Amy Hall: Will right and wrong always be obvious?

Here’s a post from Amy Hall of Stand to Reason that will cause you to think.

She writes:

A person doesn’t have to know the Bible in order to know right and wrong, right? Well, yes and no. It all depends on what value system is being fed to that person by society. A society saturated in a Christian understanding of morality will reinforce that understanding, even among its atheists. A society without the background of Christianity behind it will enforce a different understanding of morality. Atheists have the mistaken idea that objective morality is simply obvious to everyone, but the truth is, it’s not. All one has to do is look back through history (and in other cultures today) to see that this is so. Our damaged consciences are malleable.

Is murdering your child right or wrong? Ask these mothers in India, where it’s commonplace in some areas to let your girl die if you prefer a boy. Ask pre-Christian cultures. This is why I think atheists are being far too hasty when they argue that Christianity is expendable—unnecessary for a good society. If we see atrocious moral crimes in cultures not influenced by Christianity, we have no reason to think our current standards will continue in a culture that rejects Christianity.

[...]As I’ve written before, intrinsic human value has to be taught. A society’s view of the human person and its value will affect what that society views as being moral: We are just animals. Imperfect animals aren’t worth the trouble. Therefore, there’s a case to be made for killing them rather than caring for them. That conclusion reasonably follows from the non-Christian premise. As Christianity fades in influence and a different view of the human person gains acceptance, don’t expect that our society will continue to recognize that conclusion to be immoral. At that point, people will still consider themselves to be perfectly moral…but only because they’re judging themselves by a different standard of morality.

It’s difficult for us to recognize the depth our depravity when “everyone else is doing it.” Ask Gosnell’s nurses.

I like this post because it connects an apologetic concern to real life. This concern about right and wrong isn’t merely theoretical. It’s practical.

Think about the abortion really means, in practice. Basically, you have two-grown ups who are engaging in a recreational activity. In the course of that activity, they create a new innocent life that is distinct from their lives. A new human genetic code. This new person is weaker than either of her two parents. And her life imposes certain obligations on them. She needs food, and safety, and care. Like a baby bird who has fallen out of her tree. But when there is no God, there is no purpose to putting your needs second, and someone else’s first. You could do it, if it makes you feel happy. But having to take care of a newborn doesn’t normally make people who are have risky recreational sex happy. After all, people who have recreational sex instead of procreative sex are looking for recreation not responsibility.

And so what do these powerful people do to the new life they have created? Do they let this new life impose obligations on them? Do they let this new life lower the amount of happiness they themselves will have? No. They kill it. For the strong to refrain from killing the weak when the weak impose obligations on them, there has to be a design for human nature that makes moral obligations and selflessness rational, instead of merely pleasurable. Because we all know that being saddled with a newborn baby is not fun. There has to be something more going on than the pursuit of pleasure if the baby is going to live.

Similarly with no-fault divorce and gay marriage. First, we enacted no-fault divorce, which weakened the stability of marriage so that many children now grow up fatherless.  No one is careful about marriage anymore in order to provide children with what they need. Instead, we just “marry for love” and then dissolve it when it doesn’t feel good anymore. Same-sex marriage is the same thing again. The voluntarily removal of the biological father or mother from a child’s life. And why? Because the needs of children don’t matter. They’re smaller than we are, so we don’t care about them.

Is there anything more going on in our society other than the seeking of pleasure? I think that the seeking of “happiness” instead of goodness is now the dominant view. No one wants to be responsible for anyone else. No one wants to be obligated to anyone else. We all seem to want to be free of feeling bad. If we do wrong, we don’t want to be judged or reminded about what we did. If we hurt someone else, then we don’t want to have to make restitution for what we did. We try to hand our children off to strangers so that we don’t have to teach them ourselves. We don’t want to learn anything that might make us feel obligated to do the right thing instead of what we feel like doing. Other people are  just there to give us pleasure. It’s sad.

All of these concepts had meaning in a Judeo-Christian society that encouraged marriage and families. But those days are drifting away. Once upon a time, we had a social consensus that what mattered was doing the right thing – what we were designed to do. And it was OK to not feel good and to not feel happy, if you were doing the right thing. Happiness wasn’t the main goal of life. Now things are different.

Filed under: News, Abortion, Atheism, Bible, Child, Children, Christianity, Divorce, Gay Marriage, Human Rights, Judaism, Morality, Right to Life

What does the Bible say about the death penalty?

Note: This post has a twin post which talks about the evidence against capital punishment from science.

First, let’s take a look at what the Bible says in general about capital punishment, using this lecture featuring eminent theologian Wayne Grudem.

About Wayne Grudem:

Grudem holds a BA from Harvard University, a Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. In 2001, Grudem became Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary. Prior to that, he had taught for 20 years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he was chairman of the department of Biblical and Systematic Theology.

Grudem served on the committee overseeing the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, and in 1999 he was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is a co-founder and past president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He is the author of, among other books, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, which advocates a Calvinistic soteriology, the verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the body-soul dichotomy in the nature of man, and the complementarian (rather than egalitarian) view of gender equality.

UPDATE: The MP3 file has been removed, but I will leave the post up.

A PDF sermon outline is here.

Topics:

• what kinds of crimes might require CP?
• what did God say to Noah about CP?
• what does it mean that man is made in the image of God?
• is CP just about taking revenge?
• what does CP say about the value of human life?
• does CP apply to animals, too?
• could the statements supporting CP be understood as symbolic?
• one purpose of CP is to protecting the public
• another purpose of CP is to deter further wrongdoing
• but the Biblical purpose of CP is to achieve justice by retribution
• does the Pope make a good argument against CP?
• what is the role of civil government in achieving retribution?
• do people in Heaven who are sinless desire God to judge sinners?
• should crimes involving property alone be subject to CP?
• is the Mosaic law relevant for deciding which crimes are capital today?
• should violent crimes where no one dies be subject to CP?
• is CP widespread in the world? why or why not?
• what are some objections to CP from the Bible?
• how do you respond to those objections to CP?
• should civil government also turn the other cheek for all crimes?
• what is the “whole life ethic” and is it Biblical?
• what do academic studies show about the deterrence effect of CP?
• how often have innocent people been executed in the USA?
• should there be a higher burden of proof for CP convictions?

You can find more talks by Wayne Grudem here.

What about the woman caught in adultery?

Some people like to bring up the woman caught in adultery as proof that Jesus opposed capital punishment. But that passage of the Bible was added much later after the canon was decided.

Daniel B. Wallace is an eminent New Testament scholar who also teaches at Dallas Theological Seminary, an extremely conservative seminary.

About Dr. Wallace:

Dr. Daniel B. Wallace

• Professor of New Testament Studies
• B.A., Biola University, 1975; Th.M., Dallas Theological Seminary, 1979; Ph.D., 1995.

Dr. Wallace influences students across the country through his textbook on intermediate Greek grammar. It is used in more than two-thirds of the nation’s schools that teach that subject. He is the senior New Testament editor of the NET Bible and coeditor of the NET-Nestle Greek-English diglot. Recently his scholarship has shifted from syntactical and text-critical issues to more specific work in John, Mark, and nascent Christology. However he still works extensively in textual criticism, and has founded The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, an institute with an initial purpose to preserve Scripture by taking digital photographs of all known Greek New Testament manuscripts. His postdoctoral work includes work on Greek grammar at Tyndale House in Cambridge and textual criticism studies at the Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster.

And Dr. Wallace writes about the passage in John on Bible.org.

Excerpt:

One hundred and forty years ago, conservative biblical scholar and Dean of Canterbury, Henry Alford, advocated a new translation to replace the King James Bible. One of his reasons was the inferior textual basis of the KJV. Alford argued that “a translator of Holy Scripture must be…ready to sacrifice the choicest text, and the plainest proof of doctrine, if the words are not those of what he is constrained in his conscience to receive as God’s testimony.” He was speaking about the Trinitarian formula found in the KJV rendering of 1 John 5:7–8. Twenty years later, two Cambridge scholars came to the firm conclusion that John 7:53–8:11 also was not part of the original text of scripture. But Westcott and Hort’s view has not had nearly the impact that Alford’s did.

For a long time, biblical scholars have recognized the poor textual credentials of the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). The evidence against its authenticity is overwhelming: The earliest manuscripts with substantial portions of John’s Gospel (P66 and P75) lack these verses. They skip from John 7:52 to 8:12. The oldest large codices of the Bible also lack these verses: codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, both from the fourth century, are normally considered to be the most important biblical manuscripts of the NT extant today. Neither of them has these verses. Codex Alexandrinus, from the fifth century, lacks several leaves in the middle of John. But because of the consistency of the letter size, width of lines, and lines per page, the evidence is conclusive that this manuscript also lacked the pericope adulterae. Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, also from the fifth century, apparently lacked these verses as well (it is similar to Alexandrinus in that some leaves are missing).The earliest extant manuscript to have these verses is codex Bezae, an eccentric text once in the possession of Theodore Beza. He gave this manuscript to the University of Cambridge in 1581 as a gift, telling the school that he was confident that the scholars there would be able to figure out its significance. He washed his hands of the document. Bezae is indeed the most eccentric NT manuscript extant today, yet it is the chief representative of the Western text-type (the text-form that became dominant in Rome and the Latin West).

When P66, P75, Sinaiticus, and Vaticanus agree, their combined testimony is overwhelmingly strong that a particular reading is not authentic. But it is not only the early Greek manuscripts that lack this text. The great majority of Greek manuscripts through the first eight centuries lack this pericope. And except for Bezae (or codex D), virtually all of the most important Greek witnesses through the first eight centuries do not have the verses. Of the three most important early versions of the New Testament (Coptic, Latin, Syriac), two of them lack the story in their earliest and best witnesses. The Latin alone has the story in its best early witnesses.

[...]It is an important point to note that although the story of the woman caught in adultery is found in most of our printed Bibles today, the evidence suggests that the majority of Bibles during the first eight centuries of the Christian faith did not contain the story. Externally, most scholars would say that the evidence for it not being an authentic part of John’s Gospel is rock solid.But textual criticism is not based on external evidence alone; there is also the internal evidence to consider. This is comprised of two parts: intrinsic evidence has to do with what an author is likely to have written; transcriptional evidence has to do with how and why a scribe would have changed the text.

Intrinsically, the vocabulary, syntax, and style look far more like Luke than they do John. There is almost nothing in these twelve verses that has a Johannine flavor. And transcriptionally, scribes were almost always prone to add material rather than omit it—especially a big block of text such as this, rich in its description of Jesus’ mercy. One of the remarkable things about this passage, in fact, is that it is found in multiple locations. Most manuscripts that have it place it in its now traditional location: between John 7:52 and 8:12. But an entire family of manuscripts has the passage at the end of Luke 21, while another family places it at the end of John’s Gospel. Other manuscripts place it at the end of Luke or in various places in John 7.

The pericope adulterae has all the earmarks of a pericope that was looking for a home. It took up permanent residence, in the ninth century, in the middle of the fourth gospel.

As this debate between Peter Williams and Bart Ehrman shows, there are only TWO disputed passages in the entire NT that are theologically significant. The long ending of Mark and this adultery passage. A good case can be made for the long ending of Mark, but it’s best not to assume it in a debate. The adultery passage is practically impossible to defend as authentic. Dr. Wallace talks about both passages in this Parchment & Pen article. Wallace has also debated Bart Ehrman in the Greer-Heard Forum. What that debate showed is that the New Testament text is actually quite reliable except for those two passages, but it’s important to be honest about the two places that are not well supported.

Filed under: Podcasts, Government, Jesus, Christianity, Theology, Deterrence, Purpose, Prosecution, Evangelical, Catholic, Bible, Protection, Woman, Retribution, Pope, Adultery, Dan Wallace, Reliability, Roman Catholic, Capital Punishment, Death Penalty, Bible Study, Wayne Grudem, Civil Government, Protecting the Public, Pacifism, Textual Criticism, Textual Reliability, Chrsitianity, John 7, John 8, Pericope Adulterae, Daniel B. Wallace, Daniel Wallace

Stephen C. Meyer and Peter Atkins debate intelligent design

This dialog occurred in 2010 on the Unbelievable radio show.

I made a rough transcript, so please see below for that.

The MP3 file is here. (60 minutes)

Details:

The documentary film “Expelled” is presented by US Actor Ben Stein and makes the case that scientists who question Darwinian orthodoxy and support Intelligent Design are being “expelled” from academia.

As the UK edition of the DVD is released we ask “Is freedom of thought at stake or is Intelligent Design out of bounds when it comes to biological science?”

Stephen C Meyer is co founder of the Discovery Institute in the USA and a major proponent of Intelligent Design.

Peter Atkins is Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University and an outspoken atheist.

They both feature in “Expelled” and join Justin to debate the pros and cons of Intelligent Design theory.

Mark Haville who is bringing the film to the UK also joins the discussion.

Meyer’s PhD is from Cambridge, and he has a wonderful book called “Signature in the Cell”. He explains intelligent design for beginners here in his CNN editorial.

Note: The transcript below is quite snarky and may include paraphrases of Dr. Atkins for the sake of humor.

My rough transcript of the Meyer-Atkins debate

Stephen Meyer:
- started researching on ID while doing his PhD at Cambridge
- the question is whether the information-bearing properties in DNA require a designer
- what cause is adequate to explain the digital code that in the simplest living cell
- alternative explanations like self-organization and RNA-first have failed
- so the best explanation for functional sequences of parts is an intelligent designer
- Darwinists have responded to this argument with insults and suppression of dissent

Peter Atkins:
- intelligent design is creationism
- there is no science at all in it
- information can emerge without an intelligent designer
- structures emerge spontaneously, no agent is needed to generate the structure
- information in DNA is also a structure

Stephen Meyer:
- structure and information are two different things
- many structures emerge spontaneously
- structure may be like the vortex that occurs when water goes down a drain

Peter Atkins:
- the vortex is information

Stephen Meyer:
- structures are different from functionally-specified digital information
- in DNA, there is a 4-digit alphabet that is used to create code sequences
- the thing to be explained is where do the functional sequences come from

Peter Atkins:
- information can grow without an agent
- the second law of thermodynamics
- the universe is falling into disorder
- but there are local abatements of chaos that create information
- evolution can cause the amount of information to grow

Stephen Meyer:
- that’s just an assertion
- I agree that energy flow through a system can produce spontaneous order
- but spontaneous order is not the same thing as information

Peter Atkins:
- spontaneous order is the same as information

Stephen Meyer:
- it’s not order that needs to be explained it’s specified complexity

Peter Atkins:
- what do you mean by specified complexity?

Stephen Meyer:
- the chemical bonds that connect to each letter do not determine the letter
- the chemical bonding sites will accept any letter as easily as any other
- any one of the 4 bases (letters) can attach at any place along the backbone

Peter Atkins:
- the selection of which letter comes next is determined by evolution

Stephen Meyer:
- that is just an assertion
- there is no physical process that sequences the letters to have a function

Peter Atkins:
- do you believe in evolution? YES OR NO!

Mark Haville:
- for him to answer the question you have to define the word
- do you mean macro or micro? biological or stellar? directed or undirected?

Peter Atkins:
- undirected molecules to man evolution by natural processes

Stephen Meyer:
- but even Dawkins doesn’t believe in evolution then
- you’re including the origin of life from non-living matter in evolution
- Dawkins says that there is no known naturalistic explanation for that

Mark Haville:
- you need to define your terms

[They discuss of the movie Expelled and the case of Richard Sternberg]

Stephen Meyer:
- the problem is people don’t want to talk about the science
- they denounce dissent as unscientific
- they will not debate about whther natural causes can explain the information
- I want to talk about the science

Peter Atkins:
- ID people raise interesting questions for naturalists to work on
- but you want to tell us what the answer is (intelligence) before we begin
- you start from the idea that an intelligence was involved

Justin Brierley:
- but you start with the idea that natural mechanisms can explain everything!

Stephen Meyer:
- for Dr. Atkins, only explanations based on material processes are valid

Peter Atkins:
- that is correct

Stephen Meyer:
- but we think that the activities of mind can explain some effects
- e.g. – the best explanation of the Rosetta stone is a mind

Peter Atkins:
- but we naturalists think of minds as material as well

Stephen Meyer:
- that’s a materialist pre-supposition on your part
- we would have to have a debate about mind and body

Mark Haville:
- I think that the materialist position is socially dangerous
- the problem with naturalism is that it is an ideology
- the ideology pushes absurdities, e.g. – the universe came from nothing uncaused
- and naturalists exert power over others to force them to believe nonsense

Stephen Meyer:
- science progresses as the result of scientists disagreeing
- both sides agree to the facts
- the debate is about the interpretation of those facts
- and one side is being ruled out a priori based on the pre-supposition of materialism

Peter Atkins:
- why do you say that an intelligence is involved in DNA but not general relativity

Stephen Meyer:
- it is always logically possible that intelligence can be invlved in any effect
- the main thing is that explanations based on intelligence should not be ruled out

Peter Atkins:
= well you can’t appeal to any non-material process in expaining anything
- those are the rules

Moderator:
- what does intelligent design have to do with religion?

Stephen Meyer:
- creationism is about understanding the istory of life using the Bible
- intelligent design is about using the same method of inquiry as Darwin
- we know that information arises from intelligent causes
- humans create information all the time by using intelligence to sequence parts

Moderator:
- are intelligent design proponents disreputable?

Stephen Meyer:
- what’s disreputable is shutting down debate by setting arbitrary rules

Peter Atkins:
- we are both interested in the same questions

Moderator:
- why won’t you let Stephen publish his papers then?

Peter Atkins:
- because it breaks the pre-suppositions of naturalism and materialism

Stephen Meyer:
- you’re shutting down inquiry by using an arbitrary definition of science

Mark Haville:
- we need to define the word science
- science should be based on what we can observe empirically
- we can observe micro-evolution empirically
- but Darwinism goes beyond what is observable to postulate macro-evolution

Peter Atkins:
- but paleobiology is replete with evidence

Stephen Meyer:
- paleobiology uses a method of inference that I think is valid
- but intelligent design uses the same mode of reasoning which is also valid

Peter Atkins:
= you’re intellectually lazy
- we’re smart, we’re using our brains

Moderator:
- you’re saying that appeals to intelligent causes ends science?
- is ID the view that some things are too complex to be explained with naturalism?

Peter Atkins:
- yes, and to teach children that materialism is false is child abuse

Stephen Meyer:
- let’s drop the insults and the rhetoric and focus on the arguments
- the ID argument is not based on what we don’t know, it’s based on what we DO know
- first, we can ask what undirected natural processes can and cannot do
- second, we can ask what we know about intelligent causes from our own experience
- what we do know seems to me to require an intelligent agent as a cause

Peter Atkins:
- GOD! Do you mean God!? Do you mean God!?

Stephen Meyer:
- I personally mean God, but all that the arguments proves is a generic intelligent cause
- and I am using the same method of investigation that Darwin used to get there
- what we know from our experience is that a mind is needed to create information

Peter Atkins:
- NONSENSE! ABSOLUTE NONSENSE!

Stephen Meyer:
- in my book, I list 10 predictions made by ID, so it’s not a science-stopper
- furthermore, the enterprise of science began with th goal of understanding God
- consider the earliest scientists, people like James Boyler and Johannes Kepler

Peter Atkins:
- that was 300 years ago, we’ve moved on

Mark Haville:
- what about Max Planck then?

Stephen Meyer:
- how about James Clark Maxwell?

Mark Haville:
- we need to focus on the facts

Peter Atkins:
- what do you mean by the facts?

Mark Haville:
- well the fact is that Darwinism has no mechanism to produce new information

Peter Atkins:
- well copying errors introduces beneficial mutations

Stephen Meyer:
- let’s focus on where we get the first information from the simplest organism
- you can’t account for the first organism by appealing to copying errors
- to add functionality to a program, you need new lines codes from an intelligence
- once you have life, you can generate some new information
- but you can’t generate macro-evolution either

Peter Atkins:
- if we give you your explanation for teh origin of life, will you give this up

Stephen Meyer:
- of course! I’m a former theistic evolutionist
- but right now the evidence is not there for it
- we have to decide these questions based on what we see with our own eyes today

Peter Atkins:
- but I pre-suppose materialism as the starting point of all explanations
- you’re just intellectually lazy to abandon my pre-supposition

Stephen Meyer:
- why is it is less intellectually lazy to insist that materialism is true
- we are making plenty of predictions, and isn’t that what science is about?
- consider Junk DNA – you guys said it had no use
- now we know it has a use

Peter Atkins:
- naturalists were open to the idea that junk DNA might have a use before ID

Moderator:
- Dr. Meyer, what about the wall that locks out intelligence as an explanation?

Stephen Meyer:
- if these are interesting questions, then we should allow freedom of inquiry
- that’s how science advances

Peter Atkins:
- for all their science-talk really they are just saying God did it
- people who don’t agree with me are not using their brains, like I do
- to give up on my pre-supposition of materialism is a denial of humanity

Mark Haville:
- there are important issues that are affected by our view of origins
- everyone who hasn’t seen Expelled movie should definitely see it

Filed under: News, God, Atheism, Theism, Secularism, Origin of Life, Stephen C. Meyer, DNA, Specified Complexity, Christianity, Naturalism, Charles Darwin, Ben Stein, Expelled, Expelled Movie, Creationism, Evidence, University, Agnosticism, Biology, Censorship, Miracles, Materialism, Scholarship, Stephen Meyer, Richard Sternberg, Darwin, Humanism, Testability, Origins, Creation, Secular Humanism, Predictions, Cambridge University, Peter Atkins, Junk DNA, Peer-Review, RNA, Junk RNA, Oxford University, Publications, Fee Speech, Freedom of Inquiry

Large numbers of Christians fleeing oppression in Muslim countries

Fox News put up an editorial about a tragedy that is often neglected by the liberal media.

Excerpt:

A mass exodus of Christians is currently underway.  Millions of Christians are being displaced from one end of the Islamic world to the other.

[...]In 2003, Iraq’s Christian population was at least one million. Today fewer than 400,000 remain—the result of an anti-Christian campaign that began with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, when countless Christian churches were bombed and countless Christians killed, including by crucifixion and beheading.

The 2010 Baghdad church attack, which saw nearly 60 Christian worshippers slaughtered, is the tip of a decade-long iceberg.

[...]In October 2012 the last Christian in the city of Homs—which had a Christian population of some 80,000 before jihadis came—was murdered. One teenage Syrian girl said: “We left because they were trying to kill us… because we were Christians…. Those who were our neighbors turned against us. At the end, when we ran away, we went through balconies. We did not even dare go out on the street in front of our house.”

In Egypt, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their homeland soon after the “Arab Spring.” In September 2012, the Sinai’s small Christian community was attacked and evicted by Al Qaeda linked Muslims, Reuters reported. But even before that, the Coptic Orthodox Church lamented the “repeated incidents of displacement of Copts from their homes, whether by force or threat.

[...]In Mali, after a 2012 Islamic coup, as many as 200,000 Christians fled. According to reports, “the church in Mali faces being eradicated,” especially in the north “where rebels want to establish an independent Islamist state and drive Christians out… there have been house to house searches for Christians who might be in hiding, churches and other Christian property have been looted or destroyed, and people tortured into revealing any Christian relatives.” At least one pastor was beheaded.

Even in European Bosnia, Christians are leaving en mass “amid mounting discrimination and Islamization.” Only 440,000 Catholics remain in the Balkan nation, half the prewar figure.

Problems cited are typical: “while dozens of mosques were built in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, no building permissions [permits] were given for Christian churches.” “Time is running out as there is a worrisome rise in radicalism,” said one authority, who further added that the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina were “persecuted for centuries” after European powers “failed to support them in their struggle against the Ottoman Empire.”

The article has even more disturbing statistics.

This violence is not surprising, considering the attitudes of Muslims in Muslim dominated countries.

Consider this article from the liberal Washington post.

Excerpt:

A majority of Muslims in several countries say that any Muslim who leaves the faith should be executed, with the share who support this nearing two-thirds in Egypt and Pakistan. In Afghanistan, 78 percent say apostates should be killed.

As I wrote yesterday, the issue of apostasy is a complicated one with its roots in Islam’s unique foundational history. But the effect is a deeply chilling one for religious freedom, with atheists and converts often persecuted.

I was listening to a debate recently featuring Jim Wallis and Jay Richards on Christianity and economics, and I was surprised when Jim Wallis sort of threw out this strange thought at the end of one of his speeches about Islam. Something like “What are Christians doing to love their Muslim neighbor?” I think a very good thing for Christians in the West to do would be to realize that not all religions are the same, and that some are more peaceful than others. Maybe instead of worrying about not offending Muslims all the time, we could instead think about what it is like for Christians to be living in these Muslim countries, and facing horrors like being killed, raped and tortured.

Filed under: News, Afhganistan, Arab Spring, Boko Haram, Bosnia, Christianity, Christians, Coptic Christians, Copts, Egypt, Iraq, Islam, Libya, Mali, Muslim, Nigeria, Persecution, Syria, World

When is it appropriate for Christians to start dating?

First, read this article from a Crisis Pregnancy Center worker.

Excerpt:

I have a bone to pick with young, socially conservative Americans, and I know it’s something that will get under your skin. Just sit tight, though, and hear me out, because the elephant in our tidy little room is starting to tear things up. It’s time we acknowledge his existence, and maybe even call in some animal movers to take him back to the zoo.

I currently live in a small community in the Bible-belt of the country and I have been given some opportunities to mentor young people from my area through different venues. I can count on one hand the kids I know from the local high school whose parents have never been divorced.  I’ve witnessed reactions of genuine surprise and envy from students who hear that my parents are still together. In any given conversation with groups of youth, I can expect to hear continual references to step-parents, step-siblings, and half-siblings. Divorce is a way of life down here – albeit one that has taken its toll in the lives of the young people that will make up the next generation.

However, while I could certainly write extensively on my experience with the negative effects of divorce on children and on society at large, I actually want to address something else entirely.  I have concerns about the number one way that our culture chooses to perpetuate the cancer of broken marriages and failed relationships– underage dating.

You can follow them on Facebook – the failed attempts at love, I mean. Somebody is always changing their status from “in a relationship” to “single.” Unfortunately, a huge number of these disappointed lovers are too young to be legally married. I wonder sometimes if I am the only one who winces to hear a thirteen-year old speak with cavalier abandon of his or her “ex?”  Since when is it considered healthy and acceptable for underage people to be in “relationships?” Just what do parents and educators expect to be the result of the romantic conquests of these middle-school children and young high school students? The results I’ve witnessed personally are beyond disturbing; they are downright sinister, and have caused me to question whether or not those who claim to champion marital fidelity and family values are paying any attention at all to the standards we are passing to our children.

The trouble with underage dating is that it presents an entirely faulty view of what interaction with the opposite gender should be about. Rather than placing emphasis on building one strong relationship with one person at a stage of life when a marital commitment is feasible, dating encourages young people to pour their energies into consistently seducing other young people at a time when neither of them are capable of making any long-term commitments. Their “relationships” are destined to fail from the get-go because they are founded on unhealthy perceptions of love and not backed by any real necessity to stick it out.

The beauty of marriage, as it was intended to be, is that it teaches two people of opposite genders to learn to work through incompatibilities and give of themselves. In the same way, the great ugliness of dating as it is practiced by our culture and portrayed by our media, is that it teaches two people of opposite genders to be selfish by giving them an easy “out” when things don’t go according to their initial feelings. I believe it is fair to say that this form of dating is a training manual for divorce, because it encourages young people to grow accustomed to giving their hearts away and then taking them back.

Sadly, parents who should know better continue to display shocking naïveté regarding the absurd practices of driving their twelve year olds out on a “date,” or purchasing provocative clothing for their sixteen-year-olds, or sympathizing with their broken-hearted fourteen-year-olds by assuring them that they’ll “find someone better.” “They’re just having fun,” they’ll tell us, rolling their eyes at what they consider to be our tightly wound principles. I work a volunteer shift at Crisis Pregnancy Clinic where I witness every week the ruined lives and broken dreams that “fun” has left with our youth.

And now here’s my take.

Basically, you can start dating as a prelude to courting when the woman and man are able to demonstrate to the other person that they are ready to fulfill their roles in the marriage.

For example, the woman should be able to show that she has been able to maintain commitments to caring for others through some period of time, maybe with small children or pets. She should be voluntarily entering into relationships and responsibilities with other people where she is giving of herself – like volunteering at a crisis pregnancy center or caring for an ailing or elderly relative. That shows potential suitors that she has the right attitude to relationships – serving others self-sacrificially, and not looking for tingles and amusement. She should be able to show that she is good at making commitments and solving problems by studying hard subjects in school like nursing, economics, biology, chemistry, physics, engineering or computer science. That shows that she is able to do hard things that she doesn’t feel like doing, and apply herself over time until she has a degree. Obviously being conservative politically and being good at apologetics are also important if she intends to raise children.

And for the man, he should be able to show that he is able to do his roles – protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. He should be able to prove that he is able to mentor and guide other people to learn things and do things that will make them more effective Christians. That’s moral and spiritual leadership. He should have studied a subject that is going to allow him to find work. If he is committed to going to graduate school, then he can study philosophy and law and other “world-changing” subjects, like a William Lane Craig or a Ryan Anderson. Otherwise, he should study things like petroleum engineering, computer science, or other fields that will allow him to be stable and secure. It’s not enough to be a hard worker, you have to be able to pull in the money and save it and still have time left over to care for your wife and lead the children. Again, conservative politics and apologetics are a must.

I think there are other ways for men and women to show that they are ready for marriage, but those are some ways. The key thing is that people shouldn’t be dating until they are able to show that they know the roles that they are expected to fill in marriage as men and women. They should also be looking for the right things in others. They can’t be looking for the shallow things that give them tingles, like looks, athleticism, etc. They can’t be looking for sexual attraction, primarily. Marriage requires specific behaviors from men and women, which are derived from what men and women do in marriage. Before men and women start dating, they have to be able to show that they are working on being able to handle their responsibilities, and they have to show that their selection criteria for the opposite sex are at least partly based on the responsibilities that the opposite sex has in a marriage. Otherwise they are just training to be governed by their tingles and to be selfish and to break up when all that falls apart.

Filed under: Mentoring, Abstinence, Advice, Chastity, Chivalry, Christianity, Courting, Dating, Feminism, Husband, Man, Marriage, Rules, The Rules, Tingles, Tips, Wife, Wisdom, Woman