Homeschool News & Views

Issue 24, June 1, 2007

From Homeschool Helpers

In association with Pass It On Ministries

 

Greetings.  This is Dan White with Homeschool News & Views, issue 24, for June 1, 2007.

 

Some friends told of going to see a movie named Georgia Rule.  From what they had read the movie seemed friendly enough.  When they got to the theater, the theater was packed with families with children, especially a lot of young girls, so they thought they were going to see a family flick.  However, they had not checked the rating of the movie, which was R.  So these friends were sitting in the theater, waiting for something like My Friend Flicka to flicker on the screen, and five minutes later they were in the middle of a perverse sex scene onscreen. 

 

What about all those families in the theater and all those young kids?  That sex perversity was being seared into the minds of those young people, such things as young people used to not even know at all.

 

It used to be that you had to work to find such filth.  Now you have to work to avoid it and most people don’t do that.  What most people accept is set by what most people accept.  If everybody else thinks something’s OK, then it must be OK.  So if everybody’s watching porn, then it must be all right, especially if we don’t call it porn.

 

And America’s families and young people are continually being fed this filth, and almost everybody thinks it’s all right now.  These are modern times, you know.

 

Many Christians follow that same approach.  They may not accept quite the same filth as the society as a whole, but they follow that same method of setting behavior.  People just look to other people to determine what they should do.  They don’t do this intentionally, but that is what happens.  Then as the society changes, people bring those changes right into the churches, and the churches then change right along with the society.  That is exactly what has happened with Christian marriages.  Now that is happening with homosexuality.

 

The standard for a Christian is Christ Himself, not any other person or group of persons.  One of the great problems which churches have is that they are made up of people, and people in a church tend to look to other people in the church as their guide in what to do.  If you and I are part of a church congregation, I tend to look at what you do to guide me, and you tend to look at what I do to guide you.  Nobody says they do that, but in reality that’s usually what happens.

 

The media has filled the society with the grossest immorality, and almost everyone drinks it in without question.  They have no absolute standard.  Most people accept what most people accept.

 

Sometimes people say it is wrong to try to avoid wrong, things like R movies and smutty TV shows.

 

Many people have the inoculation theory of behavior.  They think the way to overcome evil is to be exposed to it.  They will say that Christian homeschoolers are being too protective of their children by not putting them in the evil public schools, and that when the homeschooled kids become adults they will go crazy and be overcome by the evil they have not been exposed to.

 

The inoculation theory does indeed work with vaccinations.  If you expose the body to a little bit of disease, usually in a dead form, the body will create antibodies against that little bit of disease which enable it to overcome a whole lot of disease.  Giving the body even a little bit of a disease in a vaccination has certain risks and drawbacks, but there is ample proof that vaccinations work against disease.

 

Does the inoculation theory work that way with human spiritual behavior?

 

When Adam and Eve took in a little bit of evil -- just one bite -- did that strengthen them to overcome all other evil?  Or were they overcome with the evil they chose to consume?

 

You know the answer to that.

 

What about pornography?  Does the inoculation theory work with that?

 

Most of the time for most people, when they go to a theater they get popcorn and porn.  When people are exposed to porn, as so often happens today, does that inoculate them from sexual sin?  When they view porn, does that make them want less sex sin or more sex sin? 
Are all of those young girls watching Georgia Rule more likely or less likely to do what they see in the movie?

 

Willingly being exposed to the evil of porn does not lead people to overcome that evil, but leads them to be overcome with that evil.  Millions of teen girls around the country will do what they saw Lindsay Lohan do in Georgia Rule.  Oh, by the way – Lohan was just arrested for doing drugs and drunk driving.  She is only 21 and her life is already a wreck.

 

Basically all sex criminals are addicted to porn.  Then they act out what they have filled their minds with.  In fact, it this litigious society, it seems to me that people who are sexually attacked could sue the sellers of the porn that the attacker was addicted to.  The left wingers sue Smith & Wesson when someone gets shot with one of their guns.  Surely, then, a porn merchant can get sued when one of his customers acts out the porn that the merchant sold.

 

It is a given that porn helps create sex criminals.  Obviously the inoculation theory does not work with human behavior.

 

So some say that Christian homeschoolers are being too protective of their children by not putting them in the evil public schools, and that when the homeschoolers become adults they will go crazy and be overcome by the evil they have not been exposed to.  That is exactly backwards.

 

Those young people who are not immersed in the evil – the Christian homeschoolers -- are not overcome by it, for the most part.  Those young people who are immersed – all the public schoolers -- in the evil are overcome by it, for the most part.  There will be exceptions on both sides.  There will be some who have not been immersed in the evil and yet will seek it out.  There will be some who have been immersed in the evil, yet will seek to avoid it.  However, a generation of results shows that Christian homeschool kids tend to stay Christians as adults.  Christian public school kids tend to become non-Christians as adults.  They have been overcome by the evil in which they have been immersed, just as with a porn addict.

 

You do not grow stronger spiritually by seeking the spirit of Satan.  You grow stronger spiritually by seeking the spirit of God.

 

All those families who absorb all those sex, violence, drugs and obscene language movies, TV shows and cd’s send that to the public schools with their kids. Perhaps the biggest use of the internet is for pornography and sex discussions.  Some of the online teen social sites have become interactive porn centers.  This is the defacto culture of the schools.

 

It’s no surprise that the public school culture produces high school seniors which, in a USA Today survey, thought that Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple.   Half the seniors in the study thought that Sodom and Gomorrah were a married couple.  They probably think that Beersheba is a bar and grill.

 

A nation that does not know the lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah is destined to repeat it.

 

School girls now wear brand named tee shirts with sayings on the front like, “Who needs brains when you have these?”  And “Anatomy tutor.”  The popular fashions emphasize sex, sex, sex with kids, kids, kids:  skirts that don’t go down far enough, blouses that don’t come up far enough, and suggestive writing in the most suggestive places.  It was reported that even girls from ages eight to twelve, called tweens, spent 1 ½ million dollars in 2003 on thong underwear.  Why does a ten year old girl wear thong underwear?  If you have a ten year old little girl, is a thong wrong?

 

I’m trying to imagine the face of a mother, whose little 4 foot 10 inch ten year old says, “Mother, I want some thong underwear.”  Apparently a lot of mothers go along with the thong.

 

The kids pick all this destructive sin up from the mass media, then they make that media culture the culture of the mass schools.  Since the schools have rejected God as the basis for their knowledge, they have no basis for excluding this immorality.  The schools become the spreaders of this immorality.

 

Sending a child to a public school is like sending them off to an R rated movie every day.  They do not get inoculated against that evil.  They get inculcated in that evil.

 

What can we learn from the false inoculation theory of behavior?

 

We can learn this.

 

A number of parents homeschool for a number of years, then send their kids into the public schools late in high school.  They have kept them out of the public schools to give them better values and a better education.  Then they send them into what they have avoided based on their belief in the inoculation theory – which is, they think they have taught their kids so well they will be able to go into a sea of evil and not be drowned in it.   They think they can send their Christian kids into the immoral public schools and not become immoral themselves.

 

When is that true?  When is a person so spiritual that they can be willingly immersed in evil and not be affected by it?

 

That is never true.

 

When is a person spiritually strong enough that he can expose himself to porn and not be affected by that?

 

A Christian man might tell himself that he is spiritual enough to be exposed to pornography and not be overcome by it.  That is a fool’s thinking.  Any man who exposes himself to porn at any time will be affected by it.  And any student who is dropped into the R rated culture of the public schools will be affected by it.  At the very best, they will be constantly trying to fight off all the evil around them, when with a Christian education they could spend that same time absorbing the richness of Christ.  Instead of trying to keep from sliding downhill, they can spend their time climbing uphill.  At the very worst, they’re swept right along with the crowd.

 

The inoculation theory does not work for homeschooled students who are sent back into the R rated culture of the public schools.  They will be badly affected by the R rated culture there.  In many cases, the homeschool family will be just throwing away the years they have spent homeschooling.

 

Eze 9:4

(4)  Yahweh said to him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark on the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry over all the abominations that are done in its midst.

 

Only those who sighed and cried were marked.  God’s people are not those who go along with anything and get along with everybody.  They do not tolerate evil.  They cry against evil.

 

A spiritually wise person never lets himself get immersed in evil.  In fact, whenever he is around evil, he battles against it, speaks out against it, and will not participate in it.  He does not go along with it.  You cannot attend or teach in the public schools without quietly accepting their R rated immorality.  When a Christian sends his child into the immoral public school culture, and he goes along with everything they teach, and he quietly accepts all the immoral conduct of most of the students, most of all that parent is teaching his child to tolerate evil.  And that is really all the other side needs to prevail.  That immorality that your child tolerates all around him, he will tolerate in himself.

 

This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers.  God bless the Christian homeschoolers.