COVID-19: Dream come true for video game industry
As government lockdowns attributed to COVID-19 forced people around the world to stay home from jobs, school, extended family and friends, many used the extra time to buy and play video games. The revenue of the global video game market increased by roughly 20 percent last year, according to a MarketWatch report published on Dec. 22, 2020. That equates to about $180 billion, more than the global film and North American sports industries combined.
Three quarters of Americans—244 million people—play video games, up 32 million from two years ago. The average gamer played 14 hours a week in 2020, compared to 12 hours a week in 2018. In 2020, about 70 million Americans—almost a quarter of the population—played video games more than 15 hours a week. In a nation in desperate need of awakening and repentance, millions are turning instead to Minecraft, Wii Sports and Grand Theft Auto.
Democrats urge Biden team to censor biblical virtues
On Nov. 30, 2020, Congressmen Jamie Raskin and Jared Huffman urged Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to use federal power to remove God from America. These Democrats presented a 28-page document to the Biden transition team on behalf of the Secular Democrats of America, a political action committee. This proposal, titled “Restoring Constitutional Secularism and Patriotic Pluralism in the White House,” recommends targeting what it calls the “Christian nationalist movement” and pressures politicians to avoid terms like “God and country,” to include secular representatives at interfaith gatherings, and to promote humanistic military chaplains who teach you can live a good life without God.
Raskin and Huffman conclude that “Christian nationalists” have mischaracterized the United States as being founded “as a ‘Christian nation’ based on biblical principles, rather than as a secular nation based on revolutionary democratic ideas.” They even urged the Biden transition team to avoid the phrase “Judeo-Christian values,” as “it has been weaponized by the religious right to advance an agenda that has the veneer of inclusivity but actually undermines tens of millions of Americans implicitly excluded from its formulation.” The Secular Democrats agenda is not to protect freedom of religion, but to censor all mention of biblical virtue in public life.
Clinic fights to continue administering puberty-blocking drugs to children
Britain’s biggest transgender clinic for children announced on Dec. 22, 2020, that it is appealing to a High Court ruling that prevents it from prescribing puberty-
blocking drugs to children under the age of 16 without prior approval from a judge.
The High Court ruling was made after a 23-year old woman who identified as a boy when she was younger took legal action against the Tavistock clinic for giving her puberty-blocking drugs when she was 16. She now regrets taking the drugs and says she was too young to know what she was getting into. Last year, the Tavistock clinic treated 95 children under the age of 16 for “gender dysphoria,” the belief that their real gender was different than biological reality.
Our Creator made two sexes, male and female, and emphasizes this in the first chapters of the Bible. God strongly differentiates between the two in dress, hair length, appearance and roles for building happy marriages, fulfilled families and strong nations (see Genesis 1-2, Deuteronomy 22:5; Matthew 19:4 and 1 Corinthians 11:14-15). In Deuteronomy 22:5, God directly forbids precisely the misery-inducing ideas that society is now applauding and even forcing on our youth.
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University: Breeding unhappiness
Although attending university gives students many experiences, social opportunities and specialized training, a recent study shows what it fails to provide is happiness. According to a December 8 report by the Office for Students, university graduates are unhappier, less satisfied with life, and have lower feelings of self-worth than the general population.
The United Kingdom’s Department for Education surveyed more than 215,000 graduates at all levels, 15 months after they had left university, and found that 73 percent of unemployed graduates had high anxiety scores, compared with 40 percent for the general public. For those employed, less than a quarter who work full time reported very high life satisfaction. Less than a third reported feeling that what they did was worthwhile.
The late educator and namesake of Herbert W. Armstrong College wrote in his autobiography: “[T]he Bible is the very foundation of all knowledge—the basic concept as an approach to the acquisition of all knowledge—whether academic, scientific, historic, philosophical or otherwise. The Bible provides the missing dimension in education. Therefore, it must be the basis for all academic courses.” When the Bible is left out of education, people learn a mixture of truth and error that, rather than solving their problems and those of others, often makes them worse.