Category: Culture

In 2007 in America almost 40% (39.7%) of children born are born to unwed mothers. This is an increase of 1.2% from the statistics of 2006. For those who attended government schools this means that almost 4 out of 10 (2 out of 5 if you never learned fractions) babies were born to unwed mothers. The statistic reveal that from 2005-2007 the number of children born in these United States to married women has declined 0.3% while the number born to unmarried women has mushroomed to 12.3%

Broken down by ethnicity the numbers reveal that between the years 2005-2007 that among blacks the percentage of children birthed to single moms grew from 69.9% to 71.6%. Among whites, who have considerably more ceiling room for increase, the numbers of bastard children, in terms of percentage expanded from 25.3% to 27.8% over the same two year period. The largest increase in out of wedlock births was found in the Hispanic community as their numbers jumped from 48%-51.3% of illegitimate children. If we take 1980 as a base for the Hispanic community that is a 32.3% increase from the base year 1980 when the rate was 19%.

Rutgers sociologist David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project, He writes,

“…Hispanics seem to have assimilated into the American culture of secular individualism more than the reverse. … These trends contradict earlier expectations that Hispanics might bring this nation a new wave of family traditionalism.” [The State of Our Unions |The Social Health of Marriage in America]

The growth in Hispanic illegitimacy is especially important because Hispanics keep increasing as a share of all new births, married or unmarried, up from 14.3 percent in 1990 to 23.8 percent in 2005 to 24.6 percent in 2007.

Thus, from 2005 to 2007, the number of babies born to unmarried white women dropped 2.0 percent, while the number of babies born to unmarried Hispanic women grew 15.2 percent.

If you’re under 35 I hope you’re taking Spanish classes because demography is destiny.

It’s almost two hours long. It would have been better without the sensationalism. But this video has a good deal of valuable information that Americans should be familiar with.

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=83108332192&h=5sWiN&u=wbGkZ&ref=nf

“Great scholarly minds come in two types. There are system-builders whose minds encompass huge amounts of seemingly disparate information and then pull them into a coherent whole. Then there are those who we will call puzzlers. These men take great systems, break them into scattered sections, and start pointing out the problems with every single part, often from a perspective that few people have thought of and fewer yet can follow.”

F. A. Hayek
Two Types Of Mind
Encounter — September 1975

The Post-modern age is an age of “puzzlers.” I am a puzzler to the puzzlers.

Really though, Hakey’s puzzlers have a great deal in common with his system builders. It really is the case that there is no way the puzzler can take great systems and break them into scattered sections, and point out the problems with every single part unless they are standing on some great system that allows them to critique other great systems. The puzzler can’t be a puzzler from nowhere. Before he can break up the furniture in other worldviews he has to have a superior worldview that he can puzzle from.

This observation is true about post-modernism. Post-modernism fancies itself as puzzlers on steroids and further they insist that all they are doing is puzzling. They insist that there is no such thing as a great system. But this is a clever lie. They couldn’t be the puzzlers they are if they didn’t have a great system they were using as a wrecking ball to destroy other systems. The dirty little secret for the post-modern puzzlers is that their great system is in the affirmation of negation. By insisting that there is no such thing as meta narratives the post-modern puzzlers build a meta-narrative around and dependent upon the meta-narrative that there are no meta-narratives. Their negation of meta-narrative is the affirmation of their meta-narrative.

So by ripping up great systems the post-modern puzzlers clear the playing field for their own great system.

The last few days have been a bit surreal. I walked in some areas that I don’t often walk in. I spend a great amount of time reading and studying and this week I was reminded again that it is a very broken world. I was also reminded that the people who are the most broken more often than not wouldn’t see themselves as broken. All their lives have been spent in brokenness and so all they know is brokenness.

In this last few days I was exposed to a young 20 something woman, who, while being married to one man was trying to get pregnant by a different man. What’s more she didn’t seem to think there was anything particularly bizarre about that kind of behavior. Further, she insisted to custody officials that she knew the child that was eventually conceived belonged to man ‘A’ even though she was having sex with both man ‘A’ and man ‘B’ during the time frame in question. She did not seem capable of understanding that there was no way that the custody officials could accept with certainty her “certainty” that the guy was the father who she said was the father. She seemed genuinely perplexed that her child would be required to have a paternity test.

Scenario 2 found me observing the divorce proceedings of two different couples who were 20 something and who hadn’t been married two years.

Scenario 3 found me hooking up with an old friend who is a chief lieutenant for Hugh Hefner and his “Playboy” empire. Seems he works in marketing. I found myself wondering what his ad campaign was like and then I realized I probably didn’t want to know.

Scenario 4 found me interacting with city-wide clergy. The older I get the more inclined I am to just listen, if only because I am becoming increasingly convinced that it is literally not possible for these clergy to hear what I am saying. Let’s just say that its time to clean out the Augean stables.

Scenario 5 found me in the middle of discussions of divorced people with young children. Again, I’m just listening but my heart is breaking inside of me as I listen to all the hurt roll off these people. There is so much hurt and there is so little I can do to fix the hurt. Their wounds will mark them the rest of their lives and it wounds me to think that will be so.

All of this reminds me of the Larry Norman “Only Visiting This Planet” album. The older I get the more I feel like a “resident alien.”

I know that I know that bad theology hurts people but trying to get people to see the connection between their hurt and their bad theology is a herculean task that is beyond my ability.

And that works within me my own brokenness.

Obama calls cloning ‘dangerous, profoundly wrong’

This was the headline for Obama’s decision to have the government become officially involved again in the destruction of human life through the sanctioning of fetal stem cell researching.

So, Obama approves of something grossly immoral and wicked and the headline gives us Obama standing in the gap against moral perfidy. What a joke.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to discuss with the President why he thinks cloning is wrong?