Integration Into the Void

Forthcoming Reformation

In his important essay, The End of Courtship, Leon Kass makes the following observations about love, courtship, and marriage as it now plays out in college campuses and universities across the United States.  His observations would hold true, we believe, pretty much everywhere throughout the West. 

Below is a summary of excerpts to enable us to get the flavour.  (We will draw some implications for Christians, churches, and the Kingdom at the end.)

I:

Here is a (partial) list of the recent changes that hamper courtship and marriage:
the sexual revolution, made possible especially by effective female contraception; the ideology of feminism and the changing educational and occupational status of women; the destigmatization of bastardy, divorce, infidelity, and abortion; the general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters, exemplified most vividly in the ubiquitous and voyeuristic presentation of sexual activity in movies and on television; widespread morally neutral sex education in schools; the explosive increase in the numbers of young people whose parents have been divorced (and in those born out of wedlock, who have never known their father); great increases in geographic mobility, with a resulting loosening of ties to place and extended family of origin; and, harder to describe precisely, a popular culture that celebrates youth and independence not as a transient stage en route to adulthood but as ‘the time of our lives,’ imitable at all ages, and an ethos that lacks transcendent aspirations and asks of us no devotion to family, God, or country, encouraging us simply to soak up the pleasures of the present.

II:

The sexual revolution that liberated (especially) female sexual desire from the confines of marriage, and even from love and intimacy, would almost certainly not have occurred had there not been available cheap and effective female birth control—the pill for the first time severed female sexual activity from its generative consequences. Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality—as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety. Woman on the pill is thus not only freed from the practical risk of pregnancy; she has, wittingly or not, begun to redefine the meaning of her own womanliness. Her sexuality unlinked to procreation, its exercise no longer needs to be concerned with the character of her partner and whether he is suitable to be the father and co-rearer of her yet-to-be-born children. Female sexuality becomes, like male, unlinked to the future. The new woman’s anthem: Girls just want to have fun. Ironically, but absolutely predictably, the chemicals devised to assist in family planning keep many a potential family from forming, at least with a proper matrimonial beginning. 

III:

Sex education in our elementary and secondary schools is an independent yet related obstacle to courtship and marriage. Taking for granted, and thereby ratifying, precocious sexual activity among teenagers (and even pre-teens), most programs of sex education in public schools have a twofold aim: the prevention of teenage pregnancy and the prevention of venereal disease, especially AIDS. While some programs also encourage abstinence or noncoital sex, most are concerned with teaching techniques for ‘safe sex’; offspring (and disease) are thus treated as (equally) avoidable side effects of sexuality, whose true purpose is only individual pleasure. (This I myself did not learn until our younger daughter so enlightened me, after she learned it from her seventh-grade biology teacher.) The entire approach of sex education is technocratic and, at best, morally neutral; in many cases, it explicitly opposes traditional morals while moralistically insisting on the equal acceptability of any and all forms of sexual expression provided only that they are not coerced. No effort is made to teach the importance of marriage as the proper home for sexual intimacy.

We may add the latest devolution to this list: as the politics of sexual identity have taken hold, and one’s gender becomes whatever one wants, prefers, or declares it to be, the sexuality attached to such genders as bisexual, trans-gendered, bestial–recall Facebook’s fifty-six gender identity options, (see below)–secular sex education in schools is already moving not to discriminate against any sexual identity.  All gender identities will have to be included, so sex-education will move even more radically to focus upon sexual techniques and the technocratic aspects of sex. 

IV:

The ubiquitous experience of divorce is also deadly for courtship and marriage. Some people try to argue, wishfully against the empirical evidence, that children of divorce will marry better than their parents because they know how important it is to choose well. But the deck is stacked against them. Not only are many of them frightened of marriage, in whose likely permanence they simply do not believe, but they are often maimed for love and intimacy. They have had no successful models to imitate; worse, their capacity for trust and love has been severely crippled by the betrayal of the primal trust all children naturally repose in their parents, to provide that durable, reliable, and absolutely trustworthy haven of permanent and unconditional love in an otherwise often unloving and undependable world.

Countless students at the University of Chicago have told me and my wife that the divorce of their parents has been the most devastating and life-shaping event of their lives. They are conscious of the fact that they enter into relationships guardedly and tentatively; for good reason, they believe that they must always be looking out for number one. Accordingly, they feel little sense of devotion to another and, their own needs unmet, they are not generally eager for or partial to children. They are not good bets for promise keeping, and they haven’t enough margin for generous service. And many of the fatherless men are themselves unmanned for fatherhood, except in the purely biological sense. Even where they dream of meeting a true love, these children of divorce have a hard time finding, winning, and committing themselves to the right one.

The separation of sex from procreation achieved in this half century by contraception was worked out intellectually much earlier; and the implications for marriage were drawn in theory well before they were realized in practice. Immanuel Kant, modernity’s most demanding and most austere moralist, nonetheless gave marriage a heady push down the slippery slope: Seeing that some marriages were childless, and seeing that sex had no necessary link to procreation, Kant redefined marriage as ‘a life-long contract for the mutual exercise of the genitalia.’ If this be marriage, the reason for its permanence, exclusivity, and fidelity vanishes.

V:

 But it would appear to require a revolution to restore the conditions most necessary for successful courtship: a desire in America’s youth for mature adulthood (which means for marriage and parenthood), an appreciation of the unique character of the marital bond, understood as linked to generation, and a restoration of sexual self-restraint generally and of female modesty in particular. Frankly, I do not see how this last, most crucial, prerequisite can be recovered, nor do I see how one can do sensibly without it. As Tocqueville rightly noted, it is women who are the teachers of mores; it is largely through the purity of her morals, self-regulated, that woman wields her influence, both before and after marriage. Men, as Rousseau put it, will always do what is pleasing to women, but only if women suitably control and channel their own considerable sexual power.

The collapse is so complete across Western society in general that we would argue that no government programme, no propaganda campaign, and no educational initiative will achieve anything like the reformation required. It’s too far gone.  The foundations have been destroyed; humanly nothing can be done now.

Only the Spirit of God, moving across the now formless, shapeless, inchoate mess of Western human relationships, has the power to reverse the evil we have put in play.  Nevertheless, we have a strong and sure hope that He will interdict and reverse the degradation, in the time and season of His pleasure.  Our hope, however, is most definitely in Him, not in Man.  As the Psalmist says,

³ Put not your trust in princes,
    in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation.
⁴ When his breath departs, he returns to the earth;
    on that very day his plans perish.

⁵ Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob,
    whose hope is in the Lord his God,
⁶ who made heaven and earth,
    the sea, and all that is in them,
who keeps faith forever;
⁷     who executes justice for the oppressed,
    who gives food to the hungry.
Psalm 146

But, let us keep in mind, His normal mode of operation is to allow evil to integrate into the void of self-destruction, and then, when despair is everywhere, to stretch forth His hand to save.  It was when Pharaoh began his programme of genocide against Israel that God heard the cries of His people, and stretched forth His mighty hand.  

Appendix:

Gender categories now available for self-choice on Facebook (as downloaded and catalogued by Slate)

• Agender
• Androgyne
• Androgynous
• Bigender
• Cis
• Cisgender
• Cis Female
• Cis Male
• Cis Man
• Cis Woman
• Cisgender Female
• Cisgender Male
• Cisgender Man
• Cisgender Woman
• Female to Male
• FTM
• Gender Fluid
• Gender Nonconforming
• Gender Questioning
• Gender Variant
• Genderqueer
• Intersex
• Male to Female
• MTF
• Neither
• Neutrois
• Non-binary
• Other
• Pangender
• Trans
• Trans*
• Trans Female
• Trans* Female
• Trans Male
• Trans* Male
• Trans Man
• Trans* Man
• Trans Person
• Trans* Person
• Trans Woman
• Trans* Woman
• Transfeminine
• Transgender
• Transgender Female
• Transgender Male
• Transgender Man
• Transgender Person
• Transgender Woman
• Transmasculine
• Transsexual
• Transsexual Female
• Transsexual Male
• Transsexual Man
• Transsexual Person
• Transsexual Woman
• Two-Spirit

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Why Nature Is Necessary

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Saturday, March 22, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Let’s clear a few things out in the first paragraph. Nature is nature, which seems obvious enough, but less obvious is that nature has a nature. The grain of the natural order runs in a particular way. It is not amorphous goo that can be shaped by any volunteer demiurge that happens by. It is not an inert substance that can successfully be altered by an act of Congress, or runaway judges. I just read in the news this week that a federal judge determined that in Michigan water must now run uphill.

This why sex change operations are such a fine example of pomosexual confusion. If nature does not have a nature, then subsets of nature (that would be us) would not have a nature either. If we do not have a nature, then it cannot be possible to contradict or violate it. But if we do have a nature, as established by nature’s God, then one of the first things that rebels against that God will want to do is declare war on it.

Not only does nature have a nature, nature also has a way of instructing us about herself. We see this in the realm of sexual customs. For example, nature teaches us that long hair is a disgrace for a man, but is a woman’s glory. But this creates an interesting set of questions.

We alter nature when we comb our hair, brush our teeth, take a bath, get braces for our teeth, or get a haircut. Now — and I am serious in asking the question — why are all these things lawful, and a sex change operation is not lawful? Why are the former examples of cultivating nature, and the latter an example of insulting her?

Nature was intended to be tended. Adam was placed in an untended garden that was entirely natural, and he was commanded to make it more like itself. A garden is more like nature than a weed patch. Nature was created to be cared for. Now when it is cared for, that care shows. It is manifested.

Up to a point, it is appropriate and lawful to force things “against nature.” Paul uses an example from grafting to make this very point. “For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree?” (Rom. 11:24).

Grafting a wild olive branch into a cultivated olive tree is described as being “contrary to nature,” and yet doing do is perfectly fine. This is something that stumps the simple. The wild branch is wild “by nature,” and the good olive tree has natural branches (that were cut off) that can be grafted back in again. In other words, wild trees are natural and domesticated trees are also natural–and better.

This is why Jews can be Jews “by nature” (Gal. 2:15). Circumcision was natural. Nature was not intended to be left alone. Man was given dominion over it, and is expected to exercise that dominion. The cultural mandate is not authorization for environmental rape. At the same time, rape of nature is a possibility. That category does exist. It is just that the people who are most likely to chatter on about it have no earthly idea of what they are talking about. A guy in San Francisco prepping for a sex change operation decides to have lunch after his most recent hormone shots. At lunch, he will inquire carefully into whether or not the chicken in his chicken salad had any hormones in it. Ah, I see. Hormones must be bad.

So how can we know how to draw the line between getting braces so that you can someday get a girl, and getting hormone shots so that you can someday become a girl? There is no way to draw this line without resorting to natural revelation or natural law, and the Bible requires us to draw this line. Biblical wisdom must therefore learn how to read the world.

When Adam was tending the garden, it was perfectly fine for him to figure out how to prune a tree, and how to oversee a process like grafting. But if Adam starting trying to plant trees with their roots in the air, so that fish could build their nests up there, we would all start to worry that a serious problem had developed. We would begin to suspect that Adam had been taking some graduate classes.

In other words, there is a line. Nature wants to be messed with, up to a point, and nature must not be messed with past that point. What is that point exactly? Well, we have to pay close attention to nature to let her tell us.

Think of it this way:

“Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion” (Lev. 18:23).

Leviticus does not say that for a woman to have intercourse with a beast is contrary to this verse — although it is. The question is this. What was it contrary to before the verse was revealed? The law is certainly prescriptive: don’t do that. But the verse is also descriptive: it is confusion, and it would be confusion in ancient China, Peru, or any other place that had never heard of Moses. It would already be confusion. Confusion about what? It would be confusion about how God shaped the world.

The poet Horace put it this way, and we should all pay closer attention than we have. Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back.

It is tempting for some Christians to appeal to this or that datum in science, as though the issue can be quantified. In a sex change operation, the DNA of the patient remains exactly what it was before. He is still male in that sense, just the eunuchs of Scripture remained male. Differences between them become manifest, obviously, just as we clearly distinguish between a steer and a bull. We have the noun eunuch for a reason. But castrating a man doesn’t make him a woman. As well hang a silicon udder on a steer and call it a cow. Doesn’t matter what you call it — you have plainly crossed the line we were talking about earlier, and graduate classes were probably involved in it.

But if we determined such things that way, why would it be lawful for a man to receive a woman’s kidney in an organ donation, but not lawful for him to receive a facsimile of a woman’s sexual organs via a surgeon’s knife? In the former case, he would have a bunch of cells that actually were female. How much sand can you put in the sugar bowl before it isn’t sugar anymore? Why would I, conservative Christian guy, not have a problem with that one and I would with the other?

The answer is that nature speaks everywhere, including in the heart of every man, woman, and child. God speaks through nature in the galaxies, in the buttercups, and under the breastbone of every proud atheist. This is routinely denied, but only by people who are trying to yammer loudly enough that they can’t hear Him anymore. But if you have questions about it, nature speaks to the Scottish common sense realist, and he doesn’t even need a microscope to answer you. Check in with him.

Athletic discipline is unnatural in one sense, and natural in another. Athletic discipline for women is unnatural in one sense, but natural in another. We see the grace of cultivated nature when she competes on the balance beam. We see the epitome of secularist stupidities when she competes in boxing and shot put. Ain’t natural, especially if she is good at it. It is called an abomination in Scripture (Dt. 22:5), but it was an abomination before Deuteronomy plainly called it that. If I were admonishing a carpenter for trying to pound nails with a tea cup, I wouldn’t need a verse.

And this is why the category of nature is such an essential one. Any denial of the nature of nature, or the reality of nature, or the goodness of nature, or the direction that nature’s grain naturally runs, or the complete authority of Jesus in and through all nature, is a catastrophic denial. We might be talking about Aquinas, or the doctrine of regeneration, or common grace, or Van Tilian apologetics, but depend upon it — any denial of nature will eventually be revealed to have been an essential part of an opening gambit designed to recreate all nature as playdough for the pomosexual.

Kinsey’s Dark Secret

A Man For Our Times

The following paragraph introduces Wikipedia’s article on Alfred Kinsey:

Alfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was an American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” (1948) and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as the Kinsey scale. Kinsey’s research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. His work has profoundly influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.

So far, so good.  Kinsey has been lionised, celebrated and glorified.  But it appears he was an acutely depraved man.

His goal was “to create his own sexual utopia,” says biographer James Jones, and Kinsey built up a select circle of friends and colleagues who committed themselves to his philosophy of total sexual freedom.  Since the results were often captured on film, we know that Kinsey and his wife both had sexual relations with a host of male and female staff members and other people.  Kinsey was also a masochist, sometimes engaging in bizarre and painful practices.

But Kinsey had an even darker secret.  In Kinsey, Sex, and Fraud, researcher Judith Reisman argued convincingly that Kinsey’s research on child sexual responses could have been obtained only if he or his colleagues were actually engaged in the sexual molestation of children.  How else could “actual observations” be made of sexual responses in children age (sic) two month to fifteen years old?  And this is the man whose ideas have been so influential in shaping American sex education.  [Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1999), p. 242f.]

Kinsey was a libertine, who told us what we all wanted to hear.  And the next generation, profoundly influenced by Kinsey, has become like the idols it has worshipped.  It has always been the way.  

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

A Fixed Given 

Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 24 April 2013

One of the reasons conservative Christians are doing poorly in the public square debates over human sexuality is that the philosophical ground has shifted under our feet over the course of the last generation or two. We are trying to fight for a different conclusion from the same ground that our adversaries have defined for us, and that is hard to do. And here is what I mean.

The apostle Paul says that homosexual behavior is contrary to nature. The words seem plain enough, but what is nature? That is where we find ourselves wandering in a labyrinth. We wander because we are refusing to read nature in the light of Scripture.

If I may make the problem stark, what is the difference between a man shaving his head, or a woman dying her hair, or a teen-ager getting braces on her teeth, or a man getting a sex change operation? All four can be cast as examples of us “tinkering with” nature.
Nature wants the hair to grow, he wants it shaved. Nature wants her hair to gray, she wants it not to. Nature wants her to be snaggletoothed, she wants a straight smile. And he wants his body to conform to his “inner woman.” Why is this last one a travesty, and the others not?

Some Christians have fought this problem by swallowing the reductio, and saying that we ought to simply “receive” whatever God gives us naturally. No make-up, no cosmetic surgery, no braces, etc. All natural. And incidentally, the fact that this can actually be used as a generic term of praise for food products shows how we are not thinking the issues through. There are natural poisons and there are artificial happy things.

Neither can we make the instrument used the issue. The same surgeon’s scalpel can be used to remove a cancer (which wants to naturally grow) and to remove male genitalia (which nature gave). The difference cannot be found in the knife. The same goes for genetic modifications. If genetic engineering could be used to correct Downs’ syndrome in the womb, would it be lawful to do that? Of course. If they figured out (using the same technology) how to change a boy into a girl, would it be lawful? Of course not. We are making a fundamental distinction, and it cannot be derived from the instrument.

Neither can it be derived from Scripture “raw,” which never prohibits sex change operations. It says that men can’t have sex with men, but it never says that one of them can’t cut himself in the pretense of becoming a woman, in order to have sex with another man. If we limit ourselves to black letter Bible alone, we will be faced with the prospect of it being an abomination for these two people to have sex in 2013, but the same two people (thanks to the surgeon and the hormone guy) can enter into holy matrimony in 2015.

But if we make the only standard “nature” (sola natura) we are going to have other big time problems. Advocates of same-sex mirages (HT: American Vision) point out that homosexuality occurs in the animal kingdom. Sure it does, but so does cannibalism. We need more than monkey see, monkey do. We have to have a personal God who reveals His will — in His Word, and in His world. Not only do we have special revelation and natural revelation, but we also have components of each revelation which make no sense apart from the other component.

So if we make the ultimate standard Scripture, we have clear instances of the charge given to humans to “take dominion” over the earth, messing around with it as they go. A man plows a field, plants it with wheat, and God gives him a (monocultural, yay) crop. But then others mess around too much, and they transgress — and they transgress in a big way, hauling down terrible judgments upon themselves.

For examples of the former, God adorns Israel with jewellery (Eze. 16:11-13). A master gardener cuts off perfectly good branches (John 15:2). The cultural mandate called for man, among other things, to subdue the earth (Gen. 1:28).

For an example of the latter, the angels who rebelled against their assigned estate (Jude 6) gave themselves up to sexual uncleanness in the same way that Sodom and Gomorrha had, in their lust going after “strange flesh” (Jude 7). They provided a pattern for filthy dreamers everywhere (Jude 8). And it is not possible to arrange a surgical procedure that turns strange flesh into anything other than a technique for fulfilling the filthy dream.

So even through a hair cut and a sex change operation can be described in identical terms (modifying the body with sharp instruments), one of them is routine and normal and the other is creeptastic.

But what this means is that obedience to Scripture requires us to obey nature, and we must obey it in such a way as to honor the fixed givens within it. There are some places where nature invites us to exercise our lordship, and there are other clear places where nature posts no trespassing signs. As Jonathan Edwards pointed out, God’s special revelation is a primer, teaching us how to read. When we have learned how to read the Word, we have been equipped to read the world. It is possible, true enough, to read some things in nature without any contact with special revelation (Rom. 1:20; Ps. 19:1-3). But these two forms of revelation were designed to be read together, not in isolation. God lets us check both books out of His library at the same time. Actually, He insists on it.

And this is why any theology that rejects the idea of a fixed natural given, as Scripture plainly indicates we need, has no answer when confronted with the latest filthy dream. The brave new world is arriving, and is unpacking its bags. Christians need to look for the answers to these challenges in the two places where God has placed those answers.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Good Friday and the Death of Same Sex Envy 

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 29 March 2013

Allow me to start with my conclusion so that when I wind up there at the end, there will be no surprises. The same sex marriage crusade has nothing whatever to do with what people can do sexually in private, and it has everything to do with what you will be allowed to say about it in public. We are not talking about whether private homosexual behavior will be penalized, but whether public opposition to homosexual behavior will be penalized. Further, there is only one effective response to this, which is the cross of Jesus Christ.

When I have made this point before, the comeback is always something like, “No, no, you Christians will still have the guaranteed right of free speech . . . honest.” And if you believe that, I have this Cypriot bank account I would like to open up for you . . . it’s insured.

The words may sound reassuring but they have the significant disadvantage of being false. Bunyan’s Faithful had a good hunch.

“Then it came burning hot in my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.”

Some of the things that IQ tests throw at you are questions that mark your ability in pattern recognition. One of the reasons that evangelical Christians fail so miserably in these cultural IQ tests we keep taking is because of precisely that failing — we don’t do pattern recognition well at all. Patterns remind us of that legalistic church we grew up in. Not only can we not see the pattern, we think it might be a sin to think that there could be a pattern. In fact, we are so bad at it that Lucy has pulled away our football a hundred times, and we don’t even know that she is doing that. At least Charlie Brown knew the potential problem coming up.

In this relativistic age, we are solemnly assured that there are certain things off the table. No, we would never go for that. Do you remember what they were telling you ten years ago? What would we never go for then? Twenty years? No, no, they say, patting our hands reassuringly. Polygamy? Out of the question. Incest? No way! Pedophilia? Beyond the pale. Bestiality? Don’t be a sicko.

But then, while the battle over “consenting adults with same-sex marriages, adorned with lasting and mature life-long commitments” is still ongoing, comes now Victoria’s Secret with a new line for teen-agers — “Bright Young Things.” These jailbait undies had messages on them like “Feeling Lucky?” and “Call Me.” Our family was talking about this last night and Nate said they should actually have messages like “Don’t touch this, Uncle Earl.”

So we really need to work on pattern recognition. We would see it if we thought about it, but we don’t want to think about it because that makes us realize that we might have to demonstrate courage some time soon in our lives. But think about it. What will you be ridiculed for opposing ten years from now? What will you be a “hater” for in 2023? Anybody who thinks that the sexual revolution is about to realize all its goals within the next year or two, and then we will all settle down in peaceful democratic harmony, is someone who probably ought to have their car keys taken away.

This is Good Friday. This the day that we mark the crucifixion of our Lord Jesus. This day was the day He spread His arms out wide to gather up the sin of the world. And at the festering center of that great mass of sin, we find putrid sin of envy. Envy bites and spits, and wants nothing to do with the way of holiness. But Jesus still died, and with Him we see the conquest of envy. Jesus died so that envy might die. Jesus died so that envy will die.

Because we in the Church have faltered in preaching, really preaching, the substitutionary, vicarious death of Christ on the cross, we have seen a great resurgence of envy in our day. It is the sin that is driving all these overwhelming cultural challenges that face us. This sin is at the heart of all of it. We are bad at federal math because we want somebody else to pay their “fair share.” We want homos to be able to marry because of a thirsting envy that thinks it can be slaked with something as absurd as the label “marriage.” We butcher children because we envy the lifestyles of those who are unemcumbered with having to care for little ones.

Envy is not the entire old man, but it is an essential organ of his. Take away a man’s liver and the man dies. Take away the old man’s envy, and he will die too — and will rise a new man in Christ.

Protective legislation is something that envy will always demand, but when the legislation is passed and signed, the unhappy ache is still there. So then there will be legislation against anyone who dares point out that the ache is still there. He must be shut up, for how can we have a true democracy with all these haters running around loose? So we can call two men in the sack together “married,” and we can police any hate speech that might hint otherwise. But there is one thing we cannot do. We cannot take those two men and turn one of them into a woman, and make the other one a man who wants to be with a woman. And so the ache and self-loathing will only ramp up further.

Yes, yes, I know . . . there are surgeons who claim to be able to make one of them a woman, and this is yet another testimony to how far envy will go. Just as the priests of Baal cut themselves with knives, so the acolytes of Envy hire the surgical knives. But all they can do is mutilate a man and call it woman. Yes, and some of these men even arrive at this state of mutilated masculinity, call themselves women, and then promptly become lesbians. Envy likes to toy with its prey before the final devouring.

This is why there is no simple political solution for the peculiar kind of frenzy that has got us all by the throat. America needs to come to Jesus. By this I mean that America needs to come to the divine Son of God who became a man for us, and who lived a perfect, sinless life on our behalf, who went to the cross — as we mark on this day — was buried in a cold sepulchre, and who rose again from the dead, and all in accordance with the Scriptures, which cannot be broken.

Unless and until we do that, we will continue to be confounded by the differences between red ink and black ink, men and women, children and lumps of tissue. We have been struck with a judicial blindness, and the only one who can heal our sight is the Lord Jesus. Pray that He walks to the very center of our country, Nebraska say, pray that He spits on the ground there, and applies the mud to our eyes. Far better that than the mud we have been applying to everything else.

But change the metaphor. America needs to know that when Jesus comes to our house, He will go through all of the rooms and throw many of our most precious things out. But the first place He will go is down into the basement to find that ramshackle cardboard kennel where we keep that semi-domesticated sewer rat Envy. We always used to go down there in the evening and feed it the delicacies of spite we gathered during the course of the day. But when Jesus goes down there, knife in hand, it will not be to feed it anything. We should really get accustomed to the sound of that squealing we hear, because when the reformation comes, there will be a lot of it.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Sexual Obedience Outside Scripture

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, January 14, 2012

And so here is my final response to the issues surrounding the publication of Real Marriage. The fundamental issue here is hermeneutics — how do we read God’s Word, and more important contextually, how do we read God’s Word in the context of God’s world? This is actually an issue having to do with the intersection of natural revelation and special revelation.

My beginning assumption is that they are not two books in the library, which can somehow be checked out and read independently of one another. They are interlocking realities.

Calvin famously began the Institutes by saying that we cannot know God unless we know ourselves, and we cannot know ourselves apart from knowing God.
We have a similar kind of thing with the relationship of special revelation and general revelation. I cannot understand general revelation apart from the grace of God brought to me through His Word — enough general revelation gets through so that I am “without excuse” for suppressing it, but unless the Spirit quickens me, I cannot read the world rightly. By the same token, I cannot get to the special revelation God has offered us except by routing it through natural revelation. How can I hear without a preacher? My Bible is outside me in just the same way that the starry heavens are, or the bowl of oranges in the kitchen. I must assume something about God’s reliability in the world to even pick up a Bible, or drive to an evangelistic meeting.

I must read the Word to read the world, and I must read the world to read the Word. This extends beyond natural phenomena like planets, spiders, oceans, and lawn crickets. It also includes fallen human culture, and all its tawdry sins. I cannot understand the culture apart from the Word, but I do not approach the Word from “nowhere.” I come to the Word with a particular set of cultural assumptions, some of which may be retained, and others which must be jettisoned. But if I had none of those assumptions, if I were a tabula rasa, this would not enable me to come in a pristine condition; it would prevent me from being able to come at all.

The grace of God is what happens when the Spirit straightens out all the dislocations that sin and evil have introduced. When He causes new life to spring into being in a man’s heart, He is in the process of restoring that man’s relationship to everything. God reconciles, not just man with God, but also heaven with earth, male with female, parents with children, man and animals, and man and the created order. In order to accomplish this sweeping set of reconciliations, it is absolutely necessary for man who has been put right with God to see how he needs to be put right with everything else. He cannot see this unless and until the Spirit enables him to read creation, read the other sex, read his children, read his history, and read his culture.

And this knowledge, this literacy, is not just something that comes to us as the end result of a chain of reasoning. Newborn infants know how to suck, and this not because they “figured it out.” They know this bodily. When Adam and Eve made love for the first time, this was not because they had passed the sex ed course. They hadn’t read a book on it. They knew what to do because their bodies were configured to know what to do. Sin freqently dislocates this kind of knowledge, but it does not eradicate it. When we are converted, and when we start to grow in grace, our dislocated forms of knowledge are gradually restored and put right.

“About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb. 5:11-14).

There are many things that can be said about this passage, but let me draw just a few things from it for now. The first is that discerning good from evil is a kingly act (one which Adam and Eve grasped for prematurely), and kings are those who have been given a gift for rule. Kings make decisions. They sort out; they adjudicate. Those who have not grown up to this, who are still on the milk rations, are not up to the task. People who claim to have kingly maturity before they actually do, legislate poorly.

Now those who are not up to the task can do one of two things. They can grasp for decision-making authority anyway, and this is where we get numerous petty legalisms. For example, people get drunk, so let’s ban drink. People live in fear of “it might lead to.” Well, sure, in the sense that enrolling in school leads to the possibility of poor grades, and getting married leads to the possibility of adultery.

But the other thing that they can do is refuse to budge. They take the dominion task that God assigned to us, and refuse to do anything with it — except perhaps to wrap it up in a napkin and bury it in the ground. The refusal to move away from “black letter” instructions is a refusal to grow up, a refusal to mature. And of course, the petty legalisms generated by the group in the previous paragraph gives this group plenty to point to as a cautionary tale. But the so-called liberties that this group can tumble into provide the legalist group with their own cautionary tales.

Legalists give application a bad name. Libertines give lack of application a bad name. They both lean against one another, and the only way out is to learn how to read culture like a grown-up. The only way out is to learn how to make the applications that the Holy Spirit is leading us to make.

This is why we should not want to ban, discourage, or prohibit anything except what God has expressly prohibited, along with anything which the Spirit of God is leading us to discourage as we make necessary applications from the Scriptures. A whole host of scriptural requirements requires us to be able to read the culture in which we are making those applications.

Honor all men (1 Pet. 2:17). How exactly? Standing up, saluting, bowing, what? Elders should have a good reputation with outsiders (1 Tim. 3:7). What does it take to accomplish that? Membership in the Chamber of Commerce? Wives are to be obedient to their husbands so that the way of God will not be blasphemed by outsiders (Tit. 2:5). What is that to look like to outsiders?

Women, dress yourselves modestly (1 Tim. 2:9). But how? We see that obedience to Scripture requires careful thought while shopping, while applying make-up, and while buying jewelry. A woman has to make decisions about modesty while sorting through a rack of dresses at Macy’s, and we may be confident that the apostle Paul never saw any one of those dresses in all his born days, or in any of his dreams, and would not know what to make of them if he did. The Bible tells women to dress a certain way, in order to achieve a certain effect, and tells them to do this without giving them a dress code. This means that obedience requires women to make decisions about their sexual attractiveness in their culture. Here is the principle — certain kinds of obedience cannot happen unless we learn how to go beyond Scripture. Women need to learn how to be attractive without attracting all and sundry, and they must do this without specific warrant from the Scriptures for any one of their particular decisions.

All these same realities apply to the marriage bed. For example, the apostle Paul says nothing about video-recording a marital sex act on your cell phone. This is because he wrote to the Ephesians, to the Galatians, and not to the Idiots. If he were writing to the Idiots, he might have felt constrained to mentioned it. Oh, no, you might reply, feeling a little stung by my insensitive use of the word Idiot with an upper case I, you are your wife are being “very careful.” Very careful. I see. So careful that when you both die in a car wreck nobody is going to go through your effects?

So in closing, this approach, an insistence on cultivating obedient cultural literacy, brings us back to the principle I discussed earlier.

“That every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour; Not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God” (1 Thess. 4:4-5).

In order to able to obey this, in order to make love not like they do, it is required that we be able to read what they are doing. And when we read what they are doing, and why, we are not reading it in the pages of the Bible. But we are doing something better — we are obeying the pages of the Bible.

If culture is the externalization of worship, and it is, then our worship of God in the twenty-first century is going to have a certain cultural embodiment. This is inescapable. We ought not to run away from it, and we must not grasp for the decision-making authority in it prematurely. How can we avoid these twin errors? The author of Hebrews says that it takes “constant practice.” That is our problem — we are afraid to practice this.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Some Preliminary Thoughts On “Real Marriage”

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, January 07, 2012

[Editor’s Note: Mark and Grace Driscoll have written a book on sex and marriage which is stirring up controversy.  A summary of the controversy can be found here.  Douglas Wilson intends to interact with the Driscoll’s book.  Here is his first piece.]

Lord willing, as time goes by, I will be interacting more with Real Marriage by Mark and Grace Driscoll. But here are some of my basic assumptions going into the discussion.

1. Words written are easier to interact with (and be concerned about) than words unwritten. Pastors like Driscoll frequently get in trouble for things they write and say. This book has been called “dangerous.” In the meantime, other pastors rarely get in trouble for things they didn’t write and didn’t say. But — and here I am convinced that the Driscolls are exactly right — a lot of damage has been caused by the church’s unwillingness to address certain topics, an unwillingness to bring the whole counsel of God to bear on this subject. Silence is also dangerous.
Sex is volatile. Writing about it can blow up on you. But not writing about it can do the same thing. But the damage that is caused by the sin of silent omission is untraceable, it cannot be pinned on anybody. People are just as hurt and just as damaged, and no pastoral fingerprints anywhere. Nobody is going to lose their job over it.

I am a small town pastor, and I think I have pretty much seen it all. In other settings, I can only imagine . . . and I would rather not. One of the things I have seen (in close conjunction with the sexual messes people get into) is that silence doesn’t help anybody.

In short, to reapply something D.L. Moody once said, “I like his way of doing it better than other people’s way of not doing it.”

2. I am more inclined to hear someone out in a discussion of adiaphora (or whether or not something should be considered adiaphora) if that person has been clear and courageous in those areas where the Scriptures speak plainly. Sexual morality and sexual cultural proprieties are two different things. Someone can fight for the former, and bump into the latter. And someone else can observe the latter assiduously, and fail to defend the former.

Take this example. Observe two Reformed pastors (Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller) of two major churches (Mars Hill and Redeemer) in two major cities (Manhattan and Seattle) who both have a book out on marriage (Real Marriage and The Meaning of Marriage). But in church polity, Keller is a soft egalitarian, and he has been conspicuous in his reluctance to address one of the central sins of Manhattan, which is the sin of sodomy. Mark Driscoll has been conspicuously courageous in how he has addressed the sexual perversions of his city. Now, which pastor is in big trouble? Which one is the controversial one? Which is the controversial one on sexual matters? We are not there yet, but this is the first step in how a people might supplant the Word of God for the sake of our traditions.

Faithfulness on the big issues should win you a ticket to discuss the matters of lesser moment.

3. Stipulate whatever distance you might think exists between what Scripture says about sex and what the Driscolls say about it. That is a distance that would be a lot shorter if our translations hadn’t done a lot of tidying up for us. A Victorian Bowlderization taint continues down to the present. Pastor Mark might not get invited to your conference now, but — truth be told — neither would Pastor Ezekiel. Actually, we would invite Ezekiel because our inerrancy statement says we have to, but we would probably arrange for him to speak with a video feed on a ten-second delay.

4. All this said, please don’t assume that I won’t be expressing disagreements with Real Marriage, up to and including significant disagreements. The Driscolls anticipate that, and welcome it. It is only to say that I, for one, appreciate the opportunity that he and Grace have created to talk about these things. The fact that these things would never be talked about in your church does not mean they are not going on. In short, this is a good opportunity– but only if we receive it as such. The publication of this book is an event that God wants the whole evangelical world to use as an opportunity for sexual stewardship. That won’t happen if we try to shout it down.

I agree with the Driscolls that what Scripture commends we should commend. What Scripture condemns we should condemn. I agree that if Scripture doesn’t condemn something, we are free to pursue it . . . depending. This last depending is where differences are likely to arise. I believe there are numerous areas where Scripture-based moral reasoning is necessary, but there needs to be a way to do it without legalistic looks of shocked dismay. When that moral reasoning — on practices not explicitly mentioned by Scripture — is followed, it has to be followed for what it is, which is casuistry done by fallible teachers. Wish us luck.

When is such moral reasoning necessary? Getting a sweet Jesus tattoo on your calf is not an indicator of poetic gifts. Growing a neck beard and moving to Portland does not make you a screenwriter. Buying a sex toy does not make you a savvy lover. We need a hermenuetic that does more than just read the Scriptures. We need a scriptural hermeneutic that shows us how to read our surrounding culture. But more later.

Utterly Evil

The Perverse Always Double Down

Further to our piece on sex-education in New Zealand government schools, Herald columnist, Garth George contributed an excellent piece on the subject. 

He commences by describing our world as mad and becoming progressively more insane.  “Mad” is George’s description for a culture apostatizing from the Living God.  Religion has consequences.  False, idolatrous religion has false and evil consequences.  George is not enough of a Bible scholar to understand the profound consequences of a world where people are blinded in their own conceits and self-asserted autonomy.  He just calls it as he sees it: they are insane.  But he is not far wrong.
   

Graphic lessons in schools have proven to be a failure by any measure. I nearly choked when I read what the FPA’s Frances Bird had to say.I have suggested several times in this column over the years that the world has gone mad and I have never had cause to resile from that view.  In fact, there is plenty of evidence that it is getting even madder.

He goes on to summarize some the symptoms of reckless self-destruction of our culture evident in this shambolic pretence at education.

Can you imagine a female schoolteacher standing before a class of 15-year-old girls and simulating for their edification the noises she makes while in the throes of sexual orgasm?  Can you imagine 14-year-old schoolgirls being taught how to roll what one of them called “yucky and sticky” condoms on to plastic penises?

Can you imagine children as young as 12 being taught in class about oral sex and boys being told it’s acceptable to play with a girl’s private parts so long as “she’s okay with it”?  Can you imagine a class of 12-year-old boys discussing with their teacher the things they could do besides having intercourse, and the teacher suggesting oral sex since it “wasn’t sex” and “won’t inevitably lead to sexual intercourse”, then adding that anal sex was another option?

Can you imagine those same boys being told to lie on the floor together with their eyes shut and imagine the world was predominantly homosexual? All those things are happening in our schools right now, as this newspaper has reported this week, and if that’s not madness, then I don’t know what is.

He then turns his guns on the New Zealand Family Planning Association–a government supported organization dedicated to teaching children libertine perversions.

I nearly choked when I read what the Family Planning Association’s health promotion director Frances Bird had to say. In one breath she said that international research showed a good-quality, comprehensive sex education programme could make a significant difference. And in the next she said that New Zealand has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world and that children as young as 12 are sexually active.

Considering that FPA-backed (Family Planning Association) sex education programmes have been used in schools for more than 25 years, any sane person who looks at the facts must come to the conclusion that they have been an abysmal failure. Over that time the number of teenage pregnancies, the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, the number of abortions and suicides have all soared.

According to the Ministry of Youth Development, births to 15- to 19-year-olds have been rising since 2000. The birth rate increased between 2001 and 2008 from 27.5 births for every 1000 women in 2000 to 33 births to the 1000 in 2008. There were 5185 births to this age group in 2008 compared with 3787 in 2000. The ministry says the teenage birthrate is still fifth-highest in the developed world at last count. This country also has among the highest rates of STDs, abortions and suicides in the developed world.

One manifestation of madness or insanity is when one does the same thing repeatedly, in expectation of different results. When the FPA’s madness produces not less, but more sexual promiscuity, unwanted pregnancies and soaring abortion rates amongst teenagers, the response? More.  We need more “education”.  Doubling down in the face of such powerful contrary evidence to your propaganda is not just a sign of ignorance, but of a wilful, stubborn darkness of heart.

George then takes a swipe at the degradation of sex to an animal function–physically pleasurable and, therefore, to be experienced and exploited as soon as hormones inform us “naturally” that it is time.

The tragedy is that the whole sex education thing is predicated on the spurious proposition that sex between consenting children is on about the same level as having a meal together or going to the movies. And that is a dreadful, dangerous, damaging lie.

The horrific result is that thousands of our children are today finding themselves abused, impregnated or poxed because they’ve been taught how to do it.  And far from encouraging them to delay sexual relations, it encourages them to experiment. In children that is only natural.

A far more reasonable approach would be to teach abstinence.  He reviews some case history of sex-education programmes stressing abstinence has being helpful and effective.  But, of course, that would not represent the doubling-down that our madness and degeneration demand.  He concludes with this indictment:

But what really gets me is that our sex education is devaluing what can be one of life’s most glorious experiences. It takes no account of the emotional and spiritual dimensions of the sex act, the means by which two, a man and a woman, can become one flesh. Rather, this so-called sex education is in fact child abuse and is tantamount to paedophilia. It is not just misguided, not just ill-thought-out, not just dangerous, it is utterly evil. 

Utterly evil.  The nail on the head.

Sex Education in Pagan Schools

 Imagining the World as Predominantly Homosexual

The NZ Herald has been running a “thread” on sex ed in schools.  Some parents have discovered what their children are actually being taught in the government schools and they are angry. 

Schools are being accused of going too far in what they teach children about sex. Children as young as 12 are being taught about oral sex and told it’s acceptable to play with a girl’s private parts as long as “she’s okay with it”.

In other cases, 14-year-old girls are being taught how to put condoms on plastic penises, and one female teacher imitated the noises she made during orgasm to her class of 15-year-olds. The often-graphic nature of today’s sex education lessons is considered perfectly acceptable, and necessary, by some parents, but many others are shocked and say it has gone too far.

Now the other “side” has weighed in.  The professionals.
  They are citing “international research” to “prove” that sex education in schools can actually reduces teenage sexual activity.  Yup.  And we have research to prove that placebos can cure diseases. 

Good quality and comprehensive education programmes in schools can delay the first time a teenager has sex and reduce risk-taking behaviour, international studies show.  Their findings are backed by Family Planning chief executive Jackie Edmond who said programmes were most effective when they began before a young person first has sex. “Comprehensive sexuality education aims to equip children and young people with the knowledge, skills and values to have safe, fulfilling and enjoyable relationships and to take responsibility for their health and well-being.”

“Because sexuality education is much more than ‘the birds and the bees’ it should start young.”

The NZ Herald has also run a bio on a young girl who has fallen pregnant after one of the enlightened sex education sessions in government schools.  She is about to give birth.  She claims that her sex-ed class encouraged her to have sex as long as everyone consented.

A pregnant teenager says sex education in schools does not prevent young people from having sex – if anything, it encourages it.  Amber-Leigh Erasmus is due to give birth to her first child on Saturday, a result of having unprotected sex during New Year celebrations.

The Hibiscus Coast 17-year-old lost her virginity at 14, a year after she was taught about sex at school and the fact it was “okay as long as you consented”.

Now sometimes social issues work through society in a kind of pendulum effect.  One generation is permissive; the next is far more strictly moral.  Will sex education in schools follow this effect?  Will it swing back to a more sane position, introducing a moral context which promotes abstinence and sex only within the bounds of marriage?

Unfortunately we do not believe so.  In the first place the edifice of our culture is built upon an established religion of evolutionary materialism.  Human beings are nothing more than biological machines.  Sex is part of the machine function.  Sex education will therefore always focus upon the mechanics of sex.  How it works.  How you do it.  The moving parts.  Whilst evolutionary biologists speculate on morality being a product of evolution its moral codes are nebulous, undefined, and racked with the naturalistic fallacy: what exists is morally right. 

Thus sex education in government schools (which exist to propagate the established religions of our age) will always focus upon sex being an ordinary part of life, a biological function, to be participated in as one participates in eating food, or breathing, or playing sport.  This will not change until our nation repents of its pathetic idolatries and false gods and turns back to the Living God. 

Secondly, it could be argued that government schools and the “sex education lobby” will eventually come to realise that it is far better for parents to ensure their children receive appropriate sex education.  Not a hope.  Why?  Because government schools proceed on the assumption and assertion that parents are incompetent to educate or to arrange for an appropriate education for their children.  They need experts to take over.  Hence New Zealand government education is “free” (a lie), compulsory, and secular. 

So if there is to be no change but only a relentless drive to promote animal-like behaviour as sex-education, what will the government classrooms be promoting in twenty-five years time?  Prostitution will be promoted as a normal part of life and an excellent career for pupils to aspire to.  Prostitutes, now euphemistically referred to as “sex-workers” will be invited to promote their careers to pupils, with explanations of how brothels work, the kinds of sex workers one can employ, how a sex worker goes about his or her work and so forth.  They will also be asked to demonstrate their craft in the classroom.  Teachers will bring their current lovers into the class to demonstrate advanced techniques of foreplay and coitus.  And so on.  All this has actually occurred in reported cases in the United States. 

We are fast following.

The father of a 12-year-old boy is questioning why his son has been taught “all the grubby stuff” about sex, but none of the basics, such as how a baby is made.  The man, who is in his 40s, took his son out of sex education classes last week because of how explicit they had been.

The boy’s class had discussed things they could do besides intercourse, and the teacher had suggested oral sex as it “wasn’t sex” and “won’t inevitably lead to sexual intercourse”.  Anal sex was discussed as another option. Students also lay on the floor together with their eyes shut imagining the world was predominantly gay.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Unbelief.  

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Rutting or Revolution

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Just last night we were having some family discussion about the tribulations of Rep. Weiner. We were talking mostly about God’s sense of humor. Here was a man who wanted the smart set to run the whole stinking economy, and he can’t even run his own Twitter account. Not only was he not able to run his own Twitter account, he did not seem to have any control over what is appropriate to do with digital images of one’s own briefs, never mind the propriety of how those images came into existence in the first place. All this was risible enough, okay, but look at how long God took to set this whole story up. This is the ultimate shaggy dog story — it went on and on, until it culminated in the exposure of one Weiner.

And so we also concluded, back in this family discussion of ours, that God can be pretty tasteless. Doesn’t God know that there are children down here?

But my takeaway conclusion from our discussion was — how can Christopher Hitchens still maintain that there is no God? I resolved to do something in the morning to chide Christopher. “Do you really believe that this sketch had no writer?” Thus far last night.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Right in the Juicy Spot

Culture and Politics
Sex and Culture
Douglas Wilson
Monday, January 24, 2011

Inter-Varsity Press (“IVP”) has released a new title, called The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are (HT: Baylyblog). Reading how they have described it themselves was like playing ping pong with your junior high friends, and one of them hits the ball about five feet above the table, exactly in the middle, right in the juicy spot. Time slows down, and what can you do? No choice involved in it, really.

“Concepts like ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ are relatively recent developments in human history. We let ourselves be defined by socially constructed notions of sexual identity and sexual orientation, even though these are not distinctly biblical or Christian ways of thinking about sex.”

Now anyone who thinks that this is a prelude to urging us all to start adopting more biblical ways about speaking about sex, is someone who is perhaps a tad more naive than they ought to be.

“And there were also sodomites in the land: and they did according to all the abominations of the nations which the LORD cast out before the children of Israel” (1 Kings 14:24).

“Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog, into the house of the LORD thy God for any vow: for even both these are abomination unto the LORD thy God. (Dt. 23:18).

Heh. So let us abandon all these recent social constructs that have done so much to clutter up our speechifying. Let us walk away from all talk of transgendered communities, let us abandon all notions of gay orientations, and let us not have any more of this funny business about dykes on bikes. Let us return to the biblical world in which harlotry is considered a problem. Everybody happy now? No? Maybe something else is going on then. Hmmm. Let’s check on what that might be.

“Anthropologist Jenell Williams Paris offers a Christian framework for sexuality that accounts for complex postmodern realities…”

But why do we want to account for complex postmodern realities? That is called missing the point, for there are no longer any points to miss. Right? Actually, underneath all the pomo jargonizing, there are a couple of non-negotiable points that they insist on us not missing, while pretending they are insisting on nothing whatever.

One is that everybody must be able to get laid whenever and however they want, and the other is that they must be allowed to rail against power games while playing the ultimate power game themselves. The first item is the bait, and the second is the trap. The people doing this are really evil or really stupid.

But let us play the game for a couple more minutes. If we were still trapped in the older Aristotelian categories, then we would have to account for realities. Part of the whole point of complex postmodern cogitations was to stop accounting for realities. Reality is offputting. Reality involves a boy and a girl, who grow up into a man and a woman (more a divine construct than a social one), fully capable of having their fun time without any help from anthropologists who write for IVP, or leather merchants in San Francisco for that matter.

“She unpacks how sexual identities are socially constructed in our cultural context, and assesses problems with common cultural and Christian understandings of heterosexuality and homosexuality. Ultimately, linking sexual feelings to human identity leads us to a dead end.”

To wit, the dead end of not being able to follow your fellow academics to the party that promises to turn into an orgy, the one with a daisy chain involving half the faculty, a chain that actually is a social construct, come to think of it.

“Avoiding simplistic moral exhortation about sexual behavior, Paris argues that the Christian tradition holds a distinct vision for sexuality without sexual identity categories. The End of Sexual Identity moves beyond culture war impasses to open up new space and vocabulary for conversations with people in diverse communities both inside and outside the church.”

Anybody who can read that without catching a whiff of the sulphurous pit it came from is probably on the tenure fast track, and those who keep wrinkling their nose like they are doing are never going to get tenure.
Incidentally, I don’t think they really mean it when they resolve to abandon all simplistic moral exhortations. If any of them ever read this post, and afterwards have reason to speak to me, I would be willing to bet ready money that I would hear quite a few simplistic moral exhoratations.

So shall we avoid all “simplistic moral exhortations” when it comes to sexual identity? As Uncle Andrew said to Digory, “Ours is a high and lonely destiny . . .” It is a hard living trying to grow luxuriant flowers on that moonscape of theirs. “Orchids need atmosphere” is a simplistic truism, and we have abandoned all such. The problem is, nothing grows anymore.

So these people are reduced to the expedient of kidnapping what other people have grown. Some poor kid arrives at their InterVarsity group at college from his Bible church background, sent there because his parents were so influenced by Packer’s Knowing God (IVP) when they were in college, little realizing that IVP is now putting out . . . initially I was going to make up some ridiculous title like Walking with Christ through Gender Change: How a Fundamentalist Man Became a Methodist Woman . . . but I think I’ll just leave it at “IVP is now putting out.”

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>

Evangelicals Confronted by a Leper

Douglas Wilson
Thursday, December 23, 2010
So the sexual socialists found a few craven Republicans and jammed a sea change bit of legislation, the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” through a lame duck Congress. Instead of the president having to leave town in humiliation over the high-handed antics of a discredited Congress, this, and a few other passed and signed monstrosities, are now being touted as proof that the elections didn’t affect the president the way everybody was talking like they might. “Don’t count him out early!” What the elections actually didn’t affect was the president’s hubris and messiah complex. Just imagine, if you have the horsepower to do so, a conservative president pulling the same tactical stunt. Your inability to do so should not be taken as a reflection on you — the current zeitgeist is rigged against the very possibility of such a thing happening. There are only two sacraments in the Church, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But these sacraments teach and instruct us about God’s ways with man in all things, and so from them we should learn that many more things are sacramental. Sexual union is one such sacramental, or mystery, as Paul puts it in Eph. 5, and is at the beating heart of family government, and from that position it is necessarily at the heart of every civilization. A people who screw this up are screwed up in everything. And everywhere we look, we see Christians accommodating themselves to these new sexual derangements outside the church, or preparing themselves for such accommodation when the opportune moment comes. It will not do to prove your purity in the meantime by holding aloft a narrowly-construed and very truncated gospel, one that passes muster with our (equally narrow) doctrine cops. A truncated and inert gospel is no gospel at all. You will call His name Jesus for He will save His people from their . . . what? One of the best books I have read in a long time was John Piper’s God is the Gospel. As soon as I was done, I started right over at the beginning, http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=jtertullian&o=1&p=8&l=bpl&asins=1581347510&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifrand am reading it again now. It is required reading (especially chapter two) for all those believe that gospel purity can be accomplished by means of setting up a tiny little evangelical kennel, in which the gospel will be required to be a yippy dog thoroughbred. No, the gospel is as wide as the character of God Himself, and is therefore something which encompasses heaven and earth, and all that they contain. This is not to say that everything is the gospel, but it is to say that the gospel pervades everything. This includes, as it turns out, the sex lives of upscale urban professionals . . . who will almost certainly find a plain statement of this cosmic reality as judgmental and offputting. Refusal to be specific about what these sins those might be is evangelical cowardice. But someone might reply that if he preached against sodomy, well, this would just get everyone in an uproar. Well, that’s something we find in the New Testament, right? A total absence of uproar whenever the gospel is preached? You might reply that if you tried that kind of message in Los Angeles or Manhattan, you would lose your audience. But if you leave out sin, there is no point in having an audience. There is a way of appealing to your audience which is just a (thinly) disguised way of revealing how much your audience has successfully appealed to you. And it will not do to say that this is being done in order to winsomely reach those who have not yet heard the gospel. Those who construe the gospel as a limited set of propositions which, if affirmed in a repentance-free and abracadabra-like fashion, will get one’s sorry butt into heaven may discover, at the end of the day, that this is not where their sorry butt actually went. When the story of the collapse of academicky evangelicalism is finally written, compromises on these sexual issues will be right at the center of the autopsy. The coroner will have circled that business with a red pen. When the winds of sexual doctrine finally blow over the cardboard cut-outs of John Knox and Hugh Latimer that we have set up in our Reformed Card and Gift Shop, there will be no end of a mess to clean up. Whenever a stiff breeze blows through this shop of ours, papers, cards, and cardboard go everywhere, cause that’s all we have anymore . . . paper products. What issues am I talking about? Here is a sampling, a representative list of issues that the respectable part of the conservative evangelical world is currently handling very badly — headship and submission in marriage, women’s ordination to the ministry, women’s ordination to the diaconate, women enrolled in seminaries, women in combat roles in the military, evangelicals ceding control of what constitutes legitimate discourse about sodomy over to the perpetually offended, the legitimzation of sodomy as a federally protected vice, the delegitimization of opposition to said vice-nurturing, women doing everything an unordained man can do, pervasive hostility to genuine masculinity within the church, puff-translations of the Bible that cater to the heresy of feminism, complementarians becoming complimentarians, and the spectacle of effeminate homosexuals fighting for what they believe in a far more manly way than Christians do. How’s that for starters? Now I know that my reception at the great banquet of evangelicalism resembles, as the fellow once said, that of badly dressed leper. Quite all right. I won’t stay long. I just had this message to deliver, and I’ll be on my way.

>Political Correctness or the Gospel: No Middle Ground

>How Social Policing Works

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America
Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 8:20 am

The antithesis is foundational to any right understanding of social order. From the beginning of our history, God has placed antipathy between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent (Gen. 3:15). The human race is divided into two races, those who love holiness and those who do not. The former are those who are having their humanity restored in Jesus Christ, and the latter are those who are actively pursuing the gollumization of humanity. So the human race is divided, and it is divided by the grace of the gospel, and in accordance with the Bible’s description of God’s character. This description of His character is something that less squeamish generations of Christians used to call God’s “law.”

Those who love God recoil from the things that nonbelievers both do (Eph. 5:12) and applaud doing (Rom. 1:32). They despise even the garments that are stained by the flesh (Jude 23). But a Christian might protest — “I don’t agree with the way you are approaching this. I’m a Christian and I don’t have that kind of detestation.” But that argument would only have weight if you really were a Christian. That’s where the argument falls down.

Now given this antithesis between two entirely distinct ways of being human, and given the fact that these two races have to live together until the Lord comes, how are we to conduct ourselves in the meantime?
We are to gird up the loins of our minds (1 Pet. 1:13), which is Peter’s way of telling us to think. We are to live as obedient children, which means being disobedient to our former lusts (1 Pet. 1:14). We are called to be holy in everything we do — but mark that holiness is not smarminess. Beware of false definitions of holiness. We are to be holy in all our lives because the one who calls us is holy (1 Pet. 1:15-16). Pass your time here as a resident alien, as a sojourner, as a pilgrim (1 Pet. 1:17). It took more than gold or jewels to redeem us from this pandering world (1 Pet. 1:18), and so we ought to place an appropriate value on what it took to get us out of that vain way of life.

So think. So gird up the loins of your mind. It will either be the case that one of these humanities will define what acceptable discourse is, with the other side keeping its head down, or it will go the other way. Either it will be acceptable to make jokes at the expense of the Jesus freak, or it will not be. Either the jokes (and with either kind of human  there will always be jokes) will reflect God’s moral order, or they will be fighting it. There is not a third way of being human that we can put in charge of this whole thing in such a way as to allow the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent to get along in peace and harmony.

If you want a high school where the gay teenager gets affirming hugs from all his classmates, and in which the devout Christian is well-liked and hailed by all and sundry, then it is clear that your intellectual toga got all tangled up when you tried to gird up those loins. On these issues, most Christians are not girding up the loins so much as running through the curtains. That high school does not exist, not here, not now, not ever.
The ability to make jokes, which police the boundaries of every moral order, is the kindest way, the least onerous way, of maintaining those boundaries. If you ban them, you have not gotten rid of the issues at stake, but have actually just escalated the conflict. Back in the fifties, it was possible to observe that someone was a little light in the loafers, and that perhaps your son should avoid hanging out with him. Now it is not possible for Christian owners of a bed and breakfast to refuse to put up lesbian couple, stating their reasons, at least not without risking being sent off to sensitivity camp for a couple weeks, and it is open season on making jokes at the expense of those troglodytes, along with their bed and breakfast cave. Right? I can just hear Letterman now.

Well, better to be a faithful troglodyte than a troglodyke. And you see, things have gotten so bad that I type this joke in fear, waiting for the sound of jackboots on my front porch.

>Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

>Special Parking Privileges

Culture and Politics – Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson
Monday, December 13, 2010

So, a professor at Columbia has been charged with some kind of incestuous relationship, and everybody was apparently a consenting adult, and so we are, again, face to face with the public incoherence of our rudderless sexual ethic. How is it possible, given all that we as a society have already granted, for us to say no to the next lust that demands recognition? The logic of what we have already allowed not only demands that we leave this guy alone, but it may even require that he be given a tag for his rear view mirror granting him special parking privileges.

He who says A must say B. You cannot reason with lust. You can either mortify your ungodly lusts (Col. 3:5), or you can begin a never-ending process of trying to appease them. But our horseleach lusts have two daughters, as it turns out (Prov. 30:15).

If there is a law of God over us, then there are limits. If there is not, then there are not. You cannot banish the God who alone gives sexual limits a liberating coherence, and yet still keep those limits. And you cannot expect the ick factor to protect us, because lusts specialize in battering down the ick factor. Lusts just love taboos. Taboos are the air that they breathe.

Now as long as the ick factor is still somewhat functional, our pretty boy preachers will not say a word about it, because it is clearly “unnecessary.” Nobody is advocating that, they will say. But as soon as somebody influential does start advocating it, and it becomes necessary to say something, do you think that the relevant pulpits of the land will magically fill up with sons of thunder? I wouldn’t bet too much on that happening.

So those who can follow an argument need to come to grips with how this will play out for them. Do you object to a guy bonking his sister? You, my friend, are clearly filled with hate.

>Rugby League (and Society’s) Morality

>The Rot is Not Just in Denmark

Miranda Devine has skewered the beast. There was always going to be more than a tinge of hypocrisy in fallout from the Cronulla Sharks group sex activities in Christchurch. Miranda, in this piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald cuts through the veneer of polite outrage and exposes the rotting carcass within.

Morality code kicked into touch

Miranda Devine
May 14, 2009 – 12:02AM

It serves Matthew Johns right that he was dumped yesterday from The Footy Show over a group sex session with former Cronulla Sharks teammates in New Zealand seven years ago.

His “apology” on the Channel Nine program last week to pre-empt revelations about a team gang bang with a naive 19-year-old woman in Christchurch showed he has little remorse.

For whom was he concerned? “For me personally, it has put my family through enormous anguish and embarrassment … For that I can’t say sorry enough.” No mention of “Clare”, the young woman who wept through the ABC’s Four Corners expose this week of rugby league sex scandals.

Clare, described by a detective as a “nice girl … young, naive, not worldly, just a growing up teenager”, said she was suicidal for years after the incident.

Calling those involved to account is right and necessary. But the wider context within the sport is also to blame. The NRL does not condemn group sex per se. It is happy to see it endorsed as appropriate and morally right.

The NRL chief executive, David Gallop, was suitably “distressed” this week. But his legalistic solutions to the ongoing sex problems plaguing rugby league have proven spectacularly unproductive. Gallop’s gender adviser, Catharine Lumby, and the fellow feminist academic Kath Albury, helped design the NRL’s program to reform players’ attitudes towards women five years ago. But “Play By The Rules” can’t be said to be a rip-roaring success.

It would not be surprising if it has been counterproductive, when Lumby expresses unusually tolerant attitudes towards group sex, or, in the parlance of rugby league, “the bun”.

In studies of sexual behaviour, less than 3 per cent of people reportedly admit to group sex. Yet “the idea that group sex is aberrant is a very particular view”, Lumby told the ABC in 2004, at the height of the Bulldogs rugby league sex scandal. “I mean, group sex happens in lots of kinds of communities and the issue should be about consent, not about group sex – it is my belief, having studied sexual and gender politics.”

Lumby and Albury are also co-authors of The Porn Report. In a submission to last year’s Senate inquiry into the sexualisation of children they sided with those libertarians who view concern about the phenomenon as moral panic.

This is the value system which informs the NRL’s gender re-education efforts for footballers as young as 17. Who could blame the players for being confused? Lumby emphasises “consent” and this week she declared a tough line on misbehaving footballers. “It’s my view that, in all sports, if someone is charged with a serious crime they should be stood aside.”

But emphasising a legalistic notion of consent, without moral context or any expectation of women to modify their behaviour, leaves players unmoored from the real consequences of their behaviour. It is putting an unsustainable pressure on the ability of young footballers, perhaps drunk, insensitive, or carried away by group dynamics, to discern the subtleties.

As the Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson pointed out: “A woman involved in degrading group sex can still be traumatised whether she consents or not.” Clare told the program she felt powerless to stop what was being done to her by a “long line” of players. “I thought I was worthless and I thought I was nothing. And I think I was in shock. I didn’t scream and they used a lot of … mental power over me and, and belittled me and made me feel really small like I was just a little old woman.”

Plenty of young women are neither assertive nor articulate enough to stand up to charismatic older football stars. Johns was 30 at the time, and married. He knew better.

It would be a rare woman who would willingly consent to such an experience, without being damaged in some way, with low self-esteem or imperfect understanding of what was happening.

Yet to state this fact is to be condemned as moralising and prudish and out of touch with modern mores. As outrage about continuing rugby league sex scandals grows, it is not just the behaviour of a few predatory players being condemned, but the uber-masculinity such contact sports represent.

Consent you may, but trauma and destruction that usually follows is none the less real. The NRL’s forked-tongued approach which approbates in principle libertinistic group-sex, yet tut-tuts on requiring consent is cheap sophistry. That it is due to the advice of an amoral Left-bank academic makes them even more culpable.

It is unfair to expect men to bear full responsibility for sexual mores as the boundaries of acceptable practice are blurred. Young women are told they can act and dress any way they please, and it is men, alone, with their supposedly filthy, uncontrollable sexual desires, who must restrain themselves.

It turns biology and the history of humanity on its head, and creates particular problems in multicultural societies. Our era’s turning point in sexual politics confuses women as much as men.

The zeitgeist is captured in the staggering success of the Twilight series of teen vampire books, which sold 22 million copies worldwide last year alone. The first of four books, Twilight, introduces Edward, the handsome lead vampire who heroically restrains himself from sucking the blood of his girlfriend Bella, and turning her into a vampire. She wants him to give in to his bloodlust, but also trusts him not to hurt her. The book depicts a chaste but passionate erotic relationship.

The popularity of the books among young teenage girls gives a profound insight into their enduring emotional needs, lately suffocated by a heavily sexualised culture which cheapens their natural modesty and intense romantic longings.

It also reflects the postmodern expectation of men that they exercise the tortured superhuman restraint of an Edward, or be branded a barbarian.

There is no understanding that female sexual attitudes have always been the most successful regulator of male sexuality – not politically correct re-education programs that are exercises in legal risk management for the NRL.

Andrew Johns, the Cronulla Sharks, the NRL, and “Clare” are all alike manifestations of a deeper, more pervasive malaise within Athens.

>Meditation on the Text of the Week

>By Their Songs You Shall Know Them

Sing for joy in the Lord, O you righteous ones;
Praise is becoming to the upright.
Psalm 33: 1

A culture is manifested by its songs. The things about which men sing are the objects of their desire and worship. A culture can claim to believe this or that, but what it sings about is the real desire, the real belief, the real longing and loyalty of the heart.

In the light of this, what can we say about modern Athenian culture? There have been times when the songs of the day have been patriotic anthems, of longing for one’s homeland, of prideful boasting in the glory of one’s nation, such as “By the dawn’s early light.” Or they have been songs to boost a nation’s spirits during a terrible time, like when a nation has been at war—such as “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag.”. Or they have been songs of lamentation and mourning during a time of calamity—such as the Negro spirituals. Or they have been songs tinged with bitterness and sadness during times of social dislocation and poverty—such as the Blues.

By today’s standard, all such formerly popular historical music can seem quaint and very strange. None of these things reflects the current Athenian culture’s objects of desire and worship. For two generations, now, modern Athens has worshiped at the altar of romantic love and sexuality. Ninety-nine percent of all songs have romantic love and sexuality as their dominant, recurring themes. What you sing about betrays and portrays your god: Athenian gods are on display, and it is not a pretty sight.

Jerusalem is a city of music and song. But its songs are not about men, in the first instance. The recurring theme of its songs is the glory and wonder of the Lord. Consequently, its songs are have cadences of wonder, awe, and praise. They can also be sad and mournful, reflecting sorrow over sin and evil. In the end, however, all the songs of Zion are joyful. So our text commands: “Sing for joy in the Lord.” This is not just because the people of the Lord are irrepressibly happy—although that is most often the case—but more importantly the joy and lightness of heart arises from contemplating the beauty and glory of God Himself.

So, our Psalm commands us to sing for joy in the Lord, and goes on numerate some of His glories–the things which bring us joy: His faithfulness, His love of righteousness, His lovingkindness, His making all things of nothing by the mere speaking of His Word, the fact that His Word and counsel stands forever and that He brings the plans and schemes of the unbelieving nations to nothing. God is wonderful indeed—and therefore, blessing without peer belongs to the people He has chosen as His inheritance.

These wonderful realities mean that that Jerusalem is a city of music and song. The timbre is not lamentation but joy—and the overwhelming subject of our songs is the Lord and His glory. As the Apostle Paul wrote, under the inspiration of the Spirit, many centuries later: “Rejoice in the Lord always—and again, I say, rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4)

This is not to say that the songs of Zion do not touch upon things in the creation—they clearly do. They do sing about man, about romantic love, about bearing children, about justice, honour, longing and struggle. But these things are sung about always in the light of the pre-interpreting, pre-ordaining Word of God. The songs of Zion speak of all of these aspects of creation being part of a comprehensive orchestra and universal choir joining in the praises and honour of God. Man is the recorder and the conductor of the performance.

Music is universally found in all human cultures. The subject of its songs—those subjects which capture the popular mind and imagination in its singing—they are the heart of a culture on display. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth sings. Popular Athenian culture is fixated on its god of romance and sex. To this god it sings it paeans of praise and longing. But God’s people still gather in worship—and when they do, their songs are utterly unlike the songs of the modern dominant culture. They sings the songs of Zion—songs of joy in the glory and greatness of our God.

Never has there been a more striking contrast between the two cities.

>Georgina Beyers–a Parable of Our Times

>Symptoms of the Body Politic

The media today carry the maudlin story of Georgina Beyers, who, since leaving Parliament has been unable to find work, and is contemplating a move to Australia. “She” complains that, although “she” has not been able to forge a new career in “her” first-choice direction of show business, “she” had expected that at the least “she” would be appointed to various state boards, quangos, or other regulatory or advisory bodies funded by tax.

Beyers, of course, claims to be the world’s first transsexual in the world to be elected mayor, and the first transsexual in the world to be elected to Parliament. These claims are found on “her” website. We are not clear whether these claims have been recognised by the Guinness Book of Records.

The website also contains the de rigueur self-congratulatory and self-promoting eulogy to “her” political career.

I have retired from Parliament after serving more than seven years as an MP. Achieving everything I set out to do, including ensuring the survival and strengthening of Masterton’s hospital, bringing government services back to heartland Wairarapa and the passing of the Prostitution Reform and Civil Unions Acts, has meant I can now look for fresh challenges. I’d like to thank everyone for their support over the years, especially the people of Carterton and Wairarapa.

Beyer has been one of the trophies of Athenian secular humanism. “Her” career to date has been such that she has served as a “poster boy/girl” for pretty much all that Athens stands for. “She” writes:

I was born in 1957, as I grew up I realised I was a woman trapped inside a male body. My book follows my rebirth, the time I worked as a stripper and prostitute in Wellington and Sydney before undergoing a full sex change operation in 1984. Since then my life has changed remarkably, I have worked as an actor, publicist and broadcaster, I was elected to the Carterton District Council in 1993, and became the first transsexual Mayor in the world in 1995.

What are the chances that a former prostitute could be elected a Member of Parliament, or of any parliament in the world, and what if that person were also a transsexual, the odds may seem insurmountable, but I am reported to be the world’s first transsexual to hold such a position.
As a result of my election and intense media focus, I have had some unexpected and wonderful opportunities, much of this has come about from the filming and production of my documentary Georgie Girl, produced by Annie Goldson and Peter Wells.

Georgie Girl has been screened on POV in America to an audience of 15 million (potential audience of 250 million), on CBC Canada, Channel 4 in the UK, Scotland, Ireland and SBS in Australia.

Georgie Girl won 5 International Awards:
– Sydney International Film Festival – Audience Award Best Documentary
– San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival – Stu & Dave’s Excellent Documentary Award
– Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil (France) – Audience Award
– Queer Doc Sydney Gay and Lesbian Film Festival – Audience Award
– Madrid Gay and Lesbian Film Festival – Best Documentary Public Award
– The Peace Foundation – Media Peace Award

“Her” parliamentary career was not particularly stellar, but “she” records the following:

1999 – 2002 served on the following Select Committees:
Law & Order Select Committee
Local Government & Environment Select Committee
MMP Review Select Committee – now disbanded with its work complete
Primary Production Select Committee
Also served on the following Labour caucus committees:
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade
Māori Caucus
Primary Production & Rural Affairs
Local Government, Environment, Broadcasting and Conservation
Arts Culture and Heritage
Rainbow Caucus Committee
Social Services, Justice Cultural Caucus Committee

Resigned as Mayor of Carterton in March 2000.
2002 re-elected Member of Parliament for Wairarapa with a majority of 6372.

2002 – 2005 served on the following Select Committees:
Law & Order Select Committee
Social Services Select Committee – As Chairperson
Also served on a variety of Labour caucus committees.

2005 re-entered Parliament as Labour Government Member of Parliament (list position 35).

2005 – 2006 served on the following Select Committees:
Chairperson of Social Services Select Committee
Member of Local Government and Environment Select Committee

Resigned from Parliament in February 2007

Now the trophy-”girl” has fallen on hard times. “Her” former colleagues apparently no longer want to know “her”. “She” has been used and tossed out. Not one of “her” former colleagues can find one little quango or tax payer funded perk to toss out as a sinecure or thank you.

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry. If one were to laugh, it would be a kind of jeering, cynical affair along the lines of “welcome to the real world.” When the use-by date of a poster “girl” has passed, tough-luck. Join most of the rest of humanity having to struggle to make ends meet—although we are aware that Beyer could not really join most of the rest of humanity. They are busy bearing and caring for children, making a truly serious commitment to mankind. Their economic struggle is likely ten times greater than Beyer’s will ever be. The hardest part of their lot is to make do in the face of an insatiable rapacious taxation system required to fund an ever burgeoning bludging state apparatus and its perpetual dependants–a system that Beyer happily endorsed and extended.

But if one were to cry, it would be a kind of tragic painful gasp. Here is a person whose life to this point has represented being given over to one’s desires and being dominated by them. The world of Athens cheered and danced—for “she” was living out, like a saint, the very essence of Athenian religion: the idolisation of self, the actualisation of anomie, the very reification of sovereign individualism. And “she” was devoting “herself” to “public service” to prove that when one lives under the dominion of self, success will follow. But it turned out to be all an illusion. “She” has served “her” purposes to Athens; no-one wants a used up sacrifice to the gods. The grave mouth yawns; it will not be denied.

So, Georgina Beyers has become a tragic comedy. In tragic comedies, it is always the tragedy which dominates. The comedic aspects are cynical and bitter. The words of our Lord return to haunt: for what has it profited you, Georgina, if for a moment you gained the whole world, but in the gaining you lost your soul?

In the end, there is no laughter. Only deep sadness and mourning. For does not the Scripture say that the Lord Himself has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. “Turn to Me, turn to Me, for why would you die, O house of Israel?”

>The Loser Letters #1

>The Loser Letters
A Former Christian Converts to Atheism

National Review is publishing a modern update on the Screwtape Letters by Mary Eberstadt. Mary tells us that she used to be a Christian, but has now become a recent, maybe the only, convert to Atheism. She is writing to her new found colleagues in an attempt to make them more effective in appealing to Christians. Read the first Loser Letter, here. It is about sex–just to grab everyone’s attention–a favourite Atheist device.