My Personal Rants, Raves, and Ramblings

This video brings out some of the topics that I have posted on lately, namely multi-generational faithfulness (i.e. The 200 Year Plan conference), as well as my wife's post on the documentary Demographic Winter.

The video presents some very startling statistics – coming from a secular perspective concerning job globalization and education in America. I have not verified the facts presented, so I cannot say whether or not they are all 100% actual. But if they are true, they are extremely mind-boggling! Here are few “multi-generational” ones to consider:

* China and India have more “honor students” than we have children. Wonder why…
* During the course of the video, 60 babies will be born in the U.S., 244 babies in China, and 351 babies in India.



The whole worldview of the makers of this video is obviously big-government socialists. But my two-second take on it is that the past 80-100 years of socialism in America hasn’t made the cut – we are falling further and further behind the rest of the world because of our lack of vision and multi-generational faithfulness. It’s time to return to Biblical principles and practices that our country was founded on in order to remedy the obvious issues that face America today.

(click to enlarge image)

(AP Photo/Lennox McLendon, file)

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

As I began thinking about Pat Riley and his obvious esteem for his father, I wondered – “What has Pat Riley truly accomplished? Why has he been so motivated to achieve greatness in sports? Why have thoughts of his father “permeated” his life for the past 38 years?”

Then I started thinking about these experiences together I came to a few conclusions (that have been very well stated by Voddie Baucham in some of his messages – my “conclusions” are really just reinforcements of his assertions).

1) Men view and place sports as one of the highest priorities in their life – above God, Family, and Work. When is the last time you saw a man spending a full afternoon enjoying the company of his wife? Or discipling his son or daughter? No, rather than do either of those things, we will sit in lawn chairs on a street corner looking for tickets to the “greatest golf tournament”. What does this say to our children? To me it says: “Tickets to one golfing event is well worth a wasted afternoon. However your life and success in life is not – I just don’t have time for it.”

2) Men spend their entire lives trying to either accomplish greatness in sports, or live vicariously through others who do. Yes Pat Riley made a career out of his passion for basketball – and he accomplished greatness in his career. But if you really evaluate his accomplishments, how do they line up with the accomplishments of truly great men in history (George Washington, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, etc..)? Is there even a comparison at all? Pat Riley has demonstrated the ability to motivate men to consistently put a ball thru a hoop for 48 minutes on 80 nights out of the year. You decide.

Question: The obvious question is: why do men elevate sports to this level of idolatry? I believe the answer lies with fathers themselves.

To give a little background on Pat Riley; he is the son of a failed MLB baseball player, whose later mission in life was to achieve a manager’s position in the MLB (Lee Riley). Do you wonder if Pat’s devotion to the game of basketball had anything to do with the priorities that his father set and modeled for him? From what has been written about his childhood, I would assert that they more than likely did. Here are a few excerpts from “Lives of Riley”:

"It was a nice place to raise a family, but for Lee Riley, father of six and career minor leaguer finally manager of the local Phillies' farm team, Schenectady was where the trail ran cold. He hadn't come to settle down but to work his way up the ladder of the Phillies' minor league system. When he was released, it was as if he'd been shipwrecked there.

Lee's life after baseball was a disappointment his kids could feel in their bones. There was a silence in their home, and Pat, the youngest of the six, would spend the rest of his life trying to shatter it, to fill that house with warmth after the fact."
……
"Lee had missed being a star, but he thought he had a promise to come to the big team. Instead he was released in In disgust, he threw out every uniform, baseball, trophy and photo he had and went looking for work after a lifetime that had trained him only to play a game.

Said Pat years later to PBS' Charlie Rose: "I could sense his disappointment for years after that ... not being able to fulfill maybe his lifelong dream which was to manage a major league team. I never had a chance to sit down with him and talk about it. He never said, `Hey, this is what they did to me,' or `This is what happened.' I mean, even Mother rarely even talked about it. But it ended very bitterly, and he carried that with him for a long time."

As for our friend in the lawn chair, I would guess that if we were to ask him what his favorite memories were growing up, they would be related to his father and sports activities.

Conclusion: Men in America today have elevated sports to the status and level of a god. And as such, as is inherent with religion, what fathers worship so will their sons. Thus the idolatry of sport worship is passed on from generation to generation. However, not only does this worship pass on to each generation, but its fervency grows as sons try to meet or exceed their fathers devotion to this god.

This cycle of idolatry will eventually bring about great moral collapse in society. A society cannot last when each generation worships sports/personal pleasure more than the previous generation. At some point sports will become more important than anything else in society and the country will cease to generate the necessary economic products and goods needed for the society to sustain itself.

At this point you are probably asking what I have against sports? My answer: nothing… put into proper perspective, priorities, and purpose. I write all of this as a man who once worshipped the god of sports (basketball). As a young man in my teenage years my life and thoughts were consumed with sports. I lived, ate, slept, and dreamed basketball – for many years it was my life (it was my god). So I come from a perspective of understanding this idolatry.

Men must begin taking responsibility and stop seeking their own personal pleasure through sports. Instead, men must begin discipling their sons and teaching them to be men, not boys playing on the playground. Recreation is necessary and good, God has definitely given us a desire for fun and a need for exercise, but it must be achieved by God’s methods. We cannot continue to supplant the knowledge of God with our own, which we have accepted from the world around us. We must begin seeking God to enlighten our hearts and minds on this issue and forsake the knowledge of this world if we are going to relay a love for Christ to the next generation.

Hate it or love it, feel free to leave a comment. :)

Update: As I was preparing this post I came across this video. If this doesn’t clearly show the fanaticism and idolatry of sport worship, I don’t know what will.

Download mp3
mp3 source: http://www.hardinbaptist.org/

Chris and Isaac


There is nothing like hearing a room full of men singing for the glory of God! It is a glorious sound… there’s just something about men lifting their voices to their Maker in Heaven.

Scott Brown exhorting us to biblical fatherhood.

Our new friends (from The 200 Year Plan conference) Marco Morales with his son Salvador.

Florin and Chris enjoying a break from the sessions.

Steve Breagy answering questions on Child Training Principles and Practices.

Scott Brown giving us a final admonition before ending the day.

Florin is addicted to the internet and stole my phone for large portions of the drive so that he could check up on his news blogs :)

And Chris is addicted to his Starbucks :)

Additional information about the conference can be found HERE.