Godlessness

As a prisoner in Nazi death camps during World War II, Lily Engelman vowed that—if she survived—she would one day bear witness to the systematic slaughter of Jewish people. After the war, she emigrated from Hungary to Israel, where she found sewing work in a mattress factory. She married another Hungarian-speaking Jew, Shmuel Ebert, who had fled Europe before the war.

Despite her vow, however, she found herself rarely even mentioning the Holocaust after the war. People noticed the number tattooed on her left forearm but didn’t ask questions. They could never fathom the horrors she had endured, she thought. As for her own children, she preferred not to terrify them.

Only in the late 1980s, spurred partly by questions from one of her daughters, did she begin to open up. Resettled in London, she told her story in schools, in gatherings of other survivors and even in the British Parliament. Once she sat in a London train station and talked about the Holocaust with anyone who stopped to listen. In one video recounting her experiences, she says the Holocaust was the first time factories were built to kill people.

Lily Ebert, who died October 9, 2024 at the age of 100, once summed up her mission as trying “to explain the unexplainable.” But one of her obituaries noted that according to Ebert, words really matter. As she explained, “The Holocaust didn’t start with actions. It started with words.”

Diamonds are the hardest substance on Earth, they rate a perfect 10 on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. But on other carbon-rich planets, the jury is still out. That’s because for some 40 years, scientists have theorized that diamond can squeeze into an even harder mineral known as an eight-atom body-centered cubic, or BC8. If true, this ultra-dense form of carbon would likely be found on carbon-rich exoplanets and would have both a higher compressive strength and thermal conductivity than diamond.

As a result of their exceptional toughness and resistance to wear, diamonds have found a wide range of services in various fields and daily life. Saw blades and drill bits with diamond tips may easily slice through stone, concrete, and metal. Diamonds are also essential in the electrical industry because of their resilience and resistance to heat and chemicals. Another use for diamonds is their high electrical insulation which makes it a promising material for improving the reliability of semiconductors. And let’s not forget the romantic side of diamonds. Because of their extreme hardness and brilliance diamonds are prized as jewelry which can last forever.

Simply put, the discovery of a way to make this “super-hard diamond” could be a game changer for a variety of industries. And scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of South Florida using the Frontier supercomputer are researching just such a possible pathway toward creating BC8.

Possible Preaching Angle:

While a diamond is remarkable for its incredible hardness, there is something on earth that is even harder – the human heart. The Bible warns that a hardened heart is a serious spiritual condition that can develop through unrepentant sin, pride, ingratitude, or disappointment. Only God can truly soften a hardened heart, which requires recognizing the problem, repenting of sin, and submitting to God's work in one's life.

In the early 1960s, political writer Hannah Arendt attended the trials of Adolf Eichmann, the German officer who had orchestrated much of the Holocaust. In 1934, Eichmann had been appointed to the Jewish section of the “security services” of the SS. From then on, he became deeply involved with the formulation and operation of the “final solution to the Jewish question.” He drew up the idea of deportation of Jews into ghettos, and went about gathering Jews into concentration camps with murderous efficiency. He took great pride in the role he played in the death of six million European Jews.

At his trial, Arendt expected to find a monster. Only a deranged psychopath could lend his considerable organizational skills to the mass murder of millions in Nazi Germany. What stunned Arendt was her startling discovery of a “normal” and “simple” man at the trial. The notorious architect of the Holocaust did not appear as a devil but as a banal bureaucrat doing what he was told.

Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, provides an unnerving account of unreflective living. Eichmann insisted in the trial that he was not a murderer but that his conscience demanded of him unquestioning submission to the demands of his superiors. Those demands resulted in the calculated deportation of millions of women, children, and men to their orchestrated deaths.

As Arendt reported, psychologists diagnosed Eichmann as “normal” with familial affections that were enviable. Herein lies the horror. Eichmann loved his wife; he was a good father. He was not a monster. He was banal, unremarkable, and commonplace. This “normal” man could be transformed into the abhorrent perpetrator of humanity’s grossest crimes because his banality and ambition kept him from an inner examination of his life.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Eichmann’s crimes seem far removed from anything ordinary people would commit. But without self-reflection and confession, normal people are capable of horrific evil. Psalm 36:2 (“In their blind conceit, they cannot see how wicked they really are,” NLT) has something to say about Eichmann and the banality of evil. It has something to say to us.

In a recent Scientific American article, writer John Horgan challenges the far-fetched ideas of atheistic physicists and scientists. Their existential concern is that in the distant future when man and life are no more, what then will have been the point of it all?

Horgan writes:

Our works of science, mathematics, philosophy, art, music and, yes, journalism will slip back into the void whence they came. Everything we have thought and done will be for naught. If nothing about us endures, if nothing is remembered, we might as well never have existed.

Horgan argues that many scientists actually do believe in God--which gives their lives meaning and the comfort of knowing they will never be forgotten. But leading the charge against scientists who believe is physicist Leonard Susskind who contends that when the entire universe will ultimately collapse in on itself and be destroyed, black holes will remain. All information and memory of man will be preserved in the outer membrane of a black hole.

Horgan points out how implausible and fantastic this belief is, including: “Long after our sun and even the entire Milky Way have flickered out, aliens with godlike powers … could in principle … reconstruct the lives of every person who has ever lived.”

Stressed out by the overwhelming events caused by the coronavirus in her city, New York City resident Gabrielle Bellot has a thirst for reassurance that everything will turn out all right. Bellot attempts to find comfort and encouragement apart from God.

She writes, that literature on pandemics, such as The Plague by Albert Camus, is never mainly about the disease:

Instead, it examines how humans deal with disease, how our inner lives shift as our outer worlds do. It affirms how precarious our place on this planet is. We move, unceasingly, in a dance with Lady Death. Her … perfume of necropolis grass and old flowers always near. If our life is always a dance macabre, the question is simply when she will take our hand in hers, blue and black nails against our skin, and bring us … into the sunless place beyond our life’s ballroom. Death, plague literature reminds us, is always, always with us.

We are living in a world “that seems to hang on the edge of apocalypse, climate or virus-related” tragedies. She doesn’t know what lies ahead, but “plagues, after all, will always return, whether or not we are ready. I still don’t know if I am. ... The literature of disease reveals the ghostly ballet we live in, ever so close to the grave. But it shows, too, those surprising moments of joy, love, and beauty we can find during disasters, even just briefly.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

In desperate times people search for assurance, peace, and security. In spite of the best man can do with medicine, philosophy, and technology, true peace of mind is only found in a genuine relationship with God.

Notorious cult leader Charles Manson was responsible for the brutal deaths of nine people in the summer of 1969. The murders were so gruesome and sensational that Manson has been an obsession for many people even after his death.

This summer (2019) a Quentin Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is being released. It is based partially on Manson’s crimes and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Kurt Russell, and Al Pacino. Film historian Peter Biskind writes about Manson’s appeal in an issue of Esquire.

Some examples of our fascination with Charles Manson and evil:

-At least 50 books have been written about Manson.

-Helter Skelter, the book on his investigation and trial, has sold over seven million copies. It is the “best-selling true-crime book of all time.”

-One opera entitled The Manson Family was produced.

-Eleven feature films, documentaries, and TV series focus entirely on him or he is a large part of the subject covered.

-According to the recent article in Esquire: “In addition to comic books and multiple websites devoted to him …, jewelry, coffee mugs, and T-shirts displaying his image sell on eBay, Etsy, and Amazon. ... You can download his singing and talking ringtones to your cell phone—for free.”

Biskind ends his article by delving into the essence of this fascination:

One thing Charlie liked to say was “Look straight at me and you see yourself.” Maybe one answer to the riddle of Manson and his girls is that they remind us of the ultimate unknowability of other people, even the seemingly unremarkable ones. Theirs is the story of Little Red Riding Hood in reverse: The smiling young girl at the door selling Girl Scout cookies is herself the Big Bad Wolf, and may be hiding a dagger under her cloak.

An August 2015 poll from Barna highlighted what's been called our "new moral code." Here are the percentages of those who agreed "completely" or "somewhat" with the following statements:

• "The best way to find yourself is to look within yourself"—91 percent of U.S. adults agreed; 76 percent of practicing Christians agreed.
• "People should not criticize someone else's lifestyle choices"—89 percent agreed; 76 percent of Christians agreed.
• "To be fulfilled in life, you should pursue the things you desire most"—86 percent agreed; 72 percent of Christians agreed.
• "The highest goal in life is to enjoy it as much as possible"—84 percent agreed; 66 percent of Christians agreed.
• "People can believe whatever they want, as long as those beliefs don't affect society"—79 percent agreed; 61 percent of Christians agreed.
• "Any kind of sexual expression between two consenting adults is acceptable"—69 percent agreed; 40 percent of Christians agreed.

Based on these results, David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons conclude: "The morality of self-fulfillment is everywhere, like the air we breathe. Much of the time we don't even notice we're constantly bombarded with messages that reinforce self-fulfillment—in music, movies, video games, apps, commercials, TV shows, and every other kind of media."

A.J. Swoboda writes in his book “The Glorious Dark”:

People of my generation are like Michael Jordan.

I vividly recall watching one of Jordan's six NBA championships. During one championship run, Jordan and the Bulls won it all just three short years after the murder of Jordan's father, who'd been shot repeatedly as he sat in his car, chair reclined, napping at a humble rest stop in North Carolina. After the game's final shot, a buzzing herd of reporters followed the players into the locker room to interview the victors in the celebration. There, in the corner of the room, lay Michael Jordan—the greatest basketball player in history—weeping, facedown, overcome, inconsolable, holding an orange basketball in his arms. No one knew quite what to do. Do we talk to him? Do we leave him alone? I suspect everyone knew exactly what was happening though. It was Father's Day. So there lay a broken champion with everything the world had to offer but with no father to grab him by the shoulders and say, "Son, I'm so proud of you." In the interviews, reporter after reporter asked Jordan what it was like to win everything, have everything, and be loved by everyone. For Jordan, his success, fame, and money didn't seem to matter; one could see it in his eyes. Because when he gazed around the locker room that day, he found everything he could ever dream of, but he couldn't find his dad.

Living life without God is like having everything you've ever wanted, but having no father in the room to celebrate with.

Christian philosopher J.P. Moreland has written about an encounter with a student at the University of Vermont. Moreland was speaking in a dorm when a student told him, "Whatever is true for you is true for you and whatever is true for me is true for me. If something works for you because you believe it, that's great. But no one should force his or her views on other people since everything is relative." As Moreland left, he unplugged the student's stereo and started out the door with it.

The student protested: "Hey, what are you doing? … You can't do that." Moreland replied, "You're not going to force on me the belief that it is wrong to steal your stereo, are you?" He then went on to point out to the student that, when it's convenient, people say they don't care about sexual morality or cheating on exams. But they become moral absolutists in a hurry when someone steals their things or violates their rights. That is, they are selective moral relativists.

Interestingly, a few weeks later this student became a follower of Christ because he recognized the connection between God and human dignity and rights—that God made us in his image. I like to tell churches that this could be a great new evangelistic method called, "Stealing Stereos for Jesus."

In the heart of Manhattan, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hangs a famous painting by the 16th century Spanish El Greco. The painting, titled The Vision of St. John, was completed around 1614. But it looks like it could have been painted in Paris in the early twentieth century. Its feel is not only modern but also contemporary. Evoking the opening of the Fifth Seal in Revelation 6:9-11, the martyrs who bore faithful witness to Christ are given white robes while John (it seems) looks heavenward toward the epiphany of the Lamb. The colors of the painting are themselves a startling revelation of another reality.

But the painting as we view it today is only a fragment. The canvas that hangs in the Met doesn't tell the whole story. In the course of a "restoration" project around 1880, the unfinished canvas was trimmed by at least 68 inches (or almost half the original painting). In the name of "improvement," the scene is truncated by almost half. And so, in what seems a fitting parable of modernity, the exultant arms of the Apostle John reach upward to—nothing: to the top of the frame, to the edge of the canvas. The martyrs seem to receive gifts from nowhere, and John seems to praise the nonexistent. All of them seem to look for something no longer there.

You can view the painting here: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/436576

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Secularism—Is it possible that much of our world operates the same way? In other words, we've been cut off from the Source of reality, the Source of all that is good and true. Is it possible that someone has trimmed the frame and we no longer see that there is so much more to the beautiful portrait of life? (2) God, presence of; Faith, loss of—Is it possible that we live our lives with a sense that God is really there?

In his book Vanishing Grace, Philip Yancey shares a story about a World War II veteran, currently serving as a pastor, who had participated in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. At the end of the war, as the U.S. soldiers marched through the gates of Dachau, nothing could prepare them for what they found in the boxcars within the camp. The man said,

A buddy and I were assigned to one boxcar. Inside were human bodies, stacked in neat rows, exactly like firewood. Most were corpses, but a few still had a faint pulse. The Germans, ever meticulous, had planned out the rows—alternating the heads and feet, and accommodating different sizes and shapes of bodies. Our job was like moving furniture. We would pick up each body—so light!—and carry it to a designated area. I spent two hours in the boxcar, two hours that for me included every known emotion: rage, pity, shame, revulsion—every negative emotion, I should say. They came in waves, all but the rage. It stayed, fueling our work.

Then a fellow soldier named Chuck agreed to escort twelve SS officers in charge of Dachau to an interrogation center nearby … A few minutes later the crew working in the boxcar heard bursts of a machine gun. Soon Chuck came strolling out, smoke still curling from the tip of his weapon. "They all tried to run away," he said with a leer.

When Yancey asked if anyone reported what Chuck did or took disciplinary action, the pastor said,

No, and that's what got to me. It was on that day that I felt called by God to become a pastor. First, there was the horror of the corpses in the boxcar. I could not absorb such a scene. I did not even know such Absolute Evil existed. But when I saw it, I knew beyond doubt that I must spend my life serving whatever opposed such Evil—serving God. Then came the incident with Chuck. I had a nauseating fear that the captain might call on me to escort the next group of SS guards, and an even more dread fear that if he did, I might do the same as Chuck. The beast that was within those guards was also within me.

Tim loved his brand new house. The architect, who had supervised the entire building work, designed it so it was a big, open building. The walls were massive windows and the ceiling had a huge skylight in it so the whole house was full of light. There was also a little flowerbed in the middle of it. And in the middle of the flowerbed was one little plant—a gift from the architect himself. The plant would need hardly any attention because the flowerbed had a fully plumbed-in, automated watering system. And, of course, there was plenty of light in the house. All that was required was a little pruning from time to time to keep it from getting out of control.

But Tim's friends weren't so sure about this low-maintenance approach. They encouraged Tim to water it regularly just to make sure, so he did. The magazines Tim read were full of ads for different types of artificial fertilizer recommended for that kind of plant. So Tim tried these too. And the TV gardening programs said it really wasn't a great idea to prune those plants—they needed to be able to grow naturally. So Tim followed that advice too.

And it made a difference. Within weeks, it was shooting up and the leaves were thickening. Soon it was pushing the bounds for a normal-sized houseplant. Tim didn't notice the out-of-proportion growth until the architect came for a visit. When Tim invited him in for a cup of tea he realized just what had happened. By then the change was dramatic. That little plant had started to take over the entire house. Getting around the root structure in the house involved stepping over some branches, ducking others and generally some pretty impressive acrobatics. The plant had come to dominate everything.

But the change which concerned the architect most of all was the lack of light. The foliage was so dense that barely any of that beautiful light was getting through. If you looked really carefully, you could see a kind of pale tinge around the edge of some of the leaves. But that was now about all you could see of the light. It had become a dark green. This was definitely not the architect's original design.

In an interview on The Stone, New York Time's philosophy blog, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga was asked "Why do you think so many philosophers—presumable rational people—are atheists?"

Plantinga's answer shows profound biblical and psychological insight: I'm not a psychologist, so I don't have any special knowledge here. Still, there are some possible explanations. Thomas Nagel, a terrific philosopher and an unusually perceptive atheist, says he simply doesn't want there to be any such person as God. And it isn't hard to see why. For one thing, there would be what some would think was an intolerable invasion of privacy: God would know my every thought long before I thought it. For another, my actions and even my thoughts would be a constant subject of judgment and evaluation.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Basically, these come down to the serious limitation of human autonomy posed by theism. This desire for autonomy can reach very substantial proportions … " In other words, philosophers have the same problem as everyone else—"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened" (Romans 1:21).

The hit TV show Breaking Bad follows the story of Walter White, a mild-mannered chemistry teacher who, after receiving a terminal diagnosis, turns to cooking crystal meth to provide for his family. As he develops a taste for the trade, Walt slowly turns into a bold but degenerate thug. But the show doesn't soft-peddle the consequences of sin. The show's creator, Vince Gilligan, said, "If there's a larger lesson to Breaking Bad, it's that actions have consequences …. I feel some sort of need for biblical atonement, or justice, or something."

In one of the most memorable scenes of season four, the biblical implications of Gilligan's vision become clear. Walt's younger accomplice Jesse Pinkman commits murder and then attends a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in hopes of finding relief. After Jesse shares a thinly veiled version of his crime, the group leader counsels self-acceptance. "We're not here to sit in judgment," he says, to which Jesse explodes:

Why not? Why not? … If you just do stuff and nothing happens, what's it all mean? What's the point? … So no matter what I do, hooray for me because I'm a great guy? It's all good? No matter how many dogs I kill, I just—what, do an inventory, and accept?

It's not surprising that Vince Gilligan believes in hell and judgment for human sin. He said, "I want to believe there's a heaven. But I can't not believe there's a hell."

Lawrence M. Krauss, an atheistic physicist and cosmologist and the author of A Universe From Nothing, has become popular for his colorful atheistic views. (He has appeared on shows as diverse as The Colbert Show and NPR's "Talk of the Nation.") Krauss has argued, "The laws of physics allow the universe to begin from nothing. You don't need a deity …. Zero total energy and quantum fluctuations can produce a universe." Although he also admits, "I can't prove that God doesn't exist, but I'd much rather live in a universe without one.

But what's truly interesting is where this worldview leads. If his view about the universe is right, Krauss says, "[Human beings] are just a bit of pollution. If you got rid of us, and all the stars and all the galaxies and all the planets and all the aliens and everybody, then the universe would be largely the same. We're completely irrelevant."

The Christian philosopher William Lane Craig argues that if God does not exist, there is no basis for objective right and wrong. All things are permitted. But Craig writes that "no atheist, no agnostic, can live consistently with such a view of life."

For example, Craig notes that although the atheist Richard Dawkins solemnly claims, "There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference …. We are machines for propagating DNA," he constantly makes moral pronouncements. Dawkins characterizes "Darwinian mistakes" like pity for someone unable to pay us back or sexual attraction to an infertile member of the opposite sex as "blessed, precious mistakes" and calls compassion and generosity "noble emotions." He denounces the doctrine of original sin as "morally obnoxious." He vigorously condemns such actions as the harassment and abuse of homosexuals, religious indoctrination of children, the Incan practice of human sacrifice, and prizing cultural diversity in the case of the Amish over the interests of their children. He even goes so far as to offer his own amended Ten Commandments for guiding moral behavior, all the while marvelously oblivious to the contradiction with his ethical subjectivism.

So although an atheist might say that certain acts are wrong—really wrong—if there is no God, he cannot honestly distinguish between right and wrong. So the atheist makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.

Psychiatrist Scott Peck wrote of meeting with a depressed 15-year-old named Bobby, who was increasingly troubled after his 16-year-old brother killed himself with a .22 rifle.

Peck tried to probe Bobby's mind, but got nowhere. Searching for ways to establish a bond, he asked what Bobby had received from his parents for Christmas. "A gun," Bobby said. Peck was stunned. "What kind?"

"A .22."

More stunned. "How did it make you feel, getting the same kind of gun your brother killed himself with?"

"It wasn't the same kind of gun." Peck felt better.

"It was the same gun."

Bobby had been given, as a Christmas present, by his parents, the gun his brother used to kill himself.

When Peck met with the parents, what was most striking was their deliberate refusal to acknowledge any wrongdoing on their part. They would not tolerate any concern for their son, or any attempt to look at moral reality.

Two decades later and after his conversion to Christianity, Peck wrote about this encounter:

One thing has changed in twenty years. I now know Bobby's parents were evil. I did not know it then. I felt their evil but had no vocabulary for it. My supervisors were not able to help me name what I was facing. The name did not exist in our professional vocabulary. As scientists rather than priests, we were not supposed to think in such terms.

Interestingly enough, although Peck often worked with convicted prisoners, he rarely found evil there. He finally decided … "The central defect of evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it." This definition is reflective of Jesus' far greater severity in dealing with religious leaders than with prostitutes and tax collectors.

I imagine you're familiar with the phrase "ship of fools." It was a common medieval motif used in literature and art, especially religious satire. One such satire is Hieronymus Bosch's famous oil painting by the same name, which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris. [See an image of "Ship of Fools."] This marvelous work, which is filled with symbolism, shows ten people aboard a small vessel and two overboard swimming around it. It is a ship without a pilot (captain), and everyone onboard is too busy drinking, feasting, flirting, and singing to know where on earth the waves are pushing them.

They are fools because they are enjoying all the sensual pleasures of this world without knowing where it all leads. Atop the mast hangs a bunch of dangling carrots and a man is climbing up to reach them. Yet above the carrots we find a small but significant detail: a human skull. This is the thirteenth head in the painting, unlucky in every imaginable way. The idea is that these twelve fools, who think all is perfect, are sailing right to their demise. The only pilot on board, the only figure leading the way, is death.

The hugely popular board game by Milton Bradley called The Game of Life went through the following variations—all of which reflect the changing values of our culture:

In 1798, before Milton Bradley was born, a board game from England arrived in the U.S. and became popular. It was called The New Game of Human Life. Acquiring virtues sped you through the game while vices slowed you down. Parents were encouraged to play this game with their children. The game's main point was, "Life is a voyage that begins at birth and ends at death. God is at the helm, fate is cruel, and your reward lies beyond the grave."

In 1860, Milton Bradley invented a simple board game and called it The Checkered Game of Life. The good path included Honesty and Bravery. The difficult path included Idleness and Disgrace. Industry and Perseverance led to Wealth and Success. Bradley described it as "A highly moral game … that encourages children to lead exemplary lives and entertains both old and young with the spirit of friendly competition."

In 1960, Milton Bradley Company released a commemorative edition, called simply The Game of Life. It sold 35 million copies. In this game you earn money, buy furniture, and have babies. Vices and virtues are non-existent. The winner of the game is the one who at "Life's Day of Reckoning" makes the most money and retires to Millionaire Acres.

In the 1990s Milton Bradley game designers tried to make the game less about money. They emphasized good deeds like saving an endangered species or solving a pollution problem. However, the only reward for these good deeds is cash. You can earn as much by winning at a reality TV show.

In the 2011 version, players can attend school, travel, start a family, or whatever they want. If they earn enough points, they can reward themselves with a sports car. There is no end or last square to the game. You can stop any time. The box says, "A Thousand Ways to Live Your Life! You Choose." Values are up-for-grabs—you get as many points scuba diving as you get donating a kidney. The description on the website says: "Do whatever it takes to retire in style with the most wealth at the end of the game."

Christian author and speaker Dennis Rainey recounts a story of visiting a clothing store with his 13-year-old daughter. While he was waiting inside the store for his daughter to pick out a sweater, Rainey noticed a life-sized poster of a young man who was completely nude. When Rainey asked to speak to the store's manager, the following conversation ensued:

I shared with him that I had six children and was a good customer; then I said very kindly, "This picture … I'm sorry, but it's just indecent." I thought I'd get agreement.

Instead he quipped, "I beg to differ with you, sir. By whose standards?"

A little stunned by his response, I replied with measured firmness, "By any standard of real morality …. Sir, if that picture is not indecent, then I'd like you to get in a similar pose to that guy in the picture."

He looked at the picture, looked at my daughter, then back at me …. There was a moment of silence, full of anticipation. Then he shook his head and said, "Huh-uh."

I smiled and said, "You know, it's a good thing you didn't drop your pants, because you could have been arrested for indecent exposure."

Then he replied, "If you think that's bad, you should see our catalog."

So I went over and opened the catalog. One photo showed four teenage girls in bed with a boy …. I pushed the catalog back and said, "I'd like you take my name and phone number. I'd like someone from your corporate office to give me a call."

To which he politely said, "Sir, I can take your name and address, but they're not interested. They really don't care what you think."

My response was kind but firm: "I just want you to know I'm only one customer. I'm just a daddy of six kids, but I have a lot of friends. And I want you to know that wherever I go, I'm going to use this episode as an illustration of a company that doesn't care about the future of our young people, their morality, or the future of our nation."

Dennis Rainey concluded this story with a challenge:

One of the greatest lies of our day is that one man, one husband, or one dad can't make a difference. As a single man, you can protect the innocence of a single woman you are dating by being a noble man of character …. As a husband and father, you are the warrior who has been charged with the duty of pushing back against the evil that seeks to prey on your wife, daughters, and sons. Stepping up to courageous manhood starts here. If you don't step up, who will?