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Product Review Summary: Excellent Read In my opinion, Ravi knocks this one out of the park. What a beautiful read. It is well written and the organization structure of what is happening to this country is priceless. The steps to the destruction of a nation are clearly laid out and reveals the America is on that perilous path.
The Glory of Kings: Developing Godly Character
Product Review Summary: Deliver us from evil If you want some answers to how the USA and the rest of the world has become so-oooo secularized. The truth is in this book. Razi is the best at intellegently making sense of all the nonsense we see today.
Product Review Summary: Getting to the Heart of Evil Ravi Zacharias looks at the West and sees a culture at risk. And he is not referring to the problems that most of us would grant - problems that, given the right combination of legislation at the national level, and enlightenment at the personal level, we can have confidence will eventually be overcome. He is talking about something far deeper, a crisis at the very heart of the West that despite our best efforts, is getting worse. It is causing a decay that, if unchecked, must eventually lead to complete cultural disintegration.
It will not do to merely list examples of evil: the Susan Smiths and Jeffrey Dahmers that make the nightly news do not get to the heart of the matter. For the problem of evil is not so much that it is "out there", but that it is "in here", in the heart of each one of us. Ravi describes several "moods of the present", philosophical commitments that we have bought in to, that not only make it impossible to diagnose and deal with the problem of evil, but actually cause us to create more wickedness and hence increase the stress upon a culture that will sooner or later have a breaking point.
The first of these moods is secularization, a worldview that banishes religion or even any notion of transcendence from public life. Secularism asserts that rational discussion is confined to "this-worldly" matters, while any view that affirms the supernatural is considered irrelevant and irrational. This has the radical effect of removing any objective point of reference for morality. No longer is morality about what is right; now it is about what we say is right. But if in fact we are designed to be in tune with a standard that is outside of us, the denial of this standard is devastating. That part of us which is sensitive to the moral law and alerts us to its violation - our sense of shame - is amputed and ultimately eradicated.
To hear that secularization results in the loss of a sense of shame could elicit the response "well, good riddance." But Ravi cautions that "shame is to the moral health of a society what pain is to the body." Neither is pleasant, but both serve as warnings that our health is in danger. Therefore, "to raise a child without shame is to raise one with no immune system against evil." When the only guide is the inner voice of reason (or unreason, for how would you tell the difference?) we are removing the brakes for the creation of a generation of sociopaths that have no conscience, with the multiplication of evil that this would bring. If this sounds incredible surely it is because the increasingly faint echoes of Christian teaching can still be heard in our culture. Secularization has been a slow process, but as it is more consistently applied, the outworking of its logical consequences are truly frightening. The horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda could become our own.
Pluralization is another mood to which our culture has subscribed, compounding the effects of secularization. For people to live peaceably next to each other in a pluralistic society, there must be trans-cultural parameters to allow for rational discussion of the conflicts that opposing worldviews inevitably bring. The United States as a melting pot where immigrants do not have to abandon their cultural distinctives, but are asked to assume such culture-transcending parameters, can forge a unified national purpose, and it becomes meaningful to talk about what it is to be "American." However, what we find with pluralization is not just the availability of a number of competing worldviews, but the insistence, in the name of tolerance that any trans-cultural parameters be abandoned; they have been replaced by a relativism which asserts that all beliefs can be equally true. Thus "if the loss of shame is the child of secularization, the loss of reason is the child of pluralization." Now, rather than a melting pot, America can more properly be pictured as a boiling cauldron. The void left by the loss of rationality in our discussions has been filled by the strong emotion of anger. Our sense of safety, both as a nation and in our neighbourhoods, seems increasingly precarious. The Los Angeles riots sparked by the Rodney King incident demonstrate the low ignition point in our culture.
Secularization and pluralization, with their denial of anything transcendent, have hamstrung our ability to deal with the problem of evil because they don't even allow it to be defined. We must abandon the radical skepticism that these moods have fostered, and allow for the possibility that there is a God and that he has spoken. The Bible claims to be God's self-disclosure, and it has much to say about his purposes for us. We learn that his law is not something to hate or to chafe under. God's moral law is a reflection of his character, and since we are made in his image, the law really is something to love because it is there to provide boundaries to keep us safe, to protect us from our habitual inclination toward evil. Of course, to simply assert that the Bible is the word of God does not make it so, and Ravi offers an appendix at the end of the book which, supplemented by a list of additional resources, give good reasons to believe that God has spoken to us in the pages of the Bible.
Such an examination is a worthy undertaking because "if the Scriptures are tested and proven to be what they claim to be, then the soul thrills at the possibility of the grandest freedom of all - deliverance from evil and restoration to unblemished beauty." We discover not only a blueprint for living, but more importantly, forgiveness of our own evil, and changed hearts that can actually seek after good. Finally, the order and sense of safety that has so long eluded us can become a reality.
Product Review Summary: A MUST for Christians to read! Every Christian in America should read this book! It is Biblically accurate, very thought provoking, and it should wake us up to how Christians are becoming more like the world. Read, heed, and pray!
Product Review Summary: Brilliant...! Leave it to Ravi Zacharias to put eloquently what all of us somehow feels. Something's gone wrong in our society -- it's not as kind as it used to be. Something's amiss. Ravi has tapped into that "something". As always, brilliantly thought out and argued. Always with compassion but never compromised.
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