Guest article by Cowboy Bob Sorensen
We seem to be living in a time of laziness and short attention spans, and it’s getting worse. People want flashy entertainment in movies, but how often do people read books nowadays? For that matter, writers of Weblogs are being advised by experts to keep it short, and if someone writes a detailed comment on a post, they may get a tl;dr (Too long; didn’t read) reply — which was for unnecessarily long, tedious comments, but now it’s thrown around with reckless abandon, even on good comments.
I reckon that one problem is that people in today’s society are tightly scheduled, even down to the minute. Another problem that adds to shorter attention spans is social media. (Over at The Question Evolution Project (on Facebook), I can post a link to a brilliant article, and five people click “Like”. Post a picture with a funny caption, and “Likes” can be in double or triple digits.) People like the funny pictures, and the short comments on Twitter, where you can have a serious intellectual argument using bursts of 140 characters or less. Yes, I’m being sarcastic, but some people seem to expect deep stuff on Twitter. Post a link to something outstanding, you may or may not get people clicking on it. Reading and thinking are hard work, it seems.
Christians are getting involved in the short attention thing as much as our secular counterparts. If you have the time and attention, do a search of Bible verses that tell us to spend time in the Word, get good teaching, grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus, and so on. The Christian life is an ongoing process and a lifelong commitment. Some people spend no regular time reading their Bibles, in prayer, in fellowship, or getting good teaching — then they wonder why their spiritual lives are lackluster. The Christian life takes commitment.
Likewise, we can find a corral-full of Christians who claim to believe the biblical account of creation and want to refute evolution. Can they learn about the authority of Scripture, the scientific evidence that supports creation and refutes evolution, the dangers of compromise, and so on by reading a few sentences of introduction to articles and from cleverly-captioned pictures? Not hardly! The Christian life takes effort as well as commitment, and so does learning what and why we believe about creation.
Someone might say, “But people will say mean things about me, and I might be labeled as a science denier or something if I stand up for the truth of biblical creation!”
Really? Ian Juby, Ken Ham, Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, Eric Hovind, many others who are not so well known — all get “labeled”, stalked, ridiculed, misrepresented and more. We have it easy in the Western world right now, but persecution is increasing; Christians in atheist and Mohammedan countries are severely persecuted and even murdered for being Christians and even daring to own a Bible! Persecution has happened from the beginning to men and women of whom the world was not worthy. We need to pray and put on the whole armor of God, and be ready to destroy speculations against Christ. Don’t be afraid of the pronouncements of the ungodly.
It ain’t easy, old son. But we need to proclaim the truth and authority of the Bible — from the first verse. What are you doing to help spread the message?
Special thanks to Cowboy Bob for his guest post. Cowboy Bob is the father of the “Question Evolution Day” project, and is also a very active blogger at http://www.piltdownsuperman.com/
