One of the topics I disagree with my right leaning Christian brethren on when it comes to political matters is the role of morality when it comes to making laws. The older I get the more libertarian I get (if I understand the way they approach laws). We shouldn’t need the government to make rules about every little thing. Sadly, we make them anyway. In the making of them we are informed by our various moral beliefs. That’s something that’s probably unavoidable, even if we did want to avoid them.

Conservatively political Christians, it seems to me, want the laws of our land to reflect the Biblical codes. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, you have to decide which Biblical laws should apply to our current society. The law that many of them wish to enact is making abortion illegal across the board. Life is sacred and it begins at conception (a view that’s apparently new to the evangelical community it seems). The problem is, that isn’t a biblical law per se. I don’t recall anything in the Bible saying that you shouldn’t abort your child. Now there is a payment that you would have to make if a child were killed in its mother’s womb in an act of violence. There are also a whole host of cases in which God commanded babies and pregnant women to be killed. But, they say, life is sacred and the taking of life, especially an innocent life, is immoral. Let’s accept that as a given for the moment.

As I have often said, if you want to make abortion illegal because it’s not biblically moral, then you have to wonder about making it legal to say, stone our children. That’s perfectly moral in the society of the Old Testament. As one of those Conservative Christians pointed out, we don’t live in Old Testament times and aren’t subject to their laws, so the stoning thing is off the table. The argument, it would seem, is more about reflecting God’s character in our laws than about any specific law. I suppose that’s an okay argument. The God I believe in loves the world and everyone in it. So I think that our law should reflect that. I think if you love someone then the law should allow you to marry that person. Because marriage is a contract that relationship should be entered into only by those able to legally enter into contracts, but otherwise we should stay out of it. But that means homosexuals can marry and that’s against the Bible!

Well let’s look at marriages in the Bible. We have a whole host of interesting marriages. We’ve got people marrying their relatives. We have numerous polygamist marriages. Then there’s that whole notion of woman as chattel. I’m pretty sure there are instances where people of what would now be considered unmarriageable ages get hitched. How old was Mary? Of course most of that is in the Old Testament. Paul is pretty anti-marriage. He seems to think that it’s better if we all just do what he did, stay single and spread the Gospel. If that proves too much for our heated loins to handle, then we should get married. So don’t get married for love’s sake, get married for appropriate sexual release. Jesus, so far as we know, didn’t get married. The apostles left any relationships they had and went on the road. I won’t say that there aren’t plenty of good words in the New Testament about marriage that I apply to my own. There are. Thing is, marriage as it’s displayed in the Bible is at best an argument for how believers are supposed to act when they’re in union. Treat each other with respect. Love sacrificially. If you can’t handle more than one wife, don’t marry more than one woman. None of that can really be legislated though. So why should we get so caught up in codifying modern marriages after a set of ancient traditions that most people now would find untenable? If you believe that the Bible has the perfect blueprint for marriage then by all means, live it!

If you want to use the ten commandments as the basis for modern law (as some would argue that we already do) that seems to be harmless enough. I mean it’s got don’t kill, don’t lie, don’t steal. Those are all excellent things not to do. We can most of us agree that making laws around that is okay. Then it begins to become problematic. Should we still have blue laws where business aren’t allowed to operate on a Saturday/Sunday (depending on how you feel about the Sabbath and where it falls)? Or should that be left to individuals? Should we let that Indian restaurant down the block have their little shrine to Ganesha? Or should that be illegal? Should it be illegal to disrespect your Mom and Dad? I don’t think we can codify those things.

Jesus said that all of the law and prophets boil down to two things: love your God and love your neighbor. I can totally get behind that. What I can’t abide is making laws requiring us to do either. Those are things that need to be left up to the individual. You can’t build that into law, except for maybe the last one and only then in the crudest/broadest strokes. You can provide for and protect your neighbor and those sentiments certainly have their place in our legal system. It isn’t unique to Christianity though. People of all backgrounds and traditions have come together to figure out how to make that happen and we’re still trying. That’s what a democracy is.

So, I’ve said my piece for now. What place do you think God’s law has in our modern day legal system? Any? A lot? None? Sound off!

Psalm 1

The Two Ways

1 How happy is the man
who does not follow the advice of the wicked
or take the path of sinners
or join a group of mockers!
2 Instead, his delight is in the Lord’s instruction,
and he meditates on it day and night.
3 He is like a tree planted beside streams of water
that bears its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.
4 The wicked are not like this;
instead, they are like chaff that the wind blows away.
5 Therefore the wicked will not survive the judgment,
and sinners will not be in the community of the righteous.
6 For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked leads to ruin.

Our new pastor preached on this passage yesterday. It was a good first sermon choice I think as what he taught said a lot about him. One of the things that popped out of his sermon was that this is not an excuse to engage in an Us vs. Them mentality. He admits that a poem this reductionist can and certainly does lead to black and white thinking. He encouraged us though to remember that the Gospel is not an excuse to gloat or to talk about how much more righteous we are than the Other.

This poem leads me instead to think about my own “chaff-ness” and how far I have to journey (and have journeyed) in my relationship with God towards becoming a tree and bearing life giving fruit. The reader still needs to deal with the first verse though. When it come to relationships with those who disagree with us, and in some cases are actively in opposition to what we believe, I think this urges caution.

Without question, we are to pursue relationships with non-believers. I have a lot of acquaintances and a few dear friends who think that the concept of religion in general and Christianity in particular are harmful at worst and wacky at best. Still, I seek out time with them. I don’t believe for a second that I’ll “convert” them. I’m not sure that’s my job. I do want to love them and bless them. Clearly I’m commanded to do those things (not that that’s why I do them), and so I do. There’s something sweet though in fellowship with believers. We can talk about things from a place of mutual understanding/benefit. And I know when I’m studying scripture, not just to prove a point or write a blog post, there’s healing that can happen and some serious thought provoking time.

This passage also talks about consequences, ultimate ones. It’s here where I will freely admit to being in uncomfortable territory. Whether this is talking about temporal or eternal repercussions for your beliefs, it’s not something I like to dwell on. On the one hand I suppose it could lead to gratitude for being in the tree category. We haven’t earned our “tree-ness”. The flip side of that in my mind is that likewise, the “chaff” haven’t earned their status either. They’re just being what the world made them to be. And yet there are severe costs if they don’t make it. I would have liked to hear Giorgio talk more about that as he winds his way through the Psalms, especially in light of our Assurance this week:

1 John 2:2 My little children, I am writing you these things so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ the Righteous One. 2 He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for those of the whole world.

This is old news, but I feel the need to write something about this. Chick-Fil-A is “anti gay marriage”. They’ve given millions of dollars to anti-gay organizations. As a “Christian” organization or at least a business that operates on biblical principles (we can and probably should talk about what that means), that shouldn’t be terribly surprising.

My quandary is should I as a person hand my ducats over to a company that actively pursues an “agenda” (a word I’m coming to hate) that I disagree with, setting aside the question of whether or not I should disagree with it. Plenty of people are boycotting them. I don’t go there often and when I do it’s usually to take advantage of a free night, but they do get my money on occasion.

Personally, I don’t care as much about what a company does with its profits, as I do about what they do to their employees. If I spent time looking into what companies did with their gains, I’d likely find something reprehensible in almost every case. That’s probably cynical, isn’t it? Still, it’s what I believe. In this case though, I don’t have to go looking. It’s right there in black and white and I do care, so what to do?

Okay, okay, let’s set all of that aside for a minute. The thing that disturbs me most is the digging they do into their operators’ lives. It’s absolutely their right to do so, apparently. But this bothers the Hell out of me:

Chick-fil-A, the corporate parent, has been sued at least 12 times since 1988 on charges of employment discrimination, according to records in U.S. District Courts. Aziz Latif, a former Chick-fil-A restaurant manager in Houston, sued the company in 2002 after Latif, a Muslim, says he was fired a day after he didn’t participate in a group prayer to Jesus Christ at a company training program in 2000. The suit was settled on undisclosed terms.

They make chicken sandwiches… They do it for the glory of the Lord, I guess, but come on. Seriously? I can understand if your primary focus is religious training/indoctrination. But the idea that if someone is single, or Muslim, or moonlights at a strip club should have zero bearing on their ability to do a good job for you. Who know, hiring them and treating them like human beings could have that “positive influence on all that come in contact with Chick-fil-A” that they expressly want.

And what does it mean to operate on Biblical principles? In this case it seems to mean making sure that your own personal business “diaconate” passes the scrutiny that Paul demands. Does it mean forgetting that all have sinned or that we’re supposed to love our neighbor to the point where we won’t hire them so that we don’t risk endorsing their sin? I would think that a Biblical principal that we’d need to include would be not to mistreat or oppress a foreigner (non-Jew) and moving beyond that we should make sure that they are fed and have the things they need. What better way to do that than to give them a job? We should bless those who persecute us. Don’t curse them; pray that God will bless them. When did God say “Blessed are those that persecute, for they shall make great fricking chicken.”?

It’s this that would make me take a step towards boycotting this business. But would that make me a chicken plucking hypocrite? Should I “persecute” Chick-fil-a for being what they almost can’t help being? We live in a church culture that wants to alienate those who disagree with us. We have set ourselves up as judge and jury. “It’s in the word of God! They are vile sinners and we must show them the depth of their corruption. We must not let that corruption taint our Godly pursuits. They must not join our non-religious groups. We must not let them lead the lives they want, controlling them to prevent them from sinning further.”

CFA will get rewarded by believers for these actions. My dollars, drop in the bucket that they are, will only serve to further allow them to push their (in my opinion) non-Christian agenda. For now I suppose I’ll continue eating the occasional spicy chicken sandwich and pray for the sinners at the top to see their way clear to loving the rest of us poor sinners down here.

WARNING: CLUMSY ATTEMPT NOT TO HURT ANYONE’S FEELINGS AHEAD!!! I have some friends that consider themselves to be fall under the category of are transgender. I’ve also written a story from the perspective of a transgender person. So naturally that makes me an expert on the topic. (I also stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.)

One of my lovely friends, who read said story, sent me a link to this video:

Transforming FAMILY (Open Captions) from LGBTQ Parenting Network on Vimeo.

I watched it and it’s an interesting look into the live of transgender people who want to be or are parents.

When I finished the video I got into a conversation with a fellow Christian about it. They are of the opinion that choosing to identify and live as if you possessed a gender other than the one you are born with is the same as living out your life as a homosexual, in the sense that both would be sins. I pushed back.

I told the person that unless they had explicit verses from the Bible that talked about the issue then they couldn’t take that stance. They responded that they believed the whole issue to be one rooted in a modern society. In essence they believed that there were no trans people in ancient times, or if there were that they simply weren’t out about it. I allow as how the latter might be true. I pushed back again.

I said that I didn’t think that a) they knew or had talked to any trans folks or b) that they had put any thought or study into the issue. I guess you can imagine that the conversation didn’t go well from there.

Personally, from a Christian standpoint, I have no idea what to think about it. Off the top of my head, it could well be that having these feelings could be a result of the fall. In an ideal world I suppose a person would be born so that their brain and body matched. I argued (and I hope this doesn’t offend) that if a person was born with a genetic defect that could be repaired medically or surgically, then it would be silly not to. In a way couldn’t being trans be a genetic defect of a sort? You feel like you should have been born with a gender other than the one your biology dictates. If you can “fix” that why shouldn’t you? How could that be a sin?

Ultimately, all I want is to be able to better understand all of the struggles that people are going through. I want to love people whether I understand them or not. I also want them to understand that they are sinners, no more or less than I am, and that there is hope through Christ for forgiveness and healing.

Fellow blogger and pastor Jared Wilson blogged about the twelve rules you’d need to follow to date his daughter. Never one to let an opportunity like this slide by, I decided to take my own stab, tongue in cheek, and present my own list.

1. You will know about Jesus before you go out with her. When I was your age no one had told me about him. Sure, I’d gone to church some, had some Sunday school under my belt, but for all of that I might as well have been a pagan. You don’t have to make a decision about what you believe, but the Gospel will be presented to you.

2. Let’s talk about sex. I know what goes through the mind of the average teen-age boy. We’re going to have a brief discussion about what sort of attention is or isn’t appropriate when it comes to my daughter. While I sharpen my Gil Hibben Pro-Throwing Axe.

3. I will meet your Mom and/or Dad. The vibe I get from them will say a lot about what likelihood you have of being more than buddies with my daughters.

4. I suspect that neither you nor my daughter will have much of your own money. Any money she has will be earmarked for savings, donation/offering, and fun. If she wants to spend her money on you, you’ll let her and vice versa. You have to work that out. If you marry her then that’s what should happen anyway. Truthfully, she’ll probably be in charge of the fundage if she’s money smart like her Mom.

5. Ninety-nine percent of what you post on Facebook, Twitter, etc. is either going to be boring or posing. People your age are almost never who they appear to be when they’re online. Heck, that’s true of people my age. Instead friending you and missing that glorious drivel, you’ll spend a good amount of time at my house and I’ll get to know the real you.

6. If you wear anything that says that Jesus is your homeboy or if you’re a preppy, there’s a good chance my daughter won’t have anything to do with you, unless it’s just to piss me off. I reserve the right to force you to wear one of my Hawaiian shirts if you come in here with that crap.

7. Young people are often jerks, but they might actually mature and become nice people. I know I did. If you’re a jerk on a regular basis, my daughter will jerk a knot in you if I don’t first.

8. I won’t be your pastor, but I’ll be here if you have any questions. If you don’t go to church you’ll come with us to the occasional service. If you do, then we’ll join you on occasion. If you’re KJVO, why are we talking again?

9. You’re going to say all manner of stupid things and pledge things that you don’t mean. My daughter will too. Maybe you’ll mean it one day. Maybe you’ll even mean it towards my daughter. Odds are good you’ll break her heart or she’ll break yours. If that happens you’re still welcome around my house. If you’ve made it this far you are probably an okay kid.

10. You’ll need time to talk, just the two of you. That can happen in libraries, movie theaters, shopping malls, McDonalds. Heck it could happen in her bedroom, but assume that both it and her phone are bugged and there will be no Fifth amendment or ACLU that will prevent everything recorded from going onto the Internet for all of your friends to see. I don’t think you want that.

11. I love someone with a sense of humor. My daughter will too. I know people that can make bodies and entire histories disappear. Isn’t that funny?

12. Ultimately it’s not my call to tell my daughter who she can and can’t “date”. Oh sure, I could say “You won’t have anything to do with that boy!” and I might, but we’ve all seen West Side Story (If you haven’t, you will. I have it on DVD.). I will trust her and you to honor my wishes and more importantly I will expect you to honor her. “No.” means “Hell, no!” when either of us says it, and if you can’t remember that, remember #11.

Our new pastoral candidate came and preached this Sunday. He seems like a good guy and is a talented preacher. I got to speak to him after a lunch where he and his wife and kids shared their story. He said that when he was in college ministry he held to the belief that the Bible was trustworthy, but not inerrant and has since moved into the inerrancy camp. I seem to have gone the other direction to some degree.

I believe that the translations we have currently are trustworthy when it comes to getting the message of the good news across. I do not believe that we have an inerrant version of the Bible (whatever that means). I could say that the original manuscripts were inerrant, but isn’t that essentially meaningless? We don’t have them so we could say that they were printed on unicorn hide written in velociraptor blood.

The important thing to me is that I can put my trust in what the inherent message of the scriptures is. God from the beginning has shown his creation more grace than we have deserved. That message is found consistently from Genesis through Revelation.

Thanks to my friend Dave Perry, I read a very thought provoking post from Rachel Evans. Apparently she left her traditional church and she and her husband are starting a home church. The post title is 15 Reasons I Left Church. Most of them resonated with me, but thanks to my church it was more of a “I Know that other people are going through this.” For me there is one area my church could be doing better in (and by my church I guess I mean me, since I need to be part of the solution).

14. I left the church because there are days when I’m not sure I believe in God, and no one told me that “dark nights of the soul” can be part of the faith experience.

If you’ve known me for any length of time then you know that I go through these stretches. Right now things are good. I’m on some nifty medication which helps. I’ve also got good friends I can be honest with. When that’s not the case, I need to know that it’s okay to be in the pit sometimes, crying out to a God that may or may not be there (at least as far as my mind is concerned). And by okay I don’t mean that I need to stay there, but that it also doesn’t mean I’ve “fallen away”. I need other people to know that too.

This is a weird, wild journey we’re on. There are going to be problems. Our life is not always going to be happy and shiny. You’re going to blame God or even wonder if there’s someone to blame. Expect that. Get help for it, when you’re in the place to reach out for help. If you see someone else in the midst of something like this, help them. And by help I mean do more than pray for them or tell your pastor/elder/deacon about them. Those things may be good, but they’re not all that needs doing.

That’s all for now.

batman gotham

Coming back with a BOOM!

So I was talking to a friend yesterday, and it came out that they’re a polygamist. They’re “in the closet” about it, but their identity isn’t important. It’s likely no one that you know. Still, the discussion led to me apologizing for the drubbing that people of my faith have given people in that lifestyle. Personally, as I told this person, I don’t care who you live with, sleep with, or marry so long as you’re all healthy and happy. It’s not my place to tell you how to run your life, particularly if you’re not a Christian. Even if you are, I’m not sure that I could come up with anything other than a cultural argument against it, and, personally, I couldn’t come up with one of those that would hold water.

This must have been on my mind quite a bit though, subconsciously. While driving into work this sentence popped into my head. “Jesus was a bisexual polygamist.” I fired it off to a friend and he said that he wanted to read that for sure. I let it run around my brain for a bit to figure out what I meant by it. After having a few cups of coffee I think this is where I’m headed:

We’re told that we are the bride of Christ. All of us (in the Church). Obviously there are men and women in the Church and there are more than one of us. So, there you go, Christ is married to millions of men and women throughout space and time. A little anticlimactic? A bit. But bear with me.

I’ve been married for sixteen years now, but I’m an only child (biologically). The analogy that we’re all married to Christ is a bit more meaningful to me than the one where we’re all his brothers and sisters. The notion that I’m to treat my fellow believers as I would my own spouse hits nearer the mark. I’ve learned a lot about communication and how to treat my wife thanks to quite a lot of therapy over the last year or so.

Things I would never want to do to my wife:
Make her feel unworthy.
Tell her that her feelings are wrong.
Abuse her physically (this one’s never been a problem for me) or verbally.
Try and “fix” her.

Things I need to do:
Encourage her.
Love her.
Learn the art of compromise.
LISTEN TO HER.

This is how a relationship with Christ and with our fellow brides needs to look (this and more). Lately it looks a lot more like an episode of Bridezillas. Whether you believe that God chose us before the creation of the world or whether we chose him, we’re in this relationship for the long haul. There’s no divorcing each other, and since this isn’t “Wife Swap” (that this is a real show pains me), there’s no telling other families how to live their lives.

I had to get this off my chest. Thanks again for your patience.

If you could help stop a genocide would you?

Right now, one of the worst atrocities in the world is unfolding in Sudan. The genocide we witnessed in Darfur is still being played being out against the people of Northern Sudan. It is the same people group being persecuted, the same government regime and the same tactics being used.

This month, The Persecution Project Foundation has launched a campaign to Save the Nuba.

You can help spread awareness of the Nuba’s plight by posting about this on Facebook and Twitter, or by reposting this on your blog. One person alone can’t stop a genocide, but a community of people can.

Please vIsit www.SavetheNuba.com to learn more.

I’ve gotten to know people with an incredible variety of beliefs regarding God’s existence. I cherish those friendships and conversations that I’ve had. If you sense a “but” coming, you’re wrong, generally speaking. One of those people is Derek Colanduno of the Skepticality podcast. While he and I don’t know each other particularly well, we’ve had some interesting conversations. Recently he posted a picture on his Facebook wall:

As you can imagine, an interesting conversation was had. There were bombs thrown, naturally. But I got to thinking about this whole “Hitler was a Christian!”/”Mao/Stalin/Pol Pot was an atheist.” meme that tens to show up early in these games. There’s an old saying “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” The duck test applies here. Christianity, the Bible itself, uses this sort of inductive reasoning.

Jesus says, speaking of prophets, “You can identify them by their fruit, that is, by the way they act. Can you pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?” Paul in Galatians 5 says “22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law… 25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.” If you fail this Christian duck test then no one will have any reason to believe that you’re a Christian, or so I thought.

Derek is quick to jump on the notion that Hitler was a Christian supposedly because he said that he was one a sufficient number of times. That strikes me as bad logic. If Hitler was a crazy as a fruit bat (a rabid, insane, Jew-hating fruit bat), then why should we accept that he was what he said he was? Particularly when he had a habit of tacking on all manner of non-Christian religious tradition to his worldview, politics, etc. I can’t think of any other reason than it suited his purpose to paint Christianity as a force for evil.

Something else Derek said jumped out at me, referring to Hitler and the rest, “As for the rest on the list, they were not Atheist, they just wanted to make sure the citizens who they ruled had no one above themselves as the leader. They were more like hard-line slave owners, had pretty much zero to do with actual Atheistic views.” I’m curious as to what those “actual Atheistic views” are. I asked him, but he didn’t answer other than to say “Basically he was not an Atheist, in any way, shape or form.”

Now, I don’t know what Hitler’s true religious views were. He pandered to the German people and add his fruit bat-ness on top of that and I don’t think it matters. These men were crazy. That much we can be relatively certain of. If you wipe out large portions of your population to make others toe the line in service to some half baked ideology cobbled together from your own insecurities then I honestly don’t think a religious belief or lack thereof can be the root cause.

I would like to know what “actual Atheistic views” are, outside of a lack of a belief in God. If I were to take the views of the Atheists (I capitalize the A to denote people who are “militant”) in that Facebook post and elsewhere:

“You do not talk to god. You do not have a personal relationship with an imaginary being. This delusion of yours is an exaggerated sense of your abilities.”

“I’m sick of being told by society that I have to “respect others’ beliefs.” No I don’t. ”

“Religion is child abuse.”

and the responses of some Atheists to Phil Plait’s admonition to not be a dick, then I would have to come to the following conclusions. If you’re an Atheist then you believe that you’re a better person than anyone who believes in a god of any stripe. You believe that your worldview will ultimately lead to the betterment of mankind through the casting off of the ancient morality most religious people stick to. In general, you know more about the universe and your place in it than your theistic counterparts. You’re essentially a mirror image of that which you hate.

Now, I won’t paint all atheists with that brush. I know some of you are capable of respectfully disagreeing. We can have discussions without despots being brought up as examples of anything other than despotism. We won’t tell the other person what they believe. We will express love for the Other as best as we are humanly able.

I do want you to know though, that if you are an Atheist (or a Theist) and your waddle gives you away as a dick, you’re not going to convince anyone of anything, religious or otherwise. I suspect that most people of this stripe are okay with that. None of them actually seem to want to do much more than beat their chests and feel awesome about themselves. I seriously doubt that any of those sort will comment here, and I also recognize that this post may well bounce back in my face. It needed to be said for my piece of mind though at least.