Friday, January 30, 2015

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Enter Jack Nicholson, playing the president of the United States in the movie Mars Attacks. Tall and stately, in suit and tie, he addresses three seemingly harmless, little, green-blooded, big-headed, large-eyed Martian leaders who are nevertheless in the process of  successfully conquering the world. He smiles his famous smile, reaches out his arms, digs deep for all the charm, diplomacy, and fine words he can muster. He speaks slowly, calmly, but with great feeling.

"Why are you doing this? Why? Isn't the universe big enough for both of us? HA-HA-HA-HA! What is wrong with you people?  We could work together. Why be enemies? "Cause we're different? Is that why?"

The president steps confidently closer to the Martians, over a smoking human skeleton.

"Think of the things that we could do. Think how strong we would be. Earth. And Mars. There's nothing that we could not accomplish! Think about it. Why destroy when we could create? We can have it all. Or we can smash it all. Why can't we work out our differences?  Why can't we work things out? Little people, why can't we all just get along?"

It's quite a speech. A big tear trickles down the head Martian's cheek. He holds out his alien hand. He and the president shake. Immediately the arm detaches from the Martian's body and crawls all over the president, stabbing him in the back clear through his chest. He falls down dead.

"Ack," says the Martian matter-of-factly. 


Very funny in a dark comedy way. Also cautionary. "Why can't we all just get along?" drawls Jack Nicholson, arrogant, condescending, and incredibly naive in the face of a merciless and deadly enemy. Why can't we all just get along? Here's why: because individuals and groups of human beings often go wrong and create evil viewpoints diametrically opposed to God's standards for humanity. The evil and the good worldviews contradict and cancel each other out; they cannot peacefully co-exist. One will win out over the other. For example, one view---arbitrary, permissive, experimental, foundationless--- insists that it is essential that we teach the normalization of things such as masturbation, homosexuality in all its forms, and fornication ("safe sex") in public schools, while the other view---supported by God, science, history, culture, and experience--- proclaims that these things are licentious, immoral, risky, harmful, the teaching of which to school children amounts to child abuse, that sex doesn't belong in school, that as a society we should continue to uphold God's rules for human sexuality and behavior for the health and well-being of all. We can plainly see which view is coming off conqueror in today's world. Morality and religion are being mocked, silenced, and punished in favor of sexual freedom. 

Sad to say, our culture has been attacked, not by extra-terrestrials but by our own fellow earthlings who wish to overthrow God along with His standards for human sexuality. Some of these are people claiming what they call alternative sexual orientations. It's a clever phrase very few people bother to think through. Right now the country is all about it. People should not be "discriminated against" or denied "rights" (since when are housing and jobs rights?) because of LGBTQI, etc. sexual orientation. For one thing, there is no evidence that gay people are being denied these things on this basis; it's just a trumped-up idea that seeks to obliterate the rights of others---those with religious and moral objections. For another thing, do we not see how intellectually bankrupt and dangerous and pointless all this contorted  finagling and concession-making is? People want to appear inclusive and fair to gays who demand society's approval and protection of their sexual ideas and choices, and at the same time the aforementioned people rightly wish to retain their own moral and religious rights (guaranteed by the Constitution) to disapprove of those sexual ideas and choices. Besides not making any sense, it's not happening and it's not going to happen. It was almost 15 years ago when the late Richard Wilkins told us that the way things now are, personal sexual freedom will trump religious freedom every time in the courts, which can now be extended to include the court of public opinion. The ack ack ack is being sounded across the nation, people are showing their true colors---that they care more about human relations than relations with God, and true principles are dropping like, well, like humanity in Mars Attacks. Supposed conservative Christians think they can win over willful sinners with kindness; instead they are the ones being won over to willful sin.

Scott Lively in Redeeming the Rainbow, wrote, "Neither should any believer expect to persuade pro-'gay' opponents. Self-evident proof is its own proof, but at the same time is so foreign to the reprobate mind that there is no common ground possible in a debate between truth-loving and reprobate thinkers. We speak completely different languages." Like Earthlings and Martians. In short, the nonvirtuous do not understand or value virtue.


Let's look at the phrase sexual orientation itself. If this sophistry is not exposed (which it looks like it won't) there will be no end of trouble. Here's a reality check. There is absolutely no evidence that sexual "orientation" of any kind is genetic or permanent. Human beings are sponges. They come to earth as babies and are taught everything they come to know. People are born male or female, and their sexuality (attitudes and beliefs and perceptions about gender roles and about sexual behavior) develops as they grow up and begin to experience sexual feelings and thoughts. Yes, a person's sexuality develops over time. Even some gays admit that sexuality is liquid, changeable, whimsical. Hence, you have bi-sexuals, the B in LGBT, that is, people changing their behaviors back and forth from gay to straight and straight to gay, which truth is conveniently covered up in the gay movement. For all sorts of reasons, especially today in our permissive, oversexed, information-glutted, temptation-advertized world, people drift in and out of all sorts of sexual experiments and escapades. The modern  phrase sexual orientation opens the door to any and everything on the sexual sins menu. Count on it, there are more letters to come in that LGBTQI alphabet soup. For example, what's to stop pedophiles, rapists, masochists, and beastialists from demanding nondiscrimination and equal opportunity and treatment?  If we don't reaffirm our formerly crystal clear, righteous discriminations, there will soon be no limits at all. It sounds like science fiction, but it is feasible that the "right" of someone to fulfill any momentary sexual whim could come to trump any other freedom.

Let's also take a look at the notion of "rights." As Dostoyevsky and C. S. Lewis and numberless other great thinkers have said: without God, that is, without God and His timeless standard for human conduct such as sexual morality, there are simply no reasons for limitations; all may come to be permitted. A new and arbitrary and most likely nonbenevolent "morality" will become established by those wielding power to take the place of God's rules. Bingo. In the last decade we have seen the unearthing of perverted and unhealthy views of sex and sexuality--- from a dark and shameful and disgusting thing to what Lewis called a position of "preposterous privilege." The result is, and will increasingly be, treachery and tyranny. Yes, in your neighborhood, in your church, in your schools, in your government.


Much as we would wish to come together, hold dialogue, appease, and downplay these issues, it is not possible. Sexual freedom and Godly conventional sexual morality are two diametrically opposed views which can never get along. Call them "extreme" if you wish, but one will be favored, says Robert Bork, and the other harmed.

Apparently we as a society, and especially church leaders from a wide range of sects who Scott Lively says are showing themselves to be gullible and weak of faith, are giving in to the idea of unlimited, individually-determined sexual orientation(s), and one result (among others immediately and eternally destructive to individuals) will be the death of our moral conscience and the destruction of religious freedom, all forfeited on the altar of "peace." We must ask ourselves: Why does giving up my religious freedom to any degree amount to any sort of peace? Historically, this has been more accurately proclaimed to be cause for war.

We should care what kind of culture we are bequeathing to rising and future generations. We should care what youth and children are being taught and what they will teach their children (if they have any). At this juncture it certainly looks like we don't care about our posterity, not to mention knowledge or God or common sense or good and evil or the souls of men at all, but about some false and vaporous and dangerous notion of  "getting along"  with those who are determined to have their way at the expense of the right way. What can be the result of such arrogance and gullibility and politically correct maneuvering on the part of those who are supposed to be valiant in the cause of God and goodness and truth and decency?

Ack.

2 comments:

Chordsoffaith said...

Thank you, Janice, for always being a voice of clarity and reason. I wish everyone could read this!

Anonymous said...

Yep, that's what the Mormon Church unfortunately did by calling for "LGBT" rights dressed up in a religious freedom package. But you can't have both, because the forces of darkness won't "accommodate" the light.