Mark Coppenger, professor of Christian apologetics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, sees a lamentable example of that in the 1941 poem “High Flight,” which was quoted in tribute to astronauts who died in the 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Not all the astronauts were Christians “but we were told they ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God,’” Coppenger noted.
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My youngest daughter was 6 when this happened and was excited about watching the blast off on TV at school. Because of the teacher aboard the shuttle, schools were taking part in a big way...
She left home that morning thrilled about the days events and chatting like a magpie...
When the shuttle exploded I immediately thought of her and how I was going to help her through such a horrendous tragedy....when I called her school, they told me that the students were to be dismissed but the time was uncertain...
When Jean came home ABOUT AN HOUR LATER, the mystery for the school’s evasiveness was apparant...They had immediately gone into mourning mode and taken the children with them...
Little Jean was already a Bible believing Christian and came into the house disgusted with the adults at her school..She proved she knew more about God and where the souls of the dead had departed to, and why..
She said, “Mom, they dismissed us, but told us to wait in our classroom. After a while, some people who were crying came into the room and told us that it had been the worse thing that would ever happen to us, and that we were sad, and we would never forget what happened, and would be sad all our lives. Mom, that’s not true. I know what happened to those people. If they believed in Jesus, they went to Heaven. If they did not believe in Jesus, then they went to Hell. John 3:16, Mom. I tried to tell those people, but they would not listen to me. They were all crying and made all the kids cry too. We were sad until they came into the room, but after they said that, kids were frightened, and screaming, and it was awful. I ran all the way home to tell you that. Why did those people say we would always be sad ???”
Out of the mouth of babes...
I was incensed that they would keep my child at school and lie to her.. I found out those hysterical people had been mental health workers from the community...without my permission, they had preached to my child a doctrine of devils..Her school was 5-10 minutes walk and I could have just gone and got her, if I had known..
Consequently Jean got over the horror of what she had witnessed a lot faster than some of the other children..when she discussed the tragedy with her little Christian friends at school, she discovered that their parents had used the event as a Bible learning tool, and had mentioned Heaven and Hell to them, too..
For a time those students not thinking that the world had come to an end were lightly ostracized..the children had been encouraged to believe a lie...religion in the schools..
Jean remembers the shuttle explosion to this day..not only because of the deaths of the astronauts, but because of how helpless she felt, at age six, when adults lied to her about God and His Heaven, and our hope of Glory...
And SO many parents entrust their children to these non-believers every day.