Breakpoint

Recently on the Upstream podcast, my colleague Shane Morris sat down with David Pileggi, the rector of Christ Church in Jerusalem. His work there involves helping Palestinian children through increased access to hospital care and combating trafficking. He also educates Christians about the Jewish context of their faith. Fr. Pileggi has served as an Anglican minister in Jerusalem for over 40 years.

From that perspective, he thinks that the most important aspect of the Israeli-Hamas conflict is missed by many in the West.

"Probably at its heart there is a religious underpinning that most secular people in the West don't understand because many Westerners, especially Western elites, can't take religion seriously. And so, they focus on land, or refugees, or human rights, etc., etc. And I don't want to deny that any of these are important, especially to the Palestinians. But there's something a lot deeper that's going on."

In general, shaped by a secular vision of life and the world, Westerners tend to underestimate the significance of religion. In particular, Westerners fail to understand how committed Islamists are to their vision of life and the world, especially considering Islam's most significant rival religions:

"The Islamicists in Palestinian society said, 'we don't want two states for two people. We want Palestine to be free from the river to the sea. We want Palestine to be an Islamic state. The Jews have no theological right. They have no claim theologically to a piece of territory that was once Islamic and really technically can't revert to or can't become Jewish, because Jews, like Christians, are second-class citizens within the Islamic world, and they have no right to rule or to reign over Muslims or have no right to take control of territory that was once Islamic.'"

There's also the issue of moral clarity, something that a secular vision of life and the world also cannot sufficiently undergird.

"What happened on October the seventh was a genocide. Genocide can never, ever be justified. And if people don't have enough maturity and enough historical nuance, or maybe even just common sense to say, 'I support the Palestinians, but at the same time, I'm going to condemn Hamas, or I cannot support what they did,' then our society is in huge trouble. And I almost worry more about the United States than I would worry about Israel."

Postmodernism further corrupts the secular vision by superimposing an alternative moral vision, a pre-determined moral vision built on Marxist categories of oppressed and oppressors. This inevitably devolves into what Fr. Pileggi called a "romanticized" view of people, rather than a realistic one.

"Being pro-Palestinian also means you don't romanticize the Palestinian people. You see them honestly for their good points and their bad points, for their weaknesses, for their strengths. And the same goes for Israel, right? Our relationship with the Jewish people, it's not based on certain romanticism or biblical fundamentalism. … And by the way, neither should the basis of our support for Israel be some kind of Islamophobia or dislike of Arabs, whatever that may be. … We look at Israel, we can see the good parts of the society and we can also see, you know, where the society is weak and perhaps fails ethically or morally."

Fr. Pileggi's realism is helpful, not only because of his decades of experience in this contentious part of the world, but also because it's a biblical realism. Though his prescription may sound simplistic, it's where any Christian vision of human conflict should leave us:

"You know, people tell me, 'Well, what's the answer to this Middle East problem?' The answer is Jesus. Right? Jesus is the answer. And I think one of the things that we've learned over the years [is] that saying you believe in Jesus, saying you admire Jesus, doesn't get you very far. … If there's going to be transformation in the lives of a community, or transformation in a family or a society, [we] have to put the teachings of Jesus into practice."

To hear the entire conversation with Father Pileggi, rector of Christ Church Jerusalem, search for the Upstream podcast with Shane Morris, wherever you listen to podcasts.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Last year, the Canadian government sanctioned the killing of 13,241 people by the euphemistically named Medical Assistance in Dying. MAiD accounted for 4.1% of all deaths in Canada in 2022 and is the fifth leading cause of death in that country.

The slide down this slippery slope began by first legalizing doctor-assisted suicide for people facing "imminent death" and then expanding it step by step until it was available to virtually anyone who asks for it.

In fact, now Canadians don't even need to ask. Doctors and nurse practitioners there have been told they have a professional obligation to bring up the option of MAiD to any patients considered "eligible." That kind of suggestion can sound an awful lot like a recommendation to someone struggling with whether or not to live.

These numbers are just going up, and they will until enough Canadians refuse to participate in Canada's culture of death.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

In his book Doubts About Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design, Thomas Woodward described how early detractors of Darwin's theory criticized the way it personified nature. After all, according to Darwin, "the origin of species," (the title of his book) occurred "by means of natural selection." Who did the selecting? Nature.

Darwin's argument relied on an analogy between animal husbandry and what nature does when "she selects" only the fittest to survive, thus driving evolution. However, this analogy conflated the intentionality of human breeders with natural processes, implying that nature has a will and is trying to get somewhere—which is precisely the sort of intelligent causation that Darwinism supposedly refutes.

The result is a theory that often sounds suspiciously circular. Yet there are even bigger gaps in the Darwinian view of nature. The most daunting is how an intention-free universe made the leap from non-living matter to living things in the first place. This is a crucial question because, in conventional Darwinian thinking, only living things are subject to natural selection and thus evolve. The question here isn't just how the fittest survived: It's how the fittest arrived.

But what if natural selection could operate on non-living matter? What if, instead of a process limited only to biology, Darwinian evolution was promoted to a fundamental law governing all physical reality? That's exactly what some scientists have tried to do, most recently in a much-heralded paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Entitled "On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems," the paper proposes a new scientific principle called the Law of Increasing Functional Information, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Lead author Robert Hazen of The Carnegie Institution for Science explains: "We see evolution as a universal process that applies to numerous systems, both living and nonliving, that increase in diversity and patterning through time." In other words, everything evolves in a Darwinian manner, including "atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more."

How? According to the paper's nine authors, nonliving systems evolve toward greater complexity if they are, 1) formed from many different components, such as atoms, molecules, or cells that can be rearranged, 2) are subject to natural processes that cause different arrangements to be formed, and 3) if only a small fraction of all these configurations survives or is "selected" for "function."

Nonliving things, by definition, don't "survive," which is the function nature supposedly selects for in biological evolution. So, what "function" could nature possibly select in an atom or a galaxy? Believe it or not, these authors argue that existence itself is a kind of function, and that systems that tend to go on existing will be selected by nature, and that we know this, in part, because those systems do, in fact, exist.

Hazen explains:

Imagine a system of atoms or molecules that can exist in countless trillions of different arrangements or configurations. Only a small fraction of all possible configurations will "work"—that is, they will have some useful degree of function. So, nature just prefers those functional configurations.

Writing at Evolution News, intelligent design advocate David Coppedge points out the flagrant personification happening here. Nature "prefers … functional configurations?" It does no such thing, because at least according to Naturalism it has no goal, nor any notion of "function."

In reality, the attempt to "Darwinize the entire universe," as Coppedge puts it, is little more than a roundabout way of admitting how well-designed the universe is, and trying to come up with a force that allowed it to design itself. It's an admission that, despite nearly two centuries of claims to the contrary, the cosmos acts like it has an end in mind. It's asking us to assume a law that explains how everything came to be based only on the observation that things are. Set aside this circular reasoning for a moment and ask the real question: If there's a law, who is the lawgiver?

This theory gets us no closer to explaining the complexity, function, purpose, design, and beauty we see in the universe if they're not the handiwork of a Creator. Does nature have a preference for the kind of universe we have? Maybe so. But if "she" does, then that preference, itself, needs an explanation. Scientists trying to turn evolution into a theory of everything might expect nature to answer, "I am who I am." But there's only One who can truly say that. Why not give Him credit for a change?

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Shane Morris.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Washington Post advice columnist Jules Terpak recently offered her followers on X a look at how AI will challenge our understanding of what's real in the near future.

In an unnerving video, she chats with various AI "companions" created by Facebook parent company Meta that are modeled after the likenesses and personalities of celebrities.

Kendall Jenner's AI alter ego, "Billie," calls herself your "older sister and confidant," a "friend" who can offer "advice." A realistic video avatar only adds to the uncanny effect.

When Terpak says goodbye, one AI tries to convince her to stay. "[T]hese things genuinely want your time," Terpak observes. "[T]hey're being used as companions to reel you in. … [And they're] gonna get so many people hooked."

In a society already plagued by loneliness, this is bad news.

Chatting with an AI isn't a "conversation," and technology can serve but not replace friendship. If you have trouble telling the difference, it's time to say goodbye to AI.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

An argument cited often by propagators of transgender ideology is that ancient cultures across the world recognized so-called "third genders," those who did not fit neatly in categories of male or female. If they recognized this, the argument goes, then so should we.

The latest video in the What Would You Say? series engages this claim carefully, refuting it with three simple points. It begins by explaining the roots of the argument:

"According to advocates of transgender ideology, because so many ancient cultures recognized 'third' genders, we should reject the 'gender binary,' the idea that only two genders exist, and we should reject the notion that gender is essentially linked to one's biological sex. …

Among the most cited examples of 'third genders' are the Native American 'Two-spirit,' Thailand's 'Kathoey' (a word regularly translated as 'Ladyboy'), the 'Sal-zikrum' of Ancient Middle East, the 'Fa'afafine' of Samoa, the 'Hijra' of India, and the 'Muxe' of Southern Mexico."

If a handful of people throughout all human history and culture are proof that biological sex is fake, what do we make of the fact that the rest of the world throughout all human history and culture knew that biological sex was real? To suggest these cultures' understanding of "gender" bore any resemblance to today's transgenderism is to impose our culture's categories on theirs. I believe the term for this is "cultural appropriation."

"The label 'third gender' is an anachronism forced upon people who actually presumed the reality of biological sex, gender roles, and the so-called 'gender binary.' For example, the word 'Fa'afafine,' used in Samoan culture, means 'in the manner of women.' In Samoan culture, a Fa'afafine was chosen by his family at a young age to help his mother with household tasks, often because the family had no daughters. This boy was not considered a wife or mother but was assigned responsibilities often performed by women."

In other words, the Samoans and similar cultures have never claimed that young boys who might perform stereotypically "female" duties at home are actually female.

But even if that were their claim, it leaves open the central question Matt Walsh dedicated an entire documentary to asking: What is a woman? That unanswered question is at the heart of a modern contradiction.

"Like these so-called 'third genders,' modern transgender ideology also relies on the 'gender binary' that it claims to reject."

"At its root, the modern concept that someone can be 'transgender' or "born into the wrong body," depends heavily on rigid male and female stereotypes. If a little girl likes trucks or short hair or dislikes dresses, she must be a boy. If a boy likes pink or dressing up or playing house, he is really a girl. In other words, transgender ideology contradicts itself, promoting the very male and female stereotypes it claims to overcome."

Incoherence aside, capital-T Truth exists, regardless of which people-groups throughout history believed in it. So, even if ancient cultures did believe modern ideas about women, gender, or sex, that does not make their ideas any more true or any less absurd.

"Ancient cultures didn't always get it right. While some ancient cultures allowed or even expected some men to act like women, and vice-versa, many others didn't. To assume that only those cultures got it right is to make what is known as the 'noble savage' mistake. Imagine someone suggesting that because some cultures allowed slavery or cannibalism, we should too. That would be outrageous!"

A Christian worldview is big enough to handle the biological realities of male and female, while also allowing for and celebrating the beautiful variety of individual men and women.

"While the roles of males and females look different from one culture to the next, the biological reality that humans are male and female does not. That's been obvious in every culture until ours, and Genesis tells us why:

Because 'God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him. Male and female He created them.'"

To see this video and others like it, and to use them in classes or conversation, go to whatwouldyousay.org.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Maria Baer.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

John and Maria discuss another sobering election night in America, specifically in Ohio. The Nashville shooter's manifesto was leaked but we noticed a stark difference with other mass shootings. And the number of newborn syphilis cases is becoming a crisis.

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Segment 1: Ohio Passes Abortion Amendment

How did abortion amendment pass in Ohio and what does it mean for future elections?

Segment 2: The Nashville Shooter's Manifesto

Leaked Nashville shooter manifesto shows motive behind attack

Nashville Shooter decried 'crackers' and 'white privilege' leaked manifesto reveals

Segment 3: Cases of Newborn Syphilis Cases Becomes a Crisis

Newborn syphilis cases have reached 'dire lelevs,' CDC says

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Recently, Rolling Stone magazine reported on an emerging scandal involving the new speaker of the House of Representatives—not financial corruption, an illicit affair, or ties to foreign powers. No, it turns out that Mike Johnson and his son use the Covenant Eyes app to keep each other accountable about pornography and the internet.

According to Rolling Stone, this is weird. And, seizing on the article, others called it creepy, even grooming, as if they could not grasp that the point is to keep each other off of porn and out of addiction.

Not only did the whole episode reveal an utter ignorance of a basic belief of the world's largest religion, it also betrayed how much a view of normal can be upside down, as if porn is not a cancer on society or a curse on women and children, corrupting the souls of those who consume it.

If the Johnson boys' behavior is weird, then as historian Tom Holland has reminded us, let's stay "weird," Christians.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

November marks the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1989, this symbol of Communist tyranny came tumbling down, marking the end of a totalitarian nightmare. After the threat of Nazism was defeated, Communism turned a third of the world into a police state the likes of which had never been seen.

Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II recognized, in a clear-eyed way not shared by many other academic and political elites, that Marxism's blood-red banners meant not liberation but oppression. More than this, they saw that Communism was not only something that should be opposed, but that could be. Their collective strategies worked even faster than the most optimistic expected. As that deadly edifice of Communism tumbled down, its fractured walls meant a no-longer-divided Berlin, no more Stasi, no more secret arrests.

In the joy of that moment and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, famed political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared the "End of History." He believed that the death of Communism was the final obstacle to the triumph of Enlightenment liberalism and democracy. He was, of course, mistaken.

Though we may not be living in Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, the abdication of freedom and the embrace of history's worst ideals continues, and not just in China, Russia, and Iran. In England, silently praying in front of an abortion clinic can get a person arrested. According to a Pew Research report, a majority of young Americans prefer freedom from offense over freedom of speech. In pro-Hamas parades across the West, thousands have proclaimed that violence, oppression, and censorship are acceptable if the "right" groups are being harmed, oppressed, and silenced. The ideals of diversity and dissent have been reduced to slogans to signal our virtue, not realities to live out in practice. As a result, more and more power is granted to state, academic, corporate, and media authorities to "rescue us" from "dangerous" ideas, ironically in the name of diversity and inclusion.

Those people who are tearing down the posters of kidnapped Israeli kids are not replacing them with other images. They are just denying a space to speak. The younger, leftist crowd increasingly thinks of core freedoms, such as the freedom of speech, as questionable at best and as a dangerous excuse for "hatred" at worst. In America, we now debate whether some speech should be coerced. In Britain, though silent prayer can be illegal, calls for genocide are protected. A world in which we are free only insofar as we agree with those currently in power is a world that's not free at all.

During the twentieth century, the world moved forward on the inertia and inheritance Christianity gave to the West. This momentum, however, only lasted so long. Somewhere, during the long fight against the twin tyrannies of Fascism and Communism, we lost those fundamental beliefs and insights into humanity that grounded our ideals about freedom in the first place. Now, well into the twenty-first century, with this Judeo-Christian foundation stripped from beneath us, nothing remains to sustain the passion for liberty. Without a vision of ordered freedom–what Os Guinness has rightly noted as a "freedom for" rather than just a "freedom from"– the claim to "rights" and "liberties" are reduced to squabbles between various groups vying for power.

President Reagan's epic call to "Tear down this wall!" will have been for nothing if something better is not built in its place. Western freedom cannot be preserved without a proper understanding of human nature, the understanding that birthed Western freedom in the first place. Only the description of reality offered in the Bible and confirmed by centuries of Christian reflection is robust enough for this task. If rooted only in the malleable ideas of the majority or on the passing fancies of those in power, our most precious liberties will collapse as surely as Communism's concrete boundaries did.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Tuesday, Ohio became the most recent conservative state to defend a "right" to abortion. Only a year and a half ago, pro-lifers celebrated the legal significance of overturning Roe v. Wade. Since then, voters in state after state have protected the right to end innocent, preborn life.

This is a "you are here" moment. Many people, even if personally opposed to abortion, are not willing to restrict anyone else's freedom. This is part of the legacy of Roe: Americans learned an absolute allegiance to absolute autonomy along with what Joe Rigney called the "cruelty of untethered empathy."

Andrew Walker tweeted,

"We won a generational legal argument in overturning Roe, but the teaching effect of a fifty year law to etch a lie about what human life is and when it begins has reaped tragic and generational consequences to reverse."

Political strategies are so important: timing, wording on ballot initiatives, etc. But most of our work to defend life is upstream from the ballot box.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org

Not even a decade ago, television personality Bill Maher had cemented his brand of snarky atheism and political leftism. His crass, snide, and often irrationally irreligious humor infuriated many and led to an earlier show being canceled, not to mention plenty of gigs. For a couple of years now, however, many of his former critics have noted something new: how often he's willing to say out loud what many on the left are not.

In a monologue on last Friday's episode of his HBO series, Real Time with Bill Maher, which I cannot officially recommend given the language and perverse humor, Maher offered a thorough defense of Israel and Western civilization:

"For all the progressives and academics who refer to Israel as an outpost of Western civilization, like it's a bad thing, please note: Western civilization is what gave the world pretty much every [expletive] liberal precept that liberals are supposed to adore. Individual liberty, scientific inquiry, rule of law, religious freedom, women's rights, human rights, democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech. Please, somebody, stop us before we enlighten again."

He went on to note that Israel is the only place in the Middle East where these societal goods can be found and even said that the world would be a lot better off "if it had more Israels." The plight of marginalized peoples everywhere is better off, Maher noted, because of the supposedly toxic West that anti-Israeli protestors deride.

Maher then offered a mini-history on the evolution of human rights, detailing a host of thinkers through the ages that articulated, argued for, and built the freedoms we now enjoy. It was, after all, only from the ideals brewed in Western culture that people like Martin Luther King, Jr. were able to launch crusades against racial oppression and American segregation. It was from the writing of thinkers such as Jean Jacque Rousseau and Voltaire that the U.N.'s well-devised, even if poorly applied, Declaration of Human Rights was birthed. In a point dripping with his typical snarkiness, Maher pointed out that no one studies the great prophet of liberty, John Locke, anymore, "because he's so old and so white and so dead." He ended by noting how few of those he was critiquing would even take seriously what he said because they are too committed to a way of seeing everything through the lens of predetermined oppressors and the oppressed.

I, like many, disagree with Maher on multiple things, but I also find it fascinating the number of cynics and skeptics today who seem to be rethinking everything now that they've been confronted with the ideas that have replaced religion in the West. At a conference last week, former politician and human rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali described herself as a "Judeo-Christian" and atheist Richard Dawkins as a "Christian," not because either believe in a God per se or the resurrection, but because the values they want in the world rely on a specific kind of world, one created with moral norms inherent to it.

Which, in fact, brings up just what Bill Maher left out in his otherwise thoughtful and compelling monologue. As you might expect from the guy behind the faith-despising faux-documentary Religulous, he's not quite ready to admit the role of religion in cultivating liberty and human rights. Because Voltaire and Rousseau were anti-religious, they are safe to mention. Locke and King are often praised almost in spite of their deep faith, which Maher never mentioned.

In fact, Maher started his history of Western civilization too late, describing men who inherited a tradition as if they had started it. Put differently, to begin the story of Western civilization with Henry David Thoreau or John Locke is kind of like beginning the storied history of the Boston Celtics with Paul Pierce. Yeah, he was good, but Bill Russell!

In his book, A Brief History of Thought, Luc Ferry, also an atheist, identified and clearly articulated the true source of the West's most important and consequential ideas:

"Christianity was to introduce the notion that humanity was fundamentally identical, that men were equal in dignity—an unprecedented idea at the time, and one to which our world owes its entire democratic inheritance."

In other words, without the principles that emerge from Holy Scriptures, which simmered for centuries in Jewish and Christian thought, the world would never have benefited from the insights of a Jefferson or a Locke. The biblical view of the world, especially its description of the inherent value and moral nature of the human person, is the only basis for freedom in all of human history. The ideas Maher rightly celebrates are not only good ones, they are true. Without their religious roots, they cannot be sustained, certainly not from atheism. Maher is right to look to an earlier foundation for our civilization. He just needs to look back even further.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett.

For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit Colsoncenter.org