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Many crazy ideas are popular until they’re proven wrong. People once believed the earth is flat. They believed you’d fall off the edge of the world if you went too far. The sun revolved around the earth, of course. And there were dangerous dragons waiting in far-off lands to greet anyone who dared to go there.

People eventually realized that all of these notions were wrong. Sailors proved that you could sail around the world, thus showing that the world was round and you couldn’t fall off the edge. Astronomers figured out that the earth revolves around the sun. After all of this, everybody with a brain realized that the earth wasn’t flat.

Unfortunately, a few insane or stupid people maintain today that the earth is flat. Ever heard of the Flat Earth Society? It really exists. Here’s the group’s website.

In the late 19th century, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels developed the idea of communism. Although many thinking people rejected the ideas as obviously impossible and contrary to how human nature works, the idea appealed to a lot of desperate people. Starting with the communist takeover of Russia, the idea took over a large part of the globe.

But the idea failed. It didn’t work as promised. Without a market system to supply basic information about how much things were worth and what people wanted, the system fell apart. Central planners couldn’t have enough information and human nature corrupted even the best intentions of the true believers. The Soviet Union collapsed, taking with it the various governments it had controlled and supported.

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When I’m with a woman I love and something bad happens, my first instinct is to reach out to protect her. It’s not conscious. It’s just the way I feel. But I never feel the same instinct with a man I’m with, even if I care deeply about him.

Some people would say this is cultural, but I think it’s hardwired in some way. The average man has a strong instinct to protect the women in his life that he cares about, and my feeling is that it’s deeply embedded in us in some way. We saw three examples of it on display in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., late Thursday night.

In at least three cases, men died trying to protect the girlfriends they had with them. In a situation such as that, there’s no time for conscious thinking. It’s all about gut instinct. How many other men in the theater that night were doing the same, but didn’t happen to die? There’s no way to know, but I’d be shocked if there weren’t a lot more who were instinctively willing to die to protect women they felt responsible for.

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Do modern Christians believe Jesus meant what He said in the Gospels? Do they believe they’re obligated to follow His commands? Or has American Christianity become something that has little to do with the words that the Son of God left for us?

In the last 22 years, the number of people who say they have no religious affiliation has more than tripled in this country. In 1990, 6 percent of people answered “None” when asked their religion, but it’s now up to 19 percent, according to one new study. Another survey from earlier this year shows that roughly 78 percent of people claim to be Christians.

When I look at the state of the country (and of the world), the question I have is why so many people still profess to faith in Jesus Christ. When people say they don’t believe, I have to confess that I don’t blame them — based on the example they see from most of us who call ourselves Christians. How many of those 78 percent of Americans actually believe? And how many are just attending services because they always have? And how many of the remainder just call themselves Christians because they happened to grow up in a church and never discarded the label?

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