Hardcore issues with our churches

Excerpt from Just Thinking: Ravi at Roxy Q&A part 2:

It is mind-boggling to me that our young men and women are raised in some churches where they are not taught what an absolute is, how to defend an absolute. I've just been invited by one of the major news network. I'll leave it unnamed. In a few days I will go to do some recording with them. And the whole issue is one of their anchors read the book "Can Men Live Without God?" And she was quite profoundly moved by that and says, "I really want to do a television program on this, and bring in a skeptic who is a naturalist to hold the counter position and we both are going to dialog on these issues. What really fascinates me is how does the skeptic really talk about moral ideas when they have no moral framework to which they refer. The skeptic draws a circle around himself or herself on these issues. The tragedy is the Christians themselves have lost this absolute. Where do we go to an absolute? Why do we need an absolute? What is the guideline for my life, for my conduct and my belief? It is critical that we read the scripture and understand that it is both good for the doctrine and for conduct. We have to teach them how to understand this.

The second thing is that really worries me and I know I'll come in for a lot of criticism with this but with each passing birthday I less worry about criticism and I have to be honest that I am willing to take it in stride: someday we might find out that we hurt a whole generation in our churches by not allowing them to think seriously. You can lose a whole generation in this. We have bought into this idea that you engineer emotions in the one hour that you have them. You manufacture feelings and we send them out of there and the net result is that their lifestyles are no different to the people of those around them who don’t believe the same thing they do. It is going to take a huge recovery operation. And sometimes my wife would tell you sometimes I really do get disheartened about this and wonder "where we are losing this battle?" I think we are really losing it in our churches by not giving our young people the credit to think and go deeper and deeper into an understanding of the nature of truth and why it is that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Light. When we manufacture emotions, the emotions stand in isolation. When emotions are generated because of knowledge, then they always remain in tandem and that is the way it should be. So I think in these two ways we are flirting with some very dangerous ground: the lost of the absolute and I think the inability to get our young people and our church people to think again. That's a tragedy.