American youth are suffering in today’s society, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s not because we’ve relegated their upbringing to people who really don’t love them. For example, t
here are too many mass murdering young people using guns to kill innocent students. Who raised a child to get to this point? One young man, Elliot Roger, was at UCSB on Memorial Day Weekend 2014, and was apparently distraught because his belief system was shallow; he thought having the “good life” meant being rich and indulging in hedonistic sex practices. Where did he learn this way of thinking? He ended up murdering innocent people before ending his own life because he didn’t get what he believed he deserved. What a wretched worldview! If a person sees life as meaningless unless he gets lots of sex and lots of money, and then has a sense of “entitlement” that goes unfulfilled, will this continue to happen? I certainly hope not, but statistics show these kinds of killings are on the rise (The NY Times published an article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/us/25shooters.html?_r=0).
Yet, what we are teaching young people in our culture? A relentless advertising of all the “stuff you need,” a proliferation of porn, and a worldview that teaches kids we’re nothing but evolved monkeys. These values have indoctrinated a generation of young people in the past 25 years or more. Should we wonder why some young people go off the deep end?
Have parents relegated their kid’s upbringing to the media and the public school system primarily? Many parents are just not present with their children because they’re too busy in the “pursuit of happiness,” climbing that ever-allusive career ladder, or indulging in whatever fulfills their fantasies. They are not around to love on their kids in ways they desperately need. I think one parent should be available for their own children consistently, and this involves some sacrifice. The job of parenting has been somehow deemed less important in society, but it is one of the most important things you can do! It is something that helps to create well-adjusted human beings who contribute to society, not damage it.
We are filling our lives with meaningless sex, materialism and a drive for money. This will never satisfy! If we continue to perpetuate this worldview, mass shootings of innocent people are likely to continue because we’ve lost a sense of what it means to be human. We’ve steered away from the deeper purposes of life, and perpetuate individualism over the common good. Have we become nothing more than a random chance occurrence in an empty universe, and are simply living out the “survival of the fittest?”
If we’re just a bunch of chemical responses in a material world (which secular humanism teaches), should what is happening among our youth surprise us? As naturalism suggests, we do not have a soul or a spirit—that’s a bunch of nonsense, right? But perhaps we do have a soul, and are not just evolved monkeys! Maybe we were created by a loving God who transcends time and space, and He is simply bigger than any scientific method can shove into a test-tube. Conceivably, God created free beings who have a choice to either accept or reject Him. From what I believe, God created a world of free beings that can choose to love the author of Love itself, who are not forced, but willingly seek Him through a desperate longing to acknowledge a life of meaning and purpose, not a life full of empty material things which never truly satisfy. We were created for so much more, and I pray we will return to teaching our children this, and not relegating their upbringing to such a shallow system.
