Posted on Tuesday,

Internet companies legislating morality?

An article came out today “Internet companies to block child porn sites,” that raises a good question and illustrates an even better point. (for the record I think it is great that they are doing what they can to protect kids from porn and exploitation, and more of it needs to happen). Are they “pushing their morality” on the rest of us???

First, the point. Legislating morality is impossible to avoid. Often when people talk about faith and values in the public square, it quickly goes to “Christians shouldn’t legislate their morality on the rest of us.” The fact is government can’t help but legislate morality—which leads us to the question….which morality should we legislate.

For as Michael Bauman explains, “All laws, whether prescriptive or prohibitive, legislate morality. All laws, regardless of their content or their intent, arise from a system of values, from a belief that some things are right and others wrong, that some things are good and others bad, that some things are better and worse. In the formulation and enforcement of law, the question is never whether or not morality will be legislated but which one.” (for more on this, see his chapter in To Everyone An Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview ).

The above article didn’t include the moral reasoning behind this decision. Should we do it because everyone (at least right now and around this table) agrees that it is wrong or because there is something intrinsically and inherently harmful here (if the latter how do we know this?)? A very different question indeed.

Issues like this help remove the myth that “we shouldn’t legislate our morality on others.” How we go about choosing which ones is a much better conversation to have. Now obviously everything shouldn’t be legislated against, but it is unavoidable that many things will be for the good and flourishing of a society.

Post Script: Porn is addictive and dangerous for individuals and societies–Here is one person’s journey Porn Nation: Conquering America’s #1 Addiction. Most people are unaware that Pornography and sex-related sites make up nearly 60 percent of daily web traffic.

Posted on Monday,

The New Tolerance

Are Christians Intolerant? A recent study found in the book Unchristian, has discovered that “Nearly nine out of ten young outsiders (87 percent) said that the term judgmental accurately describes present-day Christianity.” An outsider is just that, not a Christian and outside the church (of another faith tradition or no faith tradition at all). This group goes from late teens to about thirty. Now what is obvious is that Christianity has an image problem….but are we intolerant? Is it a good thing if we are?

Depends on what you mean by intolerant. There is some confusion and equivocation on the terms today—though intolerance is “public sin number 1.” Here is an observation by Dallas Willard that will bring this confusion into sharp relief:

“Tolerance has suffered a great deal recently in our religious and political and educational areas. And tolerance, because truth has been pulled away from it, has slipped over into the idea that everything is equally right. No longer is tolerance a matter of saying, “I disagree with you and I believe you’re wrong, but I accept you and I extend to you the right to be wrong.” That’s not enough. We’re now in the situation where everyone must be equally right, where you cannot claim that people are wrong and still love them.”

The new tolerance is that everything must be equally right or true.

The classical view of tolerance means, I disagree with you, here is why, and I treat you with dignity respect (i.e., lovingly communicating truth).

As Christians we can’t help but make truth claims (because God has and revealed them to humanity in His word), but if we are obnoxious, hateful, arrogant, condescending, etc. then shame on us!!! But claiming that everything can’t be true at the same time is not intolerant. We are Christ’s ambassadors and we need to remember that (2 Cor. 5:20).

Check out these resources to learn more:

Posted on Friday,

Medical marvel: Baby Macie Hope was born twice (thinking about personhood)

I love feel good stories, don’t you? This story is definitely one of them. But I want to go beyond the feeling good part for just a moment and think Christianly about this event by asking a couple of questions.

(from article) “When Chad and Keri McCartney say their infant daughter, Macie Hope, is born again, they aren’t referring to religion — the month-old miracle baby really was born twice. The first “birth” was about six months into Keri McCartney’s pregnancy, when surgeons at Texas Children’s Hospital took the tiny fetus from Keri’s womb to remove a tumor that would have killed Macie before she was born. The second time was on May 3, when the McCartneys welcomed their surgically repaired — and perfectly healthy — baby girl into the world.”

Read this story, and then ask yourself:

At what point does a fetus become a baby? (was Macie hope only a baby for while she was outside the womb?)
Was she a person all along or only as long as she was wanted?
As the article points out, and maybe it is the way we use language (but why do we use the language of “killing” and “alive”?), the baby / fetus was going to be “killed” by the tumor if it was not removed. So is the baby not “killed” when decisions are made to terminate a pregnancy?

I am not for a moment trying to be insensitive to the excruciatingly difficult choices that must sometimes be made by women / families, but this is important because little lives are at stake. My intention is to focus on the heart of the issue: is what is growing in the womb a person or not? This miraculous story helps us see what we already know intuitively–this baby was a born twice and was a person worthy of protection and the right to life whether inside the womb or out. Location has nothing to do with personhood.

How to defend your pro-life views in 5 minutes or less…

Posted on Thursday,

Is the Gospel about avoiding Hell?

When we share Christ with others, what do we say? What do we say is the point of the good news, the goal? Heaven when you die? Avoiding Hell? What about now? Darrell Bock is the research professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary and I think he has some good things to say about the “good news” and how we emphasize the heart of the message:

“…So the gospel is not about avoiding hell or getting to heaven; it is about coming back into a healthy relationship with the living God, on His initiative and grace. It is not about going or not going somewhere; it is about someone. Frankly, when we share the gospel, we often leave out this personal dimension that involves God directly. Rather we tell it so that it is about us and where we go. When we do this we suggest the gospel is about a single moment and where we stand. However, the gospel is about what God does to bring us to Himself. He is the subject of the action and we respond to His kind initiative as the beneficiaries of His grace. The good news is about what God has done for us. So when we discuss it or present it, we should make the ongoing relationship the key topic. Otherwise people think a decision is all there is to the gospel, when it is far more.”–Darrell Bock

For more of this blog, click here.

Posted on Tuesday,

Another Reason I’m Not a Naturalist – “Free Will”

Are people free to act or not act in a given situation? Or is everything determined because humans are nothing more than bags of chemicals governed by the laws of physics? This is the question of free will. And most people think we have it. Either I can choose strawberry or chocolate ice cream -it is up to me. Love seems to required freedom. Freedom of the will is at home in a Christian worldview, it is not in the worldview of naturalism. It seems far more obvious to me that I have free will than that naturalism is true. Thus free will is an argument against Naturalism.

For example, Cornell University professor William Provine flatly asserts that, “Free will as traditionally conceived … simply does not exist. There is no way the evolutionary process as currently conceived can produce a being that is truly free to make choices.” Check out Naturalism, Postmodernism and Free Will that discusses this important topic in an understandable way.