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83 pages

English

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Why am I here? It's one of life's biggest questions, and there are plenty of answers out there. How do you know which of them is the right one? No, not just the right one for you, which of them is actually true? Sure, you may think you know what all of the answers out there claim, but what if you're wrong? Generation Why? pulls back the curtain, exposing commonly-held beliefs for what they are: self-serving lies to get your money, your time and yes, even your soul.

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Philosophie et théologie

Christian theology

Comparative religion

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Publié par	First Edition Design Publishing
Date de parution	15 avril 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781622875764
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0360€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Generation Why?
Dan Greenup

First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
Generation Why?

First Edition Design Publishing
Generation Why?
Copyright ©2014 Dan Greenup

ISBN 978-1622-875-77-1 PRINT
ISBN 978-1622-875-76-4 EBOOK

LCCN 2014936889

April 2014

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com

ALL R I G H T S R E S E R V E D. No p a r t o f t h i s b oo k pub li ca t i o n m a y b e r e p r o du ce d, s t o r e d i n a r e t r i e v a l s y s t e m , o r t r a n s mit t e d i n a ny f o r m o r by a ny m e a ns ─ e l e c t r o n i c , m e c h a n i c a l , p h o t o - c o p y , r ec o r d i n g, or a ny o t h e r ─ e x ce pt b r i e f qu ot a t i o n i n r e v i e w s , w i t h o ut t h e p r i o r p e r mi ss i on o f t h e a u t h o r or publisher .
All Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible (Public Domain)
Generation Why?

Dan Greenup
Table of Contents
Preface
The Why Question
Living in a Material World
Evolution
Atheism
The Moral of the Story
What Comes Around Goes Around
Mars Attacks!
Immaterial
The Gospel Truth
The Word of God
Creation
Corruption
Catastrophe
Confusion
Christ
Cross
Consummation
Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
Islam
Cults
The Call
References

Preface
I don’t like being lied to. Who does? In school, I was told I was a highly-evolved accident whose distant ancestor was pond chemicals. According to my teachers, God didn’t make me. I came from pond scum. Apparently, all of my thoughts and feelings were just the result of chemical reactions in the brain. I had no mind of my own, because I didn’t have a mind at all. I wasn’t free, because everything I did was predetermined by the makeup of my brain. I was told the only purpose in life was to pass my genes on to the next generation. In other words, I was an accident in a world filled with death, pain and suffering, and my only purpose was to bring another accident into this world. Depressing? Welcome to high school biology.
These days, people are shocked when young people commit suicide. You’ll hear them say “They just had so much to live for!” Really? Like what? If evolution is true, life’s a cruel accident. What’s the point of living? Is it about getting filthy rich? Well, being the richest person in the cemetery won’t do a lot of good. Is it about partying and having a good time? How boring! Besides, what’s the point of being the happiest-looking corpse in the morgue? Is it about leaving a legacy? Who cares? I’d be dead, so I wouldn't be able to enjoy everyone loving on my memory.
Indeed, when you tell young people they are mindless animals who can’t control themselves, why would anyone be surprised when they murder their classmates? If there is no God, what’s right and wrong is a matter of personal opinion. Anything goes. Why would I obey laws? They’re nothing more than one group’s opinions about right and wrong. Who cares what they think? Why would their atoms be more “moral” than mine? So, if murdering my classmates is good for me, why not do it? After all, what’s true for you isn’t true for me, right?
Ultimately, this is why people like evolution. We’re supposedly the most ‘evolved’ things around, so we get to be in charge. Everyone likes to play God. What if kids are depressed about being told they are completely worthless? Survival of the fittest, they’ll say. How charming.
Fortunately, evolution is a lie. The Bible says God created everything, and it’s so obvious that people are “without excuse.” 1 Put differently, the Bible says there’s no excuse for atheism. The question isn’t whether or not God exists. No, the question is how you feel about God. Do you love Him, or do you hate Him? There’s no middle ground.
Of course, this is the God of the Bible we’re talking about. We’re not talking about all of the made-up versions of “God” out there. Sure, it’s more comfortable to believe in a “God” of our own making, but that’s no different than worshiping a wooden statue. You can take your ‘coexist’ bumper sticker and throw it in the trash, because it should say ‘contradict.’ All religions can’t be true. There is only one way to God, and Jesus said “I am the way.” 2 Everything else is a detour people stumble onto trying to avoid the Way, and I have firsthand experience.
I spent the first 21 years of my life running from God. Now, I never fully bought into evolution. The idea that everything created itself seemed ridiculous. How does something that doesn’t exist make itself? It made no sense. “Chance did it,” my biology teacher would say, but blind luck seemed like a stretch. Try telling your biology teacher chance ate your homework. How unlucky!
In all seriousness, if you saw a snowman, would you think it evolved from snowflakes by chance over millions of years? If you saw a sandcastle, would you say that it evolved from grains of sand by chance? If you said yes, your family would stage an intervention. Still, my teachers seemed pretty enthusiastic about evolution. They were the ‘experts,’ so, I figured God could’ve used evolution. Eventually, this also seemed ridiculous. It contradicts the first page of the Bible! I mean, if you can’t trust page one, how can you trust the rest of it?
For my part, I didn’t care about the details. I was too busy living the good life. I thought I had it all. Certainly, I was what society would consider a ‘good’ kid. I didn’t do drugs. I didn’t sleep around. I got good grades. Gold stars all around! Truth be told, I was an egomaniac. What, you couldn’t tell?
For some reason, I thought that unless you were Hitler, you were going to Heaven. You just have to be good enough, and I definitely thought I qualified. What about the bad stuff I had done? No big deal. All of the good stuff would cancel it out. Well, there’s no point system to get into Heaven. You’re either perfect, or you’re not getting in. 3 I thought I was pretty awesome, but even I could see perfection wasn’t going to happen. I thought the “Big Guy” and I were cool, but I found out that to be cool with God, you have to be cool with Jesus.
No, it wasn’t dramatic. I didn’t have a major tragedy. I was selfish. I knew I couldn’t live up to God’s standard, and I didn’t want to be punished for it. I asked Jesus to save me. How’s that for self-preservation?
You’ve heard the saying “time heals all wounds.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Time won’t heal all wounds. Jesus will. By His wounds, we are healed. 4 That’s what this book is all about. There is a real answer to the why question, and it’s much better than anything you could ever make up.
The Why Question
For as long as anyone can remember, in one way or another, human beings have asked themselves the following question: why am I here? In recent years, the common answers to this age-old question have changed quite a bit. Most people, it seems, have simply given up on finding a concrete answer. After all, a great many individuals believe “there is no such thing as truth.” Well, is that a true statement? If it is, then there’s such a thing as truth. Similarly, a good number of people maintain what is true for one person isn’t true for another. Yet, if two people jumped off of a bridge, the Law of Gravity is going to apply to both of them. Still, many individuals acknowledge that truth exists, but they say human beings can’t be certain of it. Of course, how could they know that for sure, if we can’t be certain anything is true? Other people claim all religions lead to God. This must be false, however, because all religions frequently contradict each other. For example, Christians believe Jesus is God, while Muslims deny Jesus is God. Jesus can’t be God and not God at the same time, so Islam and Christianity cannot both be correct. Since all religions make exclusive claims, they can’t all be true about God. Clearly, there is absolute spiritual truth, and only one of the many beliefs out there can truly explain why we’re all here.
Now, a few people aren’t sure if anyone is here at all. They say “everything is an illusion.” But, if that’s true, it wouldn’t be a very good idea to take their word for it. Without a doubt, we’re all really here, and the most popular explanation for where human beings came from is evolution. Evolution is the belief that everything made itself over billions of years and God had nothing to do with it. It is widely thought that billions of years ago, a tiny body of matter began expanding and this gave rise to our current universe, though no one is quite sure where this matter came from. The earth was eventually formed and as it cooled down, rain began to fall. Some time later, non-living chemicals floating around in this water somehow gave rise to a living, single-celled organism with extremely complex genetic information known as DNA. Through natural selection, this simple organism became more complex over millions of years, despite the fact natural selection actually leads to a decrease in genetic information. So, according to evolution, human beings are a highly unlikely accident that can trace their ancestry back to rearranged pond chemicals. While fashionable, evolution doesn’t completely satisfy the ‘why’ question for many people. To fill in some details, particularly what happens to people when they die, many people have turned to religions such as Buddhism and New Ageism. Other individuals, trying to shed some more light on where everybody came from, believe that aliens originally put humans on the earth. Yet, there is an entirely different explanation for how everyone got here.
The Bible, which Christians believe is the written Word of God, records that “ In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth .”1 God created a perfect world, where everything “was very good.”2 There was no suffering or death.3 Unfortunate