If you told me earlier this month that I would be doing a commentary on UFOs, I would not have believed it. But recent news stories requires some comment. First, it was the TV program 60 Minutes doing a piece on UFOs that were spotted in restricted US airspace. The next night Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted his opening segment and an interview to concerns about these UFO sightings. Former President Barack Obama said some of the UFO sightings “do not have an easily explainable pattern.”

So let me take a moment during this Memorial Day to interject some comments derived from a number of articles that I have posted on the Point of View website that supplement some of my comments on radio. If you assume that there is a military explanation, then you might want to read the analysis by Jim Geraghty who concluded that conventional wisdom has been shifting on UFOs (reference 1). He suggest that these UFOs could be secret American military technology or secret technology from another country. As a last resort, he acknowledges that another less likely possibility is alien technology.

Most of the UFO sightings in the past had normal, reasonable explanations. There are always a few that don’t have such explanations. Those could be explained with an extraterrestrial (aliens) hypothesis or an interdimensional (spiritual beings) hypothesis (reference 2).

Andrew Follett explains that most of these sightings do have natural explanations (reference 3). One of the videos, he believes, is a seabird (perhaps a Canadian goose) that is distorted by parallax. Another video could be explained as a meteor breaking up in the earth’s atmosphere.

We should know more soon since the Pentagon and the US Director of National Intelligence have been charged to investigate these phenomena and issue a report. Meanwhile, let’s all calm down and enjoy our Memorial Day.

Yesterday I talked about the American Worldview Inventory done by George Barna. He found that very few American adults have a biblical worldview. The most dominant worldview would be the worldview that could best be described as syncretism.

The other major worldview could be described as “moralistic therapeutic deism.” This is a term developed by Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in their book, Soul Searching published in 2005. It was used to describe the worldview they were finding among teenagers and young adults.

When I last wrote about this worldview, I used five characteristics to describe it. (1) “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.” (2) “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.” (3) “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.” (4) “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.” (5) “Good people go to heaven when they die.”

As you can see it could best be described as a “watered-down, feel-good, fake Christianity.” What is so interesting is that this belief system that was first identified in the Christian teen culture now permeates American culture and even the Christian church.

The survey found numerous places where this worldview conflicted with basic Bible teaching. For example, those who hold to this view do not believe people are sinful (91%) and contend that good people get to Heaven through good behavior (76%).

This is a distorted version of Christianity that places an emphasis on self rather than on God, and on emotion rather than truth. Once again, these findings are reminder that we need to teach good theology in our churches and in the home.

In his latest American Worldview Inventory, George Barna concludes that only six percent of American adults have a biblical worldview. This leads to the obvious question: What do the rest of American adults believe? Most of them (88%) hold to a worldview that could best be described as syncretism.

Syncretism is a cut-and-paste approach to life. It is not an internally consistent and philosophically coherent perspective. Americans apparently are picking and choosing what they believe based upon their exposure to various views and their emotional comfort with those views.

We might be tempted to think that anyone who does not have a biblical view must have a secular or postmodern view of the world. Those represent only a very small percentage of the views embraced by American adults.

George Barna observes that a worldview in America develops by default. Most Americans don’t even know what a worldview is and apparently haven’t spent too much time analyzing what they believe and why they believe it. “Our studies show that Americans are neither deep nor sophisticated thinkers.”

He argues that “worldview is caught more than it is taught in the US.” That should not be too surprising. Paul’s warning to believers in Romans 12:2 was “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” In Colossians 2:8 he said, “See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.”

This latest survey illustrates why we need to teach good theology in the church and in our homes. Most Americans have a mixed-up theology. We should make sure our view of the world doesn’t come from the world.

The three branches of our constitutionalist government are the executive, legislative, and judicial. Over the years, you may have written these names on a school test. You may have shouted them out as answers in a trivia game.

But the three branches of government are much more than a school lesson or trivia game answer. They’re a big reason our freedoms have been protected so well for nearly 250 years.

We enjoy such liberty and government continuity because the framers of our Constitution had a belief about human nature that comes from the Bible. While there are good aspects of human nature, there is also a great potential for evil because of sin.

That’s why the framers knew it would be a bad idea to concentrate all governmental power into the hands of a few people. The three separate branches of government check each other’s power. But people in government can still be guilty of overreach.

Right now, certain members of Congress are considering measures that would greatly decrease accountability in government. Two main ways they are attempting to accomplish this power consolidation are court-packing and ending the filibuster.

James Madison predicted that the legislative branch of government would be the greatest threat to the separation of powers. Thankfully, there is another check on government power in the United States: us.

Through elections, local government, the rights listed in the First Amendment of the Constitution, and more, US citizens have the ability to hold government accountable when it goes too far. You can find out more by visiting pointofview.net.

That’s why I do these daily commentaries. I want you to stay informed about the issues of the day and get involved in opposing government overreach.

The Democratic party has a God gap that will likely affect them in coming years. David French wrote about this in his recent book, but then decided to delete this chapter before it was published. Fortunately, he wrote about it earlier this month and joined me on radio to explain it.

He begins by reminding us how close the last presidential election was. Donald Trump’s base shrank, yet Joe Biden nearly lost anyway. Roughly 44,000 votes in three states “separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.”

David French also sets aside what has been called the “wokeness” problem in the Democratic party. James Carville acknowledged in a recent interview that, “Wokeness is a problem, and everyone know it.” There is certainly a messaging problem, but the problem is deeper because it is related to religion.

The Democratic party is currently composed of the least religious people and the most religious people. Fewer than half of white Democrats describe themselves as Christians, and only three-in-ten regularly attend religious services. More than four-in-ten are religious “nones” or religiously unaffiliated.

Contrast that with Black and Hispanic Democrats who do describe themselves as Christians and attend religious services on a regular basis. Only five percent say that don’t believe in God or a higher power, while 21 percent of white Democrats agree with that statement. The Democratic party contains a disproportionate number of the most religious communities (black Americans) and one the least religious groups (white progressives).

While you could argue that Joe Biden was able to bridge the God gap in this election, there is every reason to believe that future Democratic candidates (like those who ran in the 2020 primary) are going to be more secular in their tone and language. This poses a problem for the Democratic party in the future.

This last year of the pandemic and lockdown have put so many middle-class families in a position of financial fragility. A few years ago, the Federal Reserve Board conducted a survey of Americans. They found that nearly half (47%) of the respondents said that the only way they could cover an unexpected expense of $400 would be by borrowing or selling something. They could not come up with the money any other way.

Five years ago, writing in The Atlantic, Neal Gabler asked: Who knew? He then answered that he knew, because he was one of the people who couldn’t come up with $400. He knew what it was like to dread going to the mailbox because it usually had more new bills and rarely a check to pay for them. He knew what it was like to tell his daughter that he may not be able to pay for her wedding.

His point was you wouldn’t know this by looking at him. You could look at his resume as a writer and conclude he was doing fine. He is in the middle-class with five books and hundreds of articles to his name. That is why he wrote about what he calls, “the secret shame of middle-class Americans.”

Most Americans received one or more checks from the government in the last year. That money didn’t come close to covering their expenses. But you wouldn’t know people were struggling financially by looking at them. The challenges of this last year have put millions more into a difficult financial situation.

One study has concluded that half of American adults are “financially fragile” and are “living close to the financial edge.” And it is worth mentioning that this is not just a liquidity problem: that they don’t have enough ready cash in their checking and savings account. Median net worth has dropped significantly.

The lesson here for everyone from politicians to employers is this. When we say that American workers are hurting, it is actually much worse than we might suspect.

Three scientific discoveries point to the existence of God. Dr. Stephen Meyer makes that claim in his book, Return of the God Hypothesis. A week ago, he was on my radio program to make the case for God.

Arguments for the existence of God were compelling but began to be challenged in the 19th century. For example, we had Darwin telling us where we came from. Marx, with a secular eschatology, was telling us where we are going. And Freud had an account of what to do with the human condition.

“By the end of the 19th century, you had this materialistic worldview that answered all the basic questions that Judeo-Christian religion that always answered.” Meyer explains that there have been major cosmological and biological discoveries in the 20th century that are bringing back the features of the God hypothesis.

The first significant discovery is that the physical universe had a beginning. Scientific materialists assumed that the material universe was eternal and thus self-existent, but now must accept the idea that the universe began with an initial Big Bang.

Second, physicists also discovered that we live in a “Goldilocks universe.” Scientists are finding fundamental physical laws and parameters of our universe that have been finely tuned, against all odds, to make our universe capable of hosting life.

Third, discoveries in molecular biology have revealed the presence of a digital code at the foundation of life. This suggests a master programmer behind the genetic structure of DNA.

The book also devotes an entire section to “conjectures and refutations.” Is there a rational response to the idea proposed by skeptics of multiple universes? What about Stephen Hawking and quantum cosmology?

The God hypothesis is back, in large part because of the remarkable advances in science in this last century.

If you pay people for not working, then people aren’t likely to go out and look for work. Most of us would think that is basic common sense. But apparently that alluded so many in Congress except for a few US senators like Ben Sasse and Lindsey Graham. Months ago, they warned that providing high unemployment benefits to those out of work would create a disincentive.

Two weeks ago, the April jobs report lamented that only 266,000 jobs were created in the month. Economists had been predicting more than a million jobs would be created in April. By the way, this is the largest miss in decades.

At the time, the president had difficulty explaining why so few jobs were created but was sure that it was Trump’s fault. In fact, he made the unbelievable claim that there was no “measurable” data that people weren’t looking for jobs because it pays more not to work. The president need to get out more and talk to employers trying to do all they can to hire people for positions readily available.

One article did some quick calculations and concluded that workers could get nearly $16-an-hour by staying home. That is more than double the federal minimum wage. Bank of America estimated that anyone making less than $32,000 or less would be better off staying on unemployment than going back to work.

More than a week ago, Senator Ben Sasse called this a clear “policy failure at work here: There are 7,400,000 jobs open in the US but fewer than 300,000 people found work.” Senator Tim Scott concluded that “Democrats are disincentivizing work, pushing billions in wasteful spending, and threatening major tax hikes.” Sadly, the president and the Congress don’t seem interested in changing course.