Virginity and Faith: When Sexual Experience Sires Religious Illusions

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Matt

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant wrote, “For as regards nature, experience presents us with rules and is the source of truth, but in relation to ethical laws experience is the parent of illusion, and it is in the highest degree reprehensible to limit or to deduce the laws which dictate what I ought to do, from what is done.” Kant’s point—essentially that experience is not self-interpreting and must be subject to reason—came to mind as I read Dianna Anderson’s recent piece, “What Losing My Virginity Taught Me About Faith.” In it, she writes about her journey from an Evangelical Christian background that stressed sexual purity (and solemnized it with purity pledges, purity rings, commitment ceremonies and so forth,) through a celibate young-adulthood, and into a new spiritual understanding in which “Sex… can be a sacrament, a movement toward understanding God, a form of holiness experienced in a deep, mystical way. Sex can be holy, whether or not you have a ring on your finger.”

Now, there are many legitimate lessons that one could learn from losing her virginity if one interpreted her experience according to reason and in light of what God has told us about Himself in Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, Ms. Anderson allows her experience to interpret itself and ends up creating quite the illusion.

Before we get to Ms. Anderson, however, the subculture in which she was raised is worthy of critique as well. It is worth noting the conflation of Law (morality) and Gospel (good news of forgiveness) that occurs so often in these circles—the idea that one’s salvation depends on one’s sexual purity. According to Christianity, salvation is a free gift granted by God’s grace through faith in Christ’s atoning death specifically because none of us have been sufficiently chaste—or honest, or just, or loving, or pretty much anything else. Ms. Anderson only briefly alludes to this being an issue, but it’s not at all uncommon for the Gospel to be overshadowed by moralism in much of American Evangelicalism.

Nevertheless, even the moralism is faulty in what she calls “Christian purity culture.” Christ and his apostles undoubtedly taught the pursuit of sexual purity. Accordingly, the problem is not with Evangelicals’ condemnation of fornication. And although the Bible does not provide us with customs like purity rings, pledges, ceremonies, and so forth, it is nevertheless the job of culture to provide us with customs that guide us toward virtue. Seeing as how American culture has largely abandoned its own such customs, it is the responsibility of parents to create new ones in their stead. Thus, the problem is not even with Evangelicals’ creation of new rituals and ceremonies per se. The real problem lies in the fact that the customs they have developed are counter-productive because they ignore instructions that God does provide to help us combat temptations to fornication. When we have a fever of this kind, God’s prescription is marriage.

Despite the common impression, the virtue of chastity is not primarily a thou-shalt-not meant to produce shame, but rather a thou-shalt that provides direction and purpose. For the vast majority of people who are not called to singleness, chastity does not consist of the disuse of our sexuality until marriage spontaneously occurs. It consists of actively directing our sexuality towards its fulfillment in marriage. Though the nature of marriage does reserve sex for husband and wife, chastity among the unmarried still involves preparation to become good husbands, wives, fathers, & mothers, and ultimately to seek out someone else who has done the same. Rather than lying dormant in such an endeavor, our sexuality drives us towards marriage. In this light, it is no surprise that the instruction Paul offers Christians in 1 Corinthians 7 is quite clear: those struggling with sexual continence need to find a spouse. Rings and pledges are a poor substitute for a husband or wife. It is entirely possible to be celibate without being chaste, and this is, unfortunately, where pop-Christian efforts at purity often end up.

The error is this: most purity rituals are not designed to facilitate marriage, but to delay it. Their purpose is to encourage celibacy through a person’s teens and twenties until supposedly more important matters like education and career are completely settled and it is “sensible” to finally start settling down and looking for a spouse. They thereby prevent sexuality from guiding us into marriage. Consider, for example, Ms. Anderson’s own story:

I graduated college with only one blind date under my belt. And then graduate school. And then I moved to Japan and started questioning my faith. Lots of little things that I thought were God’s blessing – my job in Japan, my success in academics – were leading me nowhere fast. It wasn’t so much that I was unhappy – it was that I felt totally abandoned and misled by this God I’d been told to believe. I’d done everything right. I’d been told my virginity and modesty and purity would be attractive to Christian men. And yet, nothing was happening, nothing was moving, nothing was clear.

One blind date by the time college was over does not exactly suggest a rigorous attempt to find a spouse—neither on her own behalf, nor by the community dedicated to teaching her purity. This is in sharp contrast to her education and career, for one does not go through graduate school and move to to the other side of the world for a job without quite a bit of determination and effort. Most ridiculous of all, she thought she was doing everything right even though she relocated to Japan—not exactly the best place to find a Christian husband, demographically speaking. Though it was somehow mysterious to her, it’s not exactly rocket science to say why nothing was happening. While virginity and modesty are indeed attractive to marriage-minded men, they cannot overcome an absentminded approach to matrimony that’s buried beneath career ambitions. Bare celibacy does not lead to marriage.

All that said, however, one cannot exactly contend that Ms. Anderson is merely an innocent victim of the ineptitude of her elders. For even where their cautions were accurate, she still misinterprets her own experiences to create both ethical and theological illusions. She lists a number of “dire warnings” that were drilled into her as part of the point of view she has left behind, but though she implies that they were silly, even by her own accounting, they seem to be fairly accurate.

They told her that “Having sex outside of marriage will take away pleasure from sex within marriage” and “Having sex outside of marriage with make connection with your future spouse harder.” Being unmarried, her own experience cannot really speak to this yet, but in general, it certainly seems to be the case—particularly for women. They told her that “Having sex outside of marriage means disappointing God, disappointing family, and causing unnecessary pain and heartache for yourself.” She did not comment on her family’s take on her epiphany, though given what she has said about how they raised her, some measure of disappointment seems at least plausible. Nevertheless, she describes a fairly severe break with “the culture she came from,” and God has made His views on the matter about as obvious as they can be. They told her that “Having sex outside of marriage will essentially destroy you, ruining your witness, your faith, your relationships.” Again, she did not comment much on her relationships, but given that her public witness now consists of dismissing significant swaths of God’s Word and thereby becoming one of those false teachers that Christ warned us about, it’s hard to consider that witness anything other than ruined.

But what about Ms. Anderson’s faith—at least insofar as she presents it? Far from being ruined, her thesis is that fornication has made her faith stronger than ever before. Unfortunately, this interpretation of her experience is the greatest illusion of all. She explicitly notes that this strengthening did not come through repentance and a stronger grasp on forgiveness in Christ. So of what does this better, faster, stronger faith consist? Well, she claims liberation from ideas of right & wrong (even where such right and wrong are taught by God.) She claims a deeper & fuller love for neighbors, which seems mainly to involve affirming LBGT folks in their own pursuits of fornication. She claims a better understanding of God’s love despite the fact that she rejects so much of what He has actually said about it. I’m not sure what religious significance her claim that sex taught her to “meet people where they are” has. Perhaps she means in their bedrooms. There was a pronounced leftward shift in her politics, which again has nothing to do with anything God taught in Scripture. She has learned to judge people less—with the notable exception of the Evangelicals whom she spends most of her piece judging. And most importantly, in the grand traditions of the pagan temple prostitutes of yore and a Nine Inch Nails song from the 90’s, she announces a new sacrament of holy fornication that mystically brings her closer to God. Nothing in this grab-bag has much to do with the Faith once and for all delivered to the saints.

I do not doubt that Ms. Anderson’s sexual experiences were a breath of fresh air after so many years of unchaste celibacy. Neither do I doubt that this new faith is stronger than the one she was raised with. What I do doubt is that there’s anything Christian about either of these things other than her own inertia. There’s no Christ, no cross, no atonement or forgiveness. In the place of God’s promises to us, there remains only theological liberalism’s tired gospel of trendy politics and a shift in spiritual feelings toward something more pleasant. Such is the way of mysticism. It develops rituals designed to provoke deep spiritual feelings about ourselves and God, and then encourages us to believe that these manufactured feelings are indicative of God’s point of view. It is an engine by which we acquire experiences that birth illusion. So whereas Christianity proclaims God’s promises to be present in the real Sacraments and comforts us with what God has actually proclaimed, Ms. Anderson’s brand of mysticism declares fornication to be holy so that we can feel good about what feels good, making it easier to believe that God feels good about our feelings.

And so her elders’ warnings about becoming a hedonistic atheist proved to be imprecise after all, but I suspect that the danger of becoming a libertine quasi-pagan was within the spirit of their words.

Posted in Chastity, Christian Youth, The Modern Church, Theological Liberalism | 6 Comments

We Proclaim; We do not Include

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Matt

 Among theological liberals desperate to “fix” Christianity lest it die in obscurity and obsolescence (say, how is membership in liberal “churches” doing again?) one of the key goals is to make Christianity more inclusive. Why are American congregations so white? Why are they so suburban and conventional? Why are they so strict about which beliefs are true? Why don’t they match America’s glorious rainbow of diversity? If the love of Christ is for all, then surely all should be included in the tent. If they are not, then the tent must be made bigger to accommodate them.

Orthodox Christians often get taken in by this sentiment. After all, unlike theologically liberal heretics, we still believe in Hell. We still believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation. We believe that people outside our tent are dying eternally. Accordingly, though we of course deplore many of the liberals’ methods, we appreciate their desire & motivation, and so we take up their mission of inclusivity, but try to find different means of accomplishing it. This is truly unfortunate; for the problem is not primarily in the inclusivists‘ means but in their mission itself. Making any institution broadly inclusive will always destroy that institution—this is no less true for our congregations and denominations than it is for anything else. Inclusion always destroys.

But wait! Did Christ not tell us that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son? Did Paul not tell us that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus? Does this not make inclusivity the Church’s mission? Yes, Yes, and No. This is a subtle distinction, but it is an important one. What the Bible teaches us in such verses is not an instruction that the Church must be inclusive—it is a proclamation that the Church’s message already is inclusive. This cannot be our mission, for Christ has already accomplished it among us.

The Church has been given two proclamations—the Law and the Gospel. These two messages are inherently universal. The bad news is that there is a moral law that applies to everyone, and yet no one has kept it consistently; everyone is liable to judgment. The good news is that Christ has taken on that liability in our place; everyone’s sins are atoned for in Christ. Because these two proclamations apply to the whole world, the Church delivers them to the whole world no matter their race, creed, sex, or preferred sins. Our message is already universal, and cannot be made more so. We proclaim to everyone; our target is the entire human race.

The same cannot be said for inclusion. The target of efforts to include is never the masses who are dying—it is always the Church herself. When the inclusivists see people outside the Church, they feel sorry for them. Their zeal, however, is not up to the hard work of evangelizing them. Besides, there’s no way everyone would be evangelized. There would always be those who reject the message, always those with many and various reasons to stay outside, always some who never even had a chance to hear. And so, instead of taking up the mission of proclamation that Christ has actually given to the church, the inclusivists take up a newer and better one: change the Church until no one stands outside of her for any reason.

Now, every legitimate complaint about the Church excluding some group or another is ultimately a failure in proclamation—we either do not proclaim the message we have been given or we do not proclaim it enough. But to try and correct the Church beyond this is to attempt a change she cannot survive, for it is inevitably a change to her very nature. Even our own message refers to itself as a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles. Whatever periodic reasons anyone has for avoiding the Church (too judgmental, too boring, too unwelcoming, etc), none can compare to the ones inherent in our message: the scandal of exclusivity, the humiliation that we cannot improve ourselves enough to become acceptable before God and must rely solely on Christ, the disgrace that God actually lowered Himself enough to become a man. To change the Church enough to eliminate these scandals is to change it into something other than the Church. As G.K. Chesterton put it in Orthodoxy, “Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.”

I came across a great (which is to say terrible) example of this dynamic in practice the other day over at Steadfast Lutherans. The piece concerns Mark Sandlin, a pastor in the PCUSA. This summer, he kicked off a series on his blog called “The Collar is Too Tight: Heresies from a Southern Minister.” His occasion for writing is that, “Most institutionalized Churches define who is and who isn’t a Christian far too narrowly. There is an increasingly long list of tenets to which a person must dogmatically adhere in order to be in the club.” He then sets out to shorten that list by announcing a series of “I am a Christian, but I don’t believe in ________, therefore no other Christian needs to either.”

He begins with a doozy: denying that Jesus is God. Why doesn’t he believe this? As is customary for theological liberals, Sandlin claims that Jesus never said that he was God in the Gospels except for the places where he does say that he’s God, but those don’t count because everyone knows those parts are just made up. The Gospel of John is right out because it conspicuously mentions Jesus’ Godhood way too often in comparison to the synoptic Gospels, so it looks like a later addition to Sandlin. Likewise, he ignores all those places in the Synoptic Gospels where Jesus forgives sins, accepts worship, scolds those who object to people worshiping him, and generally goes around doing things only Yahweh is allowed to do because they’re just not obvious enough.

The bit about worship is particularly damning for Sandlin, as in the next part of his series he emphasizes Jesus’ extreme belief in monotheism (because he’s a Jew, you know) as a way of dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity (a red herring, since the Trinity is a monotheistic doctrine.) So after Matthew describes Jesus as rebuking Satan on the basis of his monotheism (It is written you shall worship the Lord your God and serve Him only) and then goes on to describe Jesus as accepting worship several times, you would think the implication would be clear to someone like Sandlin who so clearly recognizes Christ’s monotheism. Nope: “You have to ask yourself: Something that important, don’t you think he might have mentioned it?” Perhaps, but I guess “All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” totally doesn’t count. Neither does it count when, after affirming to Caiaphas that he is the Son of God, Jesus tells him “But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” If Jesus’ words fail to speak adequately for themselves, the High Priests reaction should clear up any ambiguity. Sandlin’s is a deeply dishonest way of reading Scripture, but then it’s theological liberalism, so I had no need to say it twice.

But as is generally the case with inclusivists, Sandlin is quick to point out that whether or not we deny God is not really the point. He writes, “I’m not trying to say I am right and others are wrong. I am saying Christianity should big enough for a variety of thought. I am saying God can handle our questions.” Here too, of course, he speaks out of both sides of his mouth. His entire case for Christ not being God is that such a fact would have been so very important that the synoptic Gospels would have made it even more explicit than it already is, and yet he simultaneously treats it as so very unimportant that it does not even matter whether a Christian believes it or not. Likewise, the conflict is not really about God being able to handle our questions, but whether theological liberals are able to handle God’s answers. And though he claims to be a Christ follower and that “as a Christ follower, frequently referred to as Christian, I have this need to actually follow Christ,” he clearly does not need to follow Christ when Jesus repeatedly warns against false teachers instead of embracing them. He does not need to follow Christ when he calls the way to life narrow and the way to destruction broad.

Shamefully dishonest or not, however, this thought brings us to the crux of the matter. Saying that the core beliefs of the Christian faith are irrelevant to it puts one outside of that faith just as surely as denying them. Saying that Jesus is not God and saying that it doesn’t even matter whether Jesus is God are both inherently contradictory to a religion that worships Jesus as God. It would be absurd of me to claim that I’m a Muslim because the fact that I believe in the Trinity instead of Allah and deny that Muhammad was a prophet isn’t really that important to Muslims. Why? Because I have no business speaking for a religion that is so very different than my own. It is no less absurd for Sandlin to claim to be a Christian, for he has no business speaking for my religion which is so very different than his own. There are therefore only two options: As long as my religion is Christianity, then theological liberals like Sandlin cannot speak for it. If, on the other hand, they deny that my religion is Christianity, then they are clearly on board with excluding people based on “an increasingly long list of tenets to which a person must dogmatically adhere,” and all that is left, then, is to show who has the right list.  Either way, the argument commits suicide.

Unfortunately, it is all too common for orthodox Christians to think of inclusivists like Sandlin as merely confused and fuzzy-minded rather than as heretics. We think that their zeal to welcome people into Christ’s Church and save their souls merely clouds their judgment. The rub is that we cannot meaningfully describe people like Sandlin as wanting to welcome people into Christ’s Church, when he himself stands outside of Christ’s Church and only welcomes people to stand alongside himself. That he extends such a welcome to those inside is an assault on the Church, not a misguided effort on her behalf. Orthodox Christians are way too wishy-washy about acknowledging theological liberalism as a heresy that amputates individuals, congregations, and denominations from the Body. History and inertia have provided the liberal denominations with orthodox Christian individuals and congregations in their midst. However, these increasingly rare aberrations do not mean we have to consider such denominations to be Christian any more than we have to consider the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Muslims to be Christian.

Posted in The Modern Church, Theological Liberalism, Theology | Leave a comment

Yes, the Problem is Clearly “Religious Extremism”

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Matt

That, at least, is the main cause of terrorism according to The Guardian;  and there’s no possible way they could have been any more precise.

Religious extremism has become the main driver of terrorism in recent years, according to this year’s Global Terrorism Index.

The report recorded 18,000 deaths in 2013, a rise of 60% on the previous year. The majority (66%) of these were attributable to just four groups: Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan and al-Qaida.

Hmm…  I wonder if there is any common factor amongst these four groups that hold such a commanding lead in their victim counts–something more specific than “religious extremism.”  Well, Wikipedia might shed some light on the subject, but that’s an awful lot of typing and mouse clicks to expect from a journalist.  Let’s just leave it at that.

Yes, we’re all used to political correctness trumping competency in journalism, and implicating the Religion of Peace is a big no-no.  There is, however, a greater misunderstanding at work here resulting from this self-imposed ignorance–one that undermines the entire point of the article.

The Guardian supposes that these numbers represent a shift in the motivation for terrorism away from socio-political matters and towards religious matters.  This is not so.  Ironically, the secular/religious distinction makes sense to Westerners because of our religion, which has traditionally been some flavor Christianity.  Though our specific theologies have differed, not even the concept of Christendom erased our inherent distinction between the City of Man and the City of God.  Some Christians have separated them more than others, some have delineated them differently than others, and some have just been confused, but there is always a distinction.

Islam, on the other hand, has no such distinction.  Mohammed established a religion that is also a political ideology.  Ignorant Westerners impose their own religious assumptions on top of that and thereby misunderstand it.  The only real religious/political distinction that Islamic theology contains is the division between Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam) and Dar al-Habr (the House of War.)  Furthermore, this distinction is not a conceptual tool for understanding the makeup of society, but a challenge with an ultimate political goal.

Accordingly, it is a gross misunderstanding to call this a shift in motivations for terrorism.  These four entirely random groups are indeed motivated by religious extremism, but for them, that is no different than a political motivation.  That is not a shift.  There is no actual change in the type of motivation–only a change in which popular political ideology is at work.

But that’s not a story liberal journalists are allowed to write.

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The Other Shirtstorm

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Matt

Feminists just can’t stop talking about clothes these days, and not just when it comes to scientist Matt Taylor. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently explained his penchant for simple gray t-shirts:

I’m in this really lucky position where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I’d feel I’m not doing my job if I spent any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.

But was this a straightforward statement about his own views on fashion, or an attack on women CEOs’–indeed on every woman who wants to work in the business world?  Naturally, Alison P. Davis think its the latter:

Is it just me or does the mindset of the Silicon Valley Power-Schlub imply that caring about clothing or how you look invalidates your ability to work? Of course, male CEOs are far too focused on changing the world or building the next Big App to care about something as “silly” or “frivolous” as dressing professionally — they’ll just leave that to Marissa Mayer.

So which is more sexist… disregarding fashion for the sake of work, or assuming that no woman is capable or desirous of doing the same?  Davis manages to make it sound like dwelling on the right kind of clothes is part of the essence of being female.  How else could anybody make the leap from Zuckerberg’s comment to Davis’ conclusion?

Posted in Feminism | Leave a comment

Catcalling and the Criminalization of Social Ineptitude

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Matt

By now, most everyone has heard of the video of a model being catcalled as she walked down the streets of New York. Under the guise of raising awareness about this casual form of alleged misogyny, it has served mainly to the raise the blood pressure of feminists who are always slathering for new wrongs to be righted.

In a sane world, catcalling would merely be seen as rude behavior, and the only reaction it would provoke would be a roll of the eyes as the target proceeded on her way, her mood temporarily dampened. After all, the rude always have and always will exist, and the polite will always go on bearing their crosses when necessary. But Americans are no longer allowed to be sane, lest sanity leave even the smallest of injustices unavenged. Unfortunately, recognizing a person as rude is no longer enough. In their never-ending quest to “help” women who are insufficiently self-centered, feminist social justice warriors have risen up to overreact by transforming “Some jerk was rude to me!” into “Somebody transgressed against my very personhood by violating my right to only interact with other people on my own terms.”

Consider, for example, Rachel Zarell’s glowing praise of #DudesGreetingDudes over on Buzzfeed. The hashtag was created by Elon James White, and is meant to satirize the notion that catcalling is (in Zarell’s words) merely a “harmless greeting” or just “saying hi” by targeting catcalls at men instead of women. My particular favorite is “You see a dude looking all hard & sh*t. Roll up on him like “Aye yo, smile, son. Damn.” BRING SUNSHINE TO HIS DAY.”

Now, I have not actually heard anybody claim that catcalling is just a greeting. Zarell links to another piece about SNL’s Michael Che as an example, but Che says nothing of the kind within that piece, so I’m inclined to believe that this is a straw man. However, if anybody does reduce catcalling to a simple greeting, then he is, of course, silly. At the very least, it combines a greeting with a signal of sexual interest; and one might argue that it signals some measure of sexual intent as well. This is precisely why White’s satire is amusing—because the casual and enthusiastic homosexuality expressed in #DudesGreetingDudes remains humorously incongruous in normal society despite the best efforts of the rainbow lobby.

The overreaction, however, is not found in the satire itself, but in White’s other comments quoted in the piece:

“A woman was just killed for not accepting a man’s advances, but we’re going to pretend that our right to engage women unsolicited outweighs their right to feel safe? No.”

“The right to approach women at any point in time no matter where they are is seen as a right by some men,”

“Dudes who were arguing for the right to greet women against their will were very annoyed with me.”

Lines like these should set off the warning sirens of anyone who loves personal liberty. Women have a right to feel a particular way that outweighs the rights of others to express interest to them in public? One should never greet a woman against her (unexpressed) will? The problem is in the ridiculous subjectivity of these “rights” with which White attempts to endow women. Essential to the notion of the rule of law (a notion we in America are quickly abandoning) is that the law to which all citizens are equally held is something that can (in principle, at least) be known by all citizens before they act against it. But no woman can accurately predict in advance exactly how she’s going to feel about any and every man approaching her about some kind of sexual relationship. Neither is a typical woman’s unexpressed “will” regarding such approaches required to be a matter of public record. Even attempting to enforce something this subjective is inherently tyrannical. It shifts authority away from the rule of law, and instead places it in whichever individuals or groups happen to hold some measure of social influence at any given moment.

Like most people, I do not deny that catcalling is rude. Many well-intentioned moderates have ended up supporting the cause of the social justice warriors on the catcalling issue specifically because they see a false dichotomy between rudeness and hypersensitivity. They naturally do not want to support rudeness, and though hypersensitivity holds no appeal to them, they see it as a more-or-less harmless kind of peevishness. The reality, however, is that such peevishness is not harmless at all—not when it leads people to claim liberty-destroying rights that grant some citizens arbitrary power over others.

Consider, for example, a recent incident at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Campus police were involved in the hunt for a young Asian student who tried to hold hands with a couple of women uninvited whilst telling them they were attractive. It also seems that he stood in their path when they walked away from him. The director of the campus police is unsure of whether this student will face any further disciplinary action, but he has determined that the student was harmless and was simply socially awkward.

I’m glad that the campus police seem to have deliberated thoughtfully on the matter, but two troubling facts remain: First, a man was arrested simply for being socially awkward around women because it creeped them out. Second, there seem to be quite a few who think that what he did should actually be considered criminal. The first, I think, is tolerable. The police had a responsibility to investigate, it got sorted out in the end, and though it was a near-miss for the accused student, no one was harmed. One would hope that he at least learned a valuable lesson about personal space—only the highly attractive get to violate it uninvited. However, the second fact, the impulse to punish the student, is much more dangerous. I keep hearing that social awkwardness is no excuse for what he did—but an excuse implies that there exists something that needs to be excused. That is fair enough insofar as we mean that the man’s rudeness is not excused by his being socially inept. But if that’s all that is meant, then why are the police involved at all? If we are speaking from a legal perspective, however, exactly what harm has actually transpired in this scenario? What has the student caused that needs to be punished rather than tolerated by the police and courts?

Too many people, like Elon James White, try to create such a basis by inventing these rights that are as subjective as they are dubious. Perhaps that was not his intention, but whenever we speak of rights in such a manner, we speak of something that demands recognition and protection by the law. The more people who assert that anyone has a right not to be made to feel certain ways by others—who insist that the momentary fear experienced by the young women amounts to actual harm that requires retribution—the more this kind of scenario will be met without thoughtful deliberation, and the more actual harm will result when awkward young men are actually punished for their awkwardness.

 

 

Posted in Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Law | Leave a comment

No Reason to Get Excited

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Matt

So America’s latest round of Choose the Form of the Destructor is over.  I must confess that I did feel some genuine pleasure at seeing the Democrats losing so badly in last night’s elections.  I shouldn’t have.  Not because it’s cruel, or gloating, or poor sportsmanship, or anything like that.  I shouldn’t have been pleased because there was very little to be pleased about.  The celebration of so many conservatives needs to be tempered by the realities of history.  Remember back  in the mid-2000’s when the Republicans held all three branches of government?  Of course you do.  They had the Presidency, majorities in both houses of Congress, and a majority of the Supreme Court was Republican appointed.

Now, do you remember how the size of the government was reduced during those years?  Do you remember the great strides they made to end the ongoing slaughter of the unborn?  Do you remember how our punitive tax system was reworked?    Do you remember how our activist courts were reined in?  Do you remember all the epic progress that was made on all the issues that conservatives care about the most?

Neither do I.

Conservatives need to get over this idea that the GOP is our political salvation.  Every story about the election has some variation on how Republicans rode a wave of discontent into congress.  While it’s great that voters don’t care for the way our government has been run by the Democrats, their loss is not our gain.  We are still being governed by Keynesian statists–they just have R’s showing up after their names when they appear on television now.  All it means is that we have 2-4 years before those same voters put the Democrats back in because they still don’t care for the way the country is being run.

That is American politics in a nutshell.  We have two political parties parties that we hate, and we take turns punishing one by rewarding the other.  But the truth is that American citizens are the only ones punished by this ridiculous political cycle.  Our deepest political problems are caused by beliefs and principles shared by both parties.  American will never have conservative government until conservatives stop being so gleeful about Democrats’ losses and so terrified of their victories.

So once the new congress takes over, have fun watching the Republicans use their new-found power to push for amnesty for illegal aliens and try to score meaningless political points to help their latest slightly-more-practical-than-a-Democrat “moderate” candidate in the upcoming presidential election.  In the meantime, the current lame duck congress will use its temporary electoral immunity to accomplish the one thing both parties can agree on:  empowering the government at the expense of the people in many and various ways.  Ah, bipartisanship.

I hate to say it, but even conservatives have gotten the government we deserve.

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Because Hazing Isn’t Controversial Enough Already…

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Matt

…Wesleyan University is apparently mandating that their fraternities allow women as members.  Oddly enough, gender warriors are cheering it as a powerful measure to fight sexual assault and gender inequality.

The foolishness of this plan for such purposes is, of course, remarkable. In his commentary, Professor Syrett proceeds from the typical feminist assumption that all men are larval rapists, and concludes that fraternities reinforce that tendency through the sheer maleness of the whole endeavor. His solution? Balance all that unseemly masculinity by including women to watch over them and keep them in line. You know, kind of like having their moms around. Only these women will be younger, not related to them at all, and hand-picked from among those who are eager to spend time among popular frat boys in intimate living arrangements. In fact, they sound a good deal like the young women Syrett believes are being violated by fraternities in the first place—the ones who quite obviously did not keep those young rapists in line. But through the magic of inclusiveness and gender equality, I’m sure it’ll turn out totally different this time. Wesleyan’s fraternities will no doubt appreciate having such ready access to a woman’s touch (figuratively speaking, of course) to liven the place up a bit.

More interesting to me, however, is this professor’s tangential comment about the nature of the university: “In only allowing men to join, fraternities insist that men are fundamentally different from women right in the middle of an environment — a university — whose goal is to question such shopworn truisms.” The dominance of the ironically unquestioned assumptions of Critical Theory should be no surprise, of course. The reduction of our institutions of higher education into places to ask meaningless questions as a substitute for seeking meaningful answers is a tragedy that has already run its course. But what should be embarrassing to any professor whose life’s goal is to “question shopworn truisms” is his failure to recognize one when he sees it.  Universities haven’t been teaching fundamental differences between the sexes for more than a generation. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s been a long time since the 50’s, and if the very existence of fraternities (strictly speaking) insists on sex differences, then it seems the frat boys of 2014 are now the bold free-thinkers questioning the tired orthodoxy of the establishment. Considering the way Professor Nicholas Syrett seems to regard masculinity as if it were something entirely strange and alien, they may very well be the only ones in universities who still do so.

Posted in Culture, Feminism | Leave a comment

Stranger than Fiction: An Apology to Terry Goodkind

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Matt

Though I’ve never written about him before, I have expressed a number of negative opinions regarding the Sword of Truth author from time to time. Not that his epic fantasy series is without its merits—the first three books are quite good. After that, however, it gets very uneven. Temple of the Winds and Soul of the Fire were so bad I just stopped reading the series. Years later, I picked up the sixth book, Faith of the Fallen, in an airport on a whim, and was pleasantly surprised. In a way, it’s probably the high point of the series (at least through the 11th book which I had thought wrapped it all up, but apparently he’s written more since then that I have not read.)

In this sixth book, our hero Richard Rahl is captured by his foes—the evil Imperial Order—and taken to their capital to be forced to live as a common man. The Order is a Soviet-style leftist dictatorship with a weird anti-human religion tacked on that gives heart to their ideology. The thought of Richard’s captor is that once he sees the plight of the poor and the downtrodden, he’ll see the value of the Order’s ideology of “compassion.” Instead, Richard thrives as an entrepreneur making his way through a dismal world of poverty & oppression and improves not only his own lot, but that of almost everyone he meets. The climax of the book is not the revolution that Richard ends of sparking—it’s the statue he carves that embodies and explains the spirit of human nobility to a culture that (in a bad misrepresentation of the doctrine of original sin) considered humanity to be fundamentally and exclusively wretched. Richard’s work of art reminds them of something which had long been driven out of them by their priests, their petty bureaucrats, and their tyrannical overlords. It has its flaws, but the book succeeds as a work of art because Goodkind managed to do what his protagonist does—powerfully communicate an abstract concept by crystallizing it in a tangible form.

Though arguably the best of the lot, Faith of the Fallen also begins what ultimately drags the series down so far: the substitution of exciting stories and interesting characters with soap boxes and mouth-pieces for the philosophy of objectivism to which Goodkind is devoutly committed. Even if I were a fan of Ayn Rand’s ideals, which I mostly am not, a successful novel needs to be an interesting story first and foremost. It can serve to express an ideology, but it can never do so well if it ever ceases to be a good story. As the series goes on, the ideology takes over to such an extent that Goodkind ends up weirdly retconning his own series and flattening its world. For example, though Goodkind crafted a dualistic world with a good Creator and an evil Keeper of the Underworld, because objectivism is atheistic, Goodkind goes to great and convoluted lengths to actually write the Creator out of his story. Likewise, early on, Richard becomes physically unable to eat meat because he has to balance all the killing that he does whilst being the hero; but later on he has to start eating meat again because he realizes that all his killing is so completely and utterly justified that it requires no balance whatsoever (he figures this out after massacring a mob of peace protestors who were protecting that book’s villain.) Accordingly, most of the latter books fail at being stories because of the extent to which ideology swallows absolutely everything (though the part towards the end where Richard escapes his enemy’s clutches by starting what is essentially a soccer riot was admittedly very entertaining.)

So why do I owe Goodkind an apology? Well, I felt that one of the greatest flaws in Faith of the Fallen was all the straw men. The villains, as I’ve already mentioned, are deeply ideological, but often in a stilted and unrealistic way (though not as bad as in later books.) I felt they showed a lack of insight into the mentality of those who hold leftist and authoritarian views. Richard’s captor, Nicci, for example, has a long history of super-generous but mindless charity that frequently results in her being mugged by those she’s trying to help and enabling them in all sorts of self-destructive behavior.  All that is fairly realistic, but the self-perception of her beliefs  sometimes stretched the bounds of credulity.   When she is called on her foolishness, she often goes on and on about how thugs should never be judged because nobody knows what circumstances conspired to made them that way. She diatribes about how responsibility to the unfortunate negates any & all sense of ownership and how people therefore have every right to literally rob her. For all intents and purposes, she thinks it’s a crime against humanity to hold thieves accountable and a mark of selfishness to actually stop someone from robbing you. And she acts accordingly. Having never encountered anyone who actually thought this way, I considered it to be a pretty over-the-top criticism of socialism that was both ineffective and detrimental to the story.

Then I found out that people like this actually exist.

Jordan Sargent comments about a New York woman who was mugged for her cell phone by a 13-year-old boy, but chased the thief down, caught him, and turned him over to police. Though most people would consider this an appropriate response and even applaud her determination in fulfilling her civic duty, Sargent has a different perspective.

Now, granted, it’s not entirely Clara Vondrich’s fault that this 13-year-old boy was arrested by police for stealing her phone. But, she did, by her own admission, willingly cause the commotion that led up to police being summoned, and she did—as the photos show—keep the kid pinned to a car until police arrived despite already knowing that he didn’t posses her phone.

Vondrich says that she “felt sorry” for the kid, but not enough to not have him arrested and charged with grand larceny. The boy will now enter New York’s vaunted juvenile justice system, which will likely [****] up his life even further, simply because he snatched a white lady’s iPhone in Williamsburg.

If you are nonviolently mugged by a child, continue to let him run along with his friends. The world will be a better place.

Yes… it’s not “entirely” the victim’s fault that the one who victimized her was arrested for doing so. Just mostly. After all, she admittedly made a fuss about being robbed! How dare a white woman take offense as such a thing? Doesn’t she know she owes her smart phone to any passing underprivileged minority who non-verbally requests it?

Sargent tries to backpedal in the comments by saying:

Since people seem confused: I’m not saying that Clara Vondrich shouldn’t have chased the kid down and gotten her phone back. That’s totally normal. I just think she shouldn’t have pinned him down so that he would be charged with grand larceny and then posed for photos in the New York Post. I think this is pretty agreeable.

Now, it’s fair enough to criticize posing for pictures as a form of gloating, but this is a function of the media rather than the robbery victim he calls out. It’s fair enough to criticize the justice system for either being too strict or too inept, but neither is this the victim’s doing (indeed, this problem has much more to do with leftist attempts to divert the justice system from retribution to systematic rehabilitation—a quick proportional punishment wouldn’t ruin the boy’s life the way being entered into the system apparently will.) In any case, it’s quite clear that Sargent’s readers came to their “confused” understanding of what he’s saying because they actually read what he said. After all, he specifically told victims of vibrant child muggers to let them run along to their friends.

Here we have a man who apparently believes that the property of whites is fair game to any young minority who wants to take it. Here we have a man who apparently believes that accountability and consequences for doing evil are too horrible to be inflicted on minority criminals—that our response to a mugging should essentially be “boys will be boys.” Thus, what I wrongly presumed to be a caricature has now been made flesh. And to one Mr. Terry Goodkind, I must apologize for thinking you too unrealistic in your characters and criticisms.

Posted in Culture | 4 Comments

Ghandi, Vegetarianism & Christian Ethics

Posted on August 30, 2014 by Matt

While we’re on the subject of Gandhi, as I was reviewing excerpts from The Story of My Experiments with Truth for my last post, I happened across a criticism of Christianity that I found intriguing. Since Gandhi was primarily a moralist it is unsurprisingly a moral criticism that doesn’t really touch the truth of our religion. Nevertheless, I thought it was worth addressing.

When Gandhi’s vegetarianism began to rub one of his Christian friends the wrong way (in particular, Gandhi began to steer her son away from eating meat), he made a comparison between Gautama Buddha and Jesus Christ. He argued that the historical Buddha’s ethics are better and more comprehensive than those of Christ because they deal with animals in addition to humans:

“Look at Guatama’s compassion! It was not confined to mankind, it was extended to all living beings. Does not one’s heart overflow with love to think of the lamb joyously perched on his shoulders? One fails to notice this love for all living beings in the life of Jesus.”

It’s a natural thought given his moral vegetarianism, but is it true? Despite recent attempts to Christianize environmentalism under slogans like “creation care,” it’s hard to deny that humanity is the chief concern of Christianity. What of the rest of creation and its living creatures? Humanity’s stewardship thereof is, of course, a necessary and Biblical ethic, but it’s hardly primary—it didn’t even make the top 10. Contrary to Gandhi’s ethics, God has, in both Testaments, given us animals to eat. This is ugly, and it is meant to be that way, but there is no sense in trying to be holier than God’s own instructions to us. This does not give us a license to cruelty, but it does remind humanity that we are in the same boat as the rest of creation that also eats other animals to temporarily survive.

Somewhere between the two ethical extremes of saying that animals are just as valuable as humans (which, as I recently observed, really means that humans are no more valuable than animals) and saying that the suffering of animals is entirely irrelevant lies a legitimate middle in which we recognize that cruelty towards these creatures is wrong. A human is worth many sparrows, but God still knows when one falls from the sky. So why doesn’t this make a more significant appearance in Jesus’ teaching?

The greatest problem for animals is not that humans sometimes treat them badly, for even apart from human activity, nature is red of tooth and claw. Even if they don’t end up on my plate or in Michael Vick’s kennel, there are usually plenty of other animals that would eat them or hurt them. Even if their end is not prey, it is still to starve, to fight, to get sick, to suffer, and to die. Guatama’s compassion may be a sweet picture, but it does not resolve their primary issue.

By Biblical reckoning, animals are in this pickle because of humanity. God created a world that was vegetarian. He gave plants for humans and animals to eat. God also made humanity the head of creation, but we chose to break this world by disobeying Him. As the head goes, so goes the rest. As Adam fell, so fell the rest of creation. But though the problem can only be attributed to human error, the solution is not human ethics. Our utopian schemes at self-improvement have invariably ended in more wickedness and misery than before. We need to die, and so does this broken world. Humans being ethical before dying does not restore nature—human redemption does. This is what Christ came to proclaim and to accomplish. He has become the new head of Creation. And when this age is complete and this world passes away, there will be a new heaven and a new earth in which the lion will lay down even with the lamb. Merely having a lamb perch on our shoulders pales in comparison.

Posted in Ethics | Leave a comment

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians”

Posted on August 25, 2014 by Matt

This comic got me thinking a lot about Gandhi lately. It is, unfortunately, quite accurate. Like most people who cry some version of “Lord, save me from your followers,” Gandhi was less familiar with the Lord than he thought. Based on what I’ve read from his autobiography, the Christ that Gandhi admired is a rather stilted version of the Christ declared to us in Scripture.

It is often disappointing to Christians when an inspiring and well-respected figure like Gandhi knowingly rejects Christ–and not simply the disappointment that comes from any soul preferring to remain lost. We like our religion, we believe it is true, and its a very human characteristic to think that anyone who is deemed wise & intelligent, and who takes the time to seriously examine and consider Christianity will come to embrace it. Accordingly, many Christians try to make excuses for such a man. In Gandhi’s case, these usually revolve around the suggestion that he was driven off by poor evangelists who never really proclaimed the Gospel to him.

It’s true enough that Gandhi had his fair share of mean Christian stories. Most of these revolve around the conflation of Christianity with modernistic progressivism. The mindset at the time among liberal theologians was essentially this: Europe is the pinnacle of human civilization because it was at the forefront of scientific discoveries and academic scholarship. This puts it further along the imagined road to progress than anywhere else in the world which, in turn, means that Europe’s religion was also the world’s most advanced. Accordingly, missionaries and scholars from theologically liberal denominations would exhort less advanced peoples to believe the Gospel because it was progressive, civilized, “in accordance with the general movement of our time,” and so forth—not because it was true. One can hardly blame Gandhi for taking offense at such an approach. The Gospel is already a self-described stumbling block and foolishness—there’s no cause for Christians to heap additional offense on top of it.

Despite these stories, however, it is clear that Gandhi’s reasons for rejecting Christ were not ultimately the progressive arrogance he encountered—he rejected Him due to inherent offense of the Cross. The twin scandals of particularity (that Christianity is the only true religion and that those who reject Christ are damned) and forgiveness (that our trespasses are forgiven through grace and paid for by the work of Christ rather than through our own moral improvement) are at the forefront of Gandhi’s thinking:

It was impossible for me to believe that I could go to heaven or attain salvation only by becoming a Christian… My difficulties lay deeper. It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were His sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. My reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world. Metaphorically, there might be some truth in it… I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the Cross was a great example to the world, but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept. The pious lives of Christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give. I had seen in other lives just the same reformation that I had heard of among Christians. Philosophically, there was nothing extraordinary in Christian principles.

At the end of the day, Gandhi was a moralist. If any religion were to legitimately claim exclusivity, then it must therefore create more ethical people than other religions are able to. Though Ghandi was highly impressed with the Sermon on the Mount (which is where his stated appreciation of Jesus mainly comes from), He (rightly) recognized that the Law as proclaimed by Christ is not so terribly different from the ethics of other religions. Certainly not different enough to warrant exclusivity.

But if that’s how he felt about the Law, what about the Gospel? Well, non-Law did not seem terribly interesting to the man. Gandhi described an encounter with someone who proclaimed the Gospel to him:

One of the Plymouth Brethren confronted me with an argument for which I was not prepared:

“…From what you say, it appears that you must be brooding over your transgressions every moment of your life, always mending them and atoning for them. How can this ceaseless cycle of action bring you redemption? You can never have peace. You admit that we are all sinners… Out attempts at improvement and atonement are futile. And yet redemption we must have. How can we bear this burden of sin? We can but throw it on Jesus. He is the only sinless Son of God. It is His word that those who believe in Him shall have everlasting life. Therein lies God’s infinite mercy. And as we believe in the atonement of Jesus, our own sins do not bind us. Sin we must. It is impossible to live in this world sinless. And therefore Jesus suffered and atoned for all the sins of mankind… Think what a life of restlessness is yours, and what a promise of peace we have.”

The argument utterly failed to convince me. I humbly replied: “If this be the Christianity acknowledged by all Christians, I cannot accept it. I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin. I seek to be redeemed from sin itself, or rather from the very thought of sin. Until I have attained this end, I shall be content to be restless.”

In other words, forgiveness would get in the way of Gandhi’s moral self-improvement, and he must therefore disregard it. He deemed himself too virtuous—too humble(!)—to willingly accept forgiveness. The moralistic vision that took root in a young Gandhi is the one common to all religions of the Law—“the conviction that morality is the basis of things, and that truth is the substance of all morality.” This seems wise because it is what’s written on man’s heart; in contrast, the Gospel is given from outside ourselves. Both of these words are true, but the truth of the Gospel relieves us of the burden imposed by the truth of the Law. Those who reject the Gospel, however, will find that they never took their failures to live up to the Law seriously enough—no matter how moralistic they strove to be.  Given how clear Christ was about this very fact, Gandhi could not have been terribly fond of the real Christ.

It is for precisely this reason that Christians should not be put out when wise men of this world are not counted among our ranks. “The wisdom of this world is foolishness before God.” No matter how inspiring a moral reformer Gandhi might have been by human standards, he chose to be counted a fool before the Judge who sets the true standard.

Posted in Gospel, Law | 2 Comments