Ever wonder why there’s such an incredible, almost(?) unbelievable difference in the character and maturity levels of a typical modern American teenager or twentysomething and those of the same age from 150, 200, or 300 years back? Ever wonder what it would be like to have young men and women (meaning: mid- to late-teens) who actually loved the Lord and life enough to take both seriously and act accordingly, enthusiastically building great (and ever-greater) cultures and civilizations one happy act of grace-fueled obedience at a time?
While you and I may wonder, yearn for and work toward such Gospel-fueled resurrection and purpose in life, culture and civilization, the State-managed and Corporate-owned systems in which we live are consecrated to making sure that nothing like that ever happens on American soil (or anywhere else) again. Even worse, this pagan System of systems pursues its goals these days in America with the happy, often adoring support of the vast majority of professing Christians in the land.
Consequences of the long running purposeful retardation of the masses through State-run “education” and Corporate-encouraged perpetual adolescence are finally beginning to come into focus in ways and on a scale that has even many long time apathetic and lazy Christians beginning to wake up.
That’s the silver lining of stories like one run this week by the New York Post, which asked: “How will today’s college students function once they leave campus and find the world no giant “safe space” protecting them from things they don’t want to hear?”
Good question.
The answer, of course, is that students who are discipled by such a system will not function in the real world. At least not in anything resembling a truly adult, self-sufficient sense. They will instead become increasingly dependent upon and therefore submissive to the State and systems training them up (discipling them) to be – you guessed it – dependent upon and submissive to the State- and Corporate-owned systems that take more and more control of our culture with each successive generation of State-“educated”, Corporate-programmed masses.
So while the question opening the Post piece is an important one, we need to understand it in a proper context if we are to ever finally deal with its underlying issues effectively. We need to understand that the invention of adolescence as a concept has been purposefully used to drag us down into our present pathetic cultural condition and that we will never again begin to earnestly pursue – much less attain – true adulthood until and unless we throw of the many binding shackles of “help” from the State and its advocates from all across the political spectrum. (Remember: Pagan “conservatism” is every but as eager and able to lead us into bondage and darkness as is Pagan “liberalism”; the Pagan Political Right and Pagan Political Left are two heads of the same dragon.)
With that noted, the Post article continued:
University of Pittsburgh students last week declared themselves “in danger” and “traumatized” over a provocative campus speech by righty flame-thrower Milo Yiannapoulos.
So traumatized that, at a student government hearing, they demanded to know why the school hadn’t provided on-site therapy for those who felt “invalidated” by the speech.
A speech that no one had to attend.
The student-gov president broke down in tears as she heard the complaints, then apologized for spending student funds on the guest (but said court rulings had left her no choice).
Meanwhile, two members of Bowdoin College’s student government faced impeachment for . . . attending a tequila party where some guests wore (gasp) tiny sombreros.
The school launched an instant investigation into this “act of ethnic stereotyping,” put partygoers on “social probation” and expelled the hosts from their dorms.
Welcome to ‘Merica!
This is what passes for “training for adulthood” these days…and it’s been this way for a while.
Which brings us back to the very important to rightly understand concept of adolescence. As we shared back in our first month of daily blogging here (August of 2014) in Adolescence is a Big Fat Lie:
Did you know that 18-year-olds are not children?
They’re not kids.
Well, they’re not supposed to be anyway…however much the typical American 20-something male might seem to be living evidence of the contrary.
They may well be the children and kids of their parents, and those parents are always going to lovingly consider them in that light forever, which is sweet in its own way, but that isn’t the point here.
The point is that 18-year-olds, and 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds, for that matter, do not belong in the “child” or “kiddo” category, because they are – get this – not children.
Did you know that for the vast majority of human (and even American) history, people were understood to transition out of the “child” category and into the “adult” at around the age of 13.
Weird, huh?
Weirder still when we notice the total and complete lack of an “in between” category.
Apparently, these strange creatures that dominated the first 95% or so of human history seem to have gone from being children pretty much straight on into being adults.
No “adolescence” or anything like it for thousands of years of history and then – whammo! – we get a whole new category of “development” magically whipped up out of thin air by “experts” and “professionals”.
Did these experts have a biblical worldview?
Well, of course not, but who cares, right?
I mean, they’re experts.
They’re professionals.
They went to school, read a lot of books, wrote a lot of papers, and then they did what experts like to do: They fundamentally changed the development of civilization by giving us adolescence.
So how’s that worked out?
How’s that expert-authored fundamental change gone so far?
Well…maybe a good way to answer that question is by asking another, like:
What do you expect out of a 15- or 16-year-old man or woman today?
See how strange that even just looks in print?
“15- or 16-year-old man or woman”…it’s just off. It’s out there. It’s like a really bad typo or something.
It’s missing something. Something like maybe a “young” thrown in there somewhere to, you know, blunt the edge of this utterly foreign sounding “15-year-old man” concept.
The sad and obvious fact is that we have practically zero expectation of there being such a thing as a real, responsible 15-year-old man or woman. Oh, we might well believe that such a thing as a responsible, solid, adult at the age of 15 can happen, and that it even occasionally does, but we have no expectation of such a creature being anything remotely resembling the norm.
It was the norm once upon a time in America, but not so much anymore…and that incredibly significant, culture-transforming transition in norms has been anything but accidental…
Nope, what was once a given “back in the day” is now so acutely foreign to us that even the proposition of such a thing as a real, genuine mid-teen adult as a normal thing strikes us as not only odd, but wrong. The “experts” and “professionals” that gave us adolescence have done such a fine and thorough job in programming the population (primarily through generations of State-controlled “education”) that we now see the mass propagation of true functioning adults in their mid-teen years as a tragic thing to be avoided at all costs.
We’ve been taught to believe that perpetual childhood (in the worst, most acutely unbiblical sense) is a good thing and that to do anything to curtail or [*gasp!*] correct that approach to life is to do great harm and “cheat” young folks out of cherished “experiences” – experiences that were avoided like the plague by the mid-teen men and women who helped to define this culture when it was ascending.
Now we have the presumption of at least some experimentation with drunkenness and sex in high school (if not much, much earlier).
And college?
Heh! Fuhgeddaboudit!
(If only.)
The accepted norm of “college life” in America is one of the most vibrantly damning examples of our culture’s plunge into God-hating oblivion.
The things that many professing Christians now embrace as “a part of the experience” comprise one of the most disgusting commentaries on the modern American Christian subculture -a subculture that has clearly been conformed to the world in every meaningful, measurable manner.
Just watch a ten minute clip of any accurate college-life themed movie if you can stomach it.
Okay, nevermind.
Don’t do that.
Instead, maybe seek out a 30 second movie trailer for one of those flicks on YouTube or something… No, wait!
Scratch that, too.
Most of those are way too awful to recommend, even for research purposes…which makes the point quite nicely.
Where once there were 15-year-old men and women who were raised to cherish, desire, and pursue serious, beautiful adult lives at around the age of 13, we now live in an American era in which even most professing Christians are more than happily along for the high-school/college “phase” of life in which debauchery and vulgarity of all sorts are the norm. Where once 14-year-olds were raised so that they desired to flee immaturity and destructive things, they are now encouraged (often by “Christian” parents) to pursue those very things for the sake of “experience” and even enjoyment.
For the professing Christians along for the ride on the high-school/college debasement bandwagon, they are viewed to be doing well by just being a bit less debauched than their more openly pagan pals.
They are more often than not viewed this way and encouraged accordingly by their parents and even by their churches – churches whose “gospel” is about “getting them saved” so that they can do whatever they like. These churches and their “gospel” also tend to vigorously protect their followers from any pain caused by the true Gospel confronting sin as sin and commanding repentance and obedience to the Lord.
This is the desperately tragic reality of modern American Christendom – including a great many “good, conservative” churches.
So the next time you read one of the scads of constantly emerging articles chronicling the tragi-comedic nature of our “young people” (who, in more sane times, were actually understood to be something called “adults”), don’t blame the colleges or the counselors or the progressives or the Democrats or the LGBTQRSUV advocates. Not first anyway. First blame (and pray accordingly for) the professing Christians and churches and pastors who have enabled and encouraged all of this for a very, very long time in America by trading in the everything-touching, everything-defining Gospel-fueled Great Commission for a cheap, hollow, powerless counterfeit.
Pray that we will see and repent of the pansy culture that we have modeled for a watching America (and world) to emulate.
Pray that we would finally grow up and act like the men and women that our King has commanded and equipped us to be.
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You can also help support the Fire Breathing Christian mission by checking out these books:
Stupid Elephant Tricks – The Other Progressive Party’s War on Christianity (originally published in 2012) takes a painful but much needed look at how Christ-less “conservatism” has captivated Christians and co-opted them into helping march the culture ever deeper into darkness:
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The Beginning of Knowledge: Christ as Truth in Apologetics is an approachable, easy to read introduction to Christ-centered apologetics:
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Apathetic Christianity: The Zombie Religion of American Churchianity explores the tragic true horror story of all-American dead religion masquerading as Christianity:
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On Education is a compilation of some of the most provocative and compelling Fire Breathing Christian articles on the subject of children’s education:
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There Is No “God-Given Right” To Worship False Gods is a compilation of some of the most provocative Fire Breathing Christian articles on the subject of America’s embrace of a satanic approach to religious liberty:
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Fire Breathing Christians – The Common Believer’s Call to Reformation, Revival, and Revolution is the book that first presented the FBC mission to apply the Gospel-fueled Great Commission in every realm of God’s creation:
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An alternate white cover version of Fire Breathing Christians is available:
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There is also an alternate black cover version of Fire Breathing Christians:
Finally, here are a few good intro/reminder links for those of you who are new to Fire Breathing Christian and curious about exactly what’s goin’ on ’round here:
What are you, some kind of [insert label here] or something?!
What’s with that shark-fishie graphic thing?
Intro to Fire: The Power and Purpose of the Common Believer
When the Bible gets hairy. (Or: Is it right for men to have long hair?)
And especially this one: Never forget that apart from God’s grace you and I are complete morons.
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