A younger bunch of Carlos Santana fans will recall his massive 1999 hit, Smooth, from his Supernatural album, or his latest work, Guitar Heaven. But those who have grown up with the music legend will always have Evil Ways, Oye Como Va, and Black Magic Woman running in the back of their heads.

Looking back, Santana has done well musically, including 10 Grammy awards, Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and being tagged number 15 out of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time. But Santana says what really got his life together was having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

It was a long voyage to home. He was traumatized when his father left his family, was sexually molested by the father of a friend when he was 10 years old, was exploited by Indian guru Sri Chinmoy when he was a young married musician, and went through a tremendous life as a rock star, with the drugs and women that came with it.

All that, plus the breakup of a 34-year marriage and seven – yes, seven suicide attempts, helped him to realize that “the only thing that we need to do is first accept that the only reality is God’s love. Everything else is an illusion,” The Plain Truth magazine reported.

Part of his journey involved going through the stranglehold that his past held over him, acknowledging it and learning to forgive; and then accepting the grace of healing. He told The Plain Truth, “You have to go through the darkest night of the soul to get to the brightest light of day.”

Music mentor

The son of a mariachi violinist, Santana’s father was also his music mentor. Even after the separation of his parents, when Santana began to earn money as a street musician to help pay the bills of his mother, it was his dad who bought him his first electric guitar.

That electric guitar, a gift for his 15^th birthday, helped him earn as a club musician, in this way contributing to the bills that can be accumulated by a single mother of six children.

Ironically, some of what many should consider the high points in one’s career were, for him, simply spaced out events. Take the historic 1969 Woodstock concert, where he emerged as the festival’s surprise star.

Of the event, he simply recalls that he was totally addled with drugs. He told The Plain Truth that he was dealing with frightening hallucinations at the time, and instinctively praying, “God, please help me. I’ll never do this again.”

Of his time with Indian Guru Sri Chinmoy, whom he and former wife Deborah followed from 1972-1981, he recalls feeling they had to “prove” they were devoted, all the time. In a Rolling Stone interview, Deborah recalled contests Chinmoy would devise, such as seeing who could go with the least amount of sleep, and who would run a 47-mile race for him.

When Santana left Chinmoy, the guru did what most cult leaders do—tried to destroy the musician. Chinmoy told his followers to cut ties with Santana but in the end, the guru gained a notorious reputation for using his women followers for sex, and for unethically making his followers generate funds for himself.

Santana and Deborah were baptized as Christians in 1994, but the growth in faith was slow and gradual, with, sometimes, steps backwards including infidelity which ended up ruining his 34-year marriage.

Part of the reason why he was able to revisit the traumatic incidents of his past was because he felt that God was helping him to go through it and lending strength through his grace.

He learned to forgive the man who molested him and was surprised to find out that this could be a personally freeing experience. He realized, through God’s grace, that “God made me worth something,” The Plain Truth reported.

He has said in the past that by the year 2015 he might completely retire from music and become a minister. But he adds that no one really knows if this will ever truly happen, except God.

He adds that he knows that his story is not yet over. He told The Plain Truth, “I am a child of God, and God is not done with me.”

Answer:
Simply put, Postmodernism is a philosophy that affirms no objective or absolute truth, especially in matters of religion and spirituality. When confronted with a truth claim regarding the reality of God and religious practice, Postmodernisms viewpoint is exemplified in the statement that may be true for you, but not for me. While such a response may be completely appropriate when discussing favorite foods or preferences toward art, such a mindset is dangerous when it is applied to reality because it confuses matters of taste and opinion with truth.

The term Postmodernism literally means after Modernism and is used to philosophically describe the current era which came after the age of Modernism. Postmodernism is a reaction (or perhaps more appropriately, a disillusioned response) to Modernisms failed promise of using human reason alone to better mankind and make the world a better place. Because one of Modernisms beliefs was that absolutes did indeed exist, Postmodernism seeks to correct things by first eliminating absolute truth and making everything (including the empirical sciences and religion) relative to an individuals beliefs and desires.

The dangers of Postmodernism can be viewed as a downward spiral that begin with the rejection of absolute truth, which then leads to a loss of distinctions in matters of religion and faith, and finally culminates in a philosophy of religious pluralism that says no faith or religion is objectively true and therefore no one can claim his or her religion is true and another is false.

Dangers of Postmodernism – #1 Relative Truth

Postmodernisms stance of relative truth is the outworking of many generations of philosophical thought. From Augustine to the Reformation, the intellectual aspects of Western civilization and the concept of truth were dominated by theologians. But, beginning with the Renaissance periods of the 14th 17th centuries, thinkers began to elevate humankind to the center of reality. If one were to look at human periods of history like a family tree, the Renaissance would be Modernisms grandmother and the Enlightenment would be its mother. Renee Descartes I think, therefore I am personified the beginning of this era. God was not the center of truth any longer man now was.

The Enlightenment was in a way the complete imposition of the scientific model of rationality upon all aspects of truth and claimed that only scientific data could be objectively understood, defined, and defended. Truth as it pertained to religion was left out and discarded. The philosopher who straddled this epochs and Modernisms contribution to relative truth was the Prussian Immanuel Kant and his work The Critique of Pure Reason, which appeared in 1781. Among other things, Kant argued that true knowledge about God was impossible so he created a divide of knowledge between facts and faith. According to Kant, Facts have nothing to do with religion. The end result was that spiritual matters were assigned to be matters of the heart and just opinion, and only the empirical sciences were allowed to speak of truth. And while Modernism believed in absolutes at least in the area of science, Gods special revelation (the Bible) was evicted from the realm of truth and certainty.

From Modernism came Postmodernism and, whereas Kant marked the philosophical transition from the Enlightenment to Modernism, Frederick Nietzsche may symbolize the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism. As the patron saint of postmodernist philosophy, Nietzsche held to perspectivism, which says that all knowledge (including science) is a matter of perspective and interpretation. Many other philosophers have built upon Nietzsches work (e.g. Foucault, Rorty, and Lyotard) and have shared his rejection of God and religion in general. They also rejected any hint of absolute truth, or as Lyotard put it, a rejection of a metanarrative (a truth that transcends all peoples and cultures).

This philosophical march through history against objective truth has resulted in Postmodernism having a complete aversion to any claim to absolutes, with such a mindset naturally painting a huge bulls-eye on something that declares to be inerrant truth, such as the Bible.

Dangers of Postmodernism – #2 Loss of Discernment

The great theologian Thomas Aquinas said, It is the task of the philosopher to make distinctions. What Aquinas meant is that truth is dependent upon the ability to discern the capability to distinguish this from that in the realm of knowledge. However, if objective and absolute truth does not exist, then everything becomes a matter of personal interpretation. To the postmodern individual, the author of a book does not possess the correct interpretation of their work; it is the reader who actually determines what the book really means a process called deconstruction. And given that there are multiple readers (vs. one author), there are naturally multiple interpretations, with the end result being no universally valid interpretation.

Such a chaotic situation makes it impossible to make meaningful or lasting distinctions between interpretations because there is no standard or benchmark that can be used. This especially applies to matters of faith and religion because the philosophers of the Enlightenment and Modernism had already deposed religion to the compartment of opinion. Such being the case, it naturally follows that attempting to make proper and meaningful distinctions in the area of religion (ones that dare suggest that one belief is right and another invalid) carries no more weight than one person arguing that chocolate tastes better than vanilla. In such situations, it becomes impossible to objectively adjudicate between competing truth claims.

Dangers of Postmodernism – #3 Pluralism

If absolute truth does not exist, and if there is no way to make meaningful, right/wrong distinctions between different faiths and religions, then the natural conclusion is that all beliefs must be given equal weight and considered valid. The proper term for this practical outworking in Postmodernism is philosophical pluralism. With pluralism, no religion has the right to pronounce itself right or true and the other competing faiths false, or even relatively inferior. For those who espouse a philosophical religious pluralism, there is no longer any heresy, except perhaps the view that there are heresies. D. A. Carson underscores conservative evangelicals concerns about what they see as the dangerous element of pluralism when he says, In my most somber moods I sometimes wonder if the ugly face of what I refer to as philosophical pluralism is the most dangerous threat to the gospel since the rise of the Gnostic heresy in the second century.

These progressive dangers of Postmodernism relative truth, a loss of discernment, and philosophical pluralism represent real and imposing threats to Christianity because they collectively relegate Gods Word to something that has no real authority over mankind and no ability to show itself as true in a world of competing religious voices. What is Christianitys response to these challenges?

Response to the Dangers of Postmodernism

It should first be stated that Christianity claims to be absolutely true, claims that meaningful distinctions in matters of right/wrong (as well as spiritual truth and falsehood) exist, and claims to be correct in its claims about God with any contrary claims from competing religions being incorrect. Such a stance provokes cries of arrogance and intolerance from Postmodernism. However, truth is not a matter of attitude or preference, and when closely examined, the foundations and philosophies of Postmodernism quickly crumble and reveal Christianitys claims to be both plausible and compelling.

First, Christianity claims that absolute truth exists. In fact, Jesus specifically says that He was sent and born to do one thing: to testify to the truth (John 18:37). Postmodernism says that no truth should be affirmed, yet its position is one that is self-defeating it affirms at least one absolute truth: that no truth should be affirmed. This means that Postmodernism does believe in absolute truth, and such a fact is exemplified by its philosophers who write books stating things they expect their readers to embrace and believe as truth. Putting it simply, one professor has said, When someone says there is no such thing as truth, they are asking you not to believe them. So dont.

Second, Christianity claims that meaningful distinctions exist between the Christian faith and all other beliefs. However, it should be understood that those claiming that meaningful distinctions do not exist between religions are actually making a distinction. They are attempting to showcase a difference in what they believe to be true and the Christians truth claims. Postmodernist authors expect their readers to come to the right conclusions about what they have written and will correct those who interpret their work differently than they have intended. Again, their position and philosophy proves itself to be self-defeating because they eagerly make distinctions between what they believe to be correct and what they see as being false.

Finally, Christianity claims to be universally true in what it says regarding mans lostness before God, the sacrifice of Christ on behalf of fallen mankind, and the separation between God and anyone who chooses not to accept what God says about sin and the need for repentance. When Paul addressed the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers on Mars Hill, he said, Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent (Acts 17:30, emphasis added). Pauls declaration was not a this is true for me, but may not be true for you statement, but rather an exclusive and universal command (i.e. a metanarrative) from God to everyone. Any postmodernist who says this is false is committing an error against his own pluralistic philosophy that says no faith or religion is incorrect because, once again, he violates his own mandate of saying every religion is equally true.

In the same way that it is not arrogant for a math teacher to insist that 2+2=4 or for a locksmith to insist that only one key will fit a locked door, it is not arrogant for the Christian to stand against Postmodernist thinking and insist that Christianity is true and anything opposed to it is false. Absolute truth does exist, consequences do exist for being wrong, and while pluralism may be desirable in matters of food preferences, it is not so in matters of truth. The Christian is to present Gods truth in love and simply ask any postmodernist who is angered by the exclusive claims of Christianity, So have I become your enemy by telling you the truth? (Galatians 4:16).

Recommended Resource:
Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview by William Lane Craig & J.P. Moreland/a>.

Question: “Why are there so many religions? Do all religions lead to God?”

Answer:
The existence of so many religions and the claim that all religions lead to God without question confuses many who are earnestly seeking the truth about God, with the end result sometimes being that some despair of ever reaching the absolute truth on the subject. Or they end up embracing the universalist claim that all religions lead to God. Of course, skeptics also point to the existence of so many religions as proof that either you cannot know God or that God simply does not exist.

Romans 1:19-21 contains the biblical explanation for why there are so many religions. The truth of God is seen and known by every human being because God has made it so. Instead of accepting the truth about God and submitting to it, most human beings reject it and seek their own way to understand God. But this leads not to enlightenment regarding God, but to futility of thinking. Here is where we find the basis of the many religions.

Many people do not want to believe in a God who demands righteousness and morality, so they invent a God who makes no such requirements. Many people do not want to believe in a God who declares it impossible for people to earn their own way to heaven. So they invent a God who accepts people into heaven if they have completed certain steps, followed certain rules, and/or obeyed certain laws, at least to the best of their ability. Many people do not want a relationship with a God who is sovereign and omnipotent. So they imagine God as being more of a mystical force than a personal and sovereign ruler.

The existence of so many religions is not an argument against God’s existence or an argument that truth about God is not clear. Rather, the existence of so many religions is demonstration of humanity’s rejection of the one true God. Mankind has replaced Him with gods that are more to their liking. This is a dangerous enterprise. The desire to recreate God in our own image comes from the sin nature within usa nature that will eventually reap destruction (Galatians 6:7-8).

Do all religions lead to God? Actually they do. All but one leads to His judgment. Only one — Christianity–leads to His forgiveness and eternal life. No matter what religion one embraces, everyone will meet God after death (Hebrews 9:27). All religions lead to God, but only one religion will result in God’s acceptance, because only through His salvation through faith in Jesus Christ can anyone approach Him with confidence. The decision to embrace the truth about God is important for a simple reason: eternity is an awfully long time to be wrong. This is why right thinking about God is so critical.

Recommended Resource:
Jesus Among Other gods by Ravi Zacharias

In November 2009, city officials in Gilbert, Arizona sent a “cease and desist” order to a pastor and his wife holding small group Bible studies in their home.

After seeing neighborhood signs for the Bible study, a city official reported the event to authorities.

According to a Gilbert city law, assemblies of religious groups and private schools are not allowed in private homes.

Reasons such as the city’s Land Development Code, zoning, building and parking codes are being cited.

The Bible study group, led by Pastor Joe Sutherland from Oasis of Truth Church, consists of seven people. The Church holds Sunday services at a school.

This month, attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) filed an appeal on behalf of the church group.

According to World Net Daily, spokespeople from ADF said Gilbert’s law does not prevent Cub Scouts meetings, large group football parties or business events from being held on a regular basis in private homes.

KTAR.com news radio in Phoenix carried a statement from Senior ADF legal counsel Douglas Napier. Napier said that the group was not cited for any violation of ordinances. There were no neighborhood complaints and no traffic violations.

Litigation Counsel Daniel Blomberg writes in an ADF Press Release: “Christian church groups shouldn’t be singled out for discrimination and banned from meeting in their own homes.”

Attorneys from ADF will appeal by using the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment Free Exercise and Freedom of Speech clause, alongside Arizona’s own Free Exercise of Religion Act. They will argue that the town’s zoning code doesn’t authorize banning in-home church gatherings while other groups are approved.

Both World Net Daily and KTAR report that in responses from the city, the town council does find the ordinance troubling and has scheduled it for review at a council meeting.

Updates:
The Oasis of Truth Church Web site now states that the City of Gilbert’s Mayor and City Manager recently attended a Sunday service, apologized and hope to revise the code  soon.

However, the newest World Net Daily report said the city continues to hand out warnings even though changes are in the works.

Should Christians be tolerant of other people's religious beliefs?

In our age of “tolerance,” moral relativism is touted as the supreme virtue. Every philosophy, idea, and faith system has equal merit, says the relativist, and is worthy of equal respect. Those who favor one faith system over another or—even worse—claim a knowledge of absolute truth are considered narrow-minded, unenlightened, or even bigoted.

Of course, different religions make mutually exclusive claims, and the relativist is unable to logically reconcile outright contradictions. For example, the Bible makes the claim that “it is appointed unto men once to die” (Hebrews 9:27), while some Eastern religions teach reincarnation. So, do we die once, or many times? Both teachings cannot be true. The relativist essentially redefines truth in order to create a paradoxical world where multiple, contradictory “truths” can co-exist.

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by Me” (John 14:6). A Christian has accepted Truth, not just as a concept, but as a Person. This acknowledgment of Truth separates the Christian from the so-called “open-mindedness” of the day.

The Christian has publicly acknowledged that Jesus rose from the dead (Romans 10:9-10). If he truly believes in the Resurrection, how can he be “open minded” concerning an unbeliever’s assertion that Jesus never rose again? For a Christian to deny the clear teaching of God’s Word would indeed be a betrayal of God.

Note that we have cited the fundamentals of the faith in our examples so far. Some things (such as the bodily resurrection of Christ) are non-negotiable. Other things may be open to debate, such as who wrote the book of Hebrews, the nature of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” and the number of angels that can stand on the head of a pin. We should avoid becoming embroiled in disputations over secondary matters (2