Why Christians are Idiots

Yes, I realize that you people aren't reading this blog anymore, but I hate TweetLonger and some things that need to be said are probably not as Pyro-Worthy as others.

Earlier today (maybe last night even), Collin Hansen let us know what he thinks about the Chic-fil-A social carnage:

The world gave the SBC grief over boycotting Disney. Then decided to imitate these intimidation tactics. Go figure.
— Collin Hansen (@collinhansen) July 26, 2012

Which, of course, is just barely right.  A little laters this morning, Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit fame instead blogged this:

JULY 26, 2012

BOSTON GLOBE: Stop Picking On Chik-Fil-A. “If the mayor of a conservative town tried to keep out gay-friendly Starbucks or Apple, it would be an outrage.” Except that doesn’t seem to happen, does it? What I think is funny is that if you have the same view on gay marriage that Obama had when he was elected, now you’re an enemy of humanity or something. It’s some sort of, I don’t know, Liberal Fascism or something. . . .

Posted by Glenn Reynolds at 8:43 am

Now, think about this for a second. What InstaPundit is saying is this: Conservative politicians on the local level lead by example and don't try to go die on hills that don't matter.  An Apple Store or a plethora of Starbucks shacks are probably good for the local economy, and letting one open someplace properly zoned is a good ideaer.

What Collin is saying is that the SBC had a good ideaer by boycotting Disney and the world persecuted them for it -- and now the world is using the same tactics. "Go Figure."

What Collin seems to miss, it seems to me, is that the SBC chose a hill to die on which didn't work at all and made them look utterly petty and stupid -- and now that the World is imitating these tactics, and is now looking petty and stupid.  And our response to them looks, at best, staged when we say that this boycott is bad but our boycott is good.

You know: if only Christians had something to teach the rest of the world when it comes to finding a solution to culture.  Then we would really have something worth getting worked up about.

A Quick Question for 9Marks

Gentlemen --

Even your tweets make me happy.

"Stop calling yourself a Christian if you're making a habit of living independently from the local church." JonathanLeeman @9Marks Portland.
— Mark Dever (@MarkDever) July 24, 2012

Look: that said, you have published an archive of books and pamphlets that frankly instruct anyone who wants to know how to do it regarding how to have a healthy and Christ-centered church.  I own them all.  I recommend them to anyone who has a question even remotely related.  There is nothing about them, as far as I'm concerned, not right.

Here's the problem we have today in English-speaking Christendom, as highlighted by this tweet from Dr. Dever from the much-esteemed Jonathan Leeman: people say they can't find a decent local church.  That is: they can't find one, if we stick to the confessional lingo, where the admixture of error isn't in fact the predominant feature of the congregation.  If there are 9Marks for s healthy church, they would say that all the churches they have visited locally are scoring below 4 good marks, and probably below 3.

As a person who thinks these claims are over-rated, but also as a person who has to drive 40 minutes one way to get to the church where I think the elders (because they have elders and not a CEO) have a real spiritual concern for my family and all the families in the church, how does the maxim blurbed via twitter, above, speak to the reality of the sick state of English-speaking evangelicalism and the near-absence of decent local churches?

Thanks much for the consideration!

Well, Because they said so, I guess

Today I read this piece from Slate.com about, well, you have to read it to believe it.  It's about whether or not the paternal human parent of a fetus ought to be forced by law to share the medical costs of prenatal development with the maternal human parent burdened with gestation.

Well, they put it this way:

... given new technologies that allow very early, safe paternity tests, why shouldn’t the father of the baby-in-progress be responsible for medical and other costs during pregnancy? ... “Preglimony names and in that way honors the man’s role in caring for his pregnant lover. A man and a woman who conceive are intimately connected. They are not spouses, and they may not even continue to be lovers, but they are not strangers either.”

"Preglimony."

Now, look: our secular society has spent the last 100 years trying to decouple the idea of shame from sexual sin all the way to the place where today even marriage is seen as obsolete because we just don't think about the enduring consequences of family relationships any more -- and that has, of course, caused the illegitimacy rates in our society to skyrocket from below 10% in 1940 to 40% in 2007 (source).

But now, what?  Because we don't have any shame or innate sense of personal responsibility to the lives we create though recreational sex, the law should come in and force anyone to do anything toward the consequences of those actions?

I have said this before: the only thing the (human) law can really do is be a trailing indicator of what people in a society are prone to do.  If most people are prone to do "X" and then "X" is made to be illegal, either the state has to implement totalitarian control over  "X" (which will create a black market for "X") or else the state has to concede that it cannot control "X" and those laws must be repealed.  Human Law only works when the citizen over which it rules are generally inclined to obey it.

That's why Prohibition didn't work.

But here, after a century-long campaign to do away with the virtues which create paternal responsibility by doing away with sexual moral shame, suddenly we find out that we are better off when men behave like men?  And now we want the Law to fix it?

How?