Insight on the News
Foretold Violence
“Adolescents are becoming a lot more violent than they were years ago,” notes James Fox, criminologist at Northeastern University. “I see a real change in the type of youngster we are getting,” states Faye Harrison, a Michigan judge. “Much harder, much quicker (to violence), much deeper into serious delinquency at an earlier age.” In fact, teenagers in a rage are “responsible for about 300 parricides (the murder of a parent) by adolescents yearly,” reports the Detroit Free Press.
Why the increase in violence among today’s youth? Fox cites greater access to weapons, television violence, and “generally, less respect for authority,” according to USA Today. Focusing on parents, David Ramirez, a Denver judge, believes that “traditional values and concepts of respect are not being passed on to children and many parents seem to have a lack of commitment to their youngsters,” notes The Denver Post.
Most timely are the words written by the apostle Paul when, centuries ago, he foretold “that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, self-assuming, . . . disobedient to parents, . . . having no natural affection, . . . without self-control, fierce, without love of goodness.” (2 Timothy 3:1-3) Christians can guard against intrusion of such attitudes by building loving family relationships, as indicated in such Bible passages as Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and Colossians 3:12-14, 18-21.
Paying the Price
“We don’t read the Bible and don’t know what is in it,” says American pollster George Gallup, Jr. “We are paying for this and suffering accordingly in the divorce rate, child abuse, drug misuse, and cheating and dishonesty at all levels of society.” According to the Gallup poll, 40 percent of Americans are in church on Sunday and about 80 percent get married in church, yet the divorce rate has tripled since 1960, the number of unmarried couples living together has increased nearly fivefold, and illegitimacy has nearly quadrupled. Abortions tripled between 1972 and 1979.
Pointing squarely to the root of the problem, Gallup observed: “Clearly the churches are not penetrating to the basic level of inculcating values. We are living religion on a very superficial level. It is not life-changing and redirecting. Nor is it biblically based.”
Yet Christianity should be life-changing, redirecting and Bible based. Originally it was. Early Christians were taught to “put away the old personality.” Paul wrote: “Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men kept for unnatural purposes, nor men who lie with men, nor thieves, nor greedy persons . . . will inherit God’s kingdom. And yet that is what some of you were.”—Ephesians 4:22; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11.
“The First Man Was a Man”
Some evolutionists claim that evolution is “one hundred percent” believable and that it is “a theory one can verify in a laboratory.” But at the Second International Congress of Human Paleontology, recently held at Turin, Italy, it was clear that many scientists still have misgivings on the matter.
Instead of confirming that evolution is “one hundred percent” believable, the congress apparently exposed major differences of opinion between scientists over when and how man evolved. Paleontologist Bernard Vandermeersch, for example, underscored the fact that, as far as man’s origins are concerned, the results of paleontology “contradict the data furnished by genetics,” which point to one common ancestor.
However, such contradictions exist only among persons who fail to accept the simple truth that God “made out of one man every nation of men, to dwell upon the entire surface of the earth.” (Acts 17:26) How did he do so? Genesis 2:7 tells us that “God proceeded to form the man out of dust from the ground and to blow into his nostrils the breath of life,” causing man to become “a living soul.”
Not surprisingly, biologist Giuseppe Sermonti, commenting on the conclusions of the congress, conceded that “all attempts to get us to descend from the trees of the apes have produced no interesting results. The first man was a man.”