Real Men Life is on this week!

Real Men Life the 2008 men's conference for C3 Oxford Falls is on this Friday night and Saturday. Conferences like this are part of the reason mega-churches are so popular and successful. I'm part of the Real Men team, so I'd like to encourage anyone who can make it to go along. Friday night is free, and Saturday is only $85 if you register before Friday (otherwise $95) - writing material, drinks and food are included.

This is what the leader of Real Men, Greg French, has to say about the Life conference:

The irony of our time is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, bigger cities and less friends, wider roads but narrower viewpoints. We have larger houses and smaller families, more money but less time, more knowledge but less judgement, more experts yet more problems.

We’ve learned how to make a living but not a life, added years to life not life to years, been to the moon and back but not crossed the street to meet a neighbour.

We’ve conquered outer space but not inner space, have more degrees but less sense, talked too much and listened too little, loved seldom and hated too often. We’ve cleaned the air but polluted the soul, written more but learnt less, planned more but accomplished less, learned to rush but not to wait. We laugh little, drive fast, stay up late, get tired, read little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

These are the days of fast foods and poor digestion, big men with small characters, steep profits and shallow relationships, disposable nappies and throwaway morality.

That can be the sum total of a man’s life. The colour and meaning of LIFE can be lost because we lose our perspective about what really matters. ‘Doing LIFE well’ doesn’t just happen. REALMEN ’08 conference ‘LIFE’ will help men adjust their worlds so as to enjoy the journey and do LIFE well. Look forward to seeing you there. It will be LIFE transforming!

Greg French

Here is the story of how one man's life has been transformed, through marriage, divorce and then eventually re-marrying his wife. The key? A relationship with Jesus Christ, and most importantly, with men he could learn from and relate to:

Australian Pentecostals < Buddhists

Amongst the various interest census facts reported by the SMH was this one:

“Though Pentecostal churches grew 26 per cent in Australia and 48 per cent in NSW, they remain numerically small, with 219,000 adherents, about half the numbers of Buddhists.”

That is a mixed result, it is brilliant that Pentecostal churches are growing, disheartening that they remain such a small part of the Christian faith in Australia and weird that there are more Buddhists - although given the loose definition of 'Buddhist' (likes Richard Gere, meditates, read a couple of books once, is a vegan), it is perhaps not so surprising.

Europe - the home of the wrinkly teenager

Mark Steyn's CD Kemp Lecture has been re-printed in The Australian, and makes for some interesting reading. He takes a swing at Europe for its declining society:

The Continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those 17 Europeans countries which have fallen into “lowest-low fertility”, where are the children? In a way, you’re looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café listening to his iPod. Free citizens of advanced western democracies are increasingly the world’s wrinkliest teenagers: the state makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection. Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, foresaw this very clearly in his book The Servile State in 1912 – before teenagers or record collections had been invented. He understood that the long-term cost of a softened state is the infantilization of the population.

From: It's breeding obvious mate (emphasis mine)

More disturbing is this piece towards the end:

...As the most advanced society with the most advanced demographic crisis, Japan seems likely to be the first jurisdiction to embrace robots and cloning and embark on the slippery slope to transhumanism.

The advantage Australians and Americans have is that most of the rest of the west is ahead of us: their canoes are already on the brink of the falls. But Australians who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we’ve led since 1945 in the western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world in which ever more parts of the map fall prey to the reprimitivization that’s afflicted Liberia, Somalia and Bosnia.

If it’s difficult to focus on long-term trends because human life is itself short-term, think short-term: Huge changes are happening now. For states in demographic decline with ever more lavish social programs and ever less civilizational confidence, the question is a simple one: Can they get real? Can they grow up before they grow old? If not, then western civilization will go the way of all others that failed to meet a simple test: as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1870, “Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.”