Hamas & Public Education

Introduction

As the tensions in the Middle East rage, which is surprising given the strength and wisdom of our current Resident and Chief, we are disgusted and appalled, perhaps the better word is, terrorized by the things we have seen and heard about. Hamas is doing what Hamas does, namely murdering, raping, maiming, mutilating, and oh yeah, cutting the heads off of babies.

As our country looks at these events we are as divided as ever. There are those who are enraged at such evil, and then there are the democrats who think that Hamas is just misunderstood and are wondering why they don’t just get a Government license to kill babies. If Hamas was just free to express their sexuality then there would be peace in the Middle East like there is in our own country.

But there are those among us who are asking the question, how could this happen? How do people get so messed up and how could something like this ever be considered not only necessary, but good. If ever there was a case of calling evil good and good evil this is it. Let me briefly answer these questions by converging two topics that are irrevocably interrelated, that most deny, or at least fail to acknowledge, and that is your conception of God and education which is the most religious thing a people can do. And then conclude by pointing my finger in judgment at every parent that sends their kids to government schools. However, as I point my finger of judgment, I’ll make sure to do it in my normal jovial and winsome way as to remove all doubt, controversy or scorn.

Training Little Terrorists

A.W. Tozer opens his classic work, Knowledge of the Holy with the following, oft quoted

words:

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.

For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. This is true not only of the individual Christian, but of the company of Christians that composes the Church. Always the most revealing thing about the Church is her idea of God.”

The idea is that our understanding, our conception of God shapes our understanding of everything else. As Abraham Kuyper said,

“There’s not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not exclaim, ‘Mine’!” 

Everyone agrees with this statement, in part. They just disagree with who the Lord over all is.

As Christians we begin with the Triune God of the Bible, who is there and is not silent. Our God in one God in Three Persons; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Our God is absolute personality, and He is perfect within Himself, and His existence is neither contingent nor dependent upon anything else. There is perfect fellowship, balance, harmony, order and love within the Godhead. Because God is triune we can rightly say, which no other religion or non-religion religion can say, that our God is not only all powerful but also that He is all loving.

Because He is triune, His personhood and love per-exist all existence. Which is to say, that’s where we start from. Because God is triune and has perfect love within Himself we begin with a communicative God, which is to say that all forms of expression; language, logic, mathematics, art, music and so on are possible because of the triunity of God. And because God is absolutely holy, his character gives us the context in which all of our thinking and doing is to operate.

Which is to say that His law, and His wrath are not arbitrary or capricious but are rooted and grounded love. Of course all of this is seen most clearly and wonderfully through the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension and reign of Jesus, the second person of the Trinity whom, in love, God put forward as a propitiation for our sin (1 John 4:10).

I say all of this for a couple reasons. First, it allows me to say one more time that without the triune God of Scripture all of life and experience would be unintelligible. Which is another way of saying that to deny the triune God is simply to confess the triune God, Him being the necessarily grounds for said denial. Second, it draws a complete contrast between the Christian conception of God and all counterfeits. Your most basic presuppositions about things, your starting point for all thinking and doing, is determined by your conception about God. You have to get somewhere in order to get anywhere.

Thirdly, in drawing said contrast, it enables us to see that the Muslim and the Secularist, both begin with a god that is absolute power, but is neither personal nor loving. I’ll return to the secularist in a minute. For the Muslim, Allah is one but he is not triune. Therefore, you cannot say that he is loving in any respect without, at the same time, saying that he is dependent upon his creation, because before he created, with whom was he loving? Therefore, love cannot be intrinsic to his nature without at the same time denying that he is god, thus making him dependent.

No matter how you try to slice it our dice it, you are left with a god of raw power. Which gives warrant and justification for all manner of violence. I am not saying all Muslim’s are violent. I am saying that their conception of god is that of raw power which gives rise and warrant and justification to said violence. Is there any Islamic country that is not filled with violence and constantly engaged in power struggles within and outside its own borders?

Some may accuse me of being reductionistic here, amongst other things, and I would grant them that, at least in part, minus said other things. I understand that this is reductionistic in that there are a great multitude of other things at play here however, it is still, the whole package, founded on their conception of god, which is completely idolatrous.

So then, if our understanding of the world stems from our understanding of God, so to then, will what we teach about the world and everything contained therein. Duh, right? Therefore, it shouldn’t be hard for us to understand, that if you are raised in a system of thought that is predicated on raw power, where there is no atonement for sin, no forgiveness for sin and no removal of guilt, with no foundation for love or charity for others (again, I am not saying that certain Muslims can’t be loving or charitable, I am simply saying that they can’t account for it), that you would get extreme violence. And then when you catechize your children from the earliest stages of development that Israel and the West are horrifically evil and that peace can only take place when they are removed from the earth it isn’t hard to see how you end up with some of the most barbaric forms of violence.

Now, back to secularism and the state of public education in our own country. Education is the most religious thing that we can do, and all education is going to stem from our conception of God and His world and our place therein. If I asked people if Christian education was religious they would look at me like I was stupid because the answer is obviously contained in the question, meaning the answer in an obvious, yes. If I asked people if Jewish education was religious in nature, again, an obvious yes. What about a Muslim education, again, an obvious yes. I think you get the idea.

Now, if we switch gears and ask whether or not secular education is religious in nature, most would say, of course not. Saying something like, “Every other form of education that could possibly exist is religious in nature and obviously biased, but secular education is obviously neutral.” Even worse than this idea are Christians that agree with said sentiment.

Some may say that they can’t be religious because they don’t believe in God. Perhaps, but they do have a worldview that begins with raw, unchecked, unordered power. Their starting point for all things is chaos. And this is clearly seen in how they see the world, in Richard Dawkins words,

“at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

And of course, we can see the fruit of this being played out in real time in our country right now.

We look at Middle Eastern countries and think, “how barbaric,” but that is nothing compared secularism. Not even looking at body counts over the last hundred years, but just looking at the number of babies aborted in our country today dwarfs anything that Hamas has done. Maybe we’re disgusted by Hamas cutting the heads off babies because they are not selling the parts of the babies like Planned Parenthood. Or perhaps, we’re disgusted that Hamas is doing this on their own dime, when it would obviously make more sense to have it subsidized through tax revenue…what a backwards people they are.

You may say, that it’s not the public schools that are doing this and what does this have to do with the schools? My point is simply that the worldview that is taught in our public schools is religious and anti-Christ to the core. My point is not that everyone that attends public school commits murder through abortion or that they even support abortion any more than every Muslim is a murderer and or supports said murdering.

What I am saying is that the worldview taught in our public schools supports it and gives justification and warrant to it, because it’s god very much acts the same as Islam’s. It is no less barbaric, no less heinous, no less idolatrous just because when we do it, it is more sanitized. Maybe if Hamas was smarter they would have gone to a clinic supported by tax revenue. This would obviously make what they were doing a complex moral issue to be publicly debated for decades. If you open your eyes and look around, it is obvious that the god of chaos, which is ultimately a god of raw power, is being openly worshipped in our culture.

To then ask, how does this happen is pretty stupid. We were educated and catechized to do so through public education which is anything but neutral. Again, I am not saying that everyone acts consistently within that starting point (and praise God for that), but that is the starting point nonetheless. What is most devastating about all of this isn’t that secularists in our country would have it to be so. Of course they have no problem giving their tithes and offerings to such a project. What is horrific is that Christians continue to support public education and do so passionately. Some even do so in the name of evangelism. Which is about as violently stupid as supporting child sacrifice as a means to save children.

Most would look at Hamas, and would never, in a million years give their children to them in the name of evangelism and yet Christian parents do the equivalent of that every day in our country when they send their kids off to a public school. Now, let me be clear, because every single time I say anything regarding public education, I get emails from people telling me how wonderful Mrs. Lippy is.

My point isn’t that every teacher in a public school is a terrorist any more than every Muslim is a terrorist. My point is that they are working for, and supporting a system that supports terrorism. We just brand it differently and call it activism whether it’s BLM, Antifa, the alphabet soup Nazi’s or the Hamas sympathizers marching through our streets now.

Let me just get right down to brass-tax while being as subtle and nuanced as I can be. If you send your kids to the public schools you are sending them to little terrorist training camps. You may not agree with that because you think your school is the exception or because you know several good people still within the school system like Mrs. Lippy, but there is no doubt that the god of chaos is being worshipped in our streets and that said worshippers were catechized in the public schools. Just because Mrs. Lippy is a good person, and some kids turn out ok, is absolutely no justification for such religious training camps, and I dare say that you would be nowhere near as sympathetic towards Mrs. Lippy if she was in a Burka. Our problem is that we think that one is a religion and the other is not.

Conclusion

If you would never dream of sending your kids to a Hamas training camp, you should likewise not be sending them to a public school. If we ever, ever want to see any real effectual change in our country there needs to be a mass exodus from the public schools. If your yard is being flooded the first thing to do is turn off the hose. Until we do that, we can’t expect to see anything other than more chaos and violence.