Civil Commotion

The Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which made contraceptives widely available on the ground of privacy, was announced 50-years ago today.

Birth control is one of the great fundamental achievements of human reason, as important to the life of mankind as the discovery of fire or the invention of printing. Birth control is the deliverance of womankind, and therefore of mankind also, from the blind and insane fecundity of nature, which created us animals, and would keep us animals forever if we did not rebel.

Upton Sinclair

It is almost impossible to believe that birth control was widely unavailable in the United States just 50-years ago, and that Sinclair’s books could not be sent through the mail because he was a strong supporter of birth control. It is even harder to believe that there are people who want to take it away, some who even condemn it as the gateway to same-sex marriage. That one puzzles me; do they think men said to themselves, “Now that I can have worry-free sex with women, I might as well have sex with only men from now on”?

There’s no question that the Pious mean to take away birth control, if they can. I don’t think they’ll succeed, but this is not a bad time to stop to reflect about what life really looks like when the Godly are running things, and to resolve that it will not happen again.

Christian, weep over your ugly sins and rejoice in the Lord for his calling you to repentance and covering you with his grace and giving you mercy.

SBC Voices

Never forget: Y’all are no damn good.

The landing at Normandy, 1944-Jun-06 — D-Day. Most of the men in this picture were dead within minutes of the time it was taken.

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
IV: How Virtue Is Made to Dominate

§323   The Patrons of Virtue –. Avarice, lust for power, laziness, simplicity, fear; all these things are interested in virtue; that is why it stands so firm.

John Loftus points toward a quote from Karl Giberson, a prominent Christian apologist and founder of the now-insignificant Biologos.

I have become convinced that the only origins issue that really matters to most Christians is Adam and Eve. Leave Adam and Eve — and their Fall — in place, and most opposition to the Big Bang, evolution, and the great age of the earth will recede. The historicity of Adam and Eve is the single most important issue driving evangelical Christianity’s widespread, deep, and disturbing opposition to science.

Just so. It isn’t difficult to imagine a Christianity without the virgin birth or, even, a Christianity without the resurrection. But Christianity without Adam and Eve? Without the Fall? Without Original Sin and the need for salvation?

What does Christianity have an offer then but a mediocre, at best, and sometimes quite bad, set of ethical teachings? Nothing.

This goes to something important, something vital to understanding how Christianity’s teachings subvert healthy impulses. There is only one sane and healthy response to learning that it is a bona fide, rock solid, bolted-down fact that the story of the Fall, and Original Sin, is bogus: NO NEED OF “SALVATION” OR DANGER OF HELL IF I’M NOT “SAVED” (whatever that means, clubs differ)? I NO LONGER HAVE TO LISTEN TO STUPID AND BORING SERMONS? YIPPEE! That is some Really Good News — right?

But … no. Not to believers. They just go looking for some other reason to need ‘salvation’ — e.g., “we all sin eventually” — and continue to be led around by the nose by some noisy fraud. There is a good deal of talk about the need for ‘community’ as a motive for perfervid religiosity, and I don’t doubt that’s true in some cases — but I don’t think that gets to the heart of it.

A lot of people just want to continue to be children, escaping the responsibility of being an adult.