Here’s the approach I usually take:

1. Nearly everyone who thinks the government ought to issue marriage licenses favors defining marriage in some way. That is, they favor excluding some combinations of people (polygamy, incest, etc.), not individuals, from the definition. Even judges. Even you!

2. You can’t consistently argue that by excluding certain combinations of people, traditional marriage violates equal rights—unless you also argue to remove every single boundary from the definition of marriage and say anyone can marry anyone, in whatever combination of numbers they like.

3. If you’re not willing to argue this, then you’re for having a definition with boundaries, which puts you on equal footing with the traditional marriage supporters.

4. So the question is, which definition should we use? It’s fine for you to argue that your definition of “two people who love each other” is better than my definition of “one man, one woman,” or someone else’s definition of “one man, multiple women,” but we need to start off by understanding that we’re arguing definitions, not rights.

It’s not unconstitutional to adopt either my or your definition, as long as it’s applied equally to every individual. Remember that the Constitution doesn’t recognize rights for combinations of people; rights only belong to individuals. So one can’t say that a man and five women have a right to get married; one can only say that each individual man or woman has the right to enter into marriage (no individual is excluded). This right is then acted upon according to the boundaries set by the state’s definition of what marriage is—boundaries which are equally applied to every individual. You would like to equally apply the boundary of “two people who love each other” (excluding some other combinations), and I would like to apply the boundary of “one man, one woman” to each individual equally.

But I agree that the boundaries we place on marriage need to be relevant to the institution of marriage in order to be legitimate, so why don’t we sit down and talk about the reasons why we each think the country should use our definition?

This definition-vs.-rights issue needs to be clarified. Otherwise, if you’re arguing for the boundaries of traditional marriage, you’ll enter the argument having already been unfairly declared an unconstitutional bigot before any of your reasons are explained (despite the fact that your opponent also favors certain boundaries), and anyone would be unlikely to listen to the reasons why you’re an unconstitutional bigot. We have to get past this first barrier if we want to be given the chance to make our case.

[Cross-posted at Stand to Reason]

Please go read Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem immediately.

In 1 Peter 2:9-10 we read:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

God calls and saves a people for Himself for the purpose of “proclaiming His excellencies”—the pinnacle of those excellencies being His mercy and grace that changed us, His enemies, into His people. And in 1 Peter, we find two ways that suffering accomplishes this purpose. The first is in 1:6-7:

[Y]ou have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

The truth about Christ’s death on the cross for our sins, about our adoption as God’s children, and our future enjoyment of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit forever is something far more precious than gold. And every time a Christian endures suffering and holds on to this truth instead of giving up in unbelief, cynicism, or bitterness, he is revealing God’s glory to the world by saying the height of God’s value is even greater than the depth of pain in suffering. In the case of Wurmbrand and his fellow prisoners, this is saying something indeed.

But there’s yet another way suffering accomplishes God’s purpose for us. Peter twice couples our suffering with a description Christ’s suffering. First in 2:21-24:

For what credit is there if, when you sin and are harshly treated, you endure it with patience? But if when you do what is right and suffer for it you patiently endure it, this finds favor with God.

For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps, who committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in His mouth; and while being reviled, He did not revile in return; while suffering, He uttered no threats, but kept entrusting Himself to Him who judges righteously; and He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.

And again in 3:17-18:

For it is better, if God should will it so, that you suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong. For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.

When we suffer unjustly and respond as Christ did, we serve as a picture of Christ to our persecutors and to the world, proclaiming His glory and revealing Him to those who don’t yet know Him.

Wurmbrand and his fellow Christian prisoners would suffer through their beatings, refusing to deny Christ, and then turn and pray in love for those tormentors whose sin was responsible for the cruel destruction of their bodies. By this living illustration of the beauty of Christ’s character, work, and value, some of the guards saw Jesus for the first time and became His followers.

The suffering of Christians, inevitable and expected, uniquely accomplishes both of these goods in the service of our ultimate purpose of glorifying God and His grace.

(Right now on Amazon, the Kindle version of Tortured for Christ is only $1. And you don’t need a Kindle! Just download a free app to read the book on your PC or Mac.)

[Cross-posted at Stand to Reason]

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus (Romans 3:23-26).

Why did God allow evil to come into this world? Why not create everything in the state of perfection we will be in after this world comes to an end? I think the answer is that God had a goal in mind that is greater than the suffering, and that goal is the revealing of Himself to His people so that we will be able to fully express our pleasure in Him through worship, enjoying Him for an eternity.

In other words, we experience suffering and sin so that Jesus could die on the cross for us.

That might sound backward to you. But if God’s greatest goal is to reveal His perfections to us (a greater goal than our temporary comfort on this Earth), then in order for us to know God’s grace, His mercy, His power, His justice, His righteousness, His love, and our need for Him, He allowed sin into this world so that we could see and experience Him in these ways. And the pinnacle of this demonstration of Himself happened at the cross.

Evil isn’t necessary for God’s goodness to exist, but it is necessary for God’s goodness to be revealed to us. I always think of the heroes of United 93 as an illustration of this. Before 9/11, the people who would soon give their lives on that flight went about their daily business doing ordinary things. They had already developed the character, invisible to us, that would direct their actions on that tragic day, but the depth of their self-sacrificing courage wasn’t made visible to us until evil led to the expression of it.

In the same way, God was God before sin was in the world. He was always full of grace, but without our sin, would we have known it? He was always just, but without judgment, would we have seen it? Would we have ever seen a love that seeks out enemies if there had been no enemies? Our knowledge and appreciation of God would have been forever stunted in a world without the cross.

In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:5-6).

(Cross-posted at Stand to Reason)

Looking back at such horrors [such as slavery and lynching], it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones?

Appiah offers a list of characteristics of past blind spots to help us spot our present ones:

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)

And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit.

These are interesting observations, and they seem to be true, but I think Appiah misses the key element of these past atrocities: they involved a denial of intrinsic human value in a particular group of human beings.

Why is it that Prohibition inspired so much fervor, only to die out, while our horror at slavery continues to grow? The answer is that unlike Prohibition, slavery was a crime against the dignity of a group of human beings. This is the factor that, oddly enough, explains both our current condemnation of slavery and its former acceptance. Because for some reason, crimes against human dignity seem to be at the same time the most atrocious offenses of a society (as recognized by future generations) and the offenses most difficult for the people of the time to spot.

Perhaps this is because people have much to gain from exploiting and/or disposing of others, but in order to do so, our intuition of intrinsic human value must be actively suppressed. (Or it could be our intuition extends only to people who look like us, and universal value must be either learned or reasoned to from knowledge of our own value.) Once a society convinces itself that one particular group of human beings is not as valuable as everyone else, not fully human for whatever reason, its conscience is freed to seek the gain it desires, so it has a powerful drive to justify itself. And unfortunately, as in the case of slavery, once the arguments separating one group of people from the rest of valuable humanity are commonly accepted, it’s very difficult for anyone to see past them.

So if we are trying to discover our blind spots, it seems to me we should be most suspicious of our culture ignoring arguments that human dignity is being violated in some way, particularly if listening to those arguments would inconvenience us.

By now you probably have a major moral blind spot in mind for our culture. See if it ends up in the list Appiah compiles using his criteria:

1. Our prison system
2. Industrial meat production
3. The institutionalized and isolated elderly
4. The environment

(Cross-posted at Stand to Reason)

Scientists reported Thursday they had developed a technique that can quickly create safe alternatives to human embryonic stem cells, a major advance toward developing a less controversial approach for treating for a host of medical problems.

The researchers published a series of experiments showing they can use laboratory-made versions of naturally occurring biological signals to quickly convert ordinary skin cells into cells that appear virtually identical to embryonic stem cells. Moreover, the same strategy can then coax those cells to morph into specific tissues that would be a perfect match for transplantation into patients.

The work, by a team led by Derrick J. Rossi of the Children’s Hospital Boston, was praised by other researchers as a breakthrough.

The article explains the new technique in more detail. I did find this quote to be an interesting commentary on the need for people to think more carefully about this issue:

Scientists hope embryonic stem cells will lead to cures for…a host of…ailments because they can turn into almost any tissue in the body. But they can be obtained only by destroying days-old embryos, which some consider equivalent to killing human life.

Some consider? Does any biologist contest the fact that the embryo is very early human life that will indeed be killed in the process of ESCR?  Is anyone unsure about what kind of embryo is being killed? I suspect that if you were to push the author on this question, he would concede that of course it’s biologically human life, but it’s not valuable human life as older humans are.

But this is why people need to be more precise with their words. Let’s make it clear to people that we really are talking about human life at the earliest stages. Using the term “human life” to refer only to the humans who meet a preferred standard for value is a good way to perpetuate a bias against certain human beings (be they embryos or slaves), but it’s not honest.

A person who does not believe that every human life is valuable ought to use language that conveys this clearly so there’s no confusion in our culture about the judgment being made against certain humans. Contrast “valuable human life” with “non-valuable human life,” but leave the “human life” constant if all involved are humans. Something like this:

But they can be obtained only by destroying days-old embryonic human life, which some consider equivalent to killing valuable human life.

Then those who feel strongly about upholding the principle of universal human rights will more easily recognize when they are violating their own principle.

[UPDATE: The phrase "which some consider equivalent to killing human life" has been removed from the article at The Washington Post. You can still find it with slightly different editing here and here.]

(Cross-posted at Stand to Reason)

Justice and grace seem to be irreconcilable. We want God to be good. But if we deserve punishment, then for God to be truly good and just, He must punish. We long for grace. But for God to show us grace it would seem He must violate perfect justice, and therefore He would not be truly good.

One way to resolve this is to split God into two and reject one half.

We love a god of mercy, but fear a god of justice. Therefore, deny His justice and suddenly God loves us no matter what, and it doesn’t matter what we do. There is no justice to face. But is this a good god? Is a god who doesn’t right wrongs, who ignores evil and sweeps it under the rug, who tells you, “Hey, just learn to make your own kind of music–it’s all good,” is that a god worthy of our respect? Justice is real and good, so a god who allows evil and injustice to remain is less than good.

Then there are those who grasp the idea of God’s perfect holiness and the goodness of destroying evil, and so they despair of mercy and live in fear. These people hang on to God’s righteousness and reject the possibility of grace.

God’s answer to this problem is beyond brilliant:

But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

God did not lay aside His good and perfect desire to completely wipe out all evil, and yet neither did He lay aside His grace–He became both just and justifier, righteous judge and gracious redeemer. He satisfied His perfect justice and upheld His righteousness by demonstrating His wrath against evil on the cross. Now grace is freely given because it’s no longer in conflict with justice. Rather, it’s because of the justice fulfilled through Jesus’ willing sacrifice that the full beauty and power of grace is revealed, for we see the real price of it.

This is the true, complete God. The true story is not one where justice and grace are forever at war with each other, but one of redemption through a justice-satisfying, grace-enabling, costly sacrifice by a good judge who has the right and authority to convict.

This is the Gospel, yet I’ve found that many people who hear the Christian story are only able to hear the part about the perfect judge who they know will destroy them when all wrongs are punished in the end. They can’t see past God’s righteous wrath to the cross. And people who recognize their own guilt and know nothing of the cross will either acknowledge God’s unbending justice and hate Him, or deny His justice and live with a morally weak god.

This is what seems to be playing out on LOST (spoilers ahead). The writers would like to embrace grace, as they did so powerfully in the episode “Dr. Linus,” but at the same time deny the goodness of justice by associating judgment with the apparently devilish Man in Black. They can’t see that by denying the value of judgment they remove all power from grace, making it weak and meaningless. For if “God” wants us to make our own way morally, and does not judge evil, then there is no guilt to be released from, no grace needed. It’s just to be expected that someone would say, “Eh, your lying, manipulation, and murder is no big deal. Let’s just move on.” That is neither good nor powerful.

The creators of LOST can’t see a way for righteousness and justice to be truly good and desirable at the same time that grace is possible, so they jettison judgment in favor of grace (or so it seems for now). Without a cross by which justice can be done and grace given, they must split God into two, putting His grace into Jacob and His condemnation of evil into the manipulative Man in Black. And so it becomes Jacob vs. Man in Black, grace vs. judgment, “Jesus” vs. scary “Old Testament God.” And in this way, they lose both justice and grace.

(Cross-posted at Stand to Reason)

Throughout this story of Darwin’s struggle, the movie doesn’t hurl anger at God or religion. God is merely…absent, unreal. Religion is clichés and traditions, kindly enough for the most part, but impotent. Darwin gives up on it altogether after hearing a sermon about how “not one sparrow will fall to the ground apart from the will of God” (a verse that got a scornful chuckle from the audience member next to me). As one who surrounds himself with things of death–dead animals hang from his workroom ceiling as they wait to become skeletons, skulls line his office, and all of nature’s cruelties in the struggle for survival constantly engage his thoughts–he knows there is no God who sees the death and suffering that has been driving all the species of the world since life began. The death of his daughter is to him just one more example of the ugliness of the stark, purposeless, unfeeling truth of animal life, weak genes, and the survival of the fittest.

No, religion in Creation is simply a thing that will eventually pass away due to its lacking any usefulness. But religion is not singled out for the viewer as the only thing unworthy of the Darwins’ faith. While Darwin’s wife, Emma, seeks help in religion, Darwin seeks help in medicine; and we are keenly aware, watching this movie from our perspective, just how impotent nineteenth century medicine is–special water baths, bleeding, etc. We are expected, as viewers, to recognize that neither of these refuges–religion or medicine–has the power to save, and they must evolve into something better in the future if they are to survive.

As with religion and medicine, the evolutionary ideas Darwin is exploring in his research do come into the story, but the film’s point is not, ultimately, about biological evolution. Darwin’s atheistic, evolutionary view of the world merely forms the framework used by the filmmakers to shed light on his inner struggle. Everything moves from lower to higher, death to greater life. And as passages of Darwin’s words from Origin are carefully placed throughout the story, as evolution is used to visually reflect the rise of Darwin’s soul from despair to redemption through the love and forgiveness of his wife, one comes to see the irony of using this framework: In the end, Creation turns out to be the same old Christian story of sin, guilt, spiritual death, love, forgiveness, new life, and reconciliation.

At one point in the movie, a doctor tells Darwin that he must find faith if he wants to get better. Not faith in God, necessarily, just faith. I assume that by “faith” he meant a belief and trust in something real and worthwhile that would give him a reason to live. Darwin does find his “faith,” regain his health, and finish his book, but exactly what the turning point consists of is not clear. The beginning of it occurs before he is reconciled to his wife and is never really explained. But one thing the filmmakers intended to say is made clear from the triumphant voiceover of (presumably) bits of Origin at the end of the movie:  “From suffering and death, higher beings emerge.”* The filmmakers (and, one would assume, Darwin) have found purpose in suffering. Just as struggle and death in the animal kingdom brought about “greater” beings, so too did good come out of Darwin’s suffering.

Surprisingly, they alight on part of the Christian answer–that suffering brings about a greater good–despite the fact that using images and ideas of atheistic evolution to tell a story with this moral creates a curious contradiction. In a world of random molecules, there is no such thing as “greater,” or “higher,” or “good.” Such things do not objectively exist in a universe that has neither purpose nor standard, so one can’t make value judgments about either one biological creature over another or one state of mind over another.

And yet the movie persists not only in doing this, but also in urging us to rise above the base evolutionary struggle (as if there were such a thing as “above”). When Darwin and his wife reconcile, Emma says she is not sorry that she married him, her first cousin, even though they suspect the weakened genes of their children caused the deaths of two of them (the “sin” of Darwin’s world)–she is not sorry, because she loves him. The film, through Emma, shows that we are more than mere animals making decisions according to “survival of the fittest”; love is a “higher” calling. The movie asserts this within an atheistic world, but how can a materialist, evolutionary world, with nothing existing higher than nature as a standard towards which we must strive, explain this?

The use of the story of materialism to show the power of decidedly non-material, spiritual things (things that are even more powerful than the science of medicine in this film) is jarring, but the contradiction couldn’t be avoided. To tell a good, human story, one must speak of the non-material realities we experience. And if one’s worldview can’t support such things, one must borrow from another that can.

When the movie ended, I could hear people commenting on how depressing it was, and they were right. They weren’t sidetracked by Darwin’s perplexing personal triumph at the end. The movie spent much time bombarding us with Darwin’s view of the world–the reality of the impersonal and never-ending death, suffering, and decay on which this atheistic universe has built itself for no purpose whatsoever. There is no one above the creaturely struggle who will set things right, no one out there who recognizes our grief, no standard of “higher” and “lower,” no purpose or point. Death just is and will be. And despite Darwin’s change of heart, no real answer is ever given to us by the filmmakers to change these facts, and the people around me knew it. Darwin overcame, yes, but for no intellectual reason we could discover.

*Quote may not be exact.
(Cross-posted at Stand to Reason)

The play told the truth.  The ugliness of sin was neither hidden nor glorified, and the excuses made by the characters to justify their actions looked weak and pathetic.  The emptiness of their previously wasted lives was made plain, and this, one of them lamented.  The play spoke the truth about the slavery of sin.  But it was not the whole truth.  For that was where the play ended, without any hope of freedom in sight.  The men were not capable of really escaping–sin was too powerful.  The end. 

And this is where the story would end for all of us were it not for God snatching us out of that living death, opening our eyes to His glory, revealing Himself to us, giving us new life.  Like the men in the play, we were helpless and could not escape on our own, but God stepped in and changed everything.  “Our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.”

I thank God for the reminder of the slavery I’ve been rescued from, for the reminder of my desperate helplessness and need for Him, and for the reminder that there’s a whole world of people in slavery out there–people whose stories end in hopelessness because they don’t know about the One who conquered sin so that we could be free and have true life with Him.  And they will never know about this hope unless we tell them.  Their pain and need ought to drive everything we do.

For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.  Therefore what benefit were you then deriving from the things of which you are now ashamed?  For the outcome of those things is death.  But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life.  For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Thank you for this gift I did not deserve, God.  Thank you, thank you.

And I– I never thought I’d leave behind
My childhood dreams
But I don’t mind
For now I love the world I see
No change of heart a change in me

For in my dark despair
I slowly understood
My perfect world out there
Had disappeared for good
But in it’s place I feel
A truer life begin
And it’s so good and real
It must come from within

And I– I never thought I’d leave behind
My childhood dreams but I don’t mind
I’m where and who I want to be
No change of heart
A change in me

So there you have it.  Hidden amongst somewhat nonsensical lyrics and some vague heresy about “good and real” things coming “from within,” there’s repentance from Belle for longing for “much more than this provincial life.”  She calls her former demands for a perfect world a “childhood dream,” and she finally finds in her humble village the kind of love, contentment, and “true life” that the Beauty of the original fairy tale never lacked.  It’s worth noting that only after this change in Belle is she able to redeem the Beast with her love.

An important difference between socialism and capitalism is that socialism promises salvation delivered from on high, while the only thing capitalism can promise is competition.  Because of this, socialism can be preached in much the same manner as the Christian gospel is preached.  You can take a typical Christian evangelistic message, replace the words “sin” with “profit,” “Satan” with “Big Business,” “God” with “the government,” “Jesus” with the politician of the hour, and “salvation” with “social justice,” and you’ve got an appeal to socialism.  This struck me as I read some excerpts of Marx and Engels.  Ultimately, they didn’t build their system with an appeal to reason.  They built it on evangelistic zeal, apocalyptic vision, and powerful appeals to a coming paradise.