"Gay," Marriage, and Equality

Two arguments fuel the debate in the eyes of those who support gay marriage.

1) The accredited hatred of those who oppose progressive marriage mandates.
2) The concept of "marriage equality."

The first premise is quickly being lost due to the widening disparages of intolerance against those who disagree with the LGBT community, evident by firings from positions, cancelling of shows promoting Christian (N.B. not religious) values or input.

The second premise shall be lost if issue is made of the concept of equality between hetero and homosexual unions.  This is now being resolved by the methodology of premise one, with the enlightening awareness that hypocritical tolerance features the acceptance of one view and appropriate measures allotted to the opposing views.

But the facet of equality is forced, and collapses on examination.  One form begets children naturally, the other by fabrication of theft (the spirit of adoption is now a birthright to same sex unions, while abortion advocates accuse the heteros of never adopting enough).  The perception of one union moves in only so far as the effect of camaraderie, without descent of understanding "what goes on in the bedroom."  SSM wishes to have the benefits of marriage, while the hetero-unions never conceives of marrying for the benefits.  Love conquers all, money need not be applied.

The idea of such equality is cosmetic at best.  This reduces the idea of examining a 3 and an 8, noting a similarity of shape (the "three" just lacking connection on its left edge), and concluding that 3=8.  In this case 3=8=E=H, or anything that mere appearance would allow.

Thus, "marriage equality" is an equality that is qualified, not quantified.  It is an unreal equality.  Much has been made on the definition of marriage as expanding.  The evolution of marriage is. however, an alteration of convenience against the best ideas.  It is marriage redefined by its detractors, the previous advocates of easy divorce, multiple marriages, unions based on self-gratification broken when the charms are lacking.  It is much the same of people who, desiring to do something with baseball, seek silly rule changes.  All to liven up the game.  The integrity of a game with established rules seems an oddity.  But to alter it ruins the integrity.

And, in the spirit of the invocation of equality (without investigating what is fundamental to "equality"), we are losing the integrity of marriage.   It is no wonder that SSM fail at a rate of 17 times those of heteros.  Two generations ago, "till death do we part" led to many golden anniversaries.  Today, they are miraculous, which is why such happen often enough in the Christian community.

The Theoretical "War on Women"

A bizarre occurrence in the NFL flap.  With the expulsion of Ray Rice from the Baltimore Ravens, a triumph was declared for the feminist version of justice, where domestic violence is a travesty to be eliminated at full cost.  Then, in the first home game in Baltimore, a set o women supported Mr. Rice by the wearing of his jersey.  The life-long (aka "indefinite") suspension is rightly being contested.  But the epic battle of the advancement of the feminist ideal has provoked a type of unexpected backlash.

The women wearing the offending jerseys were duly passed off as "duped," but they are representative of a cultural under-current of dismissing the general trends of recent feminist thought.  In a recent episode of Today, notice was made of the group of women who insisted that feminism did not define them, and that this vision of womanhood, not given to notions of patriarchalism, still valued maleness to a degree that feminism was inadequate as a universal principle.  It short, they could conceive of women as women, as men as men, not subject to demasculating tendencies.  The female journalists were quick to point out that feminism had assured all women of fairer treatment and better opportunities.

Which was, technically true, but an irritating avoidance of the true issue.  The great gains that were achieved in the 1970's were not the issue under attack, but the expansion of culture as decisively female in orientation.  Not the 1980's victory, but the 2010's irrationalism.

The issue is the decadence of feminism to a degree of its own variation of sexism.  The journalist who praises the achievements of the female contigient of the 2010 Olympics to the snubbing of the male participants.  The erotic displays of entertainment as the standard of female performance, with the understanding that male reactions to such displays are to be neutral.  To the vapid notion that certain political parties are anti-women because they don't embrace the new feminist vision and could offer critique of the barrenness of the position.

The feminist is fast moving to an arrogance of deserving the terminology of "female chauvinist sow."  Their disdain of the "duped" members of the group may lead to the next phase of the theoretical "War on Women," by making it a civil war.

If such a conflict leads to a clearing of the air on the vision(s) of what woman must be, then it would be most welcome.

The Moral Argument and the Defeat of Evil

The Moral Argument posits a deity as the foundation of morality, in light of tenets of morality being undesirable in certain cases (sexual mores, the acceptance of pedophilia, rape, abortion).  Acknowledging the necessity of moral character, the atheist counters along two lines 1) the unscrupulous character of God, particularly in the Old Testament, and 2) the problem of evil.  Evil occurs, and God, who as omnipotent and loving, should be capable of containing and eliminating evil.  God's failure to do this means His non-existence.  Morality is thus a human construct, viable to variation in light of cultural change.

However, a divine foundation of ethics is still desirable.  If not, no moral dictum has staying power beyond a rational (or even rationalizing) basis.  And reason has its means to enact genocide, if reason is found.  Thus there is a friction, a working morality sans God.  If morality fails, man is capable of plenty of travesty in the realm of naturalism.  The very fact that in some species the female devours the male has no moral impact.  But it could be the structure of immorality.

The original title of this post would have been "The Moral Argument and the Problem Defeat of Evil."  If evil is merely cited to disavow God, then have no basis for reality thereafter, we have the basic inconsistency.  The belief in God instills a component of evil, hence the "love God/good and hate evil" expressions in Scripture (Ps. 97: 10; Prov. 8: 13; Amos 5: 15).  Evil then must be seen as not as the failure of God, but the failure of men.  Our skewed ideas of the makeup of evil runs counter to the Lord's views on the nature of evil.  We despise the fact that God has us well pegged as "evil," and that some of our favorite pastimes are at core unsavory.

Evil is not to be card to wave to make anti-God claims.  It must be faced and fought.  We have passed from an era of poetic justice (good shall always overcome evil) to an embrace of evil (how many times the villainous are the heroic in Hollywood renderings of motion pictures).  We both embrace violence (in depiction in R and TVMA ratings) and eschew it.  In using the problem of evil as a cause of dispelling God, we are left with the problem called evil, and no foreseeable means of dispelling that.

Evil remains something to defeat, not to flout.

On the Nature of God's Wrath

I have recently read Tony Lane's essay The Wrath of God as an Aspect of the Love of God.  It treats a difficult issue that has afflicted the post-modern sense of Christianity as it deals with totally secularized views of God.  The world has extreme difficulty in seeing a compatibility between a loving God and a God who allows evil, which is seen as a manifestation of God's wrath.  This is not a difficulty perceived just now.  It is a concept that has intrigued the best theological minds of the Church.  The earliest schisms of the second century can be traced to this matter.

Lane recognizes four incorrect notions dealing with God's anger:

1.  Simple denial of the ira Dei.
2.  A disassociation between the God of the Old Testament and Jesus the Son of God in the New.  This was the basis of Marcion's heretical sect in the second century, who culled away much of the New Testament proto-canon (favoring the Lucan and  Pauline portions over against the material submitted by apostles of Judean background).
3.  Viewing the ira Dei as an anthropomorphic (or, better, anthropopathic) expression.  God's wrath is not equivalent to raw human emotions.  While it may begin a correct understanding of divine anger (it is not to be seen as volatile or out-of-control), it often degenerates into a cause-effect response to violating natural law, an elevation of law having built-in consequences.  But this reduces divine indignation to something along the lines of karma.
4. Acknowledging the truth of divine wrath, but minimizing its expression in the teachings of Church.

In treating the wrath of God, Lane notes a long tradition of viewing God's wrath as an attribute to God's love.  A jealous God is what the Lord portrays Himself.  The secularist trend is to see this as a belittling emotional comparison.  Lane disagrees:   Failure to hate evil implies a deficiency in love. C. E. B. Cranfield illustrates this with a well-chosen modern example. He asks whether God could be the good and loving God if he did not react to human evil with wrath. “For indignation against wickedness is surely an essential element of human goodness in a world in which moral evil is always present. A man who knows, for example, about the injustice and cruelty of apartheid and is not angry at such wickedness cannot be a thoroughly good man; for his lack of wrath means a failure to care for his fellow man, a failure to love.”  Moreover, critics who disdain the jealousy of God work from a deficient notion of love that is centered in self-gratification which moves on to new centers of affection when the emotive power of eros wanes.  If you do not truly, deeply love, jealousy is impossible.

God's wrath is perfect in itself when it is viewed as transcendent above raw human sentimentality.  It becomes the proper response to evil and wickedness, in all forms they may assume.  This is the touchstone of the whole issue.  Once mankind recognizes that its main obsession is not so much love as a sense for debauchery, the issue of divine wrath is vindicated.  A soft sell is not the solution.  If a lion is ever seen in your backyard, it would never do to ignore it.