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Transcript follows. In September 2011, the North Carolina General Assembly passed SB 514, called “An act to amend the constitution to provide that marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.” In May of 2012, voters of North Carolina will get [...]
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Or, What the Doctrine of Election Says about Your Vote in the Next Election. One of the lesser splits between Catholic and Protestant doctrine concerns the relation of politics to the fall of man. Would we have presidents and legislatures and kings on earth had there been no fall? Certainly if politics is no more [...]
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American Christians very often tend to vote “one of their own” in political elections. No doubt this is more a result of in-group/out-group mentality than Biblical doctrine. Nevertheless it is a powerful force, once for socialism, and more recently with the revival of Evangelicalism for social conservatism. And what would evince Christian bona-fides better than [...]
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Last month, I asserted that the Bible speaks nothing about how society should be governed, but has political implications only so far as it binds the conscience of the voter. Here, however, let us move beyond particular issues to whole ideologies. Scripture says nothing about Capitalism or Socialism. But can a Christian in good conscience [...]
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The Independence of Faith and Politics Nothing is easier, it seems, than to draw political implications from scripture. The Right has integrated opposition to abortion and gay marriage into its gospel, and on the Left it has become trendy to invoke Jesus’ compassion for the poor in support of the welfare state. As different as [...]
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For as long as there have been social conservatives, there has been the threat of chimp marriage, or dolphin marriage, or christmas tree marriage. Judging from the news, one could even allege these fears have borne out. Let’s start out with a definition of marriage. “Between a man and a woman” is not it. Lots of things happen between a man and a woman that are not marriage, from business relationships to one-night-stands…
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The civil rights movement of the 1960s was a resounding triumph for justice. Though it ended up swinging in the opposite direction and actually outlawing a lot of private discrimination, it was a systematic breakdown of the walls which kept blacks from justice in the courts and from equal treatment by the state. Perhaps, given [...]
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It’s not uncommon to hear people sanctimoniously condemning evangelism as forcing one’s religion on another. In their mind, religion is a purely private matter; a preference, like what flavor ice cream one likes. Rhetoric like this comes alike from the “Spiritual but not religious” crowd, the New Atheists, and pretty much anyone with a measure [...]
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When Christianity began to spread throughout the Roman Empire, the repeated complaint of the Romans was that the new faith subverted the worship of the gods that held the Roman state together. Though many less educated came to believe that the empire fell due to the displeasure of these gods at the Christian faith which [...]
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Let us for the sake of argument grant that homosexuality is unnatural in some meaningful way. Guess what else is unnatural? Monogamy. Certainly the proportion of animals in the animal kingdom practicing monogamy is lower than that which practices homosexuality: Neither is unheard of, but both are comparatively rare. And if one can make an appeal to naturalness without reference to animals, then what constitutes naturality?…
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The foundation of liberal (in the classical sense) thought is freedom, for the purpose of the maximization of the happiness of man. Unfortunately happiness isn’t exactly a cut and dry concept. Libertarians of the Subjectivist school (Mises and his followers) believe happiness is maximized when man is free to do as he pleases: value, something’s [...]
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Or, How God Works Through History to Suppress Bad Theology. The history of the Church over the past few centuries may be surprising to many who consider the world to be in a perpetual state of moral decline. The 18th and 19th Centuries were particularly dark times for Protestantism and Evangelicalism worldwide. Having fully accepted [...]