"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning."
C.S. Lewis
"The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly."
Charles Reznikoff
"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."
G.K. Chesterton
"Humility enforces where neither virtue nor strength can prevail, nor reason."
Francis Quarles
"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."
C.S. Lewis
Resistance Thinking Society
'Society' is a term used to describe a grouping of individuals and outlines the structures employed to ensure that the individuals within a society relate to each other in an appropriate fashion. Different societies may have distinctive cultural behaviours and different institutions. In this society section you will find news, articles and reviews that relate to Australian society, or more specifically, individuals who live in Australia.
Topics in this section will cover: science and technology - stem cell research, IVF, cloning, intelligent design, evolution etc.; politics - ideologies (communism, anarchism, totalitarianism, capitalism etc.), state and federal politics, the free market, the United Nations etc.; sociology - globalisation, prisons, welfare, government; environment - global warming, alternative energy etc.; and moral issues - poverty, homosexuality, euthanasia, abortion etc.
The role of the Christian within society is to stand for truth, for justice and most importantly, to represent God's agenda on the earth. As the Resistance Thinking journey continues, our aim is to stimulate engaging dialogue exploring the complexities of how followers of Jesus should engage with society in our day and age.
"For Christians, the issue of marriage is not merely a legal or constitutional issue. The Bible reveals marriage to be the sacred union of a man and a woman for a lifetime. The goods of marriage are revealed to be intimacy, union, companionship, friendship, procreation, children, and a host of related gifts. Christians must see marriage as essential for human flourishing and not open for human negotiation.
The very fact that the march for same-sex marriage has reached this point is telling. It reveals a fundamental confusion at the very heart of our society. The ideological support for same-sex marriage is deeply embedded in a host of ideas that are driving our society to the point of moral breakdown.
The U.S. Supreme Court may well decide the future of marriage as a legal institution, but the church must hold to marriage as far more, but not less than, a legal reality. Marriage is one of God’s most gracious gifts to humanity. It will be the Church’s responsibility to honor marriage, no matter what the Court may decide....."
One always needs to be careful attaching too much control to institutes who reject God but in this case the Science Youtube channel AsapSCIENCE has hit the nail on the head:
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"US President Barack Obama's administration threw its weight behind gay marriage, urging the Supreme Court to strike down California's ban on same-sex unions.
The court is set to examine the issue on March 26, when it will study the constitutionality of California's Proposition 8, a measure approved by a 2008 referendum that outlawed gay marriage in the most populous US state.
In a separate brief to the court concerning another case, the administration has asked justices to declare the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act - a law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman - unconstitutional...."
Here is an excellent article that presents a very big difficulty to Christians in their dialogues with non-Christians on the same-sex marriage debate. Peter writes in an eloquent style and I'll be looking to highlight his articles in the future.
"I came away from a debate on gay marriage between Douglas Wilson and Andrew Sullivan deeply impressed with the difficulties that Christians have, and will continue to have, defending a biblical view of marriage to the American public. It will take nothing short of a cultural revolution for biblical arguments to be heard, much less to become persuasive.
Sullivan clearly has all the hurrah words on his side – love, happiness, equality. How can anyone stand in the way of true love that seeks lifelong commitment in marriage? Sullivan also has liberal order on his side. When Wilson answered a question by citing the Bible, Sullivan pounced. Wilson’s was a fundamentalist, theocratic argument. Sullivan defined democracy as a system that excludes appeals to religious authority from the foundations of public life. He was quick to add that he is a resolute foe of political correctness, but one wouldn’t have known it from his mercurial move from Wilson’s citation of the Bible to theocracy to the Taliban to warnings about violent suppression of dissent. Sullivan demanded that Wilson defend his position with secular, civil arguments, not theocratic ones, and in this demand Sullivan has the support of liberal polity.
Sullivan’s is a rigid standard for public discourse that leaves biblically-grounded Christians with little to say. The claim that legalizing gay marriage will make the legalization of polygamy easier, as Wilson repeatedly argued, is coherent, but doesn’t have much purchase. Nobody seems to be much worried about a polygamous future for America, and making polygamy the centerpiece of opposition to gay marriage looks too much like fear-mongering.
That leaves Christians with the option of making theologically rich, biblically founded arguments against gay marriage. But do we have the vocabulary ready to hand? And even if we do, does the vocabulary we have make any sense to the public at large?
"Take the proposed amendments to anti-discrimination legislation that define discrimination as anything which "offends, insults or humiliates". Thankfully after a public backlash, the Government conceded it would review the Bill.
Something is wrong when an article on paedophile priests can lead to a complaint that the article vilifies all Catholics, or an article about an assault leads to a complaint that it vilifies the ethnic group the alleged assaulter comes from.
The danger of legislation so broad and flawed is that individuals and groups could use it to silence debate on genuine issues by forcing media outlets into prolonged, and expensive, defences. It is possible, for example, that the reporting of child sex abuse which led to a royal commission could have been greatly curbed in that way."
