In my previous post, I addressed the cosmic absurdity of naturalistic evolution. Despite the non-existence of evidentiary support for this fantasy, this is the only theory permitted to pass by the gatekeepers of our basic public education and even into our places of so-called higher learning. This alone goes far to explain why ballooning admission rates with commensurately bloated tuition costs to generously remunerate propagators of communist ideologies exit lacking basic competencies including, and most especially, literacy and critical thinking skills.
Trigger warning to those immersed in leftism as you are about to be exposed to scripture and it contains explicit content sure to rankle your politically correct sensibilities. I plan to pick up where we left off in Romans 1, having addressed how people’s minds can be corrupted to fall for risible inanities such as naturalism. I will now address the source of this convoluted thinking.
“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonouring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them. – Romans 1:24-32
Paul first speaks of how people succumbed to the lusts of the flesh which, I will remind readers includes acts such as premarital sex, adultery, prostitution, and pornography.
This context is important before we delve into what has become – in our godless culture – the minefield of homosexuality and the other spectrum sins made not only acceptable, but virtuous through the GLBT+++ rainbow connection. Paul’s language fashions a seamless garment whereby the human conceit of denying the creator, having “exchanged the truth about God for a lie” thrusts us into a glut of sexual sins as innumerable as the snowballing flavours on the gender identification chart; including a crossover into other unnatural perversions such as fetishisms, BDSM, necrophilia, and any variation that our debased minds can conjure up.
Over time, the Christian church has decided that the best approach to the shifting standards of the secular zeitgeist has been to seek détente with the devil. There have been a few prominent rationales:
One is to adopt the premise that God somehow could not possibly have imagined a future where sexual compromise had gained such mainstream acceptance: The delusion I like to refer to as the More Moral Than God Syndrome. Somehow, these people have apparently not only failed to look into their history books, but even crack open their Bible to recognise that justifying sexual sin is the world’s factory setting; which explains why we are to be in, but not of the world. For the most part, it is because we want to imagine God doesn’t care about these “minor” sexual sins since “everybody’s doing it.” To jettison these timeless truths for a lie is only to redouble the just condemnation of sexual sin by ordering a side of pride. It is also closely linked with the next deception.
By extension, the church has slouched toward making accommodations and allowances for homosexuality based on their own self-serving framing as an expression of love for our neighbour. Not surprisingly, this same rationale was dragged out to justify shuttering our churches, masking, jabbing, and giving our neighbour’s a wide berth. I suspect that for many, this concession was adopted because, like following Covid mandates, it was more comfortable to go along to (often not) get along than take a stand. Some struggled themselves with these desires, others knew this issue hit close to home, and in either case, it gave cover for their own temptations and moral compromises.
I believe there is also an element of the “better than Hitler” deflection. Essentially, this involves relegating the “unnatural” sexual sins to elevated status to deem our heterosexual “indiscretions” as less offensive. Better yet, if we are not tempted by homosexual urges, this makes not succumbing to this tier of sexual sin dead easy. Topping it all off, if we can summarily grant absolution to those engaging in what are presumptively treated as greater sexual sins, it affords us even presumption of grace while luxuriating in our “lesser” sins. This mentality is behind those who like to take “judge not, lest ye be judged” out of context in order to pull out the gavel against anyone with the temerity to point out they are engaging in sin. After all, it is much more inclusive to reject the inherent obligation as well as the either/or compromise by absolving one another by ignoring both the speck and log than go through the tedium of extricating these objects.
For those still seeking to play the “my sexual sin is better than your sexual sin game, Paul points out that broadly sexual sins are unique in that: Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.” (2 Corinthians 6:18b) Unique to heterosexual sins, however, is arguably the greatest evil concocted by man; that of killing one’s own child in the womb. Whatever homosexual perversion one might engage in, the prospect of pregnancy can only be achieved through natural conjugal relations.
Conversely, those gender-bent on acting as apologists for homosexuality, let me close this portion by pointing out that that Christ and Paul do not draw a distinction that lust is a sin strictly for those whose desires run in the so-called “cis” direction. In fact, marriage is a fully approved outlet for men and women to indulge these desires.
Many “Progressive Christians” and other full-throated defenders of the GLBTQBECONTINUED agenda are already jostling each other to get to the microphone and aver, “this is precisely why we should all embrace the “same sex marriage” solution. The problem, however, goes beyond Paul’s homophobic critique of deeming such expressions as unnatural. Marriage between a man and a woman is strictly established by God in Genesis. (Genesis 2:24) Even for those so deceived as to forget that Jesus is part of the godhead and thus, all Old Testament teachings are de facto spoken by Christ, we see the same affirmation in the red letters. When asked about the issue of divorce, Jesus takes a circuitous route by first reaffirming the Genesis of marriage. (Matthew 19:3-6) Whether or not one wants to cling to the notion that this is unfair, those who struggle with same sex attraction have the same duty as the heterosexual man or woman – outside the institution of marriage – and legal sanctioning of a godless union won’t sanctify what God establishes to be sin.
Now that we’ve established that this passage from Paul is more than a homophobic rant, but more broadly an indictment of various sexual sins, we see that the tsunami unleashed here is far more offensive to any pearl-clutching readers. Paul is also deceitophobic, murder-phobic, malice-phobic, insolence-phobic, and ultimately, he unleashes a panoply of evil- and sin-phobic indictments. No one can read through this list and not identify at least a fistful of sins they grapple with daily as I assure you this is true for me.
The problem here is not simply that we engage in these objectively immoral acts, but the fact that most if not all of those listed sins have become either acceptable or outright endorsed by the zeitgeist. For those who hold to the make-believe theory of evolution, these are not even original, but recycled debaucheries. Refer back to Sodom, Gomorrah, and the Nephilim-populated antediluvian world. Look also to Rome, Greece, Babylon, and any other number of historical failed states. We are simply taking our civilizational turn on the wheel of depravity.
While Paul’s approach to calling out sexual sins is both detailed and unambiguous – cutting away bit by bit against what defenses we might conjure up, the barrage of unrelenting indictments that follow leave us reeling through the rapid-fire spray that guarantees that no eunuch could escape. Many of his accusations relate to attitudes of the heart that directly or indirectly lead to sins of commission (i.e., covetousness, envy, strife, deceit, malice, foolishness, heartlessness, haughtiness). In fact, even his wording on deeds such as murder, gossip, slander, disobedience, etc. are presented as characteristics within us rather than necessarily specific actions – as was established in the Sermon on the Mount. (Matthew 5-7) Qualifiers such as evil and unrighteous are all-encompassing and might be judged as general and ill-defined by those unmoored from a clear biblical worldview understanding.
On the surface, we might be led to believe that some indictments listed are relational while others are internal, but in reality, all are relational. Each ties back to how we perceive or treat one another and is impacted by how others see us. More importantly, each one is relevant because they are impediments to our relationship to God and are potential stumbling blocks to interpersonal relationships as well as our personal well-being.
The list is not intended to be all-encompassing and merely serve as a reference guide for recognising a society that has been fully corrupted. We know this because we need only turn to other epistles from Paul (i.e., 1 Corinthians 6:9,10), other apostles (James 1:21, 1 Peter 2:1, 1 John 2: 15:16), and from the gospels. The denial of truth is a prerequisite to a rejection of moral absolutes. All reading through Paul’s itemization of deviancy – whether believers or unbelievers – are privy to several realities that they would be loath to admit.
- They hope that those they interact with do not have a propensity for such sins. This sentiment has not only seeped increasingly into rants by irreverent atheist, Bill Maher, but was recently touted by one of the four horsemen of modern atheism – Richard Dawkins.
Some time back, I wrote a blog addressing Dawkins’ perverse campaign in the UK where he paid for billboards that read, “There’s probably no God…now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The Dawkins of 2009 doubtless wishes he could recant this sentiment as his 2024 reincarnation has led to him to self-identify as a “cultural Christian.” The man who denounced God in his epic rant: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Since the God of the Old Testament is the same God of the New Testament and the one true God that shapes the morality of the “cultural Christian,” either Dawkins is endorsing these evils, or he is publicly devouring a heaping helping of crow.
But wait, there’s more!
Dawkins atheistic worldview denies any objective moral standards exist and also, necessarily, posits that we are being without free will. As such, we don’t have the agency to eschew or embrace any action since we are merely moist robots. His declaration therefore not only advances the moral superiority of the Christian ethic, but he is undermining his worldview position that ethics are a moveable feast and outside of our capacity to volitionally move toward or away from any act.
In perhaps the most stinging irony, Dawkins is espousing the Christian ethic in contravention of what appears to be a majority of our modern-day western churches that are running away from these core convictions.
- Ultimately, we know that we would rather have the strength to not succumb to temptations. Generally, once we have acted sinfully, we recognise that the pleasure derived is fleeting – almost as though we had a conscience reminding us that we did wrong. Similarly, sins carry guilt and the weight becomes even more onerous when we realize the hurt the we have caused others. We will go to great lengths to mask or, if possible, pretend we never did wrong.
This is why even devout Christians don’t want to confess the sins that plague us, even while we acknowledge this as central to our identity and thus our need for a saviour. We also admire those willing to openly admit when they did wrong; wishing to ourselves that we were so courageous. In fact, as I have previously addressed, I believe that many of those in power positions have been blackmailed because they don’t want the shame of having their secret deeds exposed. When leveraged to cause harm to others, this only compounds the guilt.
There are clear exceptions and these are people whose consciences are seared (1 Timothy 4:2) Such people are commonly understood as sociopaths, but many reach this place through a sense of entitlement – generally fed by others who are similarly compromised. For most, this is a gradual process and many even come to believe a lie because facing the truth is too hard to bear. Chances are they knew they were doing wrong early on, but became increasingly sanguine with their deeds by living in that zone. Paul identifies the source as people following deceitful spirits and teachings of demons (1 Timothy 4:1).
- They secretly admire these qualities when they are displayed in others while also feeling convicted. There is a reason that we take greater comfort in knowing the failures and shortcomings of others than the courage exhibited by others. When those who engage in evil are exposed and held responsible, we can revel in justice being served – a reality only explained under a Christian ethic. Similarly, we can feel shared outrage when evil is not justly punished. It takes a person of conviction to do right and face punishment for doing so and we are easily cowed into silence by facing similar threats.
Most of us lack the requisite courage to die on principle for protecting others and prefer vicarious sacrifice; however this is not to say we don’t wish or imagine that in the right circumstances, we would demonstrate such dignity and valour. While evidence shows otherwise, the notion that so many who deny that life has inherent worth or that objective morality exists posit that the courage to die out of principle is something to be emulated. This is nonsense if we are products of chance, without purpose, and who will simply become fertilizer when our lifespan is over.
God created a world where order and truth are undeniable, but also where moral truths are imprinted into each of us. All that is required of us is to not deny reality, but to follow the breadcrumbs left for us and to do so with confidence and candour.
To sum up the twin arguments regarding natural law and morality from atheism, it looks something like this:
- Nothing created everything and mankind and all the natural world is the detritus arrived at through time and chance. Consequently, we must follow the scientific laws and look to an expert class to inform us of what is true. Wherever the facts and evidence diverge from leftist assumptions and affirms the structure and design explained through biblical creation, it is to be rejected and censored for bias. Where it is not affirmed in reality (i.e., gender), then feelings guide the science.
- There are no moral absolutes, but wherever they may diverge from critical (race) theory, social justice theory, gender confusion, sexual license, climate change, abortion, personal responsibility, “climate change,” wealth redistribution, and collective rights over individual or religious freedom, etc., they are to be rejected. Morality came about through an evolutionary process driven by forces and grounded in nothing, but are both inviolable and mutable.
In short, for the dogmatic naturalist, life is a perpetual game of Calvinball, but only one side is permitted to dictate and enforce the very real consequences of their latest culture-destroying and God-hating whimsy. The basis for this ideology of convenience is no different than the justification adopted by Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit – and for the same reason. The fruit looked good for eating and they wanted to be equal with God.