Civil Commotion

Bruce Gerencser has a long post about a sad, too-familiar subject — a family breach wrought by Godly condemnation of a gay family member. The gist of it is that a pastor and his wife broke relations with their son because he is gay and — WORSE! GASP! — got married.

It has been said that in marriage, the pain and stress of divorce is greater than even the pain of losing a spouse to death. I believe the same can be said of breaking ties with your child. Unless one has experienced this kind of loss and grief, they cannot fully understand the depth of pain experienced by a parent.

Someone may ask, “Why would anyone break ties with her own child?” The answer is, “loyalty to Jesus.” Being a disciple of Jesus demands our relationship to him be greater than our relationship to our own family, even our own children (Matthew 10:37).

Fortunately, however, we’re not talking about a teenager thrown out on the street; the son is provided for.

These stories have two elements that can’t be emphasized forcefully enough.

• Matthew Vines to the contrary, the Biblical condemnation of homosexuality is fierce and unambiguous, and so is the cultish insistence that pleasing Jesus is more important than your family; what these parents did is not un-Biblical. It’s lousy, and it ought to place them outside decent society forever, but it’s not un-Biblical.

  The Bible is just an awful guide to ethics, because it is the literature of outcasts struggling for survival. The Jews have been tormented for millennia, and the 1^st-century Christian church was no better than a cult birthed by the despised Jews.

• We do know today that sexual orientation is an operating system switch set before birth, and varies according to the chemistry of the mother’s womb during gestation. There is even serious speculation that the widespread use of progesterone as an element of prenatal medical care may be promoting the incidence of same-sex attraction.

  When you choose resolute ignorance in favor of evidence, and then damage the lives of others in obeisance to Bronze Age superstitions, there is a character problem.

I know that John Piper is supposed to be some sort of big deal theologian, but his view of God, in this instance, is disturbing to me. I do not believe that God is running around killing babies and destroying Houston while playing a game of “Guess why I am furious with you?!”

The Wartburg Watch

This arises in response to a John Piper feature answering a question from a man who wonders if God caused his wife to miscarry because he viewed porn. Piper’s answer was … Might’ve.

Where to begin?

For starters, there is something amiss in the operation of a mind that makes this connection. Since there obviously is no material connection between an image on his computer monitor and a fetus in his wife’s uterus, the one could affect the other only by the operation of an intermediary — an invisible surveilling wizard with the magical power to disrupt normal chemical/biological operation without leaving fingerprints, and who would visit misfortune upon one party in order to punish another. Do people actually believe that’s the world we live in?

Second, there is something misshapen in the character of a person who worships, and hopes to spend eternity with, an invisible wizard who would do something so perverse.

I don’t care if there are pages and pages of justification for these speculations in the Bible. It’s degrading nonsense.

Silly me. I always thought the weather had something to do with the unevenly energized, 7-mile thick layer of compressible fluid that is in constant motion over the earth’s rough surface.

Well … what do you know? Turns out — according to no less an authority than Ken Ham, a bona fide Holy Man — the weather is actually an instrument for punishment of the wicked.

In a country where 42% of the population believes in young earth creationism, meaning they’re ignoramuses who listen to buffoons like Ham, I guess it’s no wonder that we can’t reach a decision to do something about climate change.

South Florida looked as though somebody had run a squeegee across the landscape when Andrew hit, and Irma is supposed to be even stronger; unless the storm keeps arcing eastward, they’re in for it, I’m afraid. Too soon to say what it all means for Tarheels.

Revisit in 6-months? What does that even mean?