Starting Points – Part 2

When Marissa was 8 years old, I took her to see Stuart Little. After seeing that movie, I was challenged by a new and irritating behavior. Marissa had learned a phrase and attitude from the movie and, much to my mortification, frequently aped Snowball in word and action. “Talk to the butt,” spilled out of her mouth sometimes several times a day. I spent months trying to purge her of it.

Young children aren’t the only ones quick to pick up ideas from their culture, teens and adults, if they are not careful can unconsciously incorporate ideas from the culture too. It is easy to identify behaviors that come from culture, but far more dangerous and insidious is when we incorporate non-Biblical thinking rooted in our humanistic culture into our own worldview. These assumptions, often unexamined, influence our decisions and affect our behaviors.

I wrote in Part 1 of my review of Starting Points about the value of articulating your personal worldview and, if you are a Christian, evaluating your worldview against the worldview presented in the Bible. Developing a Biblical worldview helps you critically examine the ideas permeating our culture and expressed in books, movies and ideas.

The literature we read as part of the Starting Points was phenomenal! (The Chronicles of Narnia; Frankenstein) But the heart of the program is in learning to evaluate the worldview being taught against our own worldview.

The Deadliest Monster: An Introduction To Worldviews is a great introduction to judiciously evaluating literature based upon worldview. It looks in particular at the view of man. Is man intrinsically good and only corrupted by the environment in which he lives? Or, is man fallen and sinful? I will never read a book the same again!