Last year Hillary Clinton told the Women in the World Summit that there was a problem, and that problem is you. Well, it's you if you're religious. "Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will, and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed." Hillary believes that law, resources, and political will have the capacity to change religious beliefs.
The Left is applying constant pressure for the Right to move. Move from where they stand now to where the Left is. (If anyone sees that as an attack on the Left, I should point out that the Right wants the Left to move where the Right is, too. This isn't an insult; this is the way it is.) Like presidential candidate Obama in 2008, the Left thinks we're too entrenched in our religious beliefs. We ought to be more concerned about things like Social Justice and feeding the poor and embracing the homosexual. We ought to go along with modern Science (capitalized because it is the name of a god) and throw away outdated beliefs in Genesis as history or the like. Our whole moral system is backwards, outdated, left behind. "Come into the 21st century!" They seem to think that time and society and pressure ought to be allowed to change religious beliefs.
Several years ago I spoke with a woman who was a Roman Catholic. She was divorced, in another relationship, and explaining to me why she wasn't marrying this other guy. It was, she told me, due to the Roman Catholic Church's views on divorce. If you divorce and remarry, you cannot be part of the church. "They need to change that rule," she told me. Many others have concurred on the topic of divorce and many other topics, such as women in ministry, abortion, homosexuals, etc. People believe that public opinion ought to have a say on what a religion believes, that a vote can be taken among the "faithful", so to speak, and we can change religious beliefs.
Given the constant press from all sides, what are we to do? Do we succumb to laws passed against us? Do we toss out our well-worn Bibles and pick up the new-and-improved Social Justice Christianity? You know, "move with the times"? Do we vote on it? The bottom line question is who gets to decide what our religious beliefs will be?
If we get to decide, be it Hillary's laws and politics or the Left's societal currents or our own vote, there are a lot of possibilities, but one absolute certainty. It isn't God's choice. If religion is something that we decide by whatever means, then it is man-made. This is why I cling so tenaciously to the Word of God. If God establishes something, then it is God-made. Of course, if it is God-made, then not our laws nor our society nor our own personal preferences have anything to say about it, and what God says is what is true. We will end up standing against law, society, and even popular opinion, but we will stand on what is true. That may not always be comfortable, but to deny Scripture and evident reason is neither safe nor wise.
3 comments:
A lie is still a lie, even if everyone believes it to be true.
The truth is still the truth, even if no one believes it.
The child of God, will lay down his/her life for the sake of the kingdom of God.
The child of the world, will lay down the life of the child of God, for the sake of the world.
Hi Stan,
I like the way the Lutheran Confessions treat this issue:
"The Gospel does not overthrow civil authority, the state, and marriage but requires that all these be kept as true orders of God and that everyone, each according to his own calling, manifest Christian love and genuine good works in his station in life.
Accordingly Christians are obliged to be subject to civil authority and obey its commands and laws in all that can be done without sin. But when commands of the civil authority cannot be obeyed without sin, we must obey God rather than men (Acts 5.29)."
-Augsburg Confession, XVI. Civil Government. Last paragraph.
Stan,
I think the difference between left and right is that the left is willing to start with ridicule and move up the spectrum to force in it's desire to make the right conform, while the right believes that persuasion is more effective than coercion. There is also a tendency on the left to equate the perceived will of the majority with being right, which is clearly just tyranny.
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