Bob Dylan said...

When I read Luke 12:54-56, I was struck by an example of this verse that applies to us, today. Jesus tells us in these verses that we are able to tell the weather by looking at the clouds or the feel of the wind but we fail to see the spiritual mess that our world is in.

In our society, we give credence to those who claim to predict future climate changes that are sometimes decades away (when they can’t predict a rain storm a day away) or others who claim to eradicate poverty through government programs (remember the “War on Poverty” that President Johnson declared in the 1960's?) or feed the poor through welfare systems that breaks families apart and encourages women to have children out of wedlock and to keep those offspring fatherless. The prognosticators of weather and climate change have told us over the last four decades that we were going to freeze to death, starve from over population and now the current theory is that we are all going to burn up some time in the future.

We, as men, are constantly telling ourselves that we are in charge of our world and environment. We some how think that if we speak it, it will happen. The fact is that God’s word tells us to pay attention to our world through His eyes and His word.

I have taken the liberty of posting some results to a poll that was put in place by a magazine based in Britain. You may link to the following website to see the polling results yourself, that website address is http://www.philosophers.co.uk/poll_results.htm .

The highlights of the poll are as follows:

Poll Results 1999

Read a full analysis of these results here

And you can complete our new survey here

A training in philosophy will make you more likely to believe in Darwinian evolution, but less likely to believe that morality is culturally relative. These are two of the findings of a striking new survey conducted by The Philosphers' Magazine over the last few months.

TPM has asked nearly 1000 visitors to its internet site about their background in philosophy and their beliefs on matters ranging from God to moon-landings. The aim has been to determine what impact, if any, a training in philosophy has on the way that people view the world and their place in it. The survey has thrown up all manner of interesting patterns of belief, but the most significant in terms of the impact of a philosophical background are those to do with Darwinism and cultural relativity.

Asked whether they believe that Darwinian evolution accounts for the emergence of complex organisms (including humans), more than four-fifths of professional philosophers replied that they do. In contrast, only about 60% of philosophy students and three-quarters of interested lay-people people replied the same way. This kind of result was repeated for the question on morality, only in reverse. Nearly 50% of philosophy students claimed to believe that moral judgements can only be made in terms of the standards of specific cultures, compared with one third of philosophy graduates and less than 20% of professional lecturers who professed the same belief.

Of the other interesting patterns to emerge, perhaps the most significant is that there is a systematic difference in the beliefs reported by men and women. For example, about 15% of men profess a belief in "Karma", compared to about a third of all women. And similarly, women polled in this survey are significantly more likely to believe in a personal God and "creationism" than men. Interestingly, they are less impressed with the claims of Darwinism than are men.

Finally, students of philosophy might be interested to hear that there are patterns of belief that they broadly share with their teachers. About a third of both groups believe that there is a personal God and hardly any of either group believe that humans have not landed on the moon!

As this poll suggests, we are influenced in our beliefs by teachers, news media icons, influential people in our personal lives and of course the incidental and indoctrinated web sites and magazines.

Just because a so called “woman’s” magazine screams at you from the check out stand in the grocery store, promising to dish the dirt on a celebrity that you have never heard of or makes promises to tell you secrets on “how to please your partner” or if you are constantly lectured by Ed Begley Jr. and others regarding your impending peril as the earth heats up an amazing 1/10th of one degree in the next century and last but not least being lectured on your moral deportment by Jesse Jackson a fellow sinner and an unlikely sage to provide anyone with an example of how to live one’s life. These are the people and things that influence our beliefs. We need to stop turning to man for the answers, ‘cause he ain’t got any. God does.

In the words of Bob Dylan; “You don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.” Or do you?