Monthly Archives: May 2013

News

Carson Weitnauer: putting atheism on the defensive

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Here’s an article at Reasons for God that explains a few simple questions that you can ask your atheist friends.

He writes:

Though it has been persistently marketed to us as a worldview that stands for reason and science, the truth is that the atheistic worldview is riddled with contradictions and outlandish claims. And because most secular people haven’t studied why atheism is true, an excellent evangelistic strategy for you and your church is to understand these five challenges for atheism.

In my experience, it is only once people realize that their own worldview doesn’t work that they become interested in seeking something that does. While some would suggest you just have to wait for people to hit rock bottom, I think a more gracious and effective approach is to humbly challenge their pretense to have a sensible worldview.

By God’s grace, studying these five holes in the atheistic worldview can create a powerful opportunity for you and your church to share the wisdom and love of Jesus Christ.

[…]Because of their fundamental commitment to impersonal matter and laws, the atheist faces very difficult problems in at least five unique areas:

  • Consciousness
  • Free will
  • Purpose
  • Reason, including mathematics and science
  • Objective moral facts, including universal human rights and the reality of evil

Here’s my favorite of the 5:

Leading atheists such as Sam Harris dismiss free will as a matter of course. Or as Tom Clark at Naturalism.org puts it, “Judged from a scientific and logical perspective, the belief that we stand outside the causal web in any respect is an absurdity, the height of human egoism and exceptionalism.”

Dr. Angus Menuge, the current President of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, explains the problem: “before we can talk of being responsible for our decisions, we need an account of why those decisions belong to us. But the trouble is, on a naturalistic view, there is no entity that can plausibly own any mental states, there is simply a plurality of parallel, impersonal processes in the brain.”

The denial of free will logically leads to the denial of personal responsibility for any of our behaviors or beliefs. But if everything about “you” is determined, then “you” could not have reasonably chosen to believe what you do. If a-rational things and laws determined your neurological structure, “you” literally cannot make any decisions about what you believe or why you believe it.

This article is worth a look if you want to start a discussion with an atheist.

News

Homosexual man complains to NZ Human Rights Tribunal for being barred from seminary

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Some friends of mine in New Zealand sent me this article.

Excerpt:

A homosexual man is taking the Anglican Bishop of Auckland to the Human Rights Tribunal after being rejected for training as a priest.

A hearing begins today following a complaint from the man, who says he feels discriminated against because of his sexuality.

It is understood the man – who is in a sexual relationship with his partner – has wanted to enter the church’s training programme for priests for years.

But after applying to enter after years of study, he was rejected by the Bishop Ross Bay, who approves entrants.

Bishop Bay told One News last night that he was simply following the church’s doctrines.

The man was rejected “by reason of the defendant not being chaste in terms of canons of the Anglican Church,” the bishop said.

That means that anyone wanting to become ordained needs to be in what the Anglican Church deems to be a chaste relationship – a marriage between a man and a woman or committed to a life of celibacy.

In a statement to the tribunal, the complainant says he “felt totally humiliated that I had spent six years of my life in study, for a process that I was not permitted to enter because I was a gay man and in a relationship”.

“My humiliation and disappointment continue to this day.”

And this humiliation is so terrible that the government has to step in and drag the church in front of a secular court to pass judgment on Judeo-Christian values.

And here’s another story from Mercator:

Family First New Zealand has received notification that government’s Charities Commission intends to deregister the charity. Why? Family First has a traditional view of marriage being one man and one woman. The commission’s investigation began just after NZ’s gay marriage debate started last year.

The decision means that the organisation will no longer be exempt from income tax and, more importantly for a non-profit, donations to it will no longer be tax-deductible.

“This is a highly politicised decision which is grim evidence that groups that think differently to the prevailing politically correct view will be targeted in an attempt to shut them up,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ.

New Zealand recently decided to legalize gay marriage, and now we are seeing some of the repercussions. This is exactly what happened in Canada as well, where Christians are regularly dragged in front of Human Rights Tribunals and Human Rights Commissions for refusing to affirm the goodness of homosexuality and gay marriage. There, Christians can be tried by non-Christians for months and even years. They are never found innocent, and can look forward to being censored, forced to apologize, fined, etc. Why? Because once gay marriage is made legal, it becomes a crime to disapprove of homosexuality or disagree with gay marriage.

Legalized gay marriage is not compatible with religious liberty. We as a society have to choose one or the other.

UPDATE: Bill Muehlenberg’s commentary on New Zealand, gay marriage and liberty.

Polemics

Ryan T. Anderson: the hidden agenda behind gay marriage activism

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Ryan T. Anderson exposes the real agenda behind same-sex marriage advocacy in the New York Daily News.

Excerpt:

Same-sex marriage will never be widely accepted in America for a simple reason: It’s based on a lie. But don’t take my word on this; leading LGBT scholars and activists say as much.

Take Masha Gessen, acclaimed author and former Russian director of Radio Liberty. “Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change,” Gessen said last year.

Last month, I was part of a debate at the NYU School of Law at which Judith Stacey, a sociology professor at the university, declared: “Children certainly do not need both a mother and a father.”

Stacey went on to suggest that three parents might be better than two. In fact, while asserting she is in favor of same-sex marriage because of “equal justice,” Stacey admitted she isn’t a fan of marriage. “Why should there be marriage at all?” she asked.

I pointed out that marriage exists, and the government takes an interest in marriage because the sexual union of a man and woman produces children — and children need both a mom and a dad.

[…]In congressional testimony against the Defense of Marriage Act, she expressed hope that redefining marriage would give marriage “varied, creative and adaptive contours,” including “small group marriages.”

Stacey was among more than 300 scholars and advocates who signed a statement, “Beyond Marriage,” calling for legal recognition of sexual relationships involving more than two partners. During our NYU debate, she asserted that nothing gives the state an interest in monogamy.

The very day of the debate, Slate posted an article headlined “Legalize Polygamy!” The author, Jillian Keenan, argues: “Just like heterosexual marriage is no better or worse than homosexual marriage, marriage between two consenting adults is not inherently more or less ‘correct’ than marriage among three (or four, or six) consenting adults.”

She concludes: “Legalized polygamy in the United States is the constitutional, feminist and sex-positive choice.”

And this is why the marriage redefiners are doomed to fail: Redefinition has no logical stopping point. Its logic leads to the effective elimination of marriage as a legal institution. This will harm women, children and society as a whole.

If we redefine marriage to exclude the norm of men and women complementing each other in (ideally) a lifelong familial bond, Gessen admits, “The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change . . . I don’t think it should exist.”

Is the the viewpoint of all gay people? Not at all. Many gay people are conservative and don’t want to change the institution of marriage. But it is the view that animates the activists who are pushing to redefine marriage for everyone. And if the activists succeed, it will affect everyone. It will affect children who don’t even have a say in the debate today, just like no-fault divorce affected children when that became the law of the land.