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Debt Free, No Tattoos?

7/25/2018

There is an internet stormlet currently happening over a home-schooling lady blogger who wrote that nice men prefer women who can come into the relationship debt-free (this meaning, the girl didn't go to college, which is the real agenda behind the debt thing), and women who don't have tattoos. This is such a peculiar controversy, I can't help but make a few mundane pastoral comments about it before we all move on to something else equally peculiar.

I agree there is no rule that every young Christian woman needs to attend a four-year college. I also agree that most colleges are dominated by liberal/progressive philosophy, which is an evil influence. It isn't always God's guidance that every young person go to college, at least not a liberal arts four-year college. There are other paths in life.

However, young Christian women will need ways to support themselves financially, and some of them have exceptional talents in the Arts and Humanities that they should steward for the Lord. Post-high-school training provides this. And if a Christian husband dies, the Christian wife will benefit from having a good way to pay the bills and put food on the table for the children. Impoverishment is a bad thing, even in the absence of college debt, and so is failing to develop God-given talents. Especially if those talents might lead to blessed common-grace breakthroughs in, say, medicine, or in influential works of art, NGO work, architecture, or other areas of skill (just to give a few examples).

The blogger also seems to assume that it's God's will for every Christian woman to marry.

The blogger, third, seems to assume that young Christian women have no discernment. Maybe many do not, but that would be the failure of their churches. A church youth ministry that is all morality and music has failed its young people, male or female.

It's no wonder church young people allegedly "lose" their faith when they go off to college. Many of them never really had faith, so when presented with philosophical alternatives that don't make you feel guilty and let you live as you please, they go for it. Others have never be taught how or why Christianity is rational, so in their first year in college their puny little twig-faith gets blown around badly. But this is not true of every young Christian woman.

Also, certain majors involve less direct indoctrination than others, like Physical Therapy. Unless you're going to say that a Christian should never have a non-Christian teacher, ever, on any subject.

Paul's injunction to all Christians, including to young women, is to work hard with our hands so as to share with others (Ephesians 4:28). If college is the best way for a young Christian woman to get equipped to work, because getting married and having children are not sure things in God's plan, then go to college. But attend a good church while you're in college, and find a good, solid collegiate fellowship like Campus Outreach.

Regarding tattoos, my personal opinion is that they are unwise. The Bible warns against women "adorning" themselves with eye-catching accouterments (1 Peter 3:3-5). Too much jewelry is adorning enough; I'm even less in favor of an adornment you can't take off.

If a person gets a racy or profane tattoo then receives Christ at a later time, they're likely to feel ashamed of it, and need to suffer a lot of pain having it removed. Why not stick with modest adornments that you can take off and put in your jewelry box at night? Plus, no one ever got a disfiguring, painful skin infection from a necklace.

So, personally speaking, I don't like tattoos. However, any implication that not having a tattoo means you are an innately more godly girl is obviously untrue, and silly, and a teaching like that shows a really poor grasp of Biblical holiness.

https://theconservativemillennialblog.com/articles/no-men-want-debt-free-virgins-without-tattoos-isnt-biblical/

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Christianity & Homosexuality.

7/20/2018

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The Christian view of sexual ethics is a religious view.

It is built on the claim of Jesus Christ that He was the Son of God. Jesus unconditionally affirmed the divine origin and authority of the Old Testament in its entirety. He said He would not abrogate Moses' Law, but rather every last bit of it would be fulfilled (Matt. 5:17-18). He claimed the Law was prophetic in nature (Matt. 11:13). He built a teaching on the historical existence of Adam and Eve (Matt. 19:1-6).

This is why the LBGT claim that Jesus never talked about, or against, homosexuality is false. Jesus affirmed the five books of Moses. Because Jesus affirmed Moses in his entirety, that means Jesus affirmed each individual law contained in Moses. When Jesus endorsed Moses as a whole, He endorsed all the particular laws contained in it. Christ endorsed Moses' teachings against homosexuality.

So, whenever you debate anything about sexual morality, you are actually debating whether Jesus was God's Son, and whether He rose from the dead. If Jesus was the Son of God, then His authority is unique and absolute on matters of morality. If He wasn't the Son of God, then His was just one more voice among many.

The Christian view of sexuality is actually "worse" than most people know. Right now a battle rages over homosexuality, as if Christians oppose this only. What many people no longer seem to know is that Christianity limits every type of intercourse to heterosexual, monogamous marriage only. Every other form of intercourse is off-limits.

Heterosexual, engaged couples. Formerly-married spouses with each other. Elderly couples living together to avoid the loss of Social Security benefits. Contracts freely entered into with prostitutes. Every act of sexual intercourse outside of heterosexual, monogamous marriage is sin. This is the Christian teaching. It is incredibly rigorous, and all Christians fail it, at least in mind and often in body. But it is still the rule.

That is what I mean by calling the Christian view of sex "worse" than you might imagine. Christ taught we are not even allowed to imagine lustful thoughts about other people (Matthew 5:27-30). So, when we look at Christianity and homosexuality, we should keep it all in the context of the greater whole.

Another key factor in the Christian view of sex, which puts us at extreme odds against U.S. culture, is that none of us are gods.

We are not all-knowing, or all-powerful, or authoritative. We did not create ourselves. We have no authority to decide what is right or wrong. However, because we have become philosophically insane, we teach our children that we create our own morality. This is the way of the sociopath.

In the real world, most people realize that this idea -- that you can just make up your own morality as it suits you in the moment -- leads to violence, crime, confusion, and hypocrisy. Yet we keep on acting as if we think we are gods. We call ourselves masters of our own fate, then shout in outrage when someone else transgresses against us, or against someone we love. We call for justice for the oppressed, but by so doing we are saying that there even is such a thing as "justice", and it should not be violated.

We are hypocrites when it comes to sex. We lament the HIV-caused death of millions of young men, but we won't lament the behavior which caused their deaths. There is justice regarding everything else found in the evening news. We fight against sex trafficking and pedophilia, and we should. We fight against bullying. We oppose the selling of young girls as "brides", which still goes on covertly in some Mormon-dominated areas of the U.S. We oppose the foot-binding of women, and vaginal circumcision.

Then we claim, from out of nowhere, based on nothing, that there are no rules for sex other than consent. Where is it written that "consent" makes something right? We are not gods, not even when we consent. If Jesus Christ says something is morally wrong, who cares about our consent? It would mean we're all freely consenting to doing something that's still wrong, and for which we will pay a harsh price. Our consent is the empty howling of wind in the night.

Christianity upholds the humanity of gay people because Christianity believes in free-will, where "pop" LGBT theories deny free-will, and dehumanizes gays. If a behavior can't be criticized, taught-against, or legally prevented because the person doing the behavior was "born that way", then that is a denial of free-will. And that is a denial of human dignity.

I do not have blue eyes by choice, I was born with them. I have no free-will about the color of my eyes, and so, yes, it would be unjust to punish me for having blue eyes. If a homosexual can't be exhorted to change his or her ways because they were born that way, then that's saying the homosexual has no free-will. But then having no free-will makes them less than human. Christianity, by opposing homosexuality, reflects a high view of the humanness of gay people, because it doesn't believe they are animals or machines.

This denial of free-will, and the personal responsibility that goes with it, opens a door to all sorts of other harm. It would be wrong to criticize rage, because the angry person was born that way. It would be wrong to criticize greed, because the person was born that way. It would be wrong to criticize Obama, or Trump, or any leader, because they were all born in certain ways.

The LBGT denial of free-will (which seems to usually be an implicit or even unaware denial) leads to bad social and legal consequences. But Christianity upholds that we are people, not things. Homosexuality is an ethical behavior, and it is not an involuntary behavior. If it is involuntary, then it counts as a slavery, an addiction, and therefore it is also a self-destructive evil from which many people wish to be freed. Jesus Christ can free them.

Christians are not surprised when people say they have felt certain desires since childhood, because Christians believe that we are all born sinners. We are not born good. We are not even born as blank slates. We are born sinners, and evil feelings -- selfishness, rage, coveting -- rises up out of us spontaneously from our earliest.

Christ taught that evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander, all come from the heart (Matthew 15:19). Not from the physical part of humanity, but from the non-physical part. Of course, Christians believe we have a non-physical aspect to us, which is called our souls. Molecules don't think, feel, or make choices, yet we do all three of those things. Therefore, our reasoning, emotions, and choices come from something other than our molecules. That is the soul.

Christians do not believe human nature is good. The human soul is born fallen, dark, and cut off from God. Evil pumps up through our personalities, like the BP oil pipeline spewing raw crude out into the Gulf of Mexico. Jesus Christ can begin the process of capping it. But only Jesus Christ can cap it.

Our faith and our church opposes sexual sin. Our opposition is based on our belief in the divine sonship of Jesus Christ, and the truthfulness of the Bible. Sexual intercourse should be limited to monogamous, heterosexual marriage, which is the only God-approved form of marriage. We are not gods; we do not get to make up our own morality. Unlike race, homosexuality is a behavior and therefore a choice. We teach that human beings are made in God's image and, though born sinners, still have a degree of free-will. People are sick and dying from every kind of sexual sin, and children are suffering from this perverted, pornographic culture we have created, so we cannot stop teaching that Jesus Christ can save us from every sexual sin.

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