Dear Foyle,
Children are our heritage from the Lord and it is our responsibility to train them in the way of the Lord for the way you train them they will go and when they are old they will never depart from it, for humility and fear of the Lord brings honour and wealth and life. Only an fool would believe that his wife and children are his property. The definition of a fool is one who says in his heart there is no God Ps 53-1. The social gospel is as useless as tits on a bull as it has no power. Whether you chose to brain wash your children with the traditions of men or the word of God be very clear they lead to different destinations as only the word of God has the power to save.
The word of God is very clear where guilt and condemnation comes from and it is not from God. Never eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for it leads to death where guilt and condemnation are found. All children are indoctrinated whether with the proactive or the reactive. By their fruit you shall know them. The fruit of God are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control against which there is no laws. The reactive fruit are sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery, idolatry and witchcraft, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy, drunkenness, orgies and the like. All which destroy and lead to death. So don't get all coy and pretend that what you promote is TRUTH.

Richie 10
In your last to post you have revealed much about yourself which does you little credit.

I challenge you to read the books of the Bible covering the Moses and Joshua eras over a few days. If you understand the contents you could only conclude that either they took their instruction from a S*it or that they were politicians who made it up as they went along to suit their political and territorial aims. I go for the latter. I accept that if he existed Jesus himself was generally a good guy but the gospels are a confused clutch of selected documents written well after the events they claim to describe and therefore inaccurate.

Both Ronald Reagan and George W Bush claimed to be guided in their political decisions by their God. Reagan was lucky with short term history going his way but George W ? America is now paying the price of the stupidity of both of them.

Your claims about the moral and ethical behaviour of convinced secularist or atheists is way off line. I associate with a few of them and the ones I know put most Christians to shame in their personal attributes and their attitude to this life and to the future of society. Firstly, they think for themselves. They tend not to be influenced by writers from the past;writers who were satisfied that the earth had four corners and that it was impossible for a human to go to the depths of the ocean.

I do not know how you relate the known age of the earth at 4.5 billion years to that of the universe at 13.7 billion but I accept that we would not be here if there had not been a supernova explosion of a previous star (sun). How did a God do that or how does acceptance of a God add to the explanation that is now accepted by most scientists who are familiar with that subject?

@ Richie 10: You make it clear that people who do not follow the teachings of Christ have no hope of amounting to anything in this life or the next. Given that there have been countless trillions of sentient humans on Earth (and who knows how many zillions on other objects in the universe), where are they now? They couldn't possibly be in Heaven, not having had the benefit of Jesus' sin-cancelling sacrifice.

Further, given that human beings have been evolving for millions of years and that they certainly evolved from a life form that you would not regard as having a soul, can you describe for us the situation that obtained when the last "human" to have not had a soul gave birth to the first human that did. It sounds like a fascinating point in our history. Perhaps if you don't have the answer, Runner might be able to offer a useful insight.

Glen,
The view that God is our creator and is at the foundation of all things, physical and spiritual, is not on the way out. That is only your wishful thinking.

When I was a lad, no one had ever heard of creationism as any kind of theory or argument. Yet today, opinion pages such as OLO are full of it. Atheists are looking over their shoulder a little concerned at its resurgence. This will only grow as science daily discovers more levels of complexity within the natural world, inexplicable to Darwin’s archaic 19th Century ideas.

We see the relevance of how ideas about human evolution over billions of years can affect ethics and behaviour. We insist to school children that they understand that our lives are the result of a chance chemical occurrence, arising from a gloomy pond, on a coagulated rock in a misplaced backwater of an otherwise cold an inhospitable void, before sending them to their next class to hear about self-esteem. If we tell them they are just a bunch of chemicals, on what basis do we tell them not to inject themselves with chemicals?

@Dan S de Merengue: We must be reading different authors. My strong impression is that the papers confirming Evolution by Natural Selection are swamping those from the declining few still trying to argue that evolution is a myth. Latterly, the ID proponents are even struggling with explaining how, if god is to be credited with designing the human being, he made such an appalling mess of the design brief.

I assume that you are an evolution denier because if you weren't, you would have accepted the need to answer my question about when humankind’s soul-less ancestors gave way to soul-equipped ones; and how god explained to the first child with a soul why he or she could aspire to an eternity in heaven but the parent couldn’t. If you are a denier, have you decided yet how to respond to the mainstream Christian churches which, I think, have now virtually all accepted that the theory of evolution is no longer deniable?

If you don’t like current theories about how life got started, just replace them with yours about how god got started. You wouldn’t, would you, try the line that god always was and always will be? That’s the one my Catechism tried on me when I was six and it didn’t even make sense then.

Richie10
Rather than preach to us, you might like to ponder the words of Isaac Asimov:
"Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly".