Tag Archives: Bible

News

Alliance Defense Fund’s strong opposition to divorce

17 Comments

This is timely, at a time where I am considering whether I would do more good supporting Christian/conservative groups on campus as an assistant professor or as a free speech lawyer defending campus groups from student governments.

No one is better at these kinds of issues than the ADF.

Here’s the article.

Excerpt:

The longer I live, and the more time I spend in the Christian conservative movement, the more keenly I’m aware of the extent to which divorce is devastating the Body of Christ.  It’s destroying children’s lives, destroying their parents, and destroying our cultural witness.  I’m 41 years old, and by this point I’ve seen friends’ marriages end because of adultery, because they felt “trapped,” because the other spouse was cruel, because they allegedly “fell in love” with someone else, because of addictions, or because they simply “wanted to be happy.”  Every single time — every time — one or both of the spouses made a series of deliberate decisions to place their own desires over those of their husband or wife, over the best interests of their children, and over the explicit admonitions of the God they allegedly serve.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the Christian community simply will not prevail in the cultural battle to preserve marriage — especially when the argument for marriage absolutely depends on the fact that marriage does not exist merely to fulfill adult desires and sustain adult happiness — if we treat our own marriage vows so shabbily.  How can we tell any population of Americans — whether inclined to homosexual behavior or even polygamy — that marriage is the earthly model of Christ’s relationship to his church if we treat it as an instrument of our own happiness?

[…]Frequently I hear talk of “divorce recovery” or someone saying they’re “going through” a divorce.  This passive language detaches individuals from the acts of will that cause the dissolution of their family.  You “recover” from the flu.  You decide to divorce.  Divorcing couples are capable of almost-epic feats of rationalization.  Divorce without adultery?  They rationalize it by saying that their spouse’s failings are the moral equivalent of adultery.  Fall in love with someone else?  They rationalize it through facile arguments that God loves them and wants them to be happy.  Children devastated?  They rationalize their actions as ultimately for the best because (despite all social science to the contrary) divorce is better for kids than living in conflict.  Couples float away on oceans of psychobabble — incapable of confronting the hard truth: They are making a deliberate choice to defy God.

A bit more from a follow-up post.

Excerpt:

Marriage is particularly fragile not just because of very real cultural changes in the Body of Christ, but because of a key (and catastrophic) legal change — the institution of no-fault divorce.

[…]And so we’re faced with an enabling church and an enabling legal system — two escape hatches that are all too tempting in times of distress.  The enabling church (including, sadly, many pastors and Christian peers) argue that various real or imagined spousal sins are the “equivalent” of adultery or the “equivalent” of abandonment.  The enabling church tells you that “God’s best” or “God’s plan” is not the cross but a happy life, a joyful life.  And the enabling legal system is all too ready to take your check, put you in the system and process your (sometimes) very fast, and (occasionally) very cheap divorce.

It then lists the well-known damage done to children, and continues:

How, you ask, can parents be so much happier when their children are so much worse off?  Wouldn’t the emotional and sexual collapse of their own children cripple the parents’ emotional well being?  Not if they long ago shifted their life priorities — away from the Biblical model of self-denial and to the world’s model of personal fulfillment.

Divorce is child abuse. Period. I’d like to see the church come out and preach sermons with the facts and statistics on what divorce does, and then provide people with practical advice and STRICT RULES about how to conduct courtships, marriages and parenting to the glory of God.

Marriage as an engineering problem

God is the customer of the marriage product, and he expects adults to love each other self-sacrificially, to honor moral obligations, and to raise the children to know him and serve him effectively.

There is no room in marriage for amusement and self-centeredness.

  • No emotions
  • No intuitions
  • No “chemistry”
  • No “fun”

We should be designing marriage as a solution to specific problems with the aim of serving God in our relationships.

If we can’t agree to do that, then we should all serve the Lord as singles. Marriage isn’t about YOU.

Commentary

What did the early church fathers think about abortion?

7 Comments
Unborn baby scheming about early church traditions
Unborn baby scheming about early church traditions

This is from Birds of the Air. (H/T Neil Simpson)

Summary:

Recently I came across a reading of the Didache. “The what?” you may ask. The Didache is a book written somewhere in the first or second century. For a long time it was up for consideration as Scripture. It was believed to be the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Eventually it was agreed that the book was an excellent book, but not inspired Scripture. So I was pleased to be able to download this admirable book containing good teachings from the early Church fathers.

The book seemed to be largely a lot of quotes from Scripture. You’ll learn the basic rules of Christianity — “First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself.” You’ll learn that “grave sins” are forbidden, like adultery, murder, fornication, and so on. (They specifically include pederasty in the list.) There are instructions regarding teachers, prophets, Christian assembly, and so on. Lots of the normal, good stuff. But, since this was written sometime prior to 200 AD, I was somewhat surprised at this instruction: “You shall not murder a child by abortion” (Didache, Ch 2).

Honestly, there is no real factual disagreement on abortion. People justify killing the weak the same way as they always do – because the weak are in their way and they are stronger and can get away with it. The politically correct jibber-jabber about “choice” is just to make them (the man and the woman) feel good afterward. Really, abortion is just selfishness taken to the nth degree – you create another human being by recreational sex (fun) and then you kill them in order to avoid have to take responsibility for that new life. It’s like going out and getting drunk then getting behind the wheel of a car and killing someone with the car. It may not be what they intended to do, but it was their decisions that led up to it. They’re responsible. But they don’t want to face the natural consequences of their own actions, and they are willing to do the most heinous crime imaginable in order to do so. Sex makes babies. If you can’t welcome a baby into the world, don’t have sex. I don’t. And the chance of getting a woman pregnant is of the reasons why. (One of the others is that I don’t want to hurt a woman by leaving her after sex – which is why I believe in married sex. I don’t want to hurt anyone, most of all babies.

Given the pro-life practices of the early church, I find it hard to understand how people can think that fornicating (pre-marital sex) and abortion are OK. We were not like that then, and we shouldn’t be like that now. Sex was not a recreational activity then, and it is not a recreational activity now.

Learn about the pro-life case

Commentary

What atheists think about religion and how should Christians respond?

26 Comments

Here’s an article from radically left-wing anti-Christian New York Times that talks about what militant atheists are doing for Christmas in order to annoy Christians. (H/T Mary)

Let’s see what atheists want to say.

Excerpt:

Just in time for the holiday season, Americans are about to be hit with a spate of advertisements promoting the joy and wisdom of atheism.

Four separate and competing national organizations representing various streams of atheists, humanists and freethinkers will soon be spreading their gospel through advertisements on billboards, buses and trains, and in newspapers and magazines.

The latest, announced on Tuesday in Washington, is the first to include spots on television and cable. This campaign juxtaposes particularly primitive — even barbaric — passages from the Bible and the Koran with quotations from nonbelievers and humanists…

[…]Relying on the largess of a few wealthy atheists, these groups are now capable of bankrolling efforts to recruit and organize a population that mostly has been quiet and closeted.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., one of the groups running advertisements, said, “We feel the only way to fight the stigma toward atheists and agnostics is for people to feel like they know them, and they’re your neighbors and your friends. It’s the same idea as the out-of-the-closet campaign for gay rights.”

[…]“We must denounce politicians that contend U.S. law should be based on the Bible and the Ten Commandments,” said Todd Stiefel, a retired pharmaceutical company executive who is underwriting most of the ad campaign that cites alarming Scripture passages. “It has not been based on these and should never be. Our founding fathers created a secular democracy.”

[…] On the confrontational end of the spectrum, American Atheists, which was founded in 1963 by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, will just before Thanksgiving put a billboard on the busy approach to the Lincoln Tunnel from New Jersey heading into New York.

It features a Nativity scene, and the words: “You Know it’s a Myth. This Season Celebrate Reason.”

David Silverman, the president of American Atheists, said that the idea of the campaign is to reach people who might go to church but are just going through the motions. “We’re going after that market share,” he said.

The United Coalition of Reason, a group in Washington, is sponsoring billboards and ads on bus shelters in about 15 cities that say, “Don’t Believe In God? Join the Club.”

The ads by the Freedom From Religion Foundation take a more inviting approach, with big portraits of some famous and some workaday people, listing their hobbies and professions and giving a punchy, personal declaration of independence from religion. The group, which has been running advertisements on and off since 2007, has spent about $55,000 this year to put up 150 billboards in about a dozen cities.

One, featuring Barbara Wright, a restaurateur in Madison, says: “It’s not what you believe, but how you behave.”

Wow! I’m impressed by these one-line catch phrases on billboards! So persuasive and rational! So focused on making propositional claims about the external world! So concerned with reason and evidence, not emotions and community! Such a careful investigation of the facts on both sides! The “Join the Club” argument! The “Celebrate Reason” argument! The “Be Nice If You Feel Like It” argument! Wowie wow wow! I’m impressed.

I note that the atheists are not funding formal debates, because that would require a discussion with two sides, and atheism is not something that performs well when the other side is well-represented. So, flashy sound-bite advertisements are used by atheists to present atheism to the public. It’s not rational, it’s marketing.

So how should Christians respond to this?

One group of Christians thinks that apologetics is the answer to this atheist plan. They think that Christians should learn the good scientific arguments for the existence of God from science (the Big Bang, the fine-tuning, the origin of life, habitability, Cambrian explosion, irreducible complexity, etc.) and the good philosophical arguments (moral argument, defense to the problem of evil, defense to the hiddenness of God, defense to religious pluralism, defense to postmodern skepticism, etc.), and the good historical arguments that don’t ASSUME the inerrancy of the Bible (1 Cor 15, minimal facts, responses to Old Testament violence, etc.).

I think that it is also important to have the money to be able to sponsor debates and conferences, as well. Nothing much would be made known the public unless deep-pocketed Christians were able to sponsor these debates and conferences. So Christians believe in choosing good degrees and getting good jobs and saving money to be able to invest in debates and conferences and such.

That’s one way to combat the sound-bite ads of the new atheists, and their rich backers.

But lately I have been having second thoughts. I talked to some of the Christians in my church, and they recommended alternative solutions to these challenges from the new atheists. They claim that these alternative solutions are superior to apologetics, so I thought I would list some of them out and you can see whether you agree with them or me.

Here they are:

  • the argument from doing yoga
  • the argument from becoming a vegetarian
  • the argument from getting body piercings and tattoos
  • the argument from reading trendy theologians whom non-Christians have never even heard of
  • the argument from reading  fiction like “The Shack”, “The Da Vinci Code” and “Conversations with God”
  • the argument from watching television shows like “American Idol”, “The Amazing Race” and “Lost”
  • the argument from short-term mission trips to Bolivia to take pictures and then tell stories (not like Neil’s)
  • the argument from having emotional experiences by singing about things we don’t know are true
  • the argument from not talking about our beliefs at work because people won’t like us
  • the argument from watching popular movies so many times that you memorize the dialog
  • the argument from listening to popular music so many times that you memorize the lyrics
  • the argument from watching sports teams play so many times that you memorize the rosters
  • the argument from breast enlargement surgery
  • the argument from turning worship into entertainment
  • the argument from telling people that things that are wrong are not really wrong so they like us
  • the argument from reading teenage vampire romance murder mysteries
  • the argument from treating cats as if they were people

And so on.

Anyway, I am not sure whether apologetics or these other church arguments are better. Can anyone help me to decide?

I actually think that William Lane Craig used a new argument in his recent debate in Mexico against Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer. I think he called it the argument from “watching the Home Decorating Network obsessively and creating detailed home renovation projects and decorating your home with expensive tacky crap and then showing it off to your neighbors”. I am not sure if that worked on Dawkins, we have to wait for the video to see what Dawkins’ response was.

Come on people. We can beat atheism like a bongo drum. We just have to be serious about out-thinking them. They have nothing. The only way they win is if we put down our apologetics and amuse ourselves with narcissism and hedonism.

UPDATE: Excellent comments here from Laura (Pursuing Holiness) about the important of good works IN ADDITION TO apologetics. She is a real culture warrior and understands all the connections between Christianity and politics.