Tag Archives: Christianity

Commentary

Men should prefer women who allow moral judging and spiritual leading

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I wanted to write about a common mistake that I see men making today when they are selecting women for marriage.

Some women prefer men who don’t have strong views on moral, spiritual, economic and political issues, and who don’t try to lead them in moral and spiritual areas. This is because if men know a lot about things then they tend to have definite opinions which might constitute grounds for rejecting the woman if she does something wrong, and women fear rejection. For the spiritual leadership, again, if the man has studied this a lot, then the woman fears that he will make her do a bunch of reading and debating which may not be much fun for her. So, some women avoid men like that. The question I want to ask in this post is – should men marry a woman who doesn’t like that they know a lot about moral issues and spiritual issues? I don’t think that men should, and I’m going to explain why.

Good men will want to set moral boundaries and lead spiritually when they have children.

Children usually look to Dad for guidance about the real world, because he is viewed as more “practical”. And fathers tend to want to protect children by setting moral boundaries and debating moral issues. Additionally, fathers want to protect children from believing lies that may cause them to make bad decisions. So, fathers are going to talk about things like chastity and oxytocin, as well as things like the big bang and the cosmic background radiation. They do this to tell children right and wrong with evidence and to tell children the truth about the world with evidence. What they do is NOT just state opinions or preferences – these are not take-it-or-leave it. And this can be offensive to some women who reject that morality is one way or the other, or that the universe is one way or the other. Some women elevate happiness above morality and truth, and men need to be aware that those women will not let them state moral principles or tell the truth about spiritual things. They value “compassion” (the denial of moral absolutes and personal responsibility) and “pluralism” (the denial that anyone’s beliefs about the world can be false). If a good man has children, he needs to be sure that the woman is not undermining all of his boundary-setting and truth-arguing at home. He has to test for this during the courtship.

Sometimes men are stupid, and choose women without regard to what God wants from the marriage.

Let’s pretend that men are choosing medicine instead of a wife. Some men are choosing their medicine based on the pretty packaging, and yummy taste, and then complaining when it doesn’t fix the illness. They want to choose a medicine without knowing anything about their illness and anything about the candidate medicines. They want to be “free” to choose a medicine based on the feelings they have about the medicine – not whether it will do the job required. They say: “But it looked good and tasted good! Medicines that look good and taste good should work!” They think that they can judge everything about a woman in her physical appearance and her manner. (Women do this too, when they talk about wanting things like “a deep voice” and “confidence” – without looking for signs that the man can meet marriage/parenting requirements). The purpose of the woman and the marriage, for some men, seems to be to meet their needs. So their criteria are the only criteria that matter. God is nowhere in the picture. He supposedly doesn’t want a marriage and children that honor him – oh no. He supposedly wants the man to be happy. The customer of the marriage is the man, not God.

And men really need to be on the alert to detect women who will block them from doing what good men do with marriage and children, otherwise they will not be allowed to make moral judgments and to lead the family. Men – make sure when you are choosing a wife that you choose someone who loves moral judgments and the way that you like to build other people up to be effective and influential. If the candidate resents your setting of moral boundaries, or resents your knowledge of issues, or resents your efforts to “bully” them into correct views using reasons and evidence, then you need to pass on that woman. You are a man. Men are interested in morality, truth, fixing problems and making things better. You must make sure your wife is supporting you in that role. Make sure she is choosing you for the right reasons, using the right criteria. You are a quarterback. Do not play for a team where you will be reduced to cheerleader and mascot. You were not designed to do that.

And women – it makes no sense to complain that men are not raising the children properly if you deliberately chose a man who didn’t believe in moral judgments or truth. If the man makes you behave morally in the courtship, he will make your children behave morally. If the man makes you believe true things in the courtship, he will make your children believe true things. You will just have to learn to like being judged on moral grounds and being led about spiritual things.

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Polemics

Are evolution and empathy a rational foundation for prescriptive morality?

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This article is from Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason. He is answering the question of whether observations of social behaviors in animals is an adequate ground for a robust prescriptive moral standard. (The “Wright” mentioned in the quote is Robert Wright)

Excerpt:

When morality is reduced to patterns of behavior chosen by natural selection for its survival value, then morality is not explained; it’s denied. Wright admits as much. Regarding the conscience he says:

The conscience doesn’t make us feel bad the way hunger feels bad, or good the way sex feels good. It makes us feel as if we have done something that’s wrong or something that’s right. Guilty or not guilty. It is amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel as if we’re in touch with higher truth. Truly a shameless ploy.[11] [emphasis mine]

Evolutionists like Wright are ultimately forced to admit that what we think is a “higher truth” of morality turns out to be a “shameless ploy” of nature, a description of animal behavior conditioned by the environment for survival. We’ve given that conduct a label, they argue. We call it morality. But there is no real right and wrong.

Does Bongo, the chimp, actually exhibit genuine moral behavior? Does he understand the difference between right and wrong? Does he make principled choices to do what’s right? Is he worthy of blame and punishment for doing wrong? Of course not, Wright says. Bongo merely does in a primitive way what humans do in a more sophisticated way. We respond according to our genetic conditioning, a program “designed” by millions of years of evolution.

The evolutionary approach is not an explanation of morality; it’s a denial of morality. It explains why we think moral truths exist when, in fact, they don’t.

Do observations of patterns of behavior in different societies and different times create any moral obligation in individuals to conform to those arbitrary patterns of behavior?

Koukl continues:

This observation uncovers the most serious objection to the idea that evolution is adequate to explain morality. There is one question that can never be answered by any evolutionary assessment of ethics. The question is this: Why ought I be moral tomorrow?

One of the distinctives of morality is its “oughtness,” its moral incumbency. Assessments of mere behavior, however, are descriptive only. Since morality is essentially prescriptive–telling what should be the case, as opposed to what is the case–and since all evolutionary assessments of moral behavior are descriptive, then evolution cannot account for the most important thing that needs to be explained: morality’s “oughtness.”

The question that really needs to be answered is: “Why shouldn’t the chimp (or a human, for that matter) be selfish?” The evolutionary answer might be that when we’re selfish, we hurt the group. That answer, though, presumes another moral value: We ought to be concerned about the welfare of the group. Why should that concern us? Answer: If the group doesn’t survive, then the species doesn’t survive. But why should I care about the survival of the species?

Here’s the problem. All of these responses meant to explain morality ultimately depend on some prior moral notion to hold them together. It’s going to be hard to explain, on an evolutionary view of things why I should not be selfish, or steal, or rape, or even kill tomorrow without smuggling morality into the answer.

The evolutionary explanation disembowels morality, reducing it to mere descriptions of conduct. The best the Darwinist explanation can do–if it succeeds at all–is explain past behavior. It cannot inform future behavior. The essence of morality, though, is not description, but prescription.

Evolution may be an explanation for the existence of conduct we choose to call moral, but it gives no explanation why I should obey any moral rules in the future. If one countered that we have a moral obligation to evolve, then the game would be up, because if we have moral obligations prior to evolution, then evolution itself can’t be their source.

What atheists mean by morality is this: accidental patterns of social behavior designed to promote group cohesion. The behaviors are accidental and they are basically the same as group food preferences, clothing preferences and traffic law preferences. They are MADE UP. Any member of the group who is sufficiently powerful can do as he pleases, because there is no real moral obligation – just customs and conventions. And the only reason not to do what you like is because you might get caught. That’s “monkey morality”. And that’s what atheists mean by morality.

And this is where this evolutionary morality leads atheists like Steven Pinker.

Excerpt:

One of the hippest intellectuals around recently argued in polite company that it’s difficult to defend laws against killing a baby. But he hardly drew a yawn.

Steven Pinker, an MIT psychology professor and best-selling author, presented his argument in a 2 November 1997 New York Times Magazine article entitled Why They Kill Their Newborns. The article attempted to shed light on the “prom mom” phenomenon of recent headlines. Pinker maintains that giving birth and then discarding the newborn in the trash is (of all things) best explained as an indirect result of species-preserving evolutionary adaptations. On this basis, Pinker eventually concludes, “The baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal (and sometimes religious) young women.”

That’s atheist morality.

Or you can read about atheist Peter Singer instead.

Excerpt:

In 1993, ethicist Peter Singer shocked many Americans by suggesting that no newborn should be considered a person until 30 days after birth and that the attending physician should kill some disabled babies on the spot. Five years later, his appointment as Decamp Professor of Bio-Ethics at Princeton University ignited a firestorm of controversy, though his ideas about abortion and infanticide were hardly new. In 1979 he wrote, “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons”; therefore, “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.”

That’s atheist morality.

When a person says “I’m an atheist”, what they mean is “Every person can decide for themselves if murdering babies is right for them, and if a society decides that murdering babies is their evolved behavior, then it’s right for them – morality is what people decide it is”. In a time and place where slavery is acceptable, atheists would own slaves. In a time and place where killing your offspring is acceptable, atheists will kill their offspring. In a time and place where killing Jews is acceptable, atheists will kill Jews. They have no external standard of morality, other than the behaviors they observe in the people around them. And they only ape those behaviors to avoid losing social prestige. In their hearts they know that these behaviors are just arbitrary conventions, like driving on the right side of the road. This is what they believe.

Evolutionary ethics is an oxymoron. What atheist mean when they talk about morality is that there is no morality. What they want to talk about is why humans have feelings of obligation to do this or that. If you ask them whether there is anything humans ought to do, independent of feelings and instincts and social conventions, the answer is NO. And feelings are so easily dismissed when they go against self-interest, for atheists. They explain morality away, so that they can jettison moral feelings when they go against their self-interest. “I only feel bad when I kill my child because of genetic programming and social conditioning, but there isn’t anything really wrong with killing my child”. That’s atheist morality.

When an atheist condemns something, he is expressing a personal preference against that thing. And on his atheistic view, the denial of his preference is as warranted as the affirmation of his preference. He may not like rape, so he says “rape is wrong”. But on his own view, the person who says “rape is right” is as warranted in his personal opinion as the atheist is. They think that all talk about what people ought to do is basically opinions of individuals and groups. Slavery isn’t objectively wrong, it’s either “the way we do things in this time and place” or it’s “not the way we do things in this time and place”. It’s all about feelings, on atheism. If it feels good, do it. Just don’t get caught, because then you’ll feel bad. That’s the level of morality that atheists rise to because there is really nothing right or wrong objectively, on their view.

The great moral accomplishment of atheist morality in the last 150 years has been to murder 100 million people. And this is not counting the 40+ million deaths caused by abortion in the US alone, or the 20 million deaths caused by environmentalist alarmism. It also doesn’t count the millions of broken homes caused by the sexual revolution, or the social costs of fatherlessness.

Commentary

Why Christians should focus on cultural issues as well as evangelism

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Scott Klusendorf linked me this article on Facebook, in which he gives five reasons why Christians should not JUST focus on the gospel, but should instead be good at promoting goodness and opposing evil.

Excerpt:

First, it does not follow that because cultural reformers cannot make a culture blameless before God, we shouldn’t try to make it better for the weak and oppressed. I do not know of a single pro-life leader, for example, who argues that cultural reform can save souls eternally; only the gospel does that. The fact that cultural reform cannot get a man to heaven, however, does not mean that it cannot (in many cases through political means) save him from injustice here on earth. In short, pro-life advocates like me do not work for change in culture to save the world from spiritual death, but to save the most vulnerable members of the human family, the unborn, from physical death.

Second, the goal of cobelligerent cultural reform is not necessarily to change the hearts of individuals (whether saved or lost), but to restrain their evil acts. Martin Luther King, Jr., put it well: “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.”3 The purpose of government, according to Scripture, is not to ensure salvation, but to promote justice (Rom. 13:1‑4). The primary purpose of the church, of course, is to preach the gospel of Christ, but if Christians, collectively, do not also challenge government to fulfill its duty to protect the weak and defenseless, who will?

Third, the notion that “there can be no real cultural impact apart from the transforming power of the gospel of Jesus Christ” sounds good, but it is simply incorrect. Consider the moral evil of slavery in America, which did not end because of mass conversions to Christ. It ended when believers and nonbelievers joined forces to stand against it—and paid for it with the lives of 360,000 Union soldiers. Was the abolition of slavery not a “real” cultural improvement? True, it did not make those who participated right with God, but it did take the physical whips off the backs of oppressed people. That is moral and cultural improvement by any reasonable standard.

Fourth, it is not spiritually unacceptable for Christians to mobilize with non-Christians for causes other than preaching the gospel. Prior to the Civil War, Protestant clergy worked with non-Christians and organized the Underground Railroad to free black slaves. Anyone who thinks that God’s people are wasting their time pursuing social justice may want to take a look at how important it is to God: Jeremiah 5:26‑28; 9:24; Isaiah 1:16‑17, 21‑23; 58:6‑7; 61:8; Psalm 94:1‑23; Proverbs 24:1‑12; Matthew 25:41‑46.

Fifth, why should anyone suppose that pro-life advocacy detracts from the discipline responsibilities of the local church as outlined in Matthew 28? Simply put, the answer to a lack of evangelical fervor for the Gospel is not to withdraw our political advocacy for the weak and vulnerable; it’s to encourage Christians to do a better job presenting the gospel. We don’t have to stop rescuing the innocent to do that.

This is why I try to have a balance of apologetics with other issues. And not just social policy, but fiscal policy and foreign policy. We need to have complete, comprehensive, coherent Christian worldviews. One obvious benefit of this is that we can connect Christianity with any topic when we are talking to others in the workplace, or anywhere that normal conversations occur. And if we study everything very well, people will link our intelligence to our faith. They’ll say “if you’ve put this much thought into economics, then you must have a well-thought-out faith, too”. Being well-rounded makes you more convincing, more influential on moral and cultural issues, and more effective at turning conversations to the gospel.