Religion “A” Versus Religion “B”
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Men Have Forgotten God
Topic : Religion
Religion is Social Penicillin
Rector says, “Religion is a social penicillin, lethal against a wide array of behavioral pathogens.” He cites a study of black inner-city youth by Harvard University’s Richard Freeman: Boys who regularly attend church are 50% less likely to commit crimes. They are 54% less likely to use drugs and 47% less likely to drop out of school. In Rector’s own studies, he finds that churchgoing boys and girls are two-thirds less likely to engage in teen sex. Regular church attendance halves the chances a woman will have a child out of wedlock.
Religion “A” Versus Religion “B”
The 19th-century Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard identified two kinds of religion—Religion A and Religion B. The first is “faith” in name only (2 Tim. 3:5). It’s the practice of attending church without genuine faith in the living Lord.
Religion B, on the other hand, is a life-transforming, destiny-changing experience. It’s a definite commitment to the crucified and risen Savior, which establishes an ongoing personal relationship between a forgiven sinner and a gracious God.
This difference explains why for many years British author C. S. Lewis had such great difficulty in becoming a Christian. Religion A had blinded him to Religion B. According to his brother Warren, his conversion was “no sudden plunge into a new life, but rather a slow, steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness—an illness that had its origins in our childhood, in the dry husks of religion offered by the semi-political churchgoing of Ulster, and the similar dull emptiness of compulsory church during our school days.”
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- Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich. - Napoleon
Men Have Forgotten God
In his 1983 acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn] recalled the words he heard as a child, when his elders sought to explain the ruinous upheavals in Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.? He added, "If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: "men have forgotten God."?
