John Stonestreet – Page 6

Ecclesiastes on X: Guest Column

Jun 27, 2025John StonestreetLifeBible

Why we’re not satisfied, even if we should be.

A few weeks ago, a self-described fitness enthusiast described life today this way:

Work a desk job

Grind 9–6 Lift weights to feel something

Marry someone beautiful enough

Move to suburbs

Get a dog

Have 2 kids

Drive an American SUV to Costco on weekends

Buy a house you’ll never finish paying off

Call it happiness

Is this the dream? or just a life we were sold?

The responses were varied. Many responded that, objectively speaking, the world—especially the Western part of it—is better off than it has ever been. One scientist noted that people used to live to an average age of 35, half of all kids died in childhood, even minor infections often led to death, and starving was a common human experience.

As my colleague Shane Morris observed, visit almost any old graveyard and it will be full of tombstones with only one year inscribed for both birth and death. Though miscarriages are still tragically common, deaths in infancy are increasingly rare. Only less than a century ago, nearly everyone would have had one or more siblings die in childhood. Today, our biggest health problems are from obesity, not starvation. Modern medicine, dentistry, technology, indoor plumbing, and all kinds of other things prevent and protect us from the diseases, calamities, and accidents that proved fatal in previous generations.

On the other hand, a different doom and gloom, the kind reflected in the X post above, still resonates with many. In fact, it sounds a bit like a work of poetry written almost 3,000 years ago by a man of wealth and power who learned that “having it all” isn’t all it is cracked up to be. His words are often quoted, perhaps most famously by the Byrds in their song, “Turn, Turn, Turn” and The Dave Matthews Band in “Tripping Billies.”

Ecclesiastes is easily the most depressing book in Holy Scripture. The bulk of the text is a meditation on how meaningless life is and then you die. The first chapter immediately declares that life is pointless.

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,

vanity of vanities! All is vanity.

What does man gain by all the toil

at which he toils under the sun?

…  I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.

“The Preacher” has tried a life of wisdom, a life of pleasure, and a life of wealth. None was satisfying. Everyone dies. All seems pointless. Everything we attempt to live for or build our lives around turns to dust. Within just a few generations, no one will remember our names.

With language stark and hopeless, the Preacher sounds like someone who has lost faith in God. However, the words describe life without God. The things he listed—money, pleasure, wisdom—none are bad. They’re blessings given by God for our use and joy. But none will bring us the peace, meaning, or fulfillment for which we long.

Much later, in his Confessions, Augustine of Hippo would describe why. “[Y]ou have made us for Yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.” When people complain this world is broken and unfulfilling, they miss that God’s good gifts are instead meant to point to the Giver of the gifts. They cannot fulfill the human heart because the hole in it is God-sized, not stuff-sized. We were made for bigger things. We were made for God.

A Double Standard on Terrorism: Guest Column

Jun 9, 2025John StonestreetTerrorismTerrorism

In November 2022, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured 25 others in a shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, CO. Aldrich identified as nonbinary, used they/them pronouns, had multiple violent encounters with law enforcement, threatened to kill Christians, and dabbled in the gay lifestyle. However, in a matter of hours, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and multiple other news outlets and commentators implicated Focus on the Family, either directly or indirectly, for “creating a culture” that led to this violence. A few weeks later, the campus of the ministry was vandalized with the words, “Their Blood Is On Your Hands.”

The false accusation was based on the notion of “stochastic violence,” that saying the wrong thing about a group or a behavior creates an environment that can lead to violence. Similarly, political conservatives were accused of “stochastic violence” when a homeless, mentally ill man attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer.

So far, no one has been accused of stochastic violence after Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian-born man living in Colorado Springs illegally, threw Molotov cocktails into a group of peaceful pro-Israel demonstrators while yelling, “Free Palestine!” At least 12 people were burned in the attack, including a holocaust survivor. After the attack, the father of five, who had planned on dying that day, calmly and directly revealed that he was a committed antisemitic Muslim who had been planning the attack for over a year.

The same voices that were certain that a Christian ministry which has never advocated violence in its history was responsible for the attack on Club Q seemed lost about any related motives or responsibility in this case. This, even though since October 2023, when Hamas militants killed nearly 1,200 Jews in Israel in a horrific attack, protestors on American streets and college campuses have been calling for violence on Jews everywhere. Even in Colorado Springs, in fact, some Colorado College students set up a protest village, refused to go to class, and chanted slogans that meant more than protestors realized.

And now, the chant “Globalize the Intifada” has become a reality. In just the last few weeks, two Israeli embassy workers were murdered on the street in Washington D.C., the Molotov cocktail attack was carried out in Boulder, and—in a story mainstream media outlets largely ignored—a Muslim man in Michigan plotted to massacre kids at a Jewish daycare. Thankfully, his plan was uncovered before he was able to inflict harm.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it in a post on X, “Antisemitism is not just rising, its metastasizing.” Everyone should be concerned. And yet, we are being told that what should concern us most is potential negative backlash against Muslims and Arab immigrants, not targeted violence against Jews, which is clearly on the rise.

This is a clear example of the “Critical Theory mood” that clouds the thought of secular and religious progressives. One consequence of this view is that the “good guys” and the “bad guys” of any situation are pre-determined. If violence happens against the “bad guys,” they somehow deserve it. If the “good guys” commit violence, they are justified because of how oppressed and mistreated they are.

The Critical Theory mood was already in place at Thomas McLaren School, where some of the children of the Boulder terrorist attended. When Soliman’s daughter, recently named one of the “Best and Brightest” seniors in Colorado Springs, started an Arab club at the school, school officials allowed the club to make regular announcements to the student body and meet inside where they highlighted Arab culture and occasionally discussed the Koran as part of the Muslim faith. But when a group of students opened a Decision Point chapter at the school, a Christian club for students to talk about their faith and the Bible, school officials did not allow them to meet in the building. They were forced to meet outside, even in bad weather.

When the Critical Theory mood leads to the disenfranchising of students, it’s wrong and unfair. However, the stakes are way higher when these bad ideas cloud our collective ability to recognize or speak truthfully about the dramatic increase of antisemitic violence. The reaction to the Boulder attack has been, in large part, propaganda. As Thaddeus Williams pointed out, “Propaganda offers a highly edited history that paints the most damning picture it can of a given people group … and gives us a way to blame all of life’s troubles on that damnable group and its members.”

Christians are called to be discerning and to defend truth anytime it is contested, but especially when lives are at stake. That time is now.

Trust the Science on Life: Guest Column

May 19, 2025John StonestreetAbortionAbortion, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

The slogan “trust the science” has been used for years to push any number of causes, many of them controversial, from Covid policies to transgender medical practices. Used in substitution for making an argument, “trust the science” signals one’s intellectual credibility without having to prove it, preempting debate and shutting down any opposition. After all, how can one argue with Science?

At this point, it should be obvious to us all that those who most loudly repeat the mantra are also most likely to put ideology before science, not the other way around. Consider the policy and corporate profiteering enabled by claiming scientific consensus about human-caused global warming. Now, an increasing number of scientists question that global warming is even happening, much less is human caused. This, despite the extensive way that federal and state policy was reoriented around cutting carbon emissions.

Though scientists do not agree about climate change, it turns out they do (mostly) agree about when life begins. A 2021 survey found 96% of 5,577 biologists surveyed from 1058 academic institutions agree that human life begins at conception. This is the kind of consensus that activists on many other issues would love to have, but don’t. Shouldn’t our laws and public policies reflect this “science,” also? Wouldn’t scientists who agree that life begins at conception be calling for us to “trust the science” and oppose abortion?

No. In this area, when “the biology” collides with the cultural priorities of sexual freedom, there are two common responses. First is deflection, citing something about “women’s rights to their own bodies,” an idea about which the science we are supposed to trust has nothing to say. Second is an assertion that the preborn, while a human life, is not yet a person with moral status or rights.

Of course, in this context, the concept of personhood is utilized with no clear definition. And “the science,” which tells us when life begins, is also of no help here. What scientifically study-able aspect of a human being makes a person “a person”?

Different worldviews offer different answers to this, ranging from birth to self-awareness. And yet, in the end, it tends to be Christians who are accused of imposing their religious, non-scientific views through law by others who are imposing their own religious, non-scientific distinctions between a human being and a person.

The implications of this debate go well beyond abortion. Historically, whenever some humans are defined as non-persons, other humans are defined as non-persons. This is the story of how those with dementia, or Down Syndrome, or any number of other mental or physical conditions have been treated throughout much of history, including in much of the world today. Once the powerful assume the right to define which humans qualify as persons, whether by legal means or more broadly across a culture, the list always tends to be reduced further. This is the slope down which Canada is sliding, where assisted suicide has devolved from a rare option for the terminally ill to standard practice justified for almost any reason.

The essential question to anyone proclaiming, “trust the science,” is What is science? Is it a means, enabled by God’s common grace, for human beings to better understand and redeem a fallen world? Or is it a tool of control?

Science tells us that human life begins at conception. Both natural law and biblical ethics teach that every human life is valuable. The best way forward, then, is to see every human being as having rights that should be protected, from the beginning of life to natural death. This is an area in which we should definitely “follow the science.”