Dangers to Your Christian Life (Edited, updated, and re-posted on 1 October 2025)

      Almost every time I am on one of my country's interstate highways I see someone texting on their cell phone while driving at 70 miles per hour (112.654 kilometers per hour). At that speed, the vehicle will travel the length of a football field in a few seconds WHILE THE DRIVER IS LOOKING AWAY FROM THE ROAD!

    This makes as much sense as turning on a chainsaw while entering a room where a baby is sleeping and throwing the chainsaw into the air. It may end well. I may not.

    Many Christians carelessly involve themselves in activities which are just as dangerous as a chainsaw. You may not agree with this list or may be able to add to it. Every item on this list has the potential to cause serious damage to your Christian life. 

    1. Practicing Cafeteria Christianity is when you take a little bit from here and little bit from there and reject things which make you uncomfortable, just like in an old-style cafeteria line. Everyone knows that there are some things about Christianity which are difficult. Paul had some strong things to say about accepting any changes to the Gospel.

    2. Religious discrimination and actual persecution are real and severe for Christians in many countries. Do not be foolish or naïve enough to believe that this does not occur in the “culturally advanced” Western nations.

    3. Complacency in your “goodness.” This is what Jesus meant about being like lukewarm water: “I will spew you out of my mouth.”

    4. Idolatry, like celebrity worship, stepping over other people for success, pursuing worldly pleasures to the point of obsession, being obsessed by where you live, or the fine clothing and jewelry you can wear to church, or by the important people you know, and extending even to things rarely recognized as sinful, such as food snobbishness.

    5. Getting involved in petty church squabbles. Really is self, pride and often reduces to factions led by two individuals. 

    6. Being too busy: becoming neglectful of church activities because of sports or busy business schedules.

    7. Accepting secularist ideas such as “all roads lead to God” (this minimizes Christianity and makes it just one religion among many), and believing non-marital sexuality is acceptable if “love” is involved.

    8. Fear of what other people think, fear of being cancelled. Who do you love more, Jesus or your social standing?

     9. Dabbling in astrology, Tarot, Ouija boards, automatic writing, divination, the occult, and other practices: these are not harmless children's games.

    10. Attempting an exorcism. Real demon possession is probably quite rare but Jesus acknowledged that it is real.

    11. Ghost hunting. The Bible never teaches the existence of ghosts though some people in the Bible obviously did believe in them. The appearances of dead Old Testament saints may have been the saints  actually being physically present. Ghost phenomena (hauntings, poltergeists, etc.) may be evidence of the other supernatural beings mentioned in the Bible. Do you really want to find out?

   12. Practicing Hatha Yoga. The Sanskrit word "hatha" (हठ) in English translates as "force" or "will" and is a system of physical exercises. From a physical standpoint, this is probably excellent for your health, relaxation, stress reduction, and bodily flexibility. When you practice yoga, from a spiritual standpoint, you are dabbling with Hinduism, a totally different religion from Christianity.

      The word "Yoga" (योग) is derived from yug, a Sanskrit word meaning "yoking" or "union." There are numerous types of yoga, all of which are focused on yoking or quieting the mind and achieving an inner stillness which contributes to a oneness with the universe, which is sometimes described as "cosmic consciousness."    

   13. Aligning oneself with extreme political views, whether conservative or progressive. Politics is not the answer; the Gospel is the answer. "Render unto Caesar" assumes that we should have civic and political involvement but our ultimate allegiance must be to Jesus. Secular political parties are ultimately not motivated by Christian principles but by a desire for political power. A real danger is equating national patriotism with Christianity. Real change can only come by reformed hearts, not by legislation.

    14. Allowing hatred or resentment to exist in your heart toward anyone. Hatred is corrosive and is a cancer. This is not about what the other person may have done but is about who you are.

    15. Reducing your Christianity to niceness, acceptance, social work, and a fight for social justice. These are important legitimate functions of the Church but they are absolutely not the essence of Christianity. The absolute, irreducible, core of the Christian message is returning each individual to a proper relationship with Jesus, one at a time, as if they were the only one. Each person on the Earth is of absolute worth because they are bought with the blood of Jesus.

    15. These first 14 are merely a few of the dangers Christians face. 

Science in Antiquity: Part 3

 Many modern people have a very limited view of history. They can only see or think about five or ten years into the past. They see history as boring and they think of the ancients as ignorant and backward. This was actually not true. What the ancients lacked was the modern accumulation of facts. An ancient Israelite would have been very puzzled and culture-shocked to have been dumped into the modern world, but he or she could have eventually learned to drive a car or to cook on a stove or to use a cellphone.

The ancients were just as intelligent as we are but the accumulation of scientific facts had not yet reached a critical point. Human knowledge took centuries to double, fact by fact. As knowledge accumulated, the rate of accumulation began to speed up. Every answer exposes a new question. Buckminster Fuller spoke of the Knowledge Doubling Curve which was relatively flat for centuries, then began a slow climb, and then went into an explosive upward thrust.

By the end of the 19^th Century, knowledge was doubling once per century. By about 1945, the rate of doubling was about every 25 years. By 1982, the rate was about every 12-13 months. By 2020, the doubling was occurring about every 12 hours. With at least 50,000,000,000 devices now operating and with the rise of artificial intelligence, the rate may now be in minutes.

 

b.80-70 – d. after 15 BC/BCE:  Life of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, a Roman military, civil, material, mechanical, and chemical engineer, architect, artilleryman, construction expert, and acoustical engineer who designed theaters in which whispers could be heard. In Roman times he was best known for standardizing the sizes of pipes. He designed pulleys, cranes, hoists, water clocks, stucco, a type of odometer, a steam engine, catapults, and a type of central heating.

ca 99-ca 55 BC/BCE: The life of Lucretius, a Roman philosopher who was the first to describe Brownian Movement, the random movements of particles which are suspended in a gas or liquid. He speculated on what we would understand to be extraterrestrial life: “Nothing in the universe is unique and alone and therefore, in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beasts.”

120 BC/BCE: Death of the Greek scientist, Hipparchus. He was a mathematician and astronomer who compiled trigonometry tables and calculated the length of the year to within 6.5 minutes of the modern measurement. He also discovered the procession of the equinoxes. He also catalogued over 850 stars and prepared an accurate star map.

Ca 190 BC/BCE: 1. Birth of the Greek scientist, Hipparchus, in Nicaea, Bithynia (modern Iznik, Turkiye) He is a mathematician and astronomer who compiles trigonometry tables and calculates the length of the year to within 6.5 minutes of the modern measurement. He studied optics and geography, prepared star charts, and described a nova in 134 BC/BCE.

Ca 200 BC:  The Hopewell Native American Culture flourishes. (USA). They had knowledge of geometry and astronomy.