Throughout history, Christians have faced demands to be silent. Throughout history, they refused. In Live Not By Lies: a Manual for Christian Dissidents, blogger and author Rod Dreher thinks Christians in the West are entering a season where we will not only have to decide whether we will be silent; we will have to decide whether we will allow ourselves to be forced into going along with what is not true, with lies.
Philosopher R. J. Snell notes that such tolerance has become highly intolerant in recent years. In fact, our culture has devolved to the point that it condemns any perspective which represses an individual’s instinctual desires.
In what could be the motto for our day, Hamlet claimed, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” We have been taught that “truth” is the result of our subjective interpretation of our subjective experiences. Your mind processes your senses differently than my mind processes mine. As a result, there can be no such thing as objective truth, only “your” truth and “my” truth. The fallacy of this reasoning becomes apparent the moment we recognize that those who reject absolute truth do so absolutely.
One of the most helpful frameworks I know of in wrestling with moral issues comes from T.S. Eliot. Before we can know what to do with something, we must know what that something is for.
Scientists who assume that human exceptionalism is a religious hang-up will see any animal spotted resembling human behavior as evidence that there’s nothing exceptional about humans. This same commitment to disproving human exceptionalism is also at work in the search for extraterrestrial life. The view that best corresponds to reality is the Biblical view, described by the audacious proclamation of Psalm 8, that humans were created “little less than God ... and crown[ed] with glory and honor,” and the audacious job description described in Genesis, that humans have “dominion” over all creation, including the “birds of the air.”
Coronavirus deaths in the US are beginning to rise again, with average deaths across the country up 10 percent over the past two weeks. Pandemic fatigue is a major factor. The Wall Street Journal reports that “a tired public lets its guard down, triggering more infections and restrictions that in turn compound the fatigue.”
Therein lies my point: The greater our challenges, the more necessary our courage.
A recent survey has found that nearly a third of self-described evangelicals do not believe that Jesus Christ is truly God.
According to the eleventh report of the annual American Worldview Inventory 2020, 44 percent of believers think the Bible is "ambiguous" on abortion.
Consistent with the relativistic claim that truth claims are subjective and personal, Justice Ginsburg advocated a view of the US Constitution as "living" and thus subject, as Justice Antonin Scalia derisively noted, to "whimsical change by five of nine votes on the Supreme Court." Such "whimsical change" discovered a "right" to abortion in 1973 and to same-sex marriage in 2015.
How are we to understand justice and self-defense through the lens of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount? Well, the idea is to do what you can to reach a person with the gospel, and sometimes that means taking a hit and turning the other cheek.
