The culture around us is dying: Supplemental

The previous post is linked: here.

Over the past few years, different states’ highway agencies have, according to apparent federal guidelines, been introducing changes to road signs with the aim of making them easier to read or understand (and with the cost of your tax dollars).  So, are these new road signs absolutely easier to read or understand?  Nope.  For instance, the Clearview font with its combination of majuscule and miniscule letters simply is not easier to read than road signs that use only capital letters; for there is a difference between all-caps in a road sign and all-caps in an indemnity section of a service agreement that you read on a computer screen.  This is yet another example of what the movers and shakers of our society do today: they possess a horrible tendency to make changes that are nothing less than wasteful, counterproductive and foolish.

Tomorrow’s movers and shakers are today’s  high school students.  I understand that teenagers are not as wise, smart, and sophisticated as they think they are; I understand that better than most since I was an introspective, observant semi-contrarian even in junior high.  Still, the actions of the first group of students in the following news item are ridiculous by any standard; hat tip to a certain trucker: Furor at Catholic high school after nun presents Church teaching on homosexuality | LifeSiteNews.com

The silver lining of this cloud is the separation of the tares from the wheat, as it were.

The culture around us is dying.

People around us are clearly and without exaggeration becoming increasingly dumber.

Why do I say this?  First it was one particular newspaper that one day I refused to read any longer because of its recurrent and frequent typos.  Now it’s reputable news organizations that cannot type correctly (Reuters comes to mind) and government agencies that misspell words in electronic transcriptions of legal documents (NYS and NJ local government likewise come to mind).  In fact, notice that I just used the contraction “it’s,” which is not the possessive pronoun “its” and has no apostrophe, regardless of the fact that even some English teachers apparently do not know about when they type messages in public forums and conflate the words in question.

The failure of English teachers is not limited to the written expression of their own thoughts.  At first, within my lifetime, large grammatical mistakes on the part of students and former students of English teachers were limited to predictable sets like their/there/they’re and it’s/its, or pseudo-corrective whom for subjective who, or the very foolish “between you and I” for “between me and you,” et cetera.  People among us were imbeciles, but at least you could more or less understand what they were saying.

However, people have since then graduated from the level of imbeciles to morons* and now they have trouble in even attempting to form a grammatical sentence when they type online or via text.  After all, who in the world actually says “Do it safe to go there after dark?” or “We can’t even deleted old questions now” in real life? Yet bizarre sentences like these keep showing up in people’s writing; these things also are almost as simultaneously infuriating and depressing as someone’s once trying to correct me by insisting that “I’ve drunk” is ungrammatical while “I’ve drank” is suddenly both the only way anyone talks and the only way you were taught to talk in English class in grade school.  (Yeah, didn’t you know?  Past participles no longer exist and they really never existed to begin with.)

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Another part of the equation, or another proof that people around are becoming apes, is the continuing trend of each “New and Improved!” version of a computer program or a website to suck more than its previous version.  I’ll come back to the point in a moment, but first let me shift gears slightly to talk about a certain Bible website which had gross typographical errors in several verses there.  These errors were ones in which spaces did not separate two distinct words: something which is entirely unacceptable.  These errors were not very few in number, and eventually I used an email address provided by the website such that I could tell them about the errors there.  Those errors would not have been present in the first place if we lived in a world where people still knew what the phrase “quality control” meant or believed in ensuring that every work of theirs was a quality work.  Remember this.**

Now let’s go back to the subject of “New and Improved!” versions of computer programs and websites.  Any time a website that you frequent emails you or otherwise tells you that a new version of that website will soon be introduced, you know it’s going to suck.  No one reading this is a spring chicken or a sucker who was born yesterday; as you know, new versions of software always move two steps back for every one step forward as numerous helpful features in one version of the website--and of various computer programs--are removed in the next version.

Why was the prone command from Star Wars: Battlefront (not the remake but the real one) absent in Battlefront II?  Answer: allegedly it was too easy to accidentally put your character into the prone position.  Why was the ability to freely place icons in any desired arrangement absent in Windows 7 though it is present in Windows XP?  Answer: allegedly it was too easy to place icons in the wrong place.  I am told that these are the reasons given by members of respective software companies for removing functionality from their software: all of us are idiots, and they will continue to treat us as such.  Of course, in reality not everyone is an idiot, and a result of these companies’ decisions is actually more work for some of us who use their software. 

Were new generations of Yahoo! Mail and Gmail really new and improved?  No.  They were dumbed-down products which required some of us to guess just what the heck this unintuitive icon (with no written description) means or just what the heck to click on this other unintuitive icon (with no written description) will do if I press the mouse button over it.  Yep: more work for the user, just so Yahoo! and Google would have a trendy, hip, contemporary user-interface.

Yahoo! Answers: are there more than 10% of its veteran users that actually prefer its new format over the previous one?  Nope.  Ask any other veteran user and they will tell you that the latest big overhaul at Yahoo! Answers sucks, which it does.  And why is the new format so lousy?  You guessed it: fewer features and more work that the user must now do.  After all, let no one claim that it is a matter of learning curves or old habits, for it is undeniable that to get from one section of that website to another now requires more steps than it previously did.

In fact, Yahoo! Answers today just got worse, as if that were possible.  They’ve now obscured people’s names when they pose a question and purposely hide some of the details of the extended form of the question: they make you click on “show more” to keep reading, which means more work for the user.  (Ironically, another change was the removal of the community vote, which will have the effect of de-incentiving the hard work that is often needed for a quality answer at that website.  In other words, the website’s developers have shot themselves and their business in the foot as veteran users have already said good-bye that site.)

Following the Google Maps fiasco of late, which I have not mentioned yet, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  For Google is no exception to the list of websites that do nothing but to introduce new format after new format that creates more work for the user.  Flickr, which is a part of the Yahoo! network, would be another example of this in how its copycat new format makes it unweildly and how its “infinity scrolling” script disallows a quick, easy delimitation of search results per page--the delimitation being something which is necessary and superior if you want to keep your computer’s hardware resources free or want to walk away from and later resume a search over the course of minutes, hours, or a large number of search results.  Yet it is the issues of Google Maps and Yahoo! that most demonstrate website companies’ disdain for their customers.  Google knows perfectly well that its new Google Maps version--with predictably fewer features and an increased burden on computer resources--is hated and Yahoo! knows perfectly well that people hate the changes that they have made.  Yet these companies collectively do not care that they offend their customers in these ways: in effect, it’s that simple.

Google does not care that its new version of Google Maps is garbage, until people abandon them for their competition in sufficient numbers.  Nokia Maps, which is the backbone of Bing Maps, meanwhile apparently does not care that their attempts at providing the customer with more information results in the customer’s receiving less information: when state borders look just like roads and road details are obscured by 3-D building models on maps that are supposed to be simple, flat street maps, one is dealing with a map that is too clever by half.

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Yet that is where the culture is today.  Both “The customer is always right” and “The customer is always the customer” have been replaced by “Follow all the latest trends in software and hardware design and shift the work burden from yourself to others, even if customers hate the results.”  In other words, the business world today couldn’t care less about whether their products are of high quality.***

And the quality of people’s writing nowadays: equally indicative of a lack of respect for second parties in the process of social interaction.  People lost the ability to type sentences that are coherent and understandable because they first lowered their IQ though serial misspellings and hyper-abbreviation in their texting, and in their comments in Internet comboxes, and so on.  They would never think to use such poor writing if they got to speak with a known dignitary or “hero” like “Pope Francis” or Barack Obama, but everyone else--including you and me--are just everyday, ordinary scum who do not deserve any effort when it comes to someone’s typing a message to them.  In retrospect, perhaps it was only a matter of time before the inability to spell gave way to the inability to speak.

Finally, and in keeping the title of this post in mind, remember that nowhere above have I said anything about the usual topics or the most obvious matters in discussions of culture wars.  All told, there are a number of indications that the next fifty years in the U.S. will be interesting times--translation: dangerous, unstable times.

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* Know that both of these are words, along with “idiot,” are outdated terms from psychology that speak to the level of cognitive functions that a person has.

** Then again, take my statement with a grain of salt.  I know firsthand that even QC departments are capable of letting things slip through the cracks and of bypassing one firewall after another.
*** Actually, it is probably the higher echelons of the business world--those at the top of corporate and leadership hierarchy--who are most responsible for stupid, customer-alienating changes to designs and software.  People in ivory towers or what-not often lack an important knowledge of what is going on in the real world or in most people’s lives and experiences; they possess financial knowledge, but not all the practical knowledge that is needed to successfully micromanage possible changes to software design.

[03/17/2014]

Re: The Grammys and the Myth of Marriage Equality

HT: to whom you ought to know, by now:

The Grammys and the Myth of Marriage Equality

One comment: it is amazing how the pro-“marriage equality” crowd tends to have no concept of reductio ad absurdum when it comes to this pet issue of theirs.  For we have already seen both that sexual deviants are now calling for marriage equality of their own and that if the logic behind the gay variety of “marriage equality” is merely taken to its logical conclusion--what propositions are implied or entailed by it--then these other sexual deviants really should be allowed to marry as they will: marriages of thruples, siblings, first cousins, etc.  Bear in mind that the people who scoff at the slippery slope arguments are probably some of the same people who refer to “homophobic” beliefs or ideas as “toxic,” with the idea being that one’s merely having certain beliefs or teachings will surely lead to anti-gay violence, slurs, or denial of “rights.”

Christian Integrity or Hypocrisy?

Truth be told, as I first began to read this blog post I thought that James White had written it.  Of course, it turns out that I was mistaken and that this was a re-posting of a piece that had more or less been Canerized at a different website.  I would like to comment--and hope to do so as a follow-up piece--but the article itself is enough to think about and chew on for a long time:

Mark Driscoll, Ergun Caner, and the Scandal of Evangelical Integrity | Alpha and Omega Ministries

By the way, if the careers of the likes of Jimmy Swaggart, Peter Popoff, or Charlton Pearson can survive or be revived after media scandals or dissolution of their ministry, why can’t Caner just fess up, lie low for a while, and wait for his public career to be brought back from the dead?  Oh, wait: somewhere along the line I think I answered my own question.

The Duck Dynasty Suspension, and the Trojan Horse

I agree with the philosophy that it is not always best to completely shy away from that which is ugly, because it behooves one to know what his opponents are thinking and doing.  So I will post a URL for the sfist blog post on Phil Robertson’s being suspended from Duck Dynasty: 'Duck Dynasty' Kingpin Says Homosexuality Is Like Bestiality [Update] (http://sfist.com/2013/12/18/duck_dynasty_kingpin_says_homosexua.php)

This comes from a secular San Francisco blog, and for those who do not mind the profane language, etc. you want to read the post and especially the comments that follow.  Read along and see if any of the liberal criticisms or allegations aimed at those without a seared conscience are actually valid; read and see if you begin to get the sense that some of the rank and file of the opponents of the Creator, regarding this issue, actually are not very well-armed.

Actually, what the heck?  Allow me to go ahead and personally just quote the post in toto and break in with comments along the way:

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<< Phil Robertson, the daddy duck to the camo-clad Robertson clan featured on A&E's reality blockbuster Duck Dynasty, is quacking up a storm [apparently a semi-clever, derisive choice of words I didn’t catch at first--K] in the latest issue of GQ. In a profile by the magazine's Drew Margary, the 67-year-old Robertson let fly a whole flock of homophobic comments about homosexuals, and what he feels is their sinful lifestyle.

Robertson, who hails from the northwest corner of Louisiana "where Cajun redneck culture and Ozark redneck culture intersect," regularly captivates 14 million viewers on his family's reality show on A&E. But unlike the majority of Americans, he's not down with LGBT. [*Hint, hint.*  By analogy, if the majority of Germans during the time of the Third Reich were down with the NSDAP (aka the Nazi Party), the sheer fact of majority status would be a good reason for the minority to adopt the NSDAP philosophy.  The majority status consequently would also be a good reason for the minority to support the Nazis’ inclusion of homosexuals as targets of the wider Holocaust, in keeping with the said philosophy.  This sort of thing should be obvious, yet this is the lame sort of reasoning that facets of the Gay Lobby are peddling nowadays.  (Compare our previous look at the “wrong side of history” meme.)--K]  As he told GQ:

    "It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical."

Then, when asked what, in his mind, was considered sinful, Robertson elaborated:

    "Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

Robertson, who once had to flee the state of Arkansas because he assaulted a bar owner and his wife, says he never bothered repenting for his own sin, saying, "I didn’t dredge anything back up. I just put it behind me.” His son and reality TV co-star Jep even suggested the family tends to fall in line behind their father. GQ quoted Jep saying, "We’re not quite as outspoken as my dad, but I’m definitely in line. If somebody asks, I tell ’em what the Bible says.”

With the backlash already brewing, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation condemned the reality TV stars [sic] toxic philosophy. [Toxic only inasmuch as proclamations of truths about the Creator’s design of the human body have a way of stirring up people’s intuitive knowledge in a way that hampers the goals of the Gay Agenda,and toxic inasmuch as it causes us to face the harsh theodic realities of the fallen, post-Edenic world in which we live.  I’ll leave it at that, for now.--K] In a statement, GLAAD wrote that the statement is "far outside of the mainstream understanding of LGBT people." [What is GLAAD suggesting here: that Phil Robertson said that all homosexuals engage in bestiality and promiscuity?  Surely GLAAD must know that Robertson merely was either: a) answering the question posed to him of what was considered sinful; or b) likening a man’s lying with another man to other acts which pervert the use or design of the human body; or c) asserting that a moral compromise on the issue of homosexuality would lead to other compromises of sexual ethics whether in the case of many people or a few people; or d) some combination of (a-c).--K] Even in Louisiana, which passed a constitutional amendment banning marriage equality, a majority of the population believes there should be some kind of recognition. [Again, by analogy if the majority of Germans during the time of the Third Reich gave special (even privileged) recognition to the Nazi Party, the sheer fact of majority status would would be a good reason for the minority to adopt the philosophy of the NSDAP.  Of course, this philosophy called in part for the Nazis’ inclusion of homosexuals as targets of the wider Holocaust, but apparently some people who want to help gay people as such do not mind offering arguments which are logically counterproductive.--K] GLAAD goes on:

    "Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil's lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe," said GLAAD spokesperson Wilson Cruz. "He clearly knows nothing about gay people or the majority of Louisianans - and Americans - who support legal recognition for loving and committed gay and lesbian couples. Phil's decision to push vile and extreme stereotypes is a stain on A&E and his sponsors who now need to reexamine their ties to someone with such public disdain for LGBT people and families." [Get real, Cruz.  Again, is GLAAD suggesting that Phil Robertson said that all homosexuals engage in bestiality and promiscuity?  Surely GLAAD must know that Robertson merely was either: a) answering the question posed to him of what was considered sinful; or b) likening a man’s lying with another man to other acts which pervert the use or design of the human body; or c) asserting that a moral compromise on the issue of homosexuality would lead to other compromises of sexual ethics whether in the case of many people or a few people; or d) some combination of (a-c).

And speaking of matters of deceit, Mr. Cruz, why can’t it be that there are “true Christians” out there who hold beliefs which simply happen to be false when it comes to what LGBT folks do and think?  For example, there are Christians who think that Arminianism is true, or that Calvinism is true: not both sides on this issue can be correct, but you don’t want to say that one side’s false beliefs on the matter means that they are not “true Christians,” which surely you must know.--K]

A&E, for their part, fired off another statement from Robertson on Wednesday, which did little in the way of making an apology. Robertson writes: "I myself am a product of the '60s; I centered my life around sex, drugs and rock and roll until I hit rock bottom and accepted Jesus as my Savior. My mission today is to go forth and tell people about why I follow Christ and also what the bible teaches, and part of that teaching is that women and men are meant to be together. However, I would never treat anyone with disrespect just because they are different from me. We are all created by the Almighty and like Him, I love all of humanity. We would all be better off if we loved God and loved each other.”

Update: Robertson has been placed on indefinite hiatus by the network.  [And if he backpedals on what he said I will lose respect for him.  There are people on MSNBC or any number of other TV channels who say that which is complete BS, in my view, just as it is also my view that their liberal rubbish creates an equally toxic environment for all the people that they claim to be helping or fighting for with their false statements.  I do not, however, think that their employers should necessarily pull the plug on them.  Is American society already forgetting why we allow and encourage people to express their varied and diverse set of viewpoints in this country?  Or is A&E simply attempting to figuratively cover their backside for financial reasons?--K] >>

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Incidentally, I am one of those people who have never watched the show and are probably proud of this fact.   My final words are reserved for the commenter J_Temperance: save scholarship for the scholars, or at least begin to offer a good reason to ignore 2 Peter 3.14-16.

Actually, per this last statement allow me to say one last thing, though I do not claim that this is an original thought.  We all know that there are people in this world who will not sit still until every last vestige of opposition to the Gay Agenda is stamped out, whether through political pressure or force of law.  These people go as far as to peddle “liberal Christian theology” on TV shows (e.g. Glee) which otherwise would not give a rip about what is said in the Book of Leviticus or in Pauline Epistles but somehow find a way to mention them in the course of “standing up” for a gay character of the show or gays and lesbians in general.  So these people are willing to meddle in the affairs of dragons or to venture into places where they neither fit nor belong in order to stamp out opposition to their agenda.  In other words, pagans and unbelievers are willing to engage in biblical textual criticism even though Christians themselves, who generally are far better acquainted with biblical texts and their background, sometimes err with regard to biblical texts.

Some of these people are willing to destroy Paul’s “credentials” as an apostle of Christ in order to make their own lives easier.  In the process they destroy the reliability of all Pauline texts of the New Testament.  Not content to stop there, they obfuscate and destroy the words of other prophets or spokesmen sent by God, including Jesus of Nazareth.  Now think about what the results of their actions will be.

But do not think that the results will be entirely theological.  Remember that man’s fallen nature prompts him to pick on and target people on account of their being different; for example, this is why there are various jokes and slurs related to one’s hair color, weight, sex, ethnicity, race and place of residence.  Once you have managed to make various conservative groups disappear into the shadows or to cease to exist entirely, some other group must be scapegoated or targeted for godless, rebellious, bored liberals and moderates to rally, rage and fight against in a way that currently substitutes for various unbelievers’ lack of spiritual and religious life.  One hundred years from now when the droughts come, and the crops fail, and yet another financial bubble bursts, who will the lynch mobs, agitators, thugs and “anarchists” come after?  Will it be the witches this time?  Will it be the Jews?  The Mexicans?  Southerners?  Poor White trash?  The rich?  In the Western World, which will never completely shake its Judeo-Christian past and where in Russia (for example) there is a growing backlash against the Gay Agenda for reasons which almost certainly are irreligious on some levels, gays and lesbians (and other folks) should not feel especially safe.  Christianity will have largely been rendered obsolete by secular moralism and through theological liberalism: it won’t be around in sufficient strength to temper the agitators or to be a target of the people’s anger in the stead of those who are markedly different than the majority of folks.

Those who proffer “liberal Christian theology” to silence the voice of conscience in their own heads: if they are half as wise as they should be then they will cease and desist this nonsense immediately and allow the Bible to be the perfectly “homophobic” book that it is.  Leave well-enough alone and don’t be greedy, especially if half of all Americans already think as you do, as you claim.

Monday Two-fer

Re: AOMIN | Christians: You Must Deny the Lordship of Christ. It is the Price of Citizenship in this Secular Nation.

As a photographer (no, my best work is not posted on this website =) ), I personally would have welcomed the opportunity to be paid to shoot the “wedding” in question after first asking that these women selflessly go elsewhere to find a photographer for the sake of my conscience and sense of moral duty.  Because I can think of one hundred ways to do poorly done photography and I would have had plenty of fun in the process of putting it all together.  It’s like the fun you had as a child when you would draw mustaches and funny eyebrows over photos of people: good stuff.

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Over at http://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/bible-verse-of-the-day/ this was the verse of the day:

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. (Genesis 50.20, ESV)

I wonder how many Arminians, post-Arminians, Pelagians and semi-Pelagians would deny that the events of 9/11 or the death of Trayvon Martin, for two instances, are events that God meant for good, to bring about that many people be blessed.  After all, people were saying right after those events that the events were not of God, yet what good reason would Joseph have for saying that his ordeal was meant for good if his statement here--which Christians accept as being true--is not believed to be a prophetic utterance?  In Joseph’s mind was it a given fact that all events are things which God means for good, to bring about that many people be blessed?

Beyond the crude facts of homosexuality

This more or less dovetails a post that DB recently pasted; I’ve only now managed to organize my thoughts enough to post them, plus I have a new perspective on them.

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I don’t often divulge details of my personal life, but I’ll be painfully candid in this case for illustrative purposes.  For a host of reasons that I cannot get into, I do not like most people.  (Notice that I did not say that I dislike most people, but rather that I do not like most people, at least not as much as most people like other people.)  Now, there is a girl at work whom I do like, perhaps both platonically and otherwise; this person is also physically well-endowed, flaunts it, flirts...and already has a BF.  So, faced with the choice of either leading a tortured existence every day at work or making the problem go away, what’s a guy to do?  Whether figuratively or literally, the easiest thing to do is to just hurry up, get a hotel room and be done with it; or the easiest thing is to attempt to just push the other guy completely out of the picture in a way that brings about unnecessary strife or rifts between the boyfriend and this girl who still likes him anyhow.  However, what I know of Christ’s teachings on sexuality (cf. John 14.25-26, John 16.12-15, 2 Peter 3.15-16, 1 Corinthians 7.8-9, Mark 7.20-23) and what I know of the Golden Rule both have an impact on my decision-making processes: thus I choose the tortured existence.

Where there is fuel there is fire, which is why a day at work can be miserable in ways to which I already alluded.  But where there is not fuel there is also trouble.  In the absence of this person, or of a significant other in general, I am left to realize my solitary existence and what a solitary existence means.  I’m not a part of one of these happy couples that you see at the restaurant, theater, park, club, or whatever.  Instead, whenever I see these couples I am sadly made aware of that which I do not have but others do have.  (Sadness of this kind is only intensified in those cases where one realizes that his odds at finding someone with whom they have chemistry and a shot at becoming part of a lasting couple are one in a billion; because those who are not easy on the eyes or are unlikable are by definition unattrative.  With that said, there is also a word that denotes what is experienced when he or she deals with such a thing, and that word is “grief.”)

As if it were not enough to have sadness and grief piled upon pain of other sorts, let’s also throw loneliness into the mix.  If someone is used to a solitary existence then they can, in God’s grace, adapt or otherwise erstwhile have the fortitude to flourish to some degree in their solitary existence.  However, if one is forced to taste of what life is like for most people on this earth, but later has that respite from solitude taken away, one must now deal with a new problem and a new sorrow: loneliness.

So there it is: a continual, daily, or weekly grind of loneliness piled upon grief piled upon sadness piled upon the experience of being teased.  Sounds great, right?  But this is exactly the sort of thing that Christians who hold fast to biblical teachings expect of gays and lesbians who either profess or do not profess to be disciples of Christ, is it not?  Of course, I do not criticize Christians on this matter, because they rightly acknowledge the fact that the Creator himself expects all people to be on the winning side of the war between the will of God vs. the desires of fallen, post-Edenic human nature (cf. 1 Peter 2.11); nonetheless, I think that people would do well to consider some of the pastoral and existential implications of contemporary culture wars as they pertain to homosexuality.  Why do I think that people should consider such things?  This is because if we as Christians counsel sinners with the words “Go and sin no more” or “Take up your cross daily and follow,” then both parties should know what they are getting themselves into in the entire process.

Unregenerate man, in large part, hasn’t the will or the interest to follow the exhortation “Take up your cross daily and follow.”  In fact, unless the meaning of the phrase and the means by which the phrase can be obeyed are explained, the person who attempts to counsel others with these words runs the serious risk of appearing to have no grip on reality or on what kinds of issues people actually deal with in life.  So I claim that such a would-be counselor should carefully consider and analyze his actions in advance, because Christianity ought not be more offensive than it already is, as one can glean from Titus 2.9-10, 1 Timothy 6.1-2, and 1 Peter 2.12.

Likewise, the phrase “Go and sin no more” does not strike me, for one, as a comforting set of words or the sort of things that good pep talks are made of: simple words and advice probably won’t be very useful to those people who are called upon to leave their same-sex significant others along with their incorrect sexual desires.  Keep in mind that in daily struggles against the flesh sometimes even the best of us apparently just give up and decide to stop fighting, which not too long ago seemed to be the case with Amy Grant and Gary Chapman (http://assets.baptiststandard.com/archived/1999/12_8/pages/grant.html) vis-à-vis the Difficult Teachings of Matthew 5, 19 and 1 Corinthians 7.  So I claim that any would-be biblical counselor should carefully consider and analyze his actions in advance and act accordingly, because sheer head knowledge of moral rights and wrongs is no guarantee that any of us will do the right thing and continue to do the right thing.

So any believer who is ready to stand up and begin to push back against the contemporary social forces that are encouraging everyone and every institution to sanction homosexuality should consider the pastoral and existential implications of their own deeds in advance; they should consider them and act accordingly for moral reasons and reasons of practicality.  Meanwhile, of course, I state the above not merely as a matter of brute facts and logic but also as a matter of someone who to some degree can begin to relate to what others might be going through.  With that said, I would urge any would-be counselor on this issue to choose his words wisely according to the time, place, person and circumstance.  For example, I think that Christ proves himself worldly-wise with regard to his words about eunuchs and the Difficult Teaching in Matthew 19 and I also find concepts and biblical teaching about theodical character-building to be somewhat comforting: these are the sorts of things that I would like to hear, somewhat, if someone were exhorting me not to choose the easy/evil solution to my own problems.  Of course, other people may respond differently to such words on an emotional or rational level, so other appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos may be helpful with other people.

But just as one’s own heterosexual affects and emotions are not activated and deactivated as easily as the flick of switch, so it is with gays and lesbians who need to leave behind whatever sin they need to leave behind but, yes, may still have to lead their lives in the meantime amid the same temptations and same strong urges, desires and drives of the flesh which they had before, because struggles in life do not necessarily go away when someone repents.  Let everyone remember this.

Is The Bible Really So "Bigoted" and "Phobic"?

The Bible does not condemn those who merely are sexually attracted to their neighbor’s spouse.  However, what one does with that attraction is what will be the death of him if he makes the evil choice.  Yet the Scriptures are never condemned as being adulterophobic.

The Bible does not condemn those singles who merely are sexually attracted to single members of the opposite sex.  However, what one does with that attraction is what will be the death of him if he makes the wrong choice.  Yet the Scriptures are never condemned as being extramaritalsexphobic.

In fact, the Bible does not condemn those who merely are uninterested in meeting the physical needs or desires of their spouse.  However, if this lack of interest persists as a product of repeated decisions borne of laziness, selfishness or foolishness, then these decisions will be his undoing.  This is one thing that the apostle Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians, chapter seven; yet no one would ever think to condemn the Scriptures as being abstinencephobic.

So may the reader consider this refresher course in biblically-based sexual ethics and the way in which it is worded.  We all need to get back to basics sometimes, as does Desmond Tutu and any number of persons today who in all undue glibness throw certain labels at Christianity or the Scriptures regarding certain social issues.

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Meanwhile, do not think that what liberal Christianity, as it were, has to say about the issues of the day are unimportant.  Liberals in general tend to think alike, coalesce, move in the same direction of thinking though they be a diverse group.  The Christian theology, again as it were, that attempts to paint a rosy picture of homosexuality is well likened to a viral infection, fifth column or Trojan horse.  First it attacks the Law and the apostles of Christ, because it must.  In the meantime, there remains the problem that recorded in the Gospel accounts is Christ’s acceptance of the authority of the Law even during his own time; accordingly, this becomes the next target as attempts are made to defeat it by glossing over it, lying about it, or writing it off as a matter of interpolation.  And the defeat of the Law, the apostles of Christ, and of the words and teachings of Christ comes at a great price: the destruction of sound practices of exegesis and hermeneutics.

Once the basics and common sense behind normal exegesis and hermeneutics are destroyed, the groundwork is laid for a groundswell of theology or teaching which fits with liberal thought patterns and emotional patterns: Sola Scriptura is effectively lost to false intuition and wishful thinking, the teaching of the everlasting punishment of the damned is lost, hell is reimagined as a condition that exists on this earth, universalism becomes a given, and the idea of divine omnipotence probably isn’t far behind.  Read this post again in fifteen years to see if and how it mirrors events of the day.

Slick’s Apostasy: Various Angles of the Issue

I heard about this first via Alpha & Omega Ministries: Yesterday on the Dividing Line.  I have not yet heard what Dr. White had to say about it, but other people have chimed in in written format, which I can access more easily.

Analysis from the redoubtable Steve Hays: Triablogue: Born to fail.

 

Another from Glenn Peoples (HT: Jason Engwer): How to exploit a family falling out for the sake of ideology.

 

Personally, in my reflections on the whole matter I was thinking more about the specifics of the stated reason for abandoning Christianity.  Without daring to put myself in the company of those commentators I will post those thoughts below, FWIW and as a possible indication of what others might be thinking

 

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From http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/07/15/the-atheist-daughter-of-a-notable-christian-apologist-shares-her-story/:

This changed one day during a conversation with my friend Alex. I had a habit of bouncing theological questions off him, and one particular day, I asked him this: If God was absolutely moral, because morality was absolute, and if the nature of “right” and “wrong” surpassed space, time, and existence, and if it was as much a fundamental property of reality as math, then why were some things a sin in the Old Testament but not a sin in the New Testament?

Four thoughts:

1) She was trained by Matt Slick.  Slick is cool, his ministry has stood the test of time, and he is probably one reason that I am a Calvinist today.  However, frankly his work has always been half-baked and over-reaching in some instances, and I fear that when it came to meta-ethics he may have trained his daughter poorly on account of possibly his own not having a solid grasp of certain issues.

2) Do the words “consequentialism” and “context” mean anything to either of the Slicks?  (Of course, I know that at least one of those matters to one of them.)  Or when did the Scriptures ever indicate that virtue ethics, or deontology, or divine command theory were the only possible correct paradigms by which to make sense of God’s law and God’s nature as revealed in the Scriptures?

Yes, Christians are sophisticated enough to reject divine command theory for reasons which are reflected in Euthyphro’s Dilemma.  Yet the Scriptures apparently never rule out consequentialism in toto and never rule out what we might call (gasp) situational ethics of a sort, and the whole of biblical ethics is best understood in considering both virtue ethics and these other ethical paradigms.

When and where is it appropriate in this country to walk around buck naked?  In a classroom at school?  No.  In worship services at church?  No.  At home?  Sure.

When and where is it appropriate to drive on the right side of the road?  In the U.S.?  Yes, but even then not if the driver is drunk and doing 100 mph on a crowded freeway.  In the U.K.?  No, unless suddenly it is good to cause needless head-on collisions with other vehicles.

Are circmstances or possible consequences relevant in the examples listed immediately above?  Yes, and that is exactly why there are exceptions to rules such as those to which we just alluded.

And is the range of permissible moral options dependent on the situation?  Yes, it is.  That is precisely how sex within the bond of marriage is permissible while your spouse’s cheating on you is not, or why harsh punishments are appropriate only for offenders who are culpable of the worst crimes, to cite two examples.

3) At some point the elder Slick may have got tripped up on issues of postmodern ethics or moral TAGs and passed a muddled, incomprehensible message down to his daughter--either that or the younger Slick just failed to grasp what she was being taught.  Similar language or similar terms appear in discussions of each, and this probably was a source of conflation or confusion at some point.

In any case, God is just (even essentially or transcendently so); in translation this means that God’s actions are just, for this is what the word “just” ultimately points to in terms of meaning and function.  Meanwhile, the words “just” and “moral” are more or less synonymous (though I  prefer “just” over the younger Slick’s “moral”), and those words ultimately mean either in accord with some ethical principle or in accord with what is good; and despite that the word “good” has many meanings--all of them dependent on what the metric or standard of measurement is--and despite anyone’s and everyone’s being capable of finding evil things to be favorable--i.e. “good”--or of prescribing evil conduct as though it were something just, God’s actions are just.

God has issued a body of ethical prescriptions and proscriptions of human behavior; each of these commandments are in accordance with both themselves and objective goodness: by definition, they are just.

Moreover, these commandments are “absolute” in the sense--and this is what people mean when they speak of moral rules which are “absolute”--that they are just regardless of whether Smith over here says, “Adultery?  Meh, that’s okay with me; there’s nothing wrong with it” or whether a society over there on the other side of the planet says, “Why not bow down before Baal?  Who else gives us rain for our crops or puts food on our table?”  That is the sense in which they are absolute.

However, this is not to be confused with the issues of divine command theory vs. rival meta-ethical theories.  There aren’t too many Christians who claim that if God suddenly decided one day to proscribe the consumption of turkey dinners then it would be evil to be turkey dinners in virtue of the proscription itself.  No, the claim would more or less be that if a divine proscription of turkey dinners came down the pike tomorrow then: a) it would be because the proscription did not have a favorable timing before then; and b) the proscription is done for a reason which is objectively good; c) rebellion against the Creator is not in accordance with what is objectively good; and d) guess what: God’s nature happens to be one of objective goodness, all such that it was never possible that an intuitively bad thing such as idolatry or sadistic torture or babies would have been prescribed at some point.

“...Why were some things a sin in the Old Testament but not a sin in the New Testament?” she asks.  Answer: if you can find an instance of such things, then stop to reconsider the matter and to ask yourself whether such things promoted the well-being of someone or something at one point in the past but later outlived their ability to do so.  Why is it a sin to issue orders to a someone of the rank of Sergeant First Class in one year whereas ten years later it is not a sin to do so?  Hmm, could it be that someone there in the Army got promoted such that legal and moral privileges which formerly were not theirs later rightly became theirs?  This is one example off the top of my head; you should be capable of doing the same.

4) How old is Rachael Slick again?  Oh yeah, that makes sense.

Re: Jesus and Same Sex Marriage | Joe Dallas Online

For anyone who missed this clever post from Joe Dallas: Jesus and Same Sex Marriage | Joe Dallas Online.

Citation corrections are provided over at Triablogue: http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2013/06/jesuss-teachings-on-marriage-in-light.html.

Another reason that we lose

Originally I was wanting to post something entirely different yet related to the Southern Baptist Convention just the same.  Chores and fatigue have prevented this for a long time now, but I will make an effort to say the following, however: Christians and social conservatives are not that bright.

We’re not that bright: first in terms of intellect, but now also in terms of positive cultural influence à la Matthew 5.13-16.  The Southern Baptist Convention in 1997 showed that it had heart when it began to fight the Disney empire and just as other Christians began to come up with every conceivable lame “excuse” for supporting the SBC’s boycott of things Disney.  This time around, on the other hand, the same organization which once was capable of noble action against social evils has shown that whatever wisdom it once had may have gone out the door in the natural flow of organizations’ shedding and gaining parts as members join, step down, die, become senile, etc.

From Southern Baptists condemn Boy Scouts over admission of gays | Fox News (06/12/2013):

HOUSTON –  The nation's largest Protestant denomination stopped short of calling for its member churches to boycott the Boy Scouts, but voiced strong opposition to acceptance of gay scouts - with a top church leader predicting at the annual gathering of Southern Baptists that a "mass exodus" of youths from the program that has been a rite of passage for more than a century.

The move by the Southern Baptist Convention came at its annual, four-day meeting in Houston, and three weeks after the Boy Scouts of America voted to allow gay youth to join.  With more than two-thirds of Boy Scout troops sponsored by religious organizations, and Baptists being the nation's largest protestant denomination, the resolution could have a crippling effect on the Boy Scouts.

"There will be a mass exodus over time," said Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee. “Churches are finally going to have to come to realize – there is a point when you say, ‘sorry, no more.’"

Let us juxtapose this with the following snippet from Baptist Press - Page, Land send letters opposing Scout proposal - News with a Christian Perspective posted on 05/17/2013:

"For over a century," Page wrote, "Scouting has helped our youth develop character and leadership skills forever impacting their lives. I am distressed by the recent proposed resolution which would introduce the subject of sex and sexual orientation into the program of the Boy Scouts. For one hundred and three years Scouting has been a safe haven from such topics rightfully reserved for parents. Such an introduction is inconsistent with the principles found in Scouting's sacred Oath and Law."

For starters, if you decimate the Boy Scouts by keeping your children out of it, you have now taken away the said means of developing character and leadership skills in the youth.

Secondly, a person who is openly gay need only be someone who is being honest about what feelings or attractions he has; it is hardly as if everyone who is a homosexual is someone who wears his “identity” on his sleeve or goes about broadcasting his sexual orientation to everyone around him.  Someone who is merely being honest their particular mental disorder--and yes, I will call it that--is not someone who categorically should be denied the opportunity to have character and leadership skills instilled within him.

Thirdly, the “safe haven” objection seems perfectly naive in considering what amount of the U.S. population is homosexual, how many members of that subpopulation would be interested in joining the Boy Scouts, and how many youngers already know that homosexuality exists.  Homosexuality is mentioned time and again in your copy of the Bible, you know.

Fourthly, what will be gained if you take your kids out of the Boy Scouts and attempt to set up conservative alternatives to the Boy Scouts?  Attempts at Christian isolation from the culture tend to create cultural ghettoes, something well-exemplified by CCM, where the only reason untalented people are getting record contracts is to fill a void in a niche market, or Christian cinema where half the movies of that genre would probably end up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 if that show were still on the air.  Sorry, but Christians do not in every instance have all the talent, money and resources necessary to put together a grade A organization or product; attempt a Boy Scouts of America alternative if you must, but please do not bother if only a few people will invest in such a project.

But again, what will be gained if you take your kids out of the Boy Scouts and attempt to set up conservative alternatives to the Boy Scouts?  Do the Scriptures not have something to say about believers’ being “salt and light”?  And do the Scriptures not have something to say about winning people with actions as opposed to mere words?  If there are kids in the BSA who are believers and if there are kids there who are not, then by isolating the believers from the unbelievers an opportunity is missed to show unregenerate people exactly how gracious and selfless a person should be toward his fellow man and how this behavior is borne of an understanding of the teachings of Christ.

Finally, some problems will naturally blow over or fade away if no further fuel is added to the fire.  The sort of attention that some social conservatives don’t want homosexuality and homosexuals to receive is something what would not exist if people would not create news stories by doing exactly the sort of thing for which the Southern Baptist Convention is currently in the news.  In fact, any further legal gains that the Gay Lobby makes could conceivably, over the course of time, come to be as forgotten and ignored as laws of various states which in our own day still outlawed sodomy or adultery.  And despite how debased Western culture has become in its ethically minimalist attitude toward homosexuality, guess what: there are still hate crimes (which I do not condone in any way) being committed against homosexuals, including the recent Madison Square Garden attacks in liberal, home-of-the-Stonewall-Inn New York City.  The point is that people such as members of the SBC need to stop the knee-jerk reactions to cultural occurrences around them and instead calm their nerves so they can think clearly.

Then again, if the reader thinks it is I who am in error here, then my first point is still proven; the fact that people can be disagreeing over the issues means that something has gone wrong somewhere down the line.

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Addendum: It is amazing what a little bit of further reading and research can reveal; lo, there may still be hope for Southern Baptist Convention: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/12/us-usa-boyscouts-baptists-idUSBRE95B0NO20130612.  The reaction of the Mormon hierarchy on this issue, meanwhile, is interesting.

Regarding Rick Warren's Son

This is probably the best web page on the subject: Triablogue: Perseverance and suicide.

Notice that in the comments section someone mentions the Scripture that I would also mention in discussions where it is denied that suicide is an “unpardonable sin”: 1 John 3.15.  With that said, my thinking is that a person would have to work to prove that any Christian who has considered suicide was in fact regenerate when he died; any Christian who has died in this way would have done mental and logical gymnastics to work around the problem of ending his life without intentionally killing himself: something which can be done though presumably no one commits himself to such a project before he puts himself to death.

Follow-up on MLK and "The Optional Jesus"

Let’s go back to what Dr. King was saying, as quoted in 11/25/09 blog post. From Google Books and page 189 of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Volumes 2-3:

    Concerning the work of Christ the two reformers stressed a substitutionary theory of atonement. They maintained that Christ actually took the place of sinners in the sight of God, and as a substitutee suffered the punishment that was due to men. But all of this is based on a false view of personality. Merit and guilt are not transferable from one person to another. They are inalienable from personality. Moreover, on moral grounds, a person cannot be punished in the place of another.

Actually, two things that are false are (a) the denial of the fact that guilt is transferable from one person to another; and (b) the denial of the fact that a person can on moral grounds be punished in the place of another.

Whose law or whose moral rules have you broken when you do something that is wrong? Answer: you have broken God’s law. Since it is God who is the offended party in this case, does he not have the right to forgive and to excuse the offenders as he will? Answer: of course he does. And suppose that I were to stand up for someone else--in practically any case of a rule’s having been broken--and say “Punish me instead of him. I’ll take the rap instead of him.” Regardless of whether the person who actually did the crime could or should be excused, am I not worthy of punishment if I willingly offer to be punished in someone’s stead? It seems to me that I am in fact worthy of punishment if that is what I insist on having.  (Notice, meanwhile, that this idea certainly is not far-gone if the scribes and Pharisees of Matthew 23.29-36 and Luke 11.45-51 are worthy of punishment in virtue of their claiming to be descendants of those who persecuted the prophets of old.) Therefore, if I offer to be punished instead then I am worthy of punishment.

Moreover, if I am worthy of punishment for a particular wrongdoing, then I also bear guilt of this particular act. Of course, the words “guilt” or “guilty” in this case would clearly carry a different meaning than it carries in the English colloquial phrase “guilty of sb,” which in turn means he did the crime, and in the phrase “feelings of guilt,” which simply speaks of feelings of culpability. So if I bring worthiness of punishment upon myself by my intercession for someone who actually did the crime, then I have brought guilt upon myself. For what else is guilt, according to the sense of the term that Dr. King uses above? Therefore, if guilt is not transferable from one person to another, we have seen at least that guilt of one person’s act of wrongdoing can become a property or quality held by another person.

Yet the guilt of one person’s act of wrongdoing can in fact virtually or exactly be transferred from one person to another. Whose law or whose moral rules have you broken when you do something that is wrong? Answer: you have broken God’s law. Since it is God who is the offended party in this case, does he not have the right to forgive and to excuse the offenders as he will? Answer: yes. Now suppose that I were to stand up for someone else, saying, “Punish me instead of him. I’ll take the rap instead of him.” If the divine punishment that I now bring upon myself were sufficient to demonstrate the degree to which God takes evil acts seriously or were sufficient to appease God’s wrath or anger, then what would be the point in punishing a second person? With that said, it is entirely conceivable that the punishment of one particular person could be effective such that punishment of a second party becomes unnecessary. And guess what: that is more or less what the Bible teaches us. For it informs us in no uncertain terms that the punishment of the transgressors was upon Christ (Isaiah 53) and that sinners who will believe in Christ are forgiven and excused such that their guilt becomes no more. Therefore, the guilt of one party ceases to exist while apparently one party freely brings guilt upon himself and is punished in order to spare the first party (Matthew 20.28; John 10.11-18).

Then again, perhaps Dr. King would object to all of this, saying, “Oh no, this won’t do at all. The person who actually sinned: he should be the one to be punished for the crime. All the people who have done me wrong in life: why should they be let off the hook while someone who did not commit their evil actions is punished for what they did?” The objection is that those who actually commit wrongdoings should be punished, not necessarily those who bear guilt of those actions. However, if one will stop to think about it then it becomes clear that not all those who have done wrong necessarily deserve to be punished. After all, even after God has forgiven any sinner for what that sinner has done the fact remains that this sinner has done wrong at some particular time in the past, an example being that Peter’s denial of Christ is a matter of public record. Peter and the other apostles of Christ did wrong, yet they do not deserve punishment, given that their sins were forgiven. Therefore, not all of those who have done wrong necessarily deserve to be punished. Therefore, we can say this of the individuals who personally sinned against Dr. King: what they sinned against was God’s property (Ps 24.1, Rom 9, Rom 11.36) and God will avenge himself as he will (Romans 12.19-20).

Triablogue: The optional Jesus

Yet another referral to Triablogue, but certainly not without good reason: Triablogue: The optional Jesus.

Indeed, liberalism in the context of Christian theology has a long record of being content not merely to see things in a different-but-understandable way but ultimately to rebel against the Scriptures in one way or another.  This is how MLK held the heretical beliefs that he held while masking them with standard Christian terminology, or how the saying “A little Greek is a dangerous thing” is proven in the case of queer Christian theology (as it were), or maybe even why someone like Carlton Pearson was able to resurrect his preaching career.

"The Passion of the Christ" and Commentary on the Problem of Evil

So “The Passion of the Christ” was on TBN a few nights ago.  I watched as Jim Caviezel was tied to a cross and I thought about how divine wrath was poured out on the real Christ when he was on the cross two thousand years ago (Isaiah 53.5).  But then I thought that there was love there and not just wrath.  Christ lay down his own life according to the command of the Father (John 10.17-18) and according to the love of both his Father and the sheep for whom he died to save and to bless (John 14.28-31, Ephesians 5.25-27).  Then I remembered John’s teaching that God is love and the scholarly opinion that every act of God’s is a loving act in some way or another (1 John 4.7-12).

Now, in considering the problem of evil we wonder why bad things happen to people of all sorts: both the righteous and the unrighteous.  We know for starters that all events are of God (e.g. see Lamentations 3.38, Romans 11.36) and that bad things which happen to the righteous benefit them in some way, considering Romans 8.28-39, other passages (e.g. Romans 5.3-4, Hebrews 12), and maybe previous thoughts on the matter.  So it becomes easier to see love in all trials and tribulations of the saints in particular.

On the other hand, when we ask why unbelievers fall prey to murderers, brutes, thieves, rapists, etc. it is all too easy to say “It is because they sinned.”  After all, such a response shows no immediate sign of one’s having considered that regardless of the individual rap sheets of unbelievers, no murderer has a right to do what he has done, no rapist has a right to do what he has done, etc.  Granted: if one turns his back on God then that person should expect to forfeit divine protection from various evils.  (Likewise, if you’re a teenager who moves out of his parents’ house to avoid authority, then don’t come asking them for money to pay rent outside in the real world.)  However, it is intuitively clear that no one had a right to kill the unbelieving victims of the Holocaust because of ethnicity or religious beliefs, none of the unbelieving victims of the torture of Uday Hussein during Iraq’s Baathist days deserved to be tortured, people did not have a right to chop off the hands of other people to coerce political support in Liberia and Sierra Leone’s diamond wars, etc.  So the response “It is because they sinned” is at best a lackluster response.

It is also an incomplete response.  For one thing, it says nothing of unborn infants who are burned or dismembered as victims of abortion before they have individually committed any sort of evil.  Of course, if one will assert that they are unrepentant sinners undeserving of divine protection in view of teachings of Original Sin, Romans chapter 5, and the gloss of “federal headship,” then fine: let them do so.  However, let the record show that apart from biblical exegesis--and even with biblical exegesis--the idea of inherited guilt does not have much in terms of other proofs.  In other words, in the world of Christian apologetics amid a broader world of skeptics who question Christianity the mere appeal to Romans 5 and certain other Scriptures is not very helpful.  Likewise, current extra-biblical proofs of corporate guilt--at least that I have seen--simply are neither cogent nor valid.*  However, even if they are valid it is not necessarily clear that corporate guilt theoretically can be predicated in cases where certain guilty parties did not even exist yet when their crime was committed, as with Adam before the fall.

Then again, maybe someone wants to argue for traducianism (e.g. see Genesis 46.26, Hebrews 7.9-10) such that we could see that all futurate human beings have existed since Adam’s time such that billions of people were parts of Adam even at the dawn of human history and thus perhaps were agents of that same individual.  Fine, but the point is this: people have their work cut out for them if they want to formally justify God’s allowing and causing what is (relatively) undeserved suffering of unbelievers.

Nevertheless, suppose that all philosophical and apologetical loose ends are tied in this case.  If God is love and if every act of his is a loving act in some way or another, then where is the love in the suffering of unbelievers either on the earth or in hell?  In terms of logos the answer is found by analogy human interpersonal relationships, I suspect.  It is not uncommon to hear that evil exists for God to demonstrate various attributes of his, including justice or justness.  That he would do such a thing as an end in itself or merely because he feels like doing so is not something that I am claiming.  However, stop and think about all the different people with whom you are acquainted and how well each of those people know you.  Chances are that you are acquainted with people that you dislike but have to deal with anyhow: chances are also pretty good that you do not divulge much personal information to them either.  On the other hand, think about the people that you like and are familiar with: you’re more willing to talk to them about current troubles, financial woes, bad days at work, interests and interesting anecdotes that you have.  And when it comes to the people that you love, usually the amount of personal information that both parties share and possess is rather high, especially among marital couples.  So people tend to open up to people that they’re cool with.

From the very beginning of time God in his wisdom has known what evil is or would be like, how bad evil is, what types and amount of destruction evil can cause, what (ethical/moral) goodness is, how excellent the members of the Trinity are, how much the same persons are capable of acting in accord with good during any and all circumstances, how wise they are and how they can use this wisdom perfectly in any situation, etc.  To know these propositions merely directly or through brain power is one thing.  To have both propositional and experiential knowledge of them is greater.  Consequently, if one member of the Trinity launches the current course of human events--with all its evil and pitfalls but also good things such as mercy, grace, and favor--it is conceivable that it is done to the benefit of other members of the Trinity who then come to have new experiential knowledge of various facets of God’s wisdom and goodness.  Of course, this is done among persons among whom there is no antipathy.

Meanwhile, there are angels whom God has rejected and there angels who have remained in the heavenly realm and who have not rebelled (Matthew 25.41, 2 Peter 2.4, Jude 1.6, Revelation 12.7-9; cf. Luke 10.18).  The current course of world history and human events--from start to finish--may also benefit the holy angels if they are capable of observing human events, God’s interaction with human events, and what their implications are.  Interestingly enough, the Scriptures speak of angels’ desires to learn of such things (1 Peter 1.12).

Finally, if God were to create human beings whom he loves but were to withhold in divulging to them much of what can be known about him, this would make for a peculiar relationship among people that he loves.  Again, if God were to create human beings but ensure that there be no Fall and no act of rebellion against God at any time in the future, there would be much of God that these humans would never know.  There would be much of his wisdom, justice and power that they would never know.  There would have been a case where to some significant degree someone did not open up to people that he’s cool with.

However, as reality now stands God has indeed informed all people that sin is bad, that rebellion is bad, that deviations from goodness and his commands are unworthy of pursuit and acceptance.  Of course, throughout human history people have rejected this knowledge and been given over to the natural results of deviation from what is good in God’s sight.  In the process God’s wisdom is proven time and again: a lesson which the saints learn and recognize yet which unbelievers often do not see.  Indeed, God has allowed the occurrence of evil acts throughout human history and has time and again punished those who choose to do what is evil while also recurrently restraining the amount of evil that may be committed under the sun: a cause for the saints’ experientially knowing of God’s goodness, righteousness and mercy while unbelievers often learn nothing from this.**  (For an example of all of this see Romans 1.18-32.)

So the problem and existence of evil are consonant with the ideas that God is love and that every act of his is somehow beneficent.  Again the question was “Where is the love in the suffering of unbelievers either on the earth or in hell?”  We already took at look at an answer which is conceivable on an intuitive and rational level.  However, it is sentimentally or emotionally unsatisfying simply to say “One group suffers miserably on earth and in hell so that another group is benefited.”  True it is that sinners choose to do that which is wrong, are undeserving of divine protection, and ultimately are punished exactly according to their crimes.  Still, true it is that God could have created a world in which people either by their nature or by divine protection had neither will nor ability to sin and that some might say that such a world is the best possible world.  In any case, there is probably no reason that a malcontent should be pleased with any world in which God creates a human race.  Of a possible world where the human race’s hands are tied from sinning, someone will claim that such a world is distasteful for lack of freedom, growth and maturity.  Of a world where people’s hands are untied, someone will complain about the freedom that does exist there and which allows evil.  Sentimentally or in terms of pathos there can be no absolutely satisfying answer for malcontents.  The bottom line of the matter is that in this world sinners get what they want, are punished exactly for the injustice that they wanted, and serve as a means of benefiting those whom God saves from themselves--all such that nothing in this universe goes to waste.

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* The idea that all citizens of a given country are at war when its leaders declare war is questionable; for instance, dissenters and war protestors do not seem to be at war with anyone.  Likewise, to say something like “The Luftwaffe dropped thousands of bombs on England during the Blitz” does not seem to be an accurate statement about each member of the Luftwaffe during the WWII: not every Luftwaffe pilot and mechanic would have been tasked with handling Britain at the time as opposed to patrolling other parts of German-held territory.  In fact, to treat someone favorably because he is your friend’s friend seems not to speak of transferable merit but of treating one favorably in order to please your friend.  A better case might be made in terms of republican forms of government and action where someone is tasked to act on someone’s behalf and the chosen party ends up misusing his power and authority behind the backs of those who sent it.

** Even more will be learned on the final day when “God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ” (Romans 2.16) and when the world is judged by the saints (1 Corinthians 6.2).

The Triumph of Sentiment Over Intellect

“Queer Christianity,” “liberal Christianity,” and heterodoxy are born of fallen humanity’s love and worship of positive sentiment.  Of course, it is impossible to feel good every day, at every moment, and all the time; nevertheless this does not stop people from pursuing extremes in order to avoid their having to acknowledge and deal with cold, harsh realities of the world in which we live.

Why are there Christians who, frankly, have gone about violating divine commandments against adultery and sexual immorality?  Because “something that feels so right can’t be so wrong”: that’s why.

How did universalism ever come into being though there was always no shortage of Scriptures which showed universalism to be questionable at best?  Because human beings, including Christians, are sympathetic creatures and some people simply are too weak-willed to deal with the reality of a world in which most people will end up condemned in the End: that’s why.

Why do some erstwhile Protestants and/or post-Protestants swim the Tiber and start singing the praises of sola ecclesia?  Almost certainly because some are too weak-willed to confront and handle the theodical reality that in a sense God is a god of risk, allowing people to deliberate truth claims (that contradict one another) with their own brains and with whatever finite amount of wisdom they may contain.

When the love of feeling good inside morphs into what is nearly or exactly idolization of positive feelings or sentiments reason is often compromised.  Evil deeds are committed with the delusional justifications “I’ll apologize later” or “I’m covered by the Blood.”  Voices of both moral and logical intuition are suppressed by ideas of falsely privileged or axiomatic status: hence the outright ignoring of many Scriptures which any reasonable person without an agenda would acknowledge of fighting heterodoxy to a draw at least.  Again, common sense goes out the window when people refuse to come to terms with the tough requirements of righteous living: they even end up making “excuses” like that of Proverbs 22:13.

The love and service of pleasure and upbeat sentiments often suppress the truth and frustrate attempts at valid reasoning.  That is why it is with extreme ease that this Rachel Held Evans person’s argument has been refuted time and time again in blogosphere of late.  In fact, I dedicate this blog post to her, because she brought all of this to mind after all.

(And finally, yes, much of political liberalism in general exists for the same reasons mentioned above.)

Missing the Obvious

Human beings who are unregenerate often do not know the evil that they do; either they simply lack the wisdom to know, lack instruction from the Scriptures that would inform them of it, or have dulled their moral senses to the point where they can no longer recognize various evils as such. That is why, for example, people might give you a strange look if you were to tell them that revenge is rightly carried out by God alone (sometimes done through the agency of government) or that extramarital sex is a bad thing. (Cf. 1 Peter 4.1-4.)

How is it, therefore, that in my travels I have encountered church-goers who act as if they possess no knowledge of the following?

But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth. (Colossians 3.8, NKJV)

Notice that on this last point I speak of blasphemy, filthy language, and perhaps even malice. Come to think of it, why also do the same people display no knowledge of the following--as if neither they nor their “pastors” have ever mentioned or happened upon the following from the apostle Paul?

1 Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. 3 But fornication and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as is fitting for saints; 4 neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor coarse jesting, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. (Ephesians 5.1-4, NKJV)

And why should anyone treat homosexuality--whether the inclination or the acts--as being good when our brother Paul, apostle of Christ, has told us the following?

9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, 10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. (1 Corinthians 6.9-10)

The answer seems simple enough. There are at least three missions or responsibilities which the church apparently no longer carries out. The first is the Great Commission of Matthew 28.18-20, which calls for the raising up of disciples. The second is the preaching of the good news of Christ, which is the power of God to the salvation of those who believe (Romans 1.16) but is in many instances replaced by messages of ill-defined faith or messages which exhort people to trust in their works and obedience in order to please God. Pseudo-conversions of erstwhile unregenerate lawbreakers can be expected as results, and consequently we are left in a world full of church-goers who are indistinguishable from sinners.  Finally, a third responsibility is that people read their Bible; no one else will truly do this for you.

I mention all of this--perhaps even in repetition of a previous blog post--because, well, personally I’ve seen matters get worse in this regard.