Posted on 03/23/2013 2:11:02 PM PDT by BurningOak
With that said and meant, this shift is altogether unsurprising. The new mark of being culturally acceptable is affirming homosexuality as virtuous (not merely okay, but virtuous, even exemplary). This is the litmus test. I don’t think many of us expected that it would so quickly fill this role, but it has. The mark of being a progressive, kind, socially courageous person today is simply this: affirming same-sex marriage. There are other cardinal virtues of a contemporary au courant identity, but this is the lodestar, the one that hangs one’s personal moon.
This shows us that the cultural middle is indeed vanishing. The space where broad-minded people could hang out is rapidly disappearing. Either you are for same-sex marriage or not. If you’re not, and you’re a known commodity, you’re now behind the curve in a public, image-driven sense. Expect in coming days to see a veritable torrent of declarations of affirmation of SSM. Celebrities, news anchors, intellectuals, politicians, religious types, tycoons, and many more are heading to the pro-marriage exits. They’re going to be calling press conferences as quickly as they can. They’ll be getting into line with the value that drives the New Cultural Acceptance: affirming same-sex marriage.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbmw.org ...
Not really, but I haven’t been paying as much attention to leftist as perhaps I should, particularly when they delve into sodomy which I find quite naturally to be disgusting.
Still I have come to recognize that our civilization has a major problem in regard to marriage and family. A problem that predates this most recent assault by at least 50 years, and has already compromised our civilizations demographic foundation. One of the reasons we are so depended upon unassimilated foreign immigrants now is because most of our assimilated population has already fallen victim to this preexisting corruption & subsequent destruction of marriage & family.
The latest assault by Homosexual activist & leftist is by comparison simply a finishing blow to an already weakened and dying institution.
Marriage rates are dropping with each generation, as more and more people start to realize the institution itself as currently defined is effetely a waste of time and money. Meanwhile single parent households and dilqeuency is rising just as divorce (where there is still marriage) is flowing increasingly like water.
The reason for all this is quite simple, real marriage has doesn’t exist anymore. Modern day youth and even folks of the older generation have got into their heads that marriage is about an emotional attachment (love) for someone else rather than simply a commitment to raise a family with them as it was originally.
This is Hollywood fought as much as anything, have you ever seen movies like Brave or rally just about any other movie dealing with marriage their always about breaking the traditional roll of filmy based marriage for love based “marriage” in one form or anther. Theses are classic stores that hold their poetic origins in a time when this really was the battle the left fought. But of course it went too far and instead of simply starting a marriage with someone you love marriage became all about the emotion of love and not about family.
The point is quite easy to understand when you think about it without children the LEGAL bonds of matrimony are nothing more than a expensive burden signifying mistrust and instability between the man and woman. (inherently a lack of love) hence the legal bonds and with it the legal term of marriage is an undesirable and unnecessary bond for a union that has become essencaly about “expressing a feeling” rather than being held to raising one particular family.
At this point if you ask me we might be better off just starting anew with a new title to define and enforce what marriage was. Too many of our civilization and pop culture have already been overrun with this corrupted and dysfunctional idea of the word marriage.
I don’t think we have the cultural power to save the word ‘marriage’ anymore. But we can thou our religious institutions reintroduce the original institution under a different name made exclusively to bond people who have children.
Destroy core values is the understatement of the year. More to the point is homosexuals destroy lives mentally and physically. Little boys are their obsession and have been for thousands of years. The Sandusky case barely scratched the underlying truth.
To be truly progressive, truly open-minded, truly relevant, truly savvy in your cultural engagement, you need to now affirm same-sex marriage, with all that represents (the moral purity of homosexual acts, for example).
It will, to be sure, take time for this shift to shake itself out. But it’s here. What does this mean for people whose first love is not the culture, but God? It means that we really are behind the times now, and will be so in increasing measure. We’re backward. We’re mean. We hate people not like us. That’s how we will be interpreted. And make no mistake: this is not a quest for some rights and a piece of paper. We will, most assuredly, face the threat of losing our religious liberty.
For those who believe what is written repeatedly (8 times at least) in 7 different books of the Bible the consequence is clear. In the last decade or so i come to truly fear for our country or rather what will happen to the country it is being transformed into. Christianity preserved the heart of Greeko-Roman culture in the Dark Ages. One can only wonder if the same thing is coming again.
The entire secular-humanist enterprise is a dead end proposition as it propagates a doctrine devoid of any notion of intergenerational content.
Secularism is at its base a doctrine that elevates the satisfaction of short term whims to any sense of duty and self sacrifice for a larger whole. This sort of shallow materialism is rife today. The effect on the core of our society, which bluntly spoken is, the white middle class, will be further demoralization and anomie. The end process will be an America that in many ways mimics black society. A middle and upper class basically made of connected lawyers, political operatives and assorted deal makers standing above a larger element of government and quasi government employees (public schools, federal, state, county and municipal government, public service unions, non-profits and politicized churches) and those above half or more the former white middle class reduced to the moral and intellectual and pervasive violence and dysfunctional squalor of the ghetto community. Without a determined saving remnant culturally we as a nation are doomed. The orgiastic celebration of the joy and virtue of queer sex (and particularly male queer sex in its most in your face vile manner) is a chilling monument on the road to cultural perdition we as a nation and people are traveling on.
Sodomy is the word we must use to remind people what they are embracing and of its inherit fallacy of this tradition.
Do not describe without that word to add historic condemnation this evil.
As for the fate of our civilization, I think you miss the positive effect of the culturally more isolated and religious immigrant population. A population that will no doubt continue to support values and if we can ever get their heads out of their ass may even begin voting for rather than against their own values.
As for the black population, no population is homogenus if we can break the race barrier with Latinos we may also find ways to break it with black.
If all else fails and we end up abandoning the republican party label and instead overrunning the Democratic party. We may very well analyze the race barrier by acting as chameleon only distinguishable by our values, which we know they share.
The future is not as dark as you suppose.
Sodomy is the word we must use to remind people what they are embracing and of its inherit fallacys.
Do not describe without that word to add historic condemnation this evil.
As for the fate of our civilization, I think you miss the positive effect of the culturally more isolated and religious immigrant population. A population that will no doubt continue to support values and if we can ever get their heads out of their ass may even begin voting for rather than against their own values.
As for the black population, no population is homogenus if we can break the race barrier with Latinos we may also find ways to break it with black.
If all else fails and we end up abandoning the republican party label and instead overrunning the Democratic party. We may very well bypass the racist firewall by acting as chameleon only distinguishable by our values & polices, which we know they share & agree with.
The future is not as dark as you suppose. Rather by changing the way we play this otherwise rigged game it can be very bright indeed.
“If heteros can deliberately choose sterile intercourse -— unnatural sex -— so can gays and lesbians.
That’s what they say.
“
So what? The act of sex is not the act of marriage.
“And there’s a certain logic consistency there. People across the board -— gay and straight -— have largely chosen against natural sex the way God made it.”
Then tell them that they have thus also chosen against the whole propose of marriage.
Ask them why they should want the burdens of the legal bonding of the institution of marriage when their desire for a relationship is so clearly based exclusively upon their own feelings for each-other?
“I must say, the Catholic Church is the only group I know which has a coherent teaching on this.”
Perhaps because the Catholic Church has retained a consistent and logical understanding of the nature and propose of marriage for thousands of years.
Homosexual acts aren't even "sexual unions" because they don't even "unite the sexes", fer Pete's sake.
As Richard Rodriguez says, the problem is, two gay men just don't have a kosher place to stick it.
British law just discovered that even though gay mariage is legal, two men or two women cannot consummate a marriage, as defined by law.
Neither can they have a marriage annulled because of inability to perform sexual intercourse, because they are not anatomicaly equipped to perform sexual intercourse with each other.
Neither can they be divorced on the ground of adultery if one partner has some kind of sexual jiggery-pokery with another person of the same sex, because whatever they did, it was not adultery as the law defines adultery.
Confused? Yes. Unnatural? Of course. Absurd? Fo' shizzle.
My point, however, is that many heterosexuals do the same. It's all part of the deconstruction of sex, which is a big part of --- in C.S. Lewis' memorable phrase --- "The Abolition of Man".
agree with all of that.
If we mention the dangers of feces and sex, how studies have shown time after time children to better wiht a mother and a father and mention that many boys molested are by men which woudl make those men touching the same sex homsoexuals then we can turn this back.
I agree we can reach out and that many today care about welfare and handouts.
Just before the election last year I saw a black family outside winn dixie.
Obama stickers, health care for everyone and so I walked by and used by northern English thick accent and said why do blacks in America vote for the Dems .
Their reply was that they care about blacks .
I pointed out that it was thatparty which segregated your ancestors, used slavery, on your ancestors, KKK anti civil rights etc.
The guy looked confused and then replied”well I don;t knwo anything about that but my money will stop coming and are you sure about that”
Just at that point the old woman came round from the other side of the vehicle and said in a loud voice “Romney will cut my food stamps and I don;t care about anything you are saying’
Right there it proved how many in that community use their color to get what they want and play victim but also could not careless about their past unless it helps them to play the race card.
I also knew right there that the GOP have bene utter clueless or cowardly when it comes ot social issues and the Dem history.
With a hisotry like the Dems you would think any sane person would never vote for that party due to being embarrassed or perceived to be racist but alas the media was infiltrated by communists, socialist and hard core radical lefty;s who have made the low info voter ignorant and utterly stupid and made the right to be the racists ones regardless of the KKK, Wilson and segregation
http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
right there on some of their rules they said this way back decades ago and they have nearly done all of those rules and yet our side let them get to this point.
I’ll never accept their sham marriage and I’ve just got a sticker saying marriage =1man and 1 woman and as soon as it;s delivered it;s on my vehicle and to hell with the communist agenda
Perhaps there is a way for people who believe in something to translate their beliefs into political action that will be transformative. I personally doubt it absent some real true calamities descending on the complacent, shallow, pleasure loving sensualists that far to much of the population of our country have become.
You are right.
Acceptance of homosexuality, especially with regard to homosexual marriage, is being presented as a civil rights issue. It will take blacks fighting against homosexual marriage to break that connection being created in the public mind.
Put simply, we need a lot more black pastors standing up and being willing to publicly say, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
One of the few pieces of good news in the general collapse of American public opinion regarding a biblical view of homosexuality is that black churches and even black secular culture, for a wide variety of different reasons, have been less willing to go along with the push to normalize sodomy.
Some of those reasons are really, really bad and cannot be endorsed by Christians who, unlike Rob Bell, actually take the Bible seriously. In secular black and Hispanic culture, and especially in the sports world, sexuality, fornication, and a certain grossly wicked concept of “manliness” are far too often glorified. While that helps make homosexuality unacceptable in a lot of secular black and Hispanic circles, glorification of heterosexual lust by men and encouraging sexual abuse of and voluntary promiscuity by women certainly isn't something good.
Of course, those same problems of glorifying heterosexual lust are also present in the “Dukes of Hazzard” Southern white culture as well. Lust isn't a black or Hispanic problem; it is a human sin problem that affects all races and all cultures, though it may manifest itself in different ways for cultural reasons.
Nevertheless, homosexuality really **IS** worse than run-of-the-mill heterosexual lust.
Romans 1 shows us that the rise of homosexuality in a culture is a warning of God's impending judgment. God gives nations over to wickedness because they abandoned him, and both male and female homosexuality are examples of that.
For those who think I'm being alarmist, go read God's Word in Romans 1:21-33, especially verses 26-27. It really is that simple.
Romans 1:21-33: “21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.”
We're mostly in agreement, but let's avoid making the statistics look even worse than they already are.
Yes, we all know that the pre-marital, non-marital, and extra-marital sexual numbers are horrible, but they haven't quite yet reached the 99 percent threshhold.
As a Calvinist I don't like even sounding as if I'm boasting in my own righteousness, but it is a matter of simple fact that I did not fornicate before marriage and have not committed adultery in my marriage. I can make a long list of sins I have committed, any one of which warrants eternal damnation apart from the blood of Christ, but those two aren't on the list.
My concern here is that when we say that virtually all Americans fornicate before marriage, the result is we give too many young people the idea that “everyone is doing it anyway, so why shouldn't I join the fun.”
It simply is **NOT** true that “everyone is doing it.”
If you had said "many people" or even "most people" fornicate before marriage, I wouldn't have disagreed. My problem is with the 99 percent number.
Let's admit the reality that we have a major problem with immorality inside the church, but let's not make the problem worse than it already is.
If you don't know, be glad.
Bell is best known for his quasi-universalist views, which are perhaps best summarized with his book and motto "Love Wins," but his problems are much worse than that. His teachings against eternal damnation of the wicked are only one part of a bigger problem.
Bell is the recently-resigned founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, a megachurch in a suburb of my hometown of Grand Rapids. He's a Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary graduate. He managed to plant a megachurch in the center of the Dutch Reformed world by advocating styles of worship and doctrinal beliefs at radical variation from the historic beliefs of the people among whom he pastors, while bringing a veneer of evangelicalism to the mix.
How did such radical views gain traction in a place like Grand Rapids?
The answer is important, and it's an important warning to conservative Christians everywhere in any denomination. I'm pinging this to the Great Reformed Ping List, but it deserves to be read by anyone who takes doctrinal integrity seriously. If we don't catechize or otherwise teach doctrine to our young people, we are only one generation away from seeing the apostasy of our grandchildren, if not our children.
The theological collapse of the Dutch Reformed world in Grand Rapids has resulted in people fleeing the CRC and RCA in all sorts of directions. Some of those directions include older and newer denominations which affirm the historic Reformed faith — the URC, OPC, and PRC, and to a lesser extent the NRC, FRC, HRC, and some Reformed Baptist churches, have all benefited from that exodus of people who want to be Reformed.
Other directions include theologically conservative but non-Reformed denominations such as the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, the Assemblies of God, and the Wesleyan Church.
And, of course, the PC(USA), the UCC, and other liberal or mainline denominations have served as a “safety valve” for decades, taking dissatisfied Dutchmen who wanted a theology which was less restrictive to their doctrine or morality.
What Rob Bell managed to create in Grand Rapids was something new. Mars Hill Bible Church combined the attractions of the externals of evangelical Christianity with the attractions of a liberal faith.
Bell was an early warning sign of a type of so-called evangelical Christianity which is growing in America, and which is not evangelical at all. It is merely a re-creation of an older type of liberalism, one which unlike the major forms of liberalism of the late 1800s and early 1900s, claimed to be “spiritual” rather than having the anti-supernatural focus of mainstream classical liberalism. Men like Friedrich Schleiermacher were present in the older forms of liberalism, though they were not the “majority report,” and their form of experience-based religion is every bit as dangerous as the anti-supernatural form of liberalism.
In fact, it's probably more dangerous today because there are a lot of people who want a “spiritual experience” who would reject open attacks on miracles or other supernatural features of historic Christianity, but are open to Rob Bell's heresies.
I am not going to spend very much time criticizing Driscoll and even less time criticizing Piper. Both men have done a lot of good work, and as you correctly point out, both men saw early on at least some of the problems of the “emergent church” movement. I follow J. Gresham Machen in declining to criticize people with whom he mostly agreed; we've got enough other problems on our plate to deal with.
But I am going to point out that when the question we ask is “how do we get young people back into church?” rather than “what is the chief end of man” or “what is your only comfort in life and in death,” we run the risk of coming up with some very wrong answers.
God gives the increase, not human methods.
The responsibility of preachers is to remain faithful to the text of the Word of God, not to try to find ways to increase the size of their congregations. Sometimes God blesses faithful pastors with large sheepfolds. Sometimes He doesn't. That's not necessarily any fault of or credit to the pastor — the Chief Shepherd is the One who makes those decisions.
Given enough time, liberalism and other forms of heresy will destroy churches. But because some people have itching ears and like churches with pastors who suit their tastes, heretics can succeed over the short run in building some pretty large congregations.
Frankly, a youth-oriented focus in churches is simply wrongheaded and misplaced. The way to keep young people in church is to teach fathers how to catechize their children, or otherwise explain what the Bible says and why their church believes what it believes.
I would say some very different things if we were talking about a college-age ministry to students who are on their own for the first time away from home, or a military chaplaincy to the 18-25 age demographic, or an outreach to troubled youth from broken homes. In those contexts, a youth-oriented focus to young people who don't know or don't understand the Gospel is entirely appropriate.
But God created families for a reason, and inside the church, the church needs to be encouraging and promoting the God-ordained means of bringing young people to faith through families, not creating a whole host of human methods to reach young people apart from those God-ordained methods.
Amoung Christians, even evangelical ones who try to understand and obey the Bible, there is a direct link from the ordination of women to the pastorate, and acceptance of homosexuality.
Once the scripture can be bent on a seemingly minor point (pastoral leadership in the Church in the Bible is reserved for men) then it is all the easier to bend it for a point of moral behavior (homosexual acts are always wrong).
Philosophically too, homosexuality is much easier to accept, if one already thinks that in all other rolls in society...men and women are interchangible. If masculinity and femininity are simply paterns of behavior generic persons put on (our souls being neuters...)...and NOT essential elements of each individual’s created nature...created by God Himself...and men and women can do all jobs, all rolls in society interchangibly—then it is logical that in basic biological rolls—sex—they, logically, can, and even should, be interchangeble too.
It is fascinating to me, that in the mainline Christian denominations in America—immediately upon the votes that allowed women to become pastors, the push began to accept homosexual practice—and—elevate homosexuals to pastoral leadership as well.
Rob Bell, and all the Emergent Church leadership...have always assumed women as leaders over men (contrary to direct New Testament commands) in the Church. It is no wonder that they have drifted into direct doctrinal heresy—such as accepting homosexual practice (and denying Hell, in Bell’s case)—since...
A wise and noted point. It will be worth noting that when the rest of our countrymen come to their senses and realize this.
That being said what will happen is a new meaningful union will be created in the shadow of the increasingly meaningless old.
The Government will not give back what it has taken, what it has taken will simply turn to shit, along with everything else the state touches.
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