Tag Archives: Secularism

News

British Columbia law society votes against accrediting evangelical law school

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Map of Canada
Map of Canada

Global News reports.

Excerpt:

The Law Society of British Columbia has voted against accrediting a proposed law school at Trinity Western University.

In a binding decision, 74 per cent of lawyers voted against TWU’s program, with 8,039 ballots cast in total – more than 60 per cent of all lawyers eligible to vote.

The society says the decision means that “the proposed law school at Trinity Western University is not an approved faculty of law for the purpose of the Law Society’s admission program.”

The vote was conducted by mail and required a two-thirds majority, with a turnout more than 33.3 per cent.

CBC has the reaction from Trinity:

The president of Trinity Western University says he is uncertain if the new law school will open as scheduled in 2016 following the recent vote by the B.C. Law Society members to reject the faith-based institution.

TWU president Bob Kuhn expressed his frustration with the recent vote as he left a ratification meeting at the law society on Friday morning.

“They had to choose between the principles upon which they made the initial decision and the popularity of that decision among lawyers in the province,” says Kuhn.

“We’re disappointed of course they chose the latter. But that’s the reality of people in an elected position.”

British Columbia is now the third province, after Ontario and Nova Scotia, to officially reject the university’s law school.

Kuhn says it’s not clear whether the Christian university will move ahead with its 2016 opening date, and the school will decide in the coming weeks whether to file a judicial review.

The board members of the B.C. Law Society voted 25 to one with four abstentions to ratify the results of a referendum announced yesterday rejecting the accreditation of a Trinity Western University’s law school.

More than 8,000 of the society’s 13,530 members voted earlier this month in a special referendum to overturn the board’s decision earlier this year to accredit the faith-based law school.

Critics oppose the new law school’s accreditation because Trinity Western students must sign a Christian covenant that states sexual relations are to be confined within the bounds of a marriage between a man and a woman.

Trinity Western Law School has a rule that says that students are expect not to engage in extramarital sex – regardless of sexual orientation, which is in keeping with what the Bible teaches. And the law society has decided that this teaching should disqualify a person from practicing law. What is objectionable about this rule? Well, the people who voted against it would be condemned by it. And so they seek to remove the influence of anyone who believes in that rule. Times change, but human nature doesn’t change. If you don’t want God, you try to silence anyone who reminds you of that fact. It’s also a reminded that secularism isn’t based in anything that science tells us or history tells us or any kind of evidence. It’s about morality. It’s about denying the authority of the moral law. That’s why people reject God, and intimidate those who don’t reject God.

I think this is a good reminder to Christian parents in the United States about why it is important to have some sort of vision for your children. If we don’t get advanced degrees, then we leave these decisions to the secular bigots. We are either going to take having an influence seriously or we are going to lose the power to have an influence. Do you have a plan to counter this?

News

Obama on stay-at-home moms: “that’s not a choice we want them to make”

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Breitbart reports:

During a speech in Rhode Island today, President Obama stressed the importance of public pre-school in America, pointing out that the cost of daycare was getting too high.

“Moms and dads deserve a great place to drop their kids off every day that doesn’t cost them an arm and a leg,” Obama stated. “We need better child care, day care, early child education policies.”

Obama explained that in many states it cost parents more money to put their kids in day care than it cost to put them in a public university.

“Too often parents have no choice but to put their kids in cheaper day care that maybe doesn’t have the kinds of programming that makes a big difference in a child’s development,” he said.

Because America lacks public pre-school, Obama said, women often earned less money than men.

“Sometimes, someone, usually Mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result,” he said. “That’s not a choice we want Americans to make.”

Creating public pre-school, Obama explained, was not only “good for families” but “good for the children.”

So I watched this video in which Obama flat out says that he favors having the government spend more money on social programs for children, despite the fact that we know that mothers are best for young children. He is not the first to push this, Nancy Pelosi did the same in 2013. This is the view championed by Democrats.

These programs are a boon to the government workers who vote for Obama, because they will be run by secular leftist social workers. This is how they earn their living – by separating mothers from their children. They want to avoid having to please customers in the private sector – that’s too risky. They prefer to take over the job of mothering from a child’s biological mother. That’s safe. You don’t get fired from the government, and you don’t have the pressure of having to care about what customers think of you. This is attractive to people on the left – they want work to be like this, even if it means a child’s misery.

How will he achieve this?

Well, he will raise taxes on the husband, so that the husband can no longer support the family on his own. This will cause the wife to have to leave the children and go to work in order to make ends meet. This way, Obama can separate the child from her parents, and from the worldview of the parents. Instead of having parents working to raise their own child, you have the government raising children to believe what the government wants them to believe. For a secular government, this will probably be that family is bad, that religion is bad, that traditional morality is bad, that the free market system is bad, and that bigger government is good. Think of examples like sex education (abortion advocacy) and global warming (anti-capitalism), if you doubt this anti-family, anti-free-market angle exists.

Does it excite me, as a single chaste man, to get married and be a husband in a world run by feminist socialist leftists like Obama? No.

I am getting up every morning and going to work so that I and my future wife can run my family our way – to promote our worldview and our values. We would be doing the work of raising a family, so we should be allowed to pass on our values. But thanks to feminism and socialism, we have these bloated parasites in government who steal our children from us and then charge us money in order to pay for imposing their disgusting, immoral values on them. The American people somewhere along the line decided that even though I earn the money, that someone else ought to be passing on their values to my children. And this would be all the people who traditionally vote Democrat. They decided that. There are many young, unmarried Christian women who vote Democrat. They decided that. They “feel” that more powerful government is more desirable than more powerful families. Nothing they hear in church teaches them not to vote for stronger government over stronger families.

I would like more Christian leaders to be telling the young, unmarried women to stop voting for bigger secular government. Someone has to get that through their heads – that men do not like sharing the duty of leadership with anyone – especially not with clowns who have degrees in the humanities and could not find private sector jobs serving customers. Unfortunately, my friends tell me that the most common books being read by young Christian women on dating sites are books by A.W. Tozer, Francis Chan, Harry Potter, Left Behind, Phillip Yancey, Beth Moore, Nancy Leigh Demoss, Joyce Meyer, Elizabeth George, Stasi Eldgredge and so on. There is a complete lack of seriousness among many Christian women about marriage and family as it relates to economics, politics and education. It’s not just apologetics that is lacking. Everything is focused on feelings, but the attraction and feasibility of the marriage/family plan is diminishing after each election right under our noses. It is diminishing for men. And there is no marriage and parenting without a man, however much Christians seem to be turning toward and celebrating single motherhood – i.e. – marriage to the secular state.

Young unmarried women, if you expect to get married, you’d better start voting for small government. Small government means bigger individuals and bigger families, and that’s exactly what men who consider marriage and families want. Wake up.

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Polemics

Should you marry someone who promises you that “there will be no divorce”?

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I was having a chat with a friend of mine who just got out of a serious relationship and I was trying to pick his brain to find out everything about the woman he was intending to marry so I could see why things went wrong. He told me that she had told him over and over that “there would be no divorce” and that he found that very convincing, despite very obvious warning signs in the area of respect (which I wrote about yesterday).

Well. I was very surprised to hear this, and so I asked him whether he thought it was enough that this woman told him that “three will be no divorce”. He said yes. This woman had experienced the divorce of her own parents and she was resolved (by act of will) never to let that happen to her. He found that acceptable, but I didn’t because I know the numbers on this, and I know that children of divorced parents are more likely to divorce themselves. So the pain of divorce is no deterrent here.

So should we believe that people can avoid a divorce just by saying they will? I told him no. And for an example, I offered a thought experiment. I said to imagine two runners on a track who are charged with completing 10 laps. One runner is a Navy SEAL like Mike Murphy, who has been trained to run miles and miles carrying a 60 pound load. In the mountains. The other is a 300-lb couch potato whose idea of exercise is reaching for the TV remote control. Suppose I ask both runners: do you intend to finish the 10 laps? Should I believe them if they both say yes?

Look, marriage is like building a house. People can say whatever they want about their prospects for success, but the will doesn’t decide here. You have to certain skills, you have to have a certain amount of money, you have to have a plan, you have to be able to read blueprints, you have to be able to hire specialists, you understand the differences between materials, etc. When you think about it, no long-term enterprise can be accomplished by act of will. Piano recitals, math exams, investing for retirement… nothing can be done by sheer act of will.

Now with that being said, let’s take a look at an example.

An example

I found this article in the Wall Street Journal way back in 2011, but it fits my conversation with my friend.

The author, Susan Gregory Thomas, lists some of the mistakes she made that led her to get a divorce in her first marriage.

This is the first thing I saw that caught my eye:

“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born.

So she is trying to express an intention here, repeatedly, to her husband. I think the point here is that she did have good intentions but as we shall see that was not enough to prevent the divorce. That’s a warning to others that good intentions are not enough.

Here is the second thing:

I believed that I had married my best friend as fervently as I believed that I’d never get divorced. No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn’t the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment.

I noticed that a lot of people seem to think that being compatible is very important to marriage. But I don’t think that it is the most important thing. For example, you would not expect two cocaine addicts or two gambling addicts, etc. to have a stable marriage. I think marriage is more like a job interview where there are specific things that each person has to be able to do in order to make it work. So again, she’s giving a warning to others that compatibility is not a guarantee of marriage success.

And there’s more:

My husband and I were as obvious as points on a graph in a Generation X marriage study. We were together for nearly eight years before we got married, and even though statistics show that divorce rates are 48% higher for those who have lived together previously, we paid no heed.

We also paid no heed to his Catholic parents, who comprised one of the rare reassuringly unified couples I’d ever met, when they warned us that we should wait until we were married to live together. As they put it, being pals and roommates is different from being husband and wife. How bizarrely old-fashioned and sexist! We didn’t need anything so naïve or retro as “marriage.” Please. We were best friends.

Sociologists, anthropologists and other cultural observers tell us that members of Generation X are more emotionally invested in our spouses than previous generations were. We are best friends; our marriages are genuine partnerships. Many studies have found that Generation X family men help around the house a good deal more than their forefathers. We depend on each other and work together.

So here I am seeing that she rejected sex roles, parental advice, or the moral guidelines of Christianity. Again, she is discussing some of the factors that I at least think contribute to divorce. I think that she is right to highlight the fact that she was wrong to disregard the statistics on cohabitation.

So here are some of the mistakes:

  • reject advice from parents
  • avoid chastity
  • cohabitate for EIGHT YEARS
  • embrace feminism, reject complementarian sex roles
  • thinking that good intentions would overcome every challenge

So, what does the research show works to have a stable marriage?

  • chastity
  • rejection of feminism
  • regular church attendance
  • parental involvement in the courting
  • parents of both spouses married
  • no previous divorces

Guess what? You can’t break all the rules and still succeed by sheer force of will.  If you break all the rules like that woman in the story, you can’t have a working marriage. Not without repudiating everything you believed, and taking steps to undo all the damage from everything you’ve done. You can’t keep all the bad beliefs and bad habits you’ve built up and marry them to a marriage that will stand the test of time.

A good marriage is an enterprise, and it requires that your character be changed to fit the requirements. There is no way to short-circuit the preparation / selection processes by act of will. And just because your friends are getting married, that’s no reason for you to rush into it unprepared. The best way to prepare for marriage is pick people of the opposite sex and practice marriage behaviors (e.g. – listening, helping) with them – even with people you don’t intend to marry. Take an interest in their lives and practice denying yourself to help them with their problems. That’s better than making idle promises you’re not able to keep. And this works the same for men and for women. Both people need to get this right.