Wednesday, July 8, 2015

God's Rainbow or the "gay" rainbow: Pick One

Conservatives lost the abortion fight. Now they've lost the marriage fight. They will utterly and completely lose their newest cause: the fight for religious freedom. Why? Because these issues are only surface distractions, one after the other. We get pushed back and back and back because we insist on focusing on  and spending all our resources on these issues which are mere symptoms arising from the all-encompassing problem: Godlessness. Roger Scruton said, "The triumph of sin comes with our failure to perceive it." And sin has certainly triumphed in our lawless time. Scripture (2 Nephi 27:13) says if there is no law, there is no sin, nor righteousness, nor happiness, nor punishment, nor misery. Nor God. Godlessness is the cause of all these evils. That's the cancer of our time that has turned our world upside down.

We're not saying that people fighting for these causes haven't worked hard and exposed evils and done their homework and had good intentions. What we are saying is it didn't and won't work because when you treat the symptom, the disease is still there, growing and spreading and mutating and metastasizing. It hasn't worked because generally speaking the rising generation doesn't have a clue about how wrong abortion is, what marriage is for, the tantamount importance of religious freedom, what Christianity really is, and who God is. They've grown up surrounded by positive characterizations of  ungodly things and negative or watered-down or de-emphasized characterizations of godly things. Despite parents' best efforts, a humanist, secular, hedonist culture is raising the children of today in large part due to the inevitable technological pervasiveness of anti-Christ communications. 

Even as good people have been striving their hearts out we have lost the culture war. This has happened because even the best-intentioned humans are easily distracted or weak of faith or intellectually lazy or gullible or protective of their own temporal interests or ambitious or prideful or smug  or overconfident, or a combination of these, and more. They have wrongly relied on the arm of the flesh, arguing against these evils using sociology, science, history, convention, and so forth, and nothing has made a dent. They fooled themselves into thinking they can handle these things without God, and in so doing have played right into the hands of the Godless. For instance, at least a decade ago we watched a gay marriage debate on TV between a secular progressive lesbian lawyer and a supposedly religious conservative law professor and it was obvious that he lost the argument. His case was weak. He resorted to human history and human tradition/sociology when he should have resorted to God. God is what this is all about. His rules. His plans. His creations. If we leave God out anything can become a demon, so said C. S. Lewis. If we leave God out all evils are permitted, according to Doestoevsky. As we've said so many times before, God and Godlessness cannot peacefully co-exist. They never have. Today, it's God's rainbow or the gay  rainbow. Pick one. 

Unfortunately, all these supposedly religious, conservative people who have been sticking their necks out have not stuck them out far enough. They've been bullied or have rationalized themselves into keeping God out of their discourse, out of their debates, and out of the public square. But it so happens that when people get this wicked God is the best and perhaps only way to bring them back to their senses. 

And now, as the preaching of the word had a great tendency to lead the people to do that which was just---yea, it had had more powerful effect upon the minds of the people than the sword, or anything else, which had happened to them---therefore Alma thought it was expedient that they should try the virtue of the word of God.  Alma 31:5


And what is the word of God? What it isn't is sociological. It isn't primarily about human relations. It's about a relationship that transcends the world. It's about the supernatural, the divine, the Godhead: God the father, Christ the Redeemer, the Holy Ghost. It's primarily and fundamentally spiritual. It's about the reality of human sin, justice, repentance, and divine redemption. But church-going people today have abandoned these truths and instead emphasize the worldly tenets of human relations and self-satisfaction and comfort. As Madeleine L'Engle  wrote almost half a century ago,

"No wonder our youth is confused and in pain; they long for God, for the transcendent, and are offered, far too often, either piosity or sociology [outward performances or human relations], neither of which meets their needs, and they are introduced to churches which have become buildings that are a safe place to go to escape the awful demands of God."

This whole cultural juggernaut is not about equality or respect or kindness or love or marriage or even religious freedom. All those words have been highjacked and redefined and deserve thick black quote marks around them. In fact, the words religious freedom are already being replaced with the cleverly stifling  phrase freedom of worship, meaning keep your beliefs inside your church building, which is more like religious imprisonment than religious freedom. But "freedom of worship" will be surrendered also, evidently quite soon. All that goes on inside the walls of church buildings will be challenged next, and why not? What is to stop the enemies of God if God's people don't publicly acknowledge Him?

Little do God's enemies know, not much goes on anymore in churches which they wouldn't approve of. They needn't feel threatened---our daughter left a church meeting in tears last Sunday when the meeting was taken over by moral relativist/homosexualist congregants who turned it into a gay sensitivity seminar. But wait, it will get much worse. Apparently the Godless are offended even by the sight of a cross, so all such buildings will have to go. And anybody who thinks sex activists will stop at this or that concession made by the churches are fooling themselves.They want to bring the whole house down, as Midge Decter pointed out. They won't rest until all Christian businesses and Christian church buildings are shut down, and after that they'll go after communities, families, and individuals. It's happened before many times, such as in communist and the Nazi regimes. And remember the Nephites who were to be put to death for praying vocally to God (Mosiah 24: 10-12).

Even as conservatives and churches make one compromise and one concession after another, treating the surface symptoms, it's easy to see that what it's about is the forcing of Godlessness on everybody. Yes, they want us abandoning our beliefs and our convictions and participating with them in sin.Most of all, they want our hearts. The wicked want us celebrating sin along with them. They want us caught up in their anti-Christ parade. At its roots it's an anger at God and goodness, a Satanic vengefulness. Read Dante's Inferno or Milton's Paradise Lost and you'll see that revenge is all Lucifer cares about. Apparently it's true that misery loves company.

Even as we must endure what we cannot cure, we mustn't fall in step. We mustn't develop the disease ourselves to any degree. We must choose God, thus we will be the ones out of step now, the ones marginalized, the ones punished. And don't be fooled into thinking we can all get along. One of these views will be punished and the other harmed, warned Robert Bork. The first house of our land, the White House, has shown itself boldly emblazoned with the gay rainbow, i.e. celebrating and promoting sin. Those who put God and goodness and righteousness first are now the ones who will be harmed. In other words, if you are on the Lord's side you will feel very uncomfortable and inconvenienced and alone, to put it mildly, living in this wicked world today.

People who won't wake up to what the real evil is in our day make all sorts of rationalizations and become easily persuaded by the Godless, become deceived themselves, and spread evil deceptions to others. As the scriptures say, there are apparently going to be few who choose God.

God's rainbow or the gay rainbow. You choose. 


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