"Tim Keller has gotten a lot of heat for saying that “you can believe homosexuality is a sin and still believe that same-sex marriage should be legal.” He was not talking about himself. He was talking about the compromise many young evangelicals are making.
Some, though, are going the next step to
I. Do. Not. Care.
The left will allow no fence sitting. You may not believe me. You may think me hyperbolic. But the history of the world shows this. Events ultimately come to a head. They boil to their essence. And at that point you must choose.
That is why so many Christians are fighting. Because we see in Europe and Canada what will happen here. Christianity is a religion of the city square. Christ compels us to “go forth and teach.” It is the Great Commission. We cannot go forth and teach when the left bars us from the town square.
Many people say we should have legal gay marriage, but not have religious gay marriage.
The left will not honor the distinction. Look to Canada. Preachers can be brought up forhate crimes charges merely for discussing passages of the Bible that deal with same sex sexual relations. You may not care that it is a sin, but the world surely does.
Look at Louie Giglio, who could not honor the President at his inauguration because of his orthodox Christian beliefs on this subject.
In short, you may choose not to care and in so doing sit on the sidelines or give aid and comfort to the open minded and tolerant who want gay marriage so everyone can have equal rights.
But the world will one day make you care. Your church, should it open its doors to all, but refuse to perform a same sex wedding, will be accused of discrimination. In some places, the church will be forced to stop performing weddings. Many churches will lose their tax exempt status. The costs of sharing the gospel will go up.
Already Christians are being harassed by fellow American citizens for not wanting to participate in a gay marriage.
The time will come, more quickly than you can imagine, when you will be made to care.
It is not, as mjdaniels posits, this:
If, as the anti-SSM crowd would have it, the levers of State are to be wielded to enforce the commands of Scripture, then pardon me, but what the H-E-double-hockey-sticks are we doing spending so much time, energy and effort fighting to overturn Obamacare?
We are not using the state to enforce the commands of Scripture.
We are using the state to protect our ability to preach the scripture under the first amendment. If the state has the power to change the definition of an institution that it did not create, but that God himself created, the state can compel and coerce the church to honor that definition or sit on the sidelines.
A Christian on the sidelines is a Christian not going forth.
You can be a sincere Christian and support the idea of gay marriage. But you would also be foolish to ignore what is going to happen to the church once the state decides something is a matter of equal protection. You can dismiss me now, but you are ignoring what’s already happening.
Keep in mind as well that many of those who you make look to for reassurance that I’m wrong are hostile to the church already and will not be on the side of the church as the equal protection arguments against it grow.
The state did not create marriage and it should not now exert the power to change the definition of that which it did not create.
Those of you who are Christians who support gay marriage will one day have Archbishop Chaput burning in your ears. He said that evil peddles tolerance until it is dominant then seeks to silence good. That’s why Christians fight on this issue. It is not to force themselves on others, but to protect themselves from others being forced on them.
[emphasis added]
It WILL be forced down our throats. Why? Because, as Obama declares, "It is a fierce moral imperative". That fierce moral imperative was re-emphasized by Justice Kennedy in striking down DOMA: DOMA is bigotry. There is no step required to get to thought crime punishment for advocating against recognizing homosexual equality, morally and legally, and for that matter, any other group which becomes the Victimization darling of the Left.
The AtheoLeft makes up its own morals, and those morals apply to everyone EXCEPT the AtheoLeft. They can be as intolerant as they wish, while forcing tolerance of their every pagan, libertine, Marxist whim. Their whims are, after all, fierce moral imperatives.
They are exceedingly dangerous; they are totalitarian; they are in charge.
2 comments:
I think the AtheoLeft is trying to do what egoistic men do to every environment they encounter that is hostile. That is, they attempt to change it to their liking or, failing that, destroy it.
The trouble is, they are appealing to the egos and inherent intellectual laziness/snobbery of the average citizen - a successful appeal in many cases. After all, Obama and his crew were re-elected by someone. Several someones.
And as Lewis pointed out in "Screwtape Proposes a Toast",
"Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden.
But of course, though they may prevail for a few years or even a decade or two, the AtheoLeft is living in a fantasy world of artificial construction - and furthermore, one that is in the long run determined to destroy itself. I have noted in the past their signature move is to cut off the branch they sit on. This is not an accident - it is a theme that runs through their entire operation.
They are corrupt, Stan. There will be many who will die (the unborn for starters) while the AtheoLeft trumpets its tiny triumphs, but reality - spiritual and temporal - will re-assert itself eventually. And they will collapse in ruin.
The task before us is to minimize the impact of this tremendous upwelling of lethal wishful thinking and preserve as much as we can of liberty and the things found in the Boy Scout creed while avoiding corruption ourselves.
Revenge, hatred and despair are forbidden, but we are not to tolerate evil.
An expansion on the comment I made of the common theme running through all AtheoLeft endeavors [got this copy of it from http://pugnaciousirishman.com/2009/10/08/how-to-saw-off-the-branch-you-are-sitting-on/#comment-4947]
How to Saw off the Branch you are Sitting on
…The new rebel is a Sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything.
He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist.
And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it.
Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself.
He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it.
As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time.
A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself.
A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie.
He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble.
The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts.
In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men.
Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.
By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.
–G.K Chesterton
It seems this sort of thing has been happening for quite some time. I cannot believe no one else has noticed.
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