It seems like every other news story is about some secular leftist getting arrested for sex crimes. Usually, it’s some prominent Democrat donor, or maybe the co-founder of a large gay rights organization, or a Democrat mayor, or a Democrat candidate for governor, or a Human Rights Commission member, or just an ordinary gay rights activist.

Here’s the latest, reported by The Post Millennial:

Netflix “Cheer” star Jeremiah Harris has been sentenced to 12 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to child pornography and sex charges in February.

Assistant US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Joseph D. Fitzpatrick told CNN that Harris will be serving a 12-year federal prison sentence, followed by 8 years of court-supervised release.

Jeremiah “Jerry” Harris rose to fame after starring in the Netflix reality docuseries “Cheer,” and shocked the nation when he was arrested and charged with possession of child pornography in Sept. 2020, days after he was under FBI investigation for soliciting sex from minors.

Following a plea agreement with the United States government, Harris pleaded guilty in February to one count of receiving child pornography and one count of engaging in sexual acts with a minor, after being charged with a seven-count indictment in the US District Court in northern Illinois in December 2020.

Harris pleaded guilty to two of the charges from that indictment, stating that he received child pornography and engaged in interstate travel to meet a 15-year-old boy with whom he engaged in sexual relations, according to court documents.

However, the star of the docuseries allegedly admitted to receiving sexually explicit images from “at least between 10 to 15 other individuals he knew were minors,” the US Attorney’s Office in Chicago said in a criminal complaint.

Harris was slapped with a $1 million lawsuit from twin brothers who claimed that he “groomed” them for sexual activities, Page Six reported.

I’m trying to think about what the game plan is for the secular left. Looking back on the last decades, they seem to have had victory after victory. They don’t like chastity, and that’s pretty much dead. They like no-fault divorce, and that’s legal. They like the hook-up culture (it’s equality for women!), and that’s going well. They don’t like natural marriage (it’s got sexist gender roles), and marriage is dying out. They even managed to legalize same-sex marriage, making it easier for selfish adults to deprive kids of a mother or a father – or both.

The goal of the secular left seems to be to separate kids from their bio-parents, and to insulate them from Christianity. They love daycare and public schools, but they hate stay-at-home moms. They just don’t want kids to have much contact with their parents, preferring them to be in contact with strangers like the people you see on LibsOfTikTok’s Twitter channel.

It must really bother them that LGBT activists having sex with children is still a crime. I guess they’ll just try harder to get Democrats to win elections, so they can shame and silence and sue anyone who dares to disapprove of their behaviors.

Rose and I just recorded the next episode of our podcast, to be released this Saturday night (late), so you can have it for Sunday morning. We’re talking about what it is like to behave morally in Christianity, and also in atheism. Anyway, there was some material we found that we couldn’t cover in detail, so I am putting it in a blog post. Also, I got way too excited at the end of the show.

Christians believe that each person, no matter how humble the circumstances of their birth, are equal because they are made in the image of God. Every person is equal, because they are all completely qualified to be in a relationship with God. So, it’s never a waste of time for a Christian to self-sacrificially love a non-Christian, because they are all able to accept Jesus as leader and savior. Even people who won’t or can’t become Christians are still valuable, because we can imitate Jesus in the way we treat them. We don’t look down on people who are poor or ugly or whatever, because they are still perfectly good for what God designed them to do.

Anyway, it’s interesting to read how early Christians put this into practice.

One historian who has studied the early church is Rodney Stark. He’s written a number of books about the early church, and I found a blog post about one called “The Rise of Christianity”.

Excerpt:

In his elaboration of this thesis, Stark proposes the following reasons for Christianity’s rapid growth in the first few centuries of the Common Era.

Christianity radically and attractively redefined the God-to-man and man-to-man relationships.

Christianity teaches that God is a God of universal and self-giving love, and that obligates us to love not just those who belong to our family, country, or religion, but all people, even if that means disadvantaging ourselves.

[…]What was new was the notion that more than self-interested exchange relations were possible between humans and the supernatural. The Christian teaching that God loves those who love him was alien to pagan beliefs. [Ramsay] MacMullen has noted [in his 1981 book Paganism in the Roman Empire] that from the pagan perspective “what mattered was . . . the service that the deity could provide, since a god (as Aristotle had long taught) could feel no love in response to that offered.” Equally alien to paganism was the notion that because God loves humanity, Christians cannot please God unless they love one another. Indeed, as God demonstrates his love through sacrifice, humans must demonstrate their love through sacrifice on behalf of one another. Moreover, such responsibilities were to be extended beyond the bonds of family and tribe, indeed to “all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 1:2). These were revolutionary ideas. (86, emphasis added)

Such teachings provided a moral order based not on reason or self-interest, but on mutual obligation and sacrifice. The beauty of these virtues is in part what attracted new converts to the faith.

Notice that “love” is defined as self-sacrificial love. Love that is costly for the lover. For example, telling someone the truth about their sin, even though they won’t like you. Or giving someone your own money and time build up their relationship with God. It certainly is NOT celebrating and affirming their sin, so that they will like you.

Another book that got a lot of attention was Tom Holland’s book “Dominion”. I bought it for my friend Dina, who recently passed away from cancer.

Here is a review of it. And here is the part I found interesting:

The dynamic in the Roman world was not between, as it is now, men and women. It was between those who have power, namely Roman free male citizens, and those who were subordinate to them. And essentially the Roman sexual universe was by our lights very brutal. It was a very Harvey Weinstein sexual arena.

A Roman man had the right to sexually use anyone who was subordinate to him: Slaves, social inferiors.

Anyone means male and female.

More:

Now, Christianity radically, radically changes that. It’s there in the very earliest Christian texts: Paul’s letters. And Paul is a Jew. So, he has an idea that the binary is male and female; god creates man and women separate. So, he brings that assumption to the table. But he also brings another novel assumption, which is that Christ came and suffered death out of love for humanity.

And so, what Paul does is to say that love, all you need is love. Love is the greatest animating force. And if we want to have a sexual relationship with another human being, then it must be true to the love that Christ has shown for humanity. So, what Paul does is to say that there can be only one way, one proper way, of having a sexual relationship, and that is you have to have a marriage that is monogamous.

As Christianity declines in our culture, and atheism takes over, relationships based on mutual respect are dying. Many of the people who are so anxious to kill Christian sexual ethics imagine that they will find spouses who will nevertheless provide them with a relationship built on Christian marital norms: permanence and exclusivity. But, of course, they won’t. Atheists think that you can jettison God from the system, but keep the parts of morality that you like. It doesn’t work like that.

It’s very funny to me to radical feminists are doing everything they can to destroy the system that provides them with stable, lifelong married love into their declining years. I don’t think they have studied history enough to realize what things were like before Christianity came along.

Final thoughts

Right now (Wednesday night) I’m chatting with the husband of a lady I mentored a while back. They are both Christians. She picked out the most amazing husband you can possibly imagine. His name is Kevin. He chose her because her library was filled with theology and apologetics books. He is a man who puts Christianity into practice. I’m talking to him to find out what happened to him today. Today, he took a vacation day off to sit outside a hospital, where a lady they know was having an abortion. She did not come out to talk to him, and she had the abortion. When I think of a man who has adventures with self-sacrificial love, because he wants to be like his Boss who values self-sacrificial love, this is what I am talking about. And this is why Christians do good things – we are investing in a relationship that God initiates, and that goes on into eternity.

One of my readers is an expert at the moral argument, and wrote a number of articles about his experiences talking to non-Christians about it. He comes from a liberal Christian background, so his views and experiences are not the result of growing up in a conservative Christian environment.

In the first article, he talks about what theists mean when we say that atheists can’t rationally ground objective morality:

They misunderstand us to be implying that they are immoral people. But this is not at all what we are saying. Since we believe that the moral law is incumbent upon every human, and is woven into the very fabric of our souls, we are not at all surprised to find even atheists dancing to its tune (to mix my metaphors). The fact that atheists very much want to be thought of as good people is only a tacit admission that they understand that there is such a thing as “good” and that it is good to be good. But if morality is merely a human convention, then the most that an atheist can be claiming is that they are morally fashionable.

There’s no moral credit for doing that.

In the second article, he talks about whether atheists can “reason” their way to correct moral views, if their conception of reality says that the universe and humans are accidents:

A chance ethical system cannot do the trick if it is true that there are right and wrong answers. If there are indeed objectively right answers to moral questions, then reason is certainly an ally, since it can help us to assess the conditions and marshal our intuitions, but it does not in itself make the answer right. Neither does an ethical system make right answers; it can only (if legitimate) help us to navigate through real passes with real reefs and currents. But you could never say that any ship of history had hit a reef unless you were first willing to admit that things such as ships and reefs actually existed. That’s a very big pill to swallow for anyone committed to a purely material world, where truth and ethics extend no farther than the will and imagination of the biochemical flukes we call “humans.”

In the third article, he takes on the argument by atheists that much of the moral evil in the world is due to theists:

When asking whether a behavior is caused by a belief system it must first be determined if that behavior is consistent with the beliefs in question. For a religion like Christianity there is some hope of doing so, since it is founded upon certain doctrines and is in possession of a guidebook — the Bible — to which one might appeal in making a ruling. For this reason a strong case can be made that most of what is commonly credited to Christianity is actually a violation of its fundamental principles. It is not consistent with Christianity; it is antithetical to it. And if something is inconsistent with a thing it is hard to make a case that it is caused by that thing.

In the fourth article, he talks about how atheists misunderstand the purpose of acting morally in Christianity:

The irony is that Christianity does not even teach that we win heaven by virtue of our good works. In fact, it may be the only religion that explicitly rejects such an idea. For example, Islam actually teaches that our good deeds must outweigh our bad, and Eastern religions teach that we must work our way to enlightenment through various moral and spiritual practices. By contrast, Christianity teaches that we must put aside our futile thoughts of measuring up to God’s perfect standard and throw ourselves upon the mercy of His court. We have but to accept, as spiritual beggars, the provision He has made to cover our sin and win our righteousness in Christ.

Good works come as a result of our love and gratitude toward our creator and redeemer; they are not the cause of our redemption. The Christian ideal is to be good for God’s sake, not for the sake of what He can do for us. God is not to be confused with Santa Claus. To think otherwise is to make the mistake that Satan made regarding Job’s motivation for righteous living (Job 1:9-11).

In the fifth article, he talks about whether atheists can rationally ground the claim that they are “good” at morality:

As it turns out, most atheists who like to think of themselves as moral do so with a sense that they are saying something particularly meaningful. The implication is that they have access to moral knowledge that they are committed to put into practice. It is something like saying that you are a good baseball player, which refers to a particular game with known rules and objectives that you skillfully follow. If this is not true, then a moral atheist is just asserting that they follow their own desires; they are saying little more than, “I do what I feel like doing, and whatever I do I call ‘good.'”

It might be a fun activity to read these posts, then find an atheist and ask them whether they are a good person, and what do they mean by “good” and “evil”.  Ask them whether they are making free decisions, and how can that be possible if they are just made out of matter. The moral argument is the most accessible argument to discuss with non-Christians.