Love and Marriage - some comments from the threads examined

March 27, 2011

Love and Marriage - some comments from the threads examined

The black and white portions are taken directly and sequentially from the comments thread of Love and Marriage - under attack. Why?

If you see "hb" then that is short for Highboy.

My post is in this color.

Anonymous said...: hb says, "I've never met a Christian who claims to have a moral high ground." Then Radar says, "Christianity has a valid claim to moral superiority by having the absolutes as defined by the Creator."
There is a clear difference between claiming that I am morally superior as opposed to saying that Christianity is morally superior. I am unable to live up to the absolutes established by God so therefore I am morally inferior to the standards of God. This is why we turn to Christ, because we cannot meet God's standards but Jesus was able to meet them and also pay the price for my failures. So I will say Christ is morally superior but not me.; 9:02 AM
highboy said...: Um, not sure where this discussion seemed to take a swan dive, but I'll do my best to answer honestly and see what happens. "What it boils down to is that Christians have been given specific rules to follow; i.e. the Ten Commandments. Yet one doesn't have to look far to find Christians who have no problem lying, cheating, stealing, etc... Isn't that hypocrisy to those who are not Christian?" What is actually true is that, when Christians lie or steal or cheat they are aware of doing wrong and are not comfortable with it. Habitual sinning either drives Christians towards repentance or drives them away from Christianity so they are not continually reminded of their sins. Sinning and hypocrisy have different definitions. Hypocrisy is from the Greek meaning "to wear a mask" so a hypocrite isn't someone who sins and realizes it, he is someone who sins and hides it or denies it. Yes, anonymous, that is hypocrisy. "It really is fun to watch you two claim to be deep thinkers, and then miss points like this time after time." Actually, you are missing the point. By what moral code are you saying that lying and cheating and stealing are wrong? If you are not willing to accede to God's moral code and if you believe that man is here by blind chance for no particular purpose then who are you to point fingers and say that somebody else is conducting themselves incorrectly? By what right do you judge the actions of others? Answer that question before you put your foot in your mouth. Well for one, I never claimed to be a deep thinker, though most who know me say I am. Second, I have no idea what point you're trying to make as I haven't claimed to be morally superior so I fail to see why this is directed at me. It seems your bone of contention is with a Christian claiming to be morally superior and then sinning like all get out. I don't disagree with that so I'm not sure what else to say. Though I would add that simply meeting a Christian who sins doesn't make them a hypocrite, unless you're referring to the "holier than thou" judgemental types and again, I wouldn't disagree. Highboy and I are on the same page here. When I first became a Christian I soon went to a seminary that was full of legalistic pharisitical types, people who put on a good front but were actually quite comfortable sinners behind the scenes. It was a huge downer to me when I discovered that all these people who were in leadership were skimming money from the till, taking kickbacks, having affairs with their secretaries or teachers having affairs with students...legalism tends to lead to an emphasis on the external appearance instead of the internal thoughts and intents of the heart. " Ask yourself this: if you don't believe that you as a Christian are morally superior to atheists, then why do you even bother to claim that atheists (or members of any other identifiable group) have no moral code?" Again Jon, I have to ask, is this directed at me or radar? I can't speak for radar but I can't recall ever claiming that an atheist had no moral code. Obviously the code is up to the individual atheist, like you Jon may feel abortion is wrong and anonymous whatsit may not. (I just picked something off the top of my head I'm not sure what you believe) But I never said an atheist has no moral code or can't live morally. The difference is God sets my standard for moral living and the atheist sets his/her own standard, usually according to their perception of humanistic morality. Right. So what I am saying is that an atheist does not recognize absolutes and has no absolute moral code. When they borrow from God's moral code I sometimes ask them to explain where they get their code from. An atheist might have his own moral code and that is fine, but it is not supported by any authority. I'll say again, its not that Christianity teaches that we Christians are better than everyone else, being a Christian if being forgiven. Completely. Making Jesus Lord of your life means yes, following a standard Christ has set rather than culture or humanism or what have you. This doesn't make me "better" than you, because trust me, I suck at it. Its not about a list of rights and wrongs, its about a devotion to Jesus. That isn't to say I excuse my sin or don't try not to sin, but that simply Jesus paid the penalty for those sins, and His presence in my life helps me work at being a better person. As I said before, my Christianity does not make me better than you, but it makes me better than who I was, and that is what matters to me. Well said! Jesus in my life has made a me who is a lot better than the me I was and has therefore made life better for my entire family.; 9:06 AM
DogMaBlog said...: Jon says "The trick, of course, is to determine which actions truly are detrimental to society, and which ones aren't." The trick???? Figuring out what actions are detrimental to society a trick????? I think you should get more sleep you are sounding very silly. The simplest idea of all and the one that gets every God hater the maddest is: Sex outside of marriage is detrimental to society. This destroys people at the very foundation of their being.
Right! If there is no sex outside of marriage there is no adultery, no STD transmission, no AIDS, no teenage pregnancies and et cetera. It is sickening to see society changing to the point that we have people coming in to grade school to teach kids about having sex both homo and heterosexual versions. Not teaching them to abstain but teaching them how to have sex!; 9:15 AM


highboy said...: Canucklehead: the third option is that I didn't realise until now that radar was claiming a moral superiority. Another option is that you're so quick to jump on highboy that in all your pathetic excitement you missed an opportunity to actually read everything posted and draw a conclusion from there. "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" Yeah that's one of the oldest and frankly most debunked lines of logic in apologetic history, small wonder you quoted it. First, the questions assume God has done nothing in the past nor will do anything in the future to address the problem. As someone once said of this very issue, "its an incomplete framing of the issue". Second, you could just as easily flip it and say, how can an all powerful God, completely good, allow good to happen to bad people? How come that doesn't get asked? The whole idea of just assuming an infinite all powerful being operating within and without a naturalist framework isn't doing anything because our finite human brains have a limited sense of good and evil doesn't make it true. The question is just silly. We will say more on that but it is kind of funny to see an atheist take God's opinion of what is good and evil and then try to use it to judge the Judge.; 9:18 AM
radar said...: As Highboy said, Christianity has made me a better me, albeit not a perfect one. Again, I am saying that God has the high moral ground and has set absolutes. Atheists reject God and his absolutes, so they have no finite absolutes for morality. Therefore atheists either borrow from God when it pleases them or depend upon their own finite brains to determine right and wrong. The Creator of all things has set a moral code in place. That moral code is superior to the situational ethics of an unbeliever or dissident. That should be clear. Highboy and Debbie and I are not perfect and we are not claiming to be. We are all saying in differing ways that God's absolutes are perfect. When imperfect people depend on God, they will be better than they were beforehand. So, relative to the man I was, Christ in me has made me better. I compare myself to Christ, see my shortcomings and try to be more like Him. I do not compare myself to Highboy or to Woolf in this way. Christ sets the standard.; 9:42 AM
Anonymous said...: hb, I will grant that you have written some fairly thoughtful stuff in this thread (you even admit to being an angry guy - gasp!). That said, I'm no dummy. Do you really expect me to believe that this is the very first time you have heard/read Radar claim moral superiority over atheists? Because he does it all the time. He also asserts moral superiority over Muslims, Darwinists, homosexuals, Evolution-believing christians, etc. etc. etc. I say its just a case of selective listening on your part. I mean, if you've missed Radar's assertions, why would I believe that you haven't missed them in all/most of the interactions with the christians you've met. Go ahead, ask your christian friends if they think they are morally supeior to atheists. I bet I know their answer. Oh and relative to your assertion that you have never claimed that "an atheist has no moral code or can't live morally", I'm almost positive that you have. That said I don't have time to search for it. You know you've made some claims about atheists and morality, and I know semantics are very important to you, so can you fill us in on what those thoughts were? Or are you saying you've been completely silent on the topic of atheism and morals? Also, you say, "The difference is God sets my standard for moral living and the atheist sets his/her own standard, usually according to their perception of humanistic morality." Now, you've been in this long enough to understand that almost every christian had a different interpretation of god's "standards", right? I mean, even you and Radar can't agree on some of the basics. So really, what's the difference between a christian's attempted interpretation of some loose guidelines and an atheist's. Also, we even know your "rules" better than you do. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2010/0928/In-US-atheists-know-religion-better-than-believers.-Is-that-bad That link includes a wide variety of non=Christians into the set named Christian and also reveals a sad lack of Bible study in the old demoninations and the emergent chuches. I'm glad you've gotten better as a person (or at least you feel you did, although I have to say, I suspect the "internet Tim" before god is A LOT like the current "internet Tim"). That said, I would interpret the situation differently, and say that you've matured and that you can go ahead and credit YOURSELF for that improvement. Sure the bible may have helped you realize some things, but the same thing would likely happen if you read a bunch of Tony Robbins books. Now to your bible college "debunking" of the quote I provided, what do your comments say about prayer? Isn't prayer then simply "assuming an infinite all powerful being operating within and without a naturalist framework..." is going to do or not do something because somebody asked/prayed for it? Especially when as you assert that "... our finite human brains have a limited sense of good and evil"? Why do you think this by the way? Could it be due to the nastiness contained in the bible? Is that why you give god a pass for calling for the killing of adulterers, or mouthy children? You know, because we just don't understand him? This argument ends up with you sounding like an abused spouse. The above is one of those Adam Sandler rants. Did you just say all that ridiculous garbage in one internet breath? What a rambling incoherent set of assertions and accusations bereft of reasoning. Let's start with the concept that Christians depend on the righteousness of Christ to bring them into relationship with God and that prayer is a conversation with God and His people. Just because you cannot comprehend a relationship with God doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Furthermore, your complete and utter ignorance concerning the Law as characterized by your accusations about "adulterers" and "mouthy children" tells me that you do not understand the books you are referencing. The five books that start the Old Testament are books of history. The Law was given to the Children of Israel in covenant and it was setting behavioral expectations at a time when the "morality" of the time in the region was up for grabs to say the least. Go ahead and enumerate for me the number of times in the Bible that you can find children or adulterers being stoned to death. Oh and good question "How CAN an all powerful God, completely good, allow good to happen to bad people?" You have an answer for this one? - Canucklehead. Did you ever take a philosophy class at all? If you have established a set of absolutes that sets the standard for "good" and "evil" then I have yet to see it. But assuming that you have a measuring stick for right and wrong? God had given us a world in which no bad happened to anyone. Adam and Eve lived in that world. But he also gave us the power to choose individual actions. If we do not have the power to choose, then we are robots. God didn't create a Universe to keep robots, He did it to contain fully functional individuals with the ability to create and think and hypothesize and fantasize and organize and work in tandem with others or alone. He made us to be able to think rather than just react. But that also made us able to choose to disobey. When God told Adam and Eve to not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, that was the one thing they were told they could not do. Of course they did it. Satan convinced them to "be as God" by knowing good and evil. But man was not meant to be a judge. The downfall was that our innocence was gone and every action we take can be right or wrong and much of what we wish to do is selfish and wrong. So what would you have God do? We are the ones who decided to take on the ability to know right from wrong and so we brought sin into the world. Do you want God to take life over and make us all do right things so we are all robots? Do you want him to take over and have supernatural control of all processes, miraculously stopping any hurricanes or earthquakes, thus taking over every action and occurrence? Either you want God to turn us all into marionettes and turn the entire Universe into his own personal toy or you have to accept the concept that beings with free will in a Universe that operates logically will have to deal with the evil of selfish mankind and the consequences of the outworking of physical laws.; 1:02 PM
Anonymous said...: Oh and Radar, FYI, the golden rule concept predates christianity. If anyone was "borrowing", it was your god (or more precisely, the men who created him). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Rule - Canucklehead.; 1:08 PM

That last one is a classic epic fail. All of these cultures mentioned in that ludicrous article were established after the Tower of Babel. Ancient history and genealogies reveal that these civilizations all were descended from the family of Noah, who knew God and God's laws as given to Adam and Eve in the Garden after the fall. There were no remnants of the pre-Flood civilization, but the people who left the Ark had the knowledge to quickly rebuild great civilizations, quickly performing engineering marvels such as the Pyramids that we still admire today.

We can be sure that Noah and his family could read and write and that all people had one common language until after Babel. The basis of God's law was known to all, but some cultures left God behind when they left Babel behind and the concept of God and the history of mankind became warped and twisted and Chinese telephoned...and yet virtually every culture on Earth mentions a flood and a Creator God and many if not all of the names of the men who left the Ark. God established the Law and the Golden Rule is simply a man-made simplification of the teachings of Christ and the Bible. The Golden Rule is inferior to the Law in authority and certainly not in keeping with what Jesus Christ was actually teaching.

Jesus Christ came to the Jews who were under the Law of God. He preached the Law to them, not just the letter of the Law but also the intent. He taught them that adultery was wrong but beyond that concept was the assertion that even considering it was also wrong! Jesus was preaching the Law to people under the Law so they could clearly see that they did not and could not keep it. At this time the Jews were still giving blood sacrifices for sins at the Temple according to the Law but these sacrifices had been going on for centuries and had never provided a solution for the problem of sin. Jesus provided the solution. But the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, is not actually such good news because not one of us can always do what Jesus urged us to do. You see, we sin because we are sinners by nature. Jesus not only didn't sin but he took the penalty for all the sins of mankind and became The Blood Sacrifice, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world for us all at the cross. He then rose again from the dead as the victorious Messiah who reclaimed the authority over the Earth and over death.

I was a sinner by nature and choice but I did come to believe in Christ in this way: I understood that Jesus Christ did not sin and that He died for my sins in my place. I understood that Jesus was God allowing Himself to be limited by a material existence, the Son of God, come to undo what Adam had done. When I trusted Christ and traded my sins for His sacrifice then suddenly a change took place inside of me. I now know that I was born again at that moment, that my dead spirit was brought to life by the Spirit of Christ.

Now people had been telling me over and over for years that Jesus Saves and that I had to be born again to know God and avoid hell. It seemed simplistic and I just ignored those people. I was looking for the great secret to the meaning of life. I sought it through philosophy, through drugs, through meditation, through hedonism, by whatever means I could. I read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" before Phil Jackson even heard of the book. No explanation for life and existence was satisfactory and so I had decided to just live for the moment and for my own pleasure.

But God didn't give up on me. He kept on seeking to catch my attention and one thing worked. My wife, who had been transformed after having our first child from a loving, fun person into a ranting shrew and I was about to seek a female upgrade via adultery and then probably divorce. But she "got saved" and was radically transformed. Suddenly the shrew was Snow White and I was being treated like a prince! Did God do that to her? So I saw that she had truly been changed and when the pastor of that church came to talk with me I, for once, listened with at least one ear opened.

I was a sinner

Jesus died for my sins

If I asked Him to take my sins and come into my heart, He would do it and I would become born again

He would work on me from the inside out.

Jesus has been working on me from the inside out ever since. What I would like would be for all of you to allow God to catch your attention long enough to truly consider the Jesus Gift. Once you put your pride all the way down and admit that you have absolutely no power to save yourself, you will be able to hear from God and give Him a chance to convince you.

God didn't make me perfect. Debbie isn't perfect. Highboy isn't perfect. But we are already judged righteous and worthy in the sight of God because Jesus took our place and our judgment and has provided us with an eternal life with God. We are hemmed in by a material world for now. But once we escape the bonds of this life we will live in a form in which we can see God in all his Glory. You see, when God makes a human life He makes something supernatural, a self that will never end. Do you want your never end to be with peace and joy and God or do you want it in solitary torment with no hope of deliverance?

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Love and Marriage - some comments from the threads examined