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The Rant Came Back

12:25 PM - Apr. 10, 2007 - Wild Thoughts {0} - Add to the Wildness

Ahhh... I'm done my itinerant behaviour for now, having redesigned three of my website sections with blog-based homepages. It is now time to sit back on my comfy HSB couch and enjoy being home.

Wanna hear something sick?? I didn't think so, but here's a link anyway.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17980152/from/ET/

Fifth-graders (granted, it sounds like the good ol' system was doing its usual best and had held some of them back a year or two) getting busted for public acts of obscenity.

It begs several questions, most of them not even about the school system. One, where did they get the seared conscience to do these things? What had they been exposed to previously? It doesn't take much imagination to lay it at the feet of the internet.

A recent TV special on online gaming interviewed players who indicated that, whether the games were openly obscene or not, they were being used as "hook-up" places for cyber-sex. This handy speck of information has, of course, been quickly put to use by the porn industry, which wouldn't want to be left behind in the transition from TV-based media to online interactivity.

Lately, I keep running across articles on the addictive qualities of gaming. I think it might apply to online activities in general. There is always something more, another place to go or read or experience. The internet, at its worst, is not a place of filth and sin, though that's bad enough, but a place where people can lose themselves.

This is a "respectable sin," which makes it far more deadly. The ability to shut out the real world allows people to pretend things are different than they are - for instance, that there are no consequences to behaviour. Or that they are the people they pretend to be when the computer can act as a mediator between them and the world.

In other words, the internet at its worst is a place where sin doesn't matter and people don't have to face their sinfulness. It doesn't have consequences, it can be erased with a delete key, and it doesn't have any impact on others.

We were created to lose ourselves, that's for sure. A key component of mystic religions is the giving up of self, the merging with some greater awareness, being or life force. Humanity cannot get away from the need to escape our own selves in order to find meaning in life. It seems to be a hard-wired reflex to the fallen state in which we exist.

But we're intended to lose ourselves in Christ. Sin remains an eternal reality, no matter how we avoid it temporally. The need to continue searching forever, without satisfaction, is a key evidence that only the true God can give us what we're looking for.

Sexual Politics, Part 2

5:07 PM - Feb. 26, 2007 - Wild Thoughts {3} - Add to the Wildness

It’s fascinating to me that so many talk wistfully about wanting a vibrant faith experience like the early New Testament church – and fail to recognize that the global society which it engaged and thrived in was even more morally arbitrary than our own.

In order to examine the Christian worldview on morals, here are the presuppositions to borrow:

Presupposition #1: The Bible is accurate when it says that God is love, and that we can know Him.

Corollary Conclusion #1: If God is love, then the nature, purpose and meaning of love must be defined by who God is as a person. It follows that in order to know what love is and how to express it, one must know (not guess or opine) who God is.

Presupposition #2: The Bible is accurate when it says that God has plans for our welfare, and not for our calamity.

Corollary Conclusion #2: When God lays out guidelines for human sexuality – and any other behaviour – He has our best interests in mind.

Presupposition #3: The Bible is accurate when it says that God created human beings – not evolved them or spat them out of some semi-accidental process. It is also accurate when it describes marriage as originating with God and predating all cultures and societies, unless one considers two people a society.

Corollary Conclusion #3: If God is the Designer of humanity, then He is qualified to write the operating manual.

Presupposition #4: When God created humans as sexual (rather than asexually reproducing) beings, he designed them primarily for fellowship with Him, and all other activities in life – including sexuality – are subject to the expression of relationship (or lack of relationship) with God.

There is a common misconception that Christianity "requires" certain behaviours of people, and is by definition oppressive to "alternative" communities.

On the contrary, biblical faith produces certain behaviours in people. Those who don't share a family relationship with God (see the federal headship rant) are predicted by the Bible not to share in the behaviours of God's family. (See Romans chapter 1.)

What this means is that Christianity actually grants more empowerment to individual human beings than the rest of the culture does. The Bible's message does not state that you must be a certain way (orientation, personality, etc) because of the way you were created. In fact, that's the message of the alternative sexuality community: You were hard-wired or "made" a certain way, so that's the way you must act by default.
I believe God gives humanity more freedom than that. I have chosen heterosexual monogamy with one life-partner. I've had to reaffirm that choice with gritted teeth on occasion. It can be work. I'm not a faithful type of person. My natural tendency is to go where the wind blows.

I choose this because I believe in a personal God and in His decision to provide me with full redemption from sin. While Ephesians chapter 5 defines gender roles, it's not because one gender is "more valuable," "more capable," or "more suited." I could out-preach a lot of guys. I refuse to. That is their place, a symbolic act that pictures Jesus Christ's interaction with humanity. The symbolism is the reason.

My marriage is worth ten thousand words. It pictures Jesus Christ's relationship with me, based on His death and resurrection. It's not Ephesians 5 that really defines this. It's Ephesians 1. If you want to understand why Christians are the way they are, read the whole book, not just the last half of chapter 5.

If you don't accept the presuppositions of the Bible, it's pretty hard to come up with any rationale for marriage at all. Funny thing about arbitrary values systems. They're arbitrary.

Sexual Politics Part 1

9:00 PM - Feb. 22, 2007 - Wild Thoughts {0} - Add to the Wildness

It’s that nasty God of the Bible again, messing up His adherents with His apparent contradictions. What about homosexuality? Premarital or extramarital sex? Sex for anything other than procreation?

Once again, here is why these are issues of disagreement between Bible-believers and others: Presuppositions. Here are the presuppositions drawn from secularism:

Presupposition #1: Love is a feeling or commitment as I define it.

Presupposition #2: The sex act has no greater context than what I give it in my life.

Presupposition #3: The Bible condemns sex except where it can’t avoid it – being fruitful and multiplying, as it were.

Presupposition #4: Marriage is a cultural phenomenon, and sexuality is not.

As with the question of God’s justice, secular thinking has already shut itself off from investigation of any other world view, because it does not allow for even a temporary shift of presuppositions. The question of hell isn’t nearly as emotionally charged as the politics of sex, because hell is sometime after you die, and sex is now. So in this area in particular, people do not allow themselves a full examination of differing views.

It only makes sense for a society which doesn’t take its values from the Bible to create its own definitions for marriage and sexuality. What doesn’t make sense is for Christians to run around gasping in shock. Nor does it make sense for Christians to try to impose their outward morality on people who have no compelling inward reason to follow it. That is totalitarianism, and it isn’t evangelism. Quite the contrary, I would argue that it sacrifices the eternal grace of God in Jesus Christ for a temporary political maneuver.

For whatever reason, many folks seem not to recognize that the legislative imposition of external mores without personal spiritual regeneration is actually a spiritual loss. The idea of a “Christian nation” is a false one. It only signifies a nation that operates on a Judeo-Christian legal and cultural structure, one which more deeply masks the inward spiritual emptiness of so many living within it because of their outward compliance.

Next time: the Christian assumptions.

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