Deeper Waters

We live in a culture that does tend to value humility out of the many virtues we have destroyed. Unfortunately, I think we’ve valued it to a point that it is not meant to be valued. Ambition is often seen as a bad thing as well as the desire to succeed. In order to make ourselves be humble, many of us cut ourselves short.

Yes. It’s an experience this blogger knows all too well.

I do not believe I am alone in this either. I have spoken to many friends and thanked them for saying something that they considered small. I am often told something along the lines of “That little thing helped?” Yes. It did. I can hear about something someone else said and I am just awed at a compliment I hear about. They might have said it off-hand, but it meant a lot. In fact, it means more if it’s said off-hand. There are less chances that it is faked.

Of course, this can sadly work in the opposite way. Many times, we can all be cut by one small thing someone says or does. While we may be stunned at the effect our words can have for good on other people, we should also be aware of the effect that our words and actions can have for ill on other people as well.

Every human being is a dynamic force in the universe. How could they not be? They are bearers of the image of God? We change the world by our every action. We have something supernatural in our very being by reflecting him. Our very rational processes scream design.

Yet, we doubt.

It is only a little sin that I am committing. It will not hurt things in the long run. It does not matter what I say to this person or how I treat them. How do you know? People commit suicide for a reason. Maybe it might be something we say. (Or dare I say it, something we should say but fail to.) People say the church shows no love for a reason. Ask yourself why if you’re a member of it.

It won’t make a difference what I do. I’m only one person. I’m just not that capable. How do you know? Upon what is this knowledge based? You’d be surprised how one word or action can change someone. You want evidence? Look at the little things people have done or said to you that have helped you in huge ways? Think they were trying to do something monumental every time?

The truth is, we are great beings. Ephesians 6 describes us in heavenly battle going out and facing the evil one and expunging his darts. We are told that we are the light of the world. Not just a city. We’re the light of the world. We have to touch it all. We are told we are stars shining in the universe.

You want to see how the Bible speaks of us who are children of God? It often speaks of us quite highly and in ways that stun us. Consider 1 John 3:1. We are children of God, and that is what we are! It is almost as if John had to repeat it because it was so shocking a truth and he wanted us to get it.

Epictetus was a Stoic Philosopher who lived aroung 55-135 A.D. He was most likely born a slave, which was a lowly position, but in his Golden Sayings, he had some profound ideas. If we understood them in Christian terminology, how great it would be.

Saying IX:

If a man could be throughly penetrated, as he ought, with
this thought, that we are all in an especial manner sprung from
God, and that God is the Father of men as well as of Gods, full
surely he would never conceive aught ignoble or base of himself.
Whereas if Caesar were to adopt you, your haughty looks would be
intolerable; will you not be elated at knowing that you are the
son of God? Now however it is not so with us: but seeing that in
our birth these two things are commingled–the body which we
share with the animals, and the Reason and Thought which we share
with the Gods, many decline towards this unhappy kinship with the
dead, few rise to the blessed kinship with the Divine. Since then
every one must deal with each thing according to the view which
he forms about it, those few who hold that they are born for
fidelity, modesty, and unerring sureness in dealing with the
things of sense, never conceive aught base or ignoble of
themselves: but the multitude the contrary. Why, what am I?–A
wretched human creature; with this miserable flesh of mine.
Miserable indeed! but you have something better than that paltry
flesh of yours. Why then cling to the one, and neglect the other?

XVI

He that hath grasped the administration of the World, who
hath learned that this Community, which consists of God and men,
is the foremost and mightiest and most comprehensive of all:–
that from God have descended the germs of life, not to my father
only and father’s father, but to all things that are born and
grow upon the earth, and in an especial manner to those endowed with Reason (for those only are by their nature fitted to hold
communion with God, being by means of Reason conjoined with Him)
–why should not such an one call himself a citizen of the world?
Why not a son of God? Why should he fear aught that comes to pass
among men? Shall kinship with Caesar, or any other of the great
at Rome, be enough to hedge men around with safety and
consideration, without a thought of apprehension: while to have
God for our Maker, and Father, and Kinsman, shall not this set us
free from sorrows and fears?

Indeed, we are to be put to shame when it seems at times the pagans have a greater concept of the realities of our faith than we do. (It could be Epictetus was influenced by some Christians.)

Dear friend. Today, we need to stop underestimating ourselves and realize what we can do. We are told to change the world for Christ. Let’s do it. Let’s go about encouraging and empowering one another. This is our divine mission. This is our calling. Let us not think for a moment also that we would not be given this calling if it was not believed that we wouldn’t succeed.

Ah yes. The past two days have been on rather depressing topics. None of us really like to think about regret or fear. It is like answering the Problem of Evil. None of us like to hear each example that the skeptic pulls up because so many of us can just feel the pain there and you want to address the issue, but you don’t want to ignore the wound.

Tonight though, we get to discuss the cure. We get to talk about joy. There is one important distinction that occurred to me actually while I was in a session with another pastor. That is that fear is of the future and regret of the past, but joy transcends time. It can be at home in all three areas. You can have joy over a past memory, joy over a future event coming (Like a marriage, birth of a child, eternity in Heaven), and joy over present circumstances.

Why is this? Because joy is at the heart of God and is thus, eternal. When we have joy, we are in fact touching eternity. It is the same for any other goodness. This is why true pleasure is so joyful. True pleasure is that which is not sinful in anyway and thus touches the heart of God. I think this is also why monogamous Christian marriages report greater joy in their sex lives than others do.

This is one reason we all seek something beyond ourselves. We all seek something transcendent. G.K. Chesterton once said that when a man knocks on the door of a brothel, he is looking for God. Is it because joy is unnatural to us? In some ways. It is what we were created for and in and we are constantly wanting to experience Eden again.

It seems that the Fall has left us in a state of chaos and absurdity. We do not know who we are. We do not know who our neighbor is. We do not know what reality is. We do not know who God is. There is little that seems to make sense at times and we all seek that place of solace and we find that most in joy.

Joy is what brings us home in many ways. Joy is that which satisfies the longing of our hearts. Deep down, I suspect we know there is more to life than what we consider the meaningless day-to-day existence.  We all want our lives to matter for something. We all want to make a difference. We all want to touch eternity.

We want more than what we have here. Are we not like the children at Christmas who get so many gifts and when we’ve opened them all we want to say “Is that it? Are there any more?” Indeed, how many of us have had Christmases where we did get so much that was good but at the end of the day, we felt empty? Isn’t there great truth in post-Christmas letdown?

What is the answer? Ah. It is simply to seek after where joy is. We are to seek God. However, we do not seek him for the joy ironically. We seek him for who he is. It’s quite bizarre indeed. I don’t believe God works the way we want to with joy because he is not a medicine.

You are not to read two chapters, pray, and witness to your neighbor in the morning and then you get joy. Joy just happens. However, I do believe we are to be on the lookout for it and we are to treasure it when it happens. It is one of those pleasant surprises in life and we are to enjoy it.

Dear friends. There are those moments that touch eternity. Remember them always. Remember also the one who has joy at his heart. C.S. Lewis once said that joy is the serious business of Heaven. He has made our hearts restless until we find their peace in him. Only then will we know joy that never ends.

 

Yesterday, I wrote on regret. It’s not the most interesting of topics for us because we really aren’t a society that focuses on the past. Most of us know very little about what happened in history unless you count what is written in the newspapers. While I am writing on something future tonight, I do urge us all to learn from the past. (I am intensely interested in ancient philosophy for instance.)

Fear though, is about the future. Now some of you may be saying “I’m afraid of something right now!” Yes. You are. However, you could also be regretting something right now, and that regret is centered on an event in the past. Fear is unusual in that it is centered not on an actuality but a potentiality.

Any time of fear is more often a “What if?” than anything else. Some cases might be more certain. A cancer patient with a terminal case is aware of death coming. However, he still fears a future event. (How painful will it be? What will happen to those left behind? Am I ready to meet God?)

However, none of these are present realities. Now there is a sense in preparing for the future, but there is a wrongness in being anxious about that which isn’t a reality yet. While I consider myself good at budgeting, I will admit that from time to time, I can still have one payment I need to make and soon I’m imagining that I’m going to go broke.

We can make all of those future things reality? If there is a 1% chance something bad will happen and a 99% chance that it will not, we will focus on the 1% and before too long, we will add a couple of zeros to that number. Then, when it doesn’t happen, we will realize we were worrying for nothing. It brings to mind Mark Twain’s saying of “I’ve feared many things in my life. Some of them actually happened.”

In philosophy, we can speak of that which is not and that which is. I will say the past is that which is and the present is that which is. The future is not yet though. Why do we spend so much time worrying about what is not yet? We can prepare because we know there will be a future, but can we worry for we do not know what will happen either for good or for bad? (Aside from the second coming of Christ.)

Whatever thing you fear, picture if it has a future connotation to it. If you are being mugged by someone for instance, which I hope doesn’t happen, your fear will often consist of “wills.” “He will rob me.” “He will murder me.” “He will seriously injure me.” None of these are present and they keep you from acting in the present.

What do I wish to ultimately convey? Fear is a future emotion and we have no place for it. We are the people who need to deal with what is and not with what may be. Fear is always temporary and not focused on what is actual yet, merely potential. Prepare by all means, but do not fear. Remember who is in charge of time.

Let’s face it. We all have it. We all wish that we hadn’t done some things in the past. I look back on my life and wonder how I could have been so foolish as to make some of the decisions that I made. There are many times I would just love to go back and just change one decision.

What is regret though? Have we ever noticed the timeframe it is featured in. It is about the past. It is not about the future. It is not about the present. (You can be sorry you have done something when you have done it, but repentance means you looked at it afterwards, even if just a second afterwards, and were sorry for it.)

This is a past emotion though. This is something that within the next few blogs I plan to bring out an idea I have on. Despite what some people may say, you cannot change the past. You can regret what you did. Yeah. Repent. Confess. Move on. Oh if only we really did such. Too often, we don’t.

Instead, we want to keep beating ourselves up for our old sins. (I seriously doubt I’m alone in doing such.) We want to see them as a way of bringing ourselves down today. What we did was then. Instead, it should bring us joy. We can have joy that we do realize we did wrong, which isn’t joyful, but that we have come to confess that and realize it.

Have you considered that? What does it mean to say you once were blind but now you see? It means that you have been forgiven. It means that the errors of the past are covered. This is what the Bible means I believe when it tells us that we are to forget the sins of the past.

From what I’ve gathered, forget does not necessarily refer to a divine gift of amnesia. Remember does not always refer to recovering memory on a topic either. It seems to refer to being a focus of concern. God is telling us not to focus on the sins of the past. If only we would do so!

Perchance, the greatest fault of this is the human condition to make the temporary to be the eternal. We make our sins to be eternal when they are really temporary. We make sinfulness to be greater than grace. Grace has to be greater than sin though or else there can be no redemption.

Christians. We need to return to that biblical mindset. We will sing Amazing Grace in church, but do we really believe it? There is no cause for regret for our sins have been forgiven. Truly, we are to go on and sin no more, but let us not feel the need to crucify ourselves when Christ already took that for us.

Readers of yesterday’s blog know that a friend of mine helped me in a situation I’m dealing with. One thing I had stated, though I don’t remember how I said it, was that I felt numb. The feelings weren’t there. At that, she said she was going to throw my own words back at me. “So what?”

C.S. Lewis spoke about this in the Screwtape Letters. He has the demons writing to each other and the older says to the younger that at times, God will remove his presence from a Christian and let him stand on his own. He then says to the younger demon to not be deceived. Our cause is never more in danger than when a Christian looks at a world full of danger, heavens that are empty, cries out “Why?” and still obeys!

My future events coming up have I believe given me a kind of numbness. In some ways, it’s hard to enjoy things, but yet as I do them, I find that I enjoy them. Many of us I think can relate. We know that there is something good there, but the passion just isn’t there. We want it to be there, but it isn’t.

That could be a good thing though. I was at my church evening service last night and a girl who had been on a missions trip spoke about seeing these kids and how they had this great passion and she didn’t have that so she prayed that she would get to experience that great passion again.

Don’t get me wrong. I can understand that. I’ve prayed it myself. I wonder how much error I could be in though in doing so. Am I wanting God just so I can feel passionate? That’s just a nice bonus. The man is to love the woman for who she is and not just the pleasure he looks forward to with her. Pity the man who tells his lady that he only wants her for the pleasure that she brings him. We would say such is unromantic, but do we not do the same with God at times?

What would be the better? We don’t pray for passion. We pray for devotion. We pray that we will be willing to serve even when the feeling is not there. We will go even when the desire to go is not there. We will pray when we don’t feel like it and we will study when we don’t want to.

I would also dare say that many of us are just the kind of people that we don’t have a lot of emotional passion about many things. I find I can have at times great passion for something, and yet it’s not an effort to hide it. I am not the type to express emotions. Maybe if we don’t have that kind of passion for God, it might be we don’t have it for a lot of other things as well.

Do good feelings come sometimes? Yeah. Of course they do. However, we are to be people that are not slaves to our passions, feelings, and emotions. We are to rise above them and control them. They are good things of course, but they are not to wag the dog and too often, we have let emotion, passion, and feeling do just that.

To my great friend, I think you for that shock to my system that told me that. I am thankful you remembered my advice and shot it back at me at a time when I needed it the most. There are other ideas to write on, but those are for other nights.

When I was driving home from my trip Thursday, my associate pastor and I got a flat tire on our way home. He was wondering why it happened and if only we had stopped at the rest stop sooner. (btw, we did get someone down there to fix it relatively quickly.) I told him G.K. Chesterton’s quote that an inconvenience is an adventure wrongly understood and an adventure is an inconvenience rightly understood.

I had a great reminder of this last night. I sign off of the net to get in some reading, but I have a friend who’s going to send me a file so I keep my computer on. After a good time of reading, I go and check on the computer. Lo and behold, someone IMs me after I remove my away message and I’m caught in a conversation.

I really want to get to bed…..

I’m nice though. I stay up and chat some and in the middle of that, another friend of mine contacts me. I tell her I want to get to bed and somehow, we start talking about my feelings in relation to my upcoming move. I find that that conversation was one of the most beneficial ones and I was greatly blessed by it. It has kept me going all of today.

And how did that start? I would not have been on to hear her if I had not decided to stay up? It was an inconvenience that for some reason, I couldn’t download the files on my own. It was also one that someone else signed on and kept me up later than I wanted to. However, because of both of those, I was able to hear something I needed to hear.

Now was the hand of God at work? I truly can’t say. However, that is always a possibility. I just thought immediately about Chesterton’s quote. Here I had been complaining about something and it turned out that because of that something, I received such a great blessing that evening.

Friends. We’re too quick at times to realize what could be going on. What blessings might come because of something we consider in our way at first? I look back now and wish my eyes had been more open. I do believe everything is allowed to happen for a reason and there’s something I can learn from it all.

Thus, last night brought some personal revival to me and I have been thinking much about things that have been said. Keep watching the Deeper Waters blog as I share more thoughts on it over the next few days.

I was recently traveling with the associate pastor where I preach on a long journey. Thus, we had much time to discuss. One topic that came up was finding God’s will. Yesterday, I spoke about the same kind of thing to a friend of mine who is in ministry as well. This was an idea I grew up with and I find I still have to un-think a lot of what I learned.

When I read the Bible, I see two wills of God presented. The first one is the sovereign will. This is what is going to happen and nothing can change that. Now I do believe that while there are fixed events, we have been given liberty to kind of ad-lib. God knows what we will do, but we freely do. Nothing we do though can change sovereignly declared events like the second coming of Christ. We can’t know about when these events will happen though or the entirety of his sovereign plan.

The second kind is the moral will. This is the way God tells us we should live. We could consider the Ten Commandments as an example. God’s moral will tells us that there is a way we ought to live and there is a way we ought not to live. We may not be absolutely certain on every moral issue, but the main aspects of the moral will we can know.

Yet somehow, people find a third will that is not taught anywhere that I see in Scripture. That is God’s individual will for their lives.

I know some people won’t like this post, but I just have to say I don’t see it. Instead, I see God telling us how to make wise decisions that are in accordance with what I call the way of wisdom from earlier blogs. I find it hard to believe God left us a book called Proverbs but at the same time, says to wait on him to decide for us.

In this case, I think the onus of proof is on those who wish to tell me that they see this will presented in the Bible. Go ahead. Give me the verses. I’ve probably seen all of them. Or, you could simply consider this. Could it be that all the ideas we have of feeling led and hearing God’s voice and such are not taught as normative practices in Christianity?

So what do we do?

It’s simple. We obey God’s will. Which one? Well, it can’t be his sovereign will because we don’t have access to that. It must be his moral will then. We need to ask of each action we do if it is the right action or not. There are some that I think would be valid no matter what path you took as there are many moral things one can do.

For a minor example, consider this. You’re just had a shower in the morning and you’re getting dressed and you’re putting on your socks. Do you put on your left one first or your right one? I see no reason to think any such action would be sinful. You don’t have to pray and see which one to do. You simply put one on.

Now take another example. Suppose you have some money you want to donate to charity. Is there just one charity you have to give it to? Not at all. You can go and donate to many different charities and be just as beneficial. My family donates to St. Jude’s for instance. Does that mean they’d be sinning if they took some money instead to give to the Red Cross at another time?

Consider the mission field also. I have a friend who really wants to go to Japan and witness there. Do I think he’ll do good? Yeah. He’s an awesome friend and he knows his stuff. Let’s suppose he changed his mind though and said “I’d like to go to China instead.” Do I think he’s sinning? Not at all.

Why not? Because each of these falls into the moral framework. None of the other choices are immoral actions. They are just different actions. There are a lot of good things you can do and it’s okay to choose one because that is the one you want to do. It is not a sin to enjoy serving the Lord.

Ultimately, it comes down to what I heard someone say on this once. I don’t know how he got there in the discussion as it was on a different topic originally, but we did get into this and he had someone ask what God’s will for their life was. His response is still my favorite: To conform you to the likeness of Christ.

So let’s look at what we do. Will it conform us or not? If so, there’s no reason not to do it. If not, there’s every reason not to.

In the Holy Cross debate done against William Lane Craig, scholar Bart Ehrman argues that the gospels were not written by the traditional authors. The names “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John” were not part of the text. These were the authors noted by early church tradition as the writers of the gospels.

In Ehrman’s words, “The Gospels were written 35 to 65 years after Jesus’ death — 35 or 65 years after his death, not by people who were eyewitnesses, but by people living later.” Let us suppose for the sake of argument that Ehrman is right about his first claim in the earlier paragraph. Let us suppose that the authors were not the ones named.

I don’t think that, but my point is that the second point does not follow from the first. How do we know they were not written by eyewitnesses. The only way we can know that is if we know who the authors were and whether or not they were eyewitnesses. They could have been written by anyone in the area who could have been an eyewitness.

This was a point I wanted to see substantiated. We hear that the accounts are not eyewitness accounts. (Neither is much of ancient history.) How do we know such though? I read through the debate and sadly, I cannot see anywhere where this claim was backed and I was quite pleased with Craig’s performance.

However, one of the gospels was most likely not written by an eyewitness. This would be the gospel of Luke. However, Luke tells us that he spoke to the people and heard the stories and gave an account of what happened. In fact, Luke has been found to be quite accurate in his history and thorough in his detailing.

This seems to make the case more. If the account written by a non-eyewitness can be so reliable, then what will happen if we find the gospels were written by eyewitnesses? (Note I do believe Mark is the memoirs of Peter. Mark is writing for Peter and thus, it is an eyewitness account.)

Even if they weren’t, do we throw them out? No. We look and see if they are historically reliable. Unfortunately, Ehrman, like many others, holds to a a priori assumption of naturalism. The way he argues, if a miracle occurred, we’d have no way of knowing that it did so it’s best to assume that they didn’t.

This seems odd though. If a miracle happened, then it happened. We cannot just say “It didn’t.” What kind of evidence would there be? There would most likely be accounts from eyewitnesses that described what happened. This is what we have. People talk about events that we call miracles. The only reason to rule them out a priori is because of our immediate bias.

Historians ought to give the benefit of the doubt until something is shown to be false. If a friend came to me today and said “I saw an angel” and I was assured he wasn’t trying to pull a joke on me as many of my friends are jokesters, I would believe him. What am I to say? “Well, an angel never appeared to me!” or “I’ve never heard of anyone else seeing one!” or “That’s highly improbable!”

No. I would believe him for the same reason I believe him when he tells me that he and his wife went to dinner last night. The only reason to refuse it is to either say my friend is insane or something of the sort or that the testimony of people is not reliable. If the first, then we have a priori again. If the second, then why trust anyone on anything? We should not make special pleading just for the cases that don’t fit into our preconceived worldview. (Which is why the Christian should always be open to arguments from any angle and evaluate them.)

Now, have I argued that the authors are the traditional ones? No. I believe they are but that is secondary. I have stated that I believe Luke was accurate, but I could even say they were inaccurate and my main point would still stand. We have no way of knowing these are not eyewitness accounts simply because we don’t have 100% certainty on the authorship of the books.

Of course, we can get into other arguments after that. My case has simply been that which I stated above. I hope my fellow Christians see that point and realize that many other times non-Christians make statements like these. This question should always be asked. “Does the conclusion follow from the premises?” This time, it doesn’t.

My associate pastor and I were traveling together today. He told me that he likes the term pastor. The term preacher has a negative connotation today. (“Don’t preach to me” or “Are we going to hear another sermon again” said outside of a church context.) He told me though that Reverend sounds too holy and impersonal.

Now this is a godly man here we’re talking about. I don’t want to give the wrong idea. He took his whole day to help me with something. I’m very grateful to him for that, but I also have to confess I’ve had the same kind of thought before. Why do we see holiness as impersonal and often boring?

Sadly, my first thought of holiness is someone who spends all their time in prayer and Bible study and walks around with a holier-than-thou attitude and never will crack a smile or laugh ever. That is not an accurate representation. I’ll give you that. It is a representation though and it is not enjoyable. Holiness has been made to be unappealing. It has been made to seem that if you are in the will of God, your life will be miserable.

However, what if holiness is truly boring and impersonal? What will that mean. The conclusion is that God is boring and impersonal. Now I’m not saying God is either, but we’ve effectively made him such many times in the church today. We don’t view our life with God as active usually. It’s more of a passive thing that’s just going on. It has become a habit. We live in an age where the new is the best and if there isn’t a constant flux of new, we lose interest.

What has made this such? I believe much of it is our modern world twisting our view. Biblical movies are usually quite boring for instance. Jesus never really cracks a smile even and everyone walks around and speaks in a monotone. How many times do we think about Jesus laughing for instance or Jesus as funny?

In reality, these things should be enjoyable. When I exegeted a text recently where I disagreed with the pastor, I enjoyed it. When friends and I discussed the star of Bethlehem or the meaning of Seraphim, I enjoyed it. When a co-worker and I started talking about the dates of the gospels and the worldview of Carl Sagan, I enjoyed it.

Yet somehow, it seems we approach these things as unenjoyable.

Could it also be our view of the Puritans? We see them as the holy people in history and we usually picture them as boring people. From what I’ve heard though, they were not. Yet somehow, we have pictured them as such. (We have a lot of crazy views about the ancients, like how they thought that the Earth was flat. That’s a myth as well.)

Honestly then, could it be we’re not holy because we fear that it will make us not enjoy life. The reverse is the case. Holiness will help us to enjoy life. The greatest pleasure seeker of all is God. He created everything as an act of joy and love. (Surely he did not do it as an act of misery.) If he is, then we should see that he is holy and loves all that is good, including true pleasure, far more than we do.

Holiness. It’s a joy and a treasure. Let’s start seeing it that way.

In our discussion on actions that are moral and immoral, I have decided that I simply need to make a statement about moral absolutism. Why do I believe that such things as moral absolutes exist? I do believe that moral relativism is one of the most dangerous philosophies of our day. As Dostoevsky made clear, if God does not exist, anything is permitted.

I would like to start by saying that there are statements called propositions. They contain a coherent though with a subject and a predicate. “The grass is green” is a proposition. “I am writing my blog” is a proposition. “The planet Earth is the sixth planet from the sun” is a proposition.

Now, I hope most readers know that I intentionally put in a false proposition. After all, we all know that grass is really blue. (It begged to be done!) The point is that if all the terms in a proposition are understood properly, then the proposition can either be true or false. I do not know of a proposition that is neither. Some might seem incredibly wild to us, but they would either be true or false. We might say some are just stupid.

So let us consider some moral propositions.

It is good to love your neighbor as yourself. (Note that propositions can be put with the predicate first. This could read “Loving your neighbor as yourself is good.”)

It is wrong to torture babies purely for the joy it brings  you.

Giving money to the poor is a right thing to do.

Sexual intercourse outside of marriage is wrong.

The holocaust was a wicked event.

All of these are statements about moral beliefs. I would hope that all of us would take a stance on them. I wonder about the person who says “It may be wrong for you to torture a baby for fun, but I just think that everyone should decide for themselves.” If it wasn’t for so many of our pyschologists trying to explain away sin as well, I’d suggest that people with such a view go see them.

Friends. I really think it’s bizarre that we even have to argue for such a thing. Imagine how exactly you would formulate an argument to convince someone that it is wrong to torture babies for fun. Now in some cases, you can make moral arguments with people, but that is because they agree on a larger framework of morality and want to know if what they are doing falls within the moral or immoral aspect.

What part is it that someone does not know is wrong? Is it torture? Is it murder? Is it the fact that it’s a baby? What part? Why is it that this kind of action would be condemned throughout the world? While we speak of diverse differences among moral teachings of the world, the truth is the reverse. There are many principles that every society agrees on.

Take cowardice for an example. C.S. Lewis asked us to try to think of a world where it was good to be a coward. I’ve heard some people use Pacifist groups as a counter-example, but that doesn’t work. Pacifists don’t refuse to fight because they’re cowards. They refuse to fight because they think it is immoral.  Does this mean though that they will never act with courage? No. There are many other ways to be courageous and many other ways to be cowardly.

In fact, that we even have such terms to define such actions is sufficient. Why do we speak of good and evil or right and wrong or moral and immoral? Furthermore, we don’t really have a hard time understanding these concepts. If we meet up with a complete stranger, we can understand them.

When we get into arguments about morality, we even assume that moral absolutism is true. If it isn’t, why would you argue with someone about it? C.S. Lewis uses the example of a quarrel between two men over who got the seat first on a bus. You don’t hear anyone say “Why should I hold to your moral framework?” in the quarrel. No. The moral framework is assumed and it’s up to us to decide who fits and doesn’t fit into it.

Now I can think of a possible rejoinder about some people might say our taste in music is subjective and our taste in food and movies and such as well so these are subjective propositions.

My stance on this is that I haven’t been convinced that they are subjective. There are some kinds of music that I do not think qualify as music and I make that as an objective claim. There are some foods we think some people are crazy for not liking and some that if we thought they’d like, we’d be stunned.

Lewis Grizzard told the story about a man who had the job of selling toothbrushes on the street and didn’t have any luck. Then he got an idea and started serving cookies to people. They’d take a bite and say “This tastes like dog doo!” He’d answer, “That’s what it is. Would you like to buy a toothbrush?”

No one has to have that story explained. We all seem to believe immediately even though I doubt few of us have ever eaten it that “Dog doo tastes terrible.” Most of us would even reel at the thought of having to try it. On the other hand, if you told me “Peanut butter tastes terrible,” I would wonder what exactly was wrong with your mind.

Note that this isn’t about healthiness or unhealthiness. We usually find that easier to agree on. In fact, we find that what most of us enjoy is not considered healthy and what most of us don’t enjoy is what is considered healthy. We agree though that there is a healthy and an unhealthy. I’d say that a properly functioning human with properly functioning taste buds would find some things tasty and some not just as he should find some things beautiful and some not.

One main contention though is that people don’t live this lifestyle out. When someone cuts them off in driving they don’t think “Oh. Well his moral framework must justify him cutting me off in traffic.” No. They might likely wave their hand (Or finger) out the window and yell obscenities and profanities.

What are they to say? “He should respect my moral framework?” Why should he. Why should anyone care about anyone’s moral framework. The ultimate result of this would be tyranny. Plato taught a monarchy as the best form of government and tyranny as the worst. In monarchy, a king represents the law. In tyranny, a king is the law. One realizes there’s a standard outside himself. (That’s why our Legislative Branch consists of Legislators and not lawmakers) The other thinks his view is the standard.

Is there any way moral relativism could avoid that? They might not have one man as the ruler, but rest assured if they want some form of government, some men will be the leaders and it is their view that will be the morality and everyone else will be expected to respect it. (Even though the only reason would be “respect or suffer.”)

This also means that relativists cannot complain about the Problem of Evil. If you ever see a relativist complaining about the Problem of Evil, as they will do, call them on it. If they ever complain about intolerance, call them on it. If they complain about the Crusades or the Inquisition or the conquest of the promised land, call them on it. If they make any moral claim they expect to be treated as an absolute, call them on it.

Friends. This is a fight we cannot afford to lose. Let’s be sure we don’t back down.