hand what it’s like to feel alienated at school purely because of our sexuality, this proposed policy couldn’t be more important.

For too many of us, our first introduction to anything LGBT is via playground meanness. I spent most of my childhood thinking 'gay' was a rude word. When I was five, my very accepting parents just didn’t think to tell me that it’s OK for girls to fancy girls, and I didn’t think to ask them. If my teachers had taken it upon themselves to impart that crucial nugget, even as a side note – 'A triangle has three sides. Two plus two is four. Oh, by the way, gay people are a thing and that’s fine' – things could’ve been very, very different.” 

Wait a minute! I thought that homosexuality was a sexual orientation that people were born with, that they couldn't choose to be anything else; how come we're now indoctrinating five-year-olds into it?  

It's pretty obvious what they're doing:  Much like evolution, society wants the idea of homosexuality being good and normal to be so ingrained into kids' heads when they can barely read or think for themselves that by the time that they start experiencing homosexual urges when they're a little older, they will have been taught their whole life that there's nothing wrong with homosexuality, and they won't think anything of acting on their urges.  

Fellow believers who are parents raising up kids, don't let society tell you how to raise your kids, and don't let them raise your kids.  Raise your kids up like scripture tells you to:  in the ways of the Lord.  In the future, I will be releasing a companion guide for my book Another Inconvenient Truth; the purpose of this companion guide will be to help you explain the topics of my book in a way that your five-year-old  can understand.  It will be a great tool for countering what the people in this post are doing.