To hell in the handbasket of your choice

Parade Magazine, the Sunday newspaper insert, will never be accused of heady journalism. A few recipes (all with Mr. Healthy Heart), a few puzzles, a few comic strips, and a few articles with a depth comparable to People Magazine fill its dozen-and-a-half pages. Cotton candy.

Yeah, I read it, and it usually leaves me with a gut-ache as it did today. The cover story? Spiritual America (here).

How representative is a Parade Magazine poll (from which its article was birthed) that samples 1051 folks who responded to on-line questions during five days last May? It didn't sample Wall Street Journal readers. Or New York Times readers. Come to your own conclusions.

That aside, it highlights some disturbing trends within our national fabric. Consider,

• 45% of the folks consider themselves religious


• 50% of those rarely or never attend worship services.


• Over one-quarter of respondents say they don't practice any kind of religion.


• 24% consider themselves spiritual but not religious.

These next few, all similar, are doozies:

• Only 12% believe that their religion was the only true faith.


• 59% believe that all religions are valid.


• 62% believe in an afterlife where you'll rub elbows with family and friends but only 42% believe in heaven or hell.

Things that make you say, "Hmmm..." Since the Parade writer, Christine Wicker, didn't see fit to some up the data, let me give it a whack. America's lost as a goose.

Because parents no longer feel it necessary to train up there children in the way they should go, because academicians have misapplied the scientific theory of relativity to all of life (and we bought it), because most homes in America own Bibles but few crack them, because we don't understand our Founder's original intent in establishing our nation with its form of government, and because we miscontextualize what they have said and what they have written, we have set ourselves adrift on a sea without water and without shorelines.

If it doesn't matter, why bother?!? Paul, one of the chief spokesman for the significance of Jesus Christ's death, burial, and resurrection (here), rolled his eyes and declared, "If Christ is not raised (from the dead), your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins." Paul wasn't asking folks to hope in fables. He appealed to what had taken place only a few years before.

Many declare, as the Parade poll/article suggests, that the history really doesn't matter. What matters, they puhl, is that it's good for you. Paul would have hammerd such drivilites. He had nothing for fuzzy sentimentality. He emphasized to one group, "If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied."

While we profess to understand Christianity, we are biblically illiterate. We reject historical truth and substitute the platitudes of Chopra, Albom, and Tolle. We think we know what the Bible says and findinig that unpalatable, we opt for Turkish Delight that will sour in the stomach faster than a Parade Magazine article.

Problem is, that of which we are ignorant, what the Bible declares to be true (backed by historical accuracy and correspondence to reality), declares that our eternal destiny hangs in the balance in reference to one man in history, Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish Messiah. The Son of God. No man comes to God the Father except through Him.

And no number of on-line polls will change that.