Today I attended the first day of the
Manitoba Association of Christian Home Schooling's yearly
conference. This is my fourth time attending such an event, and I
have to say, I have thus far enjoyed it immensely.
I will attempt, for the benefit of
the reader as well as myself, to outline some of the things I learned
today. Being still a teenager (grumble grumble) I went to the
sessions geared towards teenagers, known as Teen Trak.
The speaker of two of the three Teen
trak sessions I attended today is named John Feakes, and he is a
Christian apologist who, I believe, runs something called CARE
ministries. Unfortunately, I forget what the acronym 'CARE' stands
for.
In his two sessions, Feakes defended
the existence of God. He asserted that apart from God, none can
really claim to know anything. We
cannot conclusively know anything apart from God. If God is taken out
of the equation, chance reigns supreme, and hence, everything is open
to question. When we know something to be an absolute fact, it is
because God has in essence declared it to be.
Feakes
pointed out the fallacy of Descartez' famous statement “I think,
therefore I am”. For although it may seem to make sense at first,
the correlation between us thinking and us being defined as absolute
entities is simply not there. Hence, we cannot base our reasoning on
such a faulty statement.
The
problem of traditional apologetics is that they can only, at best,
uphold God as a possibility, or
a probability at best.
We cannot begin with uncertain facts, and reason our way to
certainty. For apart from God, how can we determine anything to be
absolute?
The Bible contains the answer. God reveals himself to be the one in whom we find all wisdom and knowledge. In [Christ] are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. (Col. 2:3)
I
am greatly looking forward to tomorrow's sessions, which will defend
Biblical Creation, the Deity of Christ, and the Historicity of the
Bible.
The
other Teen Trak session was presented by the conference's keynote
speaker, Rick Boyer. As a father of fourteen, he spoke to us about
defending our plans to homeschool our children someday. Although it
is axiomatic that not all who were homeschooled will do so with their
own children, we as Christians have a major incentive to homeschool
our children. The public school system is becoming increasingly
Godless and hostile to those who would live out the truth. He also
spoke of the way in which the government conditions the brains of
those who go through their public school system. His concern was
that their individual needs were not being met, and they were stuck
up only with those of their own age group, which was not a good
thing. Boyer also spoke of the need for Christian leaders in this
generation to lead God's army.
What
he said contained quite a bit of truth – although the government
conditioning my children's brains to be good, obedient, and naive
citizens would not be quite as much of a concern to me as the
destruction and shipwreck of my children's faith in God that could
result because of the sheer Godlessness they would be exposed to on a
daily basis. Either reason, however, gives me sufficient incentive
to homeschool my children someday, as I know that unless the Lord
works a miracle, things in the world and in the schools will only get
worse than they already are.
Finally,
I attended the keynote session in the evening, in which Rick Boyer
shares a testimony from his own life, details of which I will not
bother to get into here.
I
look forward to tomorrow's sessions, and you will all hopefully hear
more from me about this tomorrow night or Sunday.
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