Christianity and Modern Gods

What are the gods we deal with today? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I am reading through the church fathers, among other things, and something I am noticing with Tertullian who I am on now is that he has a vast array of knowledge about the gods of the Roman society he lives in. I grew up reading Greek mythology which was claimed by the Romans, but there is still a lot I don’t know about it. Tertullian is familiar with the ins and the outs of the great stories in addition to being familiar with the biblical topics he knows about and the history of Christianity and the Roman Empire.

Nowadays, most people do not believe in those gods. Many people would consider themselves secularists and even many Christians are largely secular in their thinking. That does not mean we are not without gods. Not by a long shot. We have several gods today and these are gods Christians need to know about as well to interact with worshippers of these gods, as there are plenty of such worshippers.

So what are they?

Let’s start with sex. Yes. We all know about sex. A goes into B and sometimes a baby can result. We all know how it works, but what about what it is. We have plenty of debates on this topic. What is the ultimate purpose of sex? Is it something reserved for marriage? Is it to be between a man and a woman?

Then this gets into our personal identity. What is orientation? Is there such a thing? Is there a difference between sex and gender? Is this something that is assigned at birth or is it something immutable that cannot be changed? On one level, we can say the question “What is a woman?” is simple, but on the other, it is something quite deep that we need to get more to an answer on.

Christians definitely need to have a message here. After all, if we aren’t sharing our views on this with our children, the world is and the world will speak loudly. If we do believe sex is reserved for a man and a woman in marriage, how can we tell children this is a great gift while at the same time saying it needs to be reserved for that state? (Something even difficult for we adults who are single again.)

Another god is money. For this, Christians need to study economics. Many of the debates we have in this country are because people are ignorant of economics. We think with our hearts alone and think “If our intentions are good, the results will follow.” Not at all. I am not saying to avoid compassion, but I am saying that to see if a policy works, you don’t ask “How compassionate is it?” but rather “How effective is it?”

Capitalism is often seen as encouraging greed. Is it? Marxism is seen as caring for the poor. Is it? Why did we go to war with Marxism so much in our history? Is Marxism necessarily linked with atheism? Were the early Christians socialist?

As for caring for the poor, what is the best way to help people who are poor? What method has the best results? How should individual Christians care for the poor? Is it wrong for you to buy something really nice for yourself when there are poor people in the world?

Power is another one and this gets into politics. This is definitely here when an election year is going on. Christians need to learn how their government works. Can we tell the three branches of the American government? What is the Constitution? The Bill of Rights? The Declaration of Independence?

How much power should the government have? Should the citizenry be able to have guns and if so, are there any limitations to that? What should we prohibit? What should we permit? What should we promote? What role do passages like Romans 13 play?

What about science? This seems to be the reigning authority today. What is science? Is science necessarily materialistic? Can it answer the God question? Can it answer questions of good and evil? Is it the only way to know anything?

What should we accept in science and what should we not? Is evolution true? If it is, what does this say about our beliefs on Scripture, inerrancy, the existing of God, and the resurrection of Jesus? Can you be a faithful Christian and accept evolution? Can you be a good scientist and reject evolution?

What about modern issues as well like climate change? Is the earth’s climate changing? If so, is that something that would happen anyway or is man responsible? Is there anything that can be done about it either way? What about our response to Covid? What did we get right? What did we get wrong? Can we trust the science or are we even more skeptical?

Christians interacting in our culture need some knowledge on all of this. In addition definitely understand other gods if you are interacting with other systems. We need Christians who understand cults, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, atheism and any other belief system out there.

In all of this, yes, we need to know our Bibles and our history and what we believe and why, but we are interacting with people who speak of other gods. Like good missionaries, we need to know what those other gods are and how to address them. Christians throughout history have had something to say about more than just Christianity. We need to do the same to be effective witnesses in our culture.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Atheist Universe Part 12

Is internet porn a danger? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Up until now, I have considered Mills highly ignorant.

Yet when I got to this chapter, that changed.

Mills has an attitude that is disgraceful to have and highly misogynistic towards women. I do not make such statements lightly. I do intend to back it.

First, why this chapter anyway? Why did he write it? He didn’t just write a chapter about supposedly odd views about sex that Christians have. No. This was about internet porn specifically. This was about men going on the internet with the intention of looking up pictures of women in various stages of undress all the way to completely nude for the purpose of feeding their own lusts and that is okay to Mills. Note I say men specifically since that is the group that Mills focuses on saying girls don’t really have this struggle. Well, they actually do, and a large part of that is because men do as well.

So let’s dive in.

Is there truly a problem of children’s accessing pornography on the internet? And if there is, shouldn’t we, as adults, strive mightily to prevent impressionable children from viewing sexually oriented material intended solely for adults? The answers to these questions are: (1) There is no problem; and (2) We should not strive to “child-proof” the internet.

Mills, David. Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism (p. 193). Ulysses Press. Kindle Edition.

Entirely wrong on both counts. It is extremely hard for women to find men today who are not viewing porn. They are the exception, not the rule, and this is changing the way men think about sex and in turn changing the way women are doing sex and thinking about sex. Men are getting more and more the idea that what they see on the screen is how sex is supposed to be an how women are supposed to look.

Those are airbrushed fantasy and put a real woman next to a fantasy and the fantasy will win. I hate saying that because real women I do think are definitely superior because they are real, but fake women can be whatever the man wants them to be. Today, a man’s first sexual encounter won’t be on his wedding night. It will be in front of a computer screen.

Yes. We need to child-proof the internet. Minors are passing around nude pictures of themselves that in any other hands would be considered child pornography and a crime. A number of them have committed suicide after said pictures have leaked. Women are suffering in the Instagram generation where they think they have to look like the women on Facebook.

But this is just the beginning for Mills.

He goes on to talk about how our young men reach sexual maturity in their teen years and then have to wait several years before they can get married. On this, I agree. This is a problem. Our society has set eighteen as if it is some magical number that suddenly makes a boy a man. It doesn’t. There are several boys who are over eighteen and there are several men who are under, though those numbers are greatly increasing on both sides.

So Mills says:

So economic reality, more than anything else, has crafted our perception that teenage males are “harmed” by sexual preoccupation. Today’s male faces a frustrating gap of approximately ten years between the onset of his sexual maturity and the median marital age. Genetically and hormonally, however, today’s teenage male is unchanged from the day when early teenage copulation was the accepted norm. During this extended gap between puberty and marriage, all teenage males masturbate frequently, and the overwhelming majority of them view pornography as well.

Mills, David. Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism (pp. 197-198). Ulysses Press. Kindle Edition.

In this, there is very little to disagree. It’s his next part that’s the big problem.

Again I pose the question: If, throughout the entirety of human history, teenage males were not “jeopardized” by full penile-vaginal intercourse with their teenage partners, how then are today’s teenage males “endangered” by mere photographs of women?

Mills, David. Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism (p. 198). Ulysses Press. Kindle Edition.

And this I declare is incredibly misogynistic. Mills says “If a man was involved in a relationship with a woman where he was spending his life with her and siring children with her and raising a family with her, then how is looking at photographs a problem? That is hardly a one-to-one parallel. The former requires that a man be a man. It requires that he take responsibility for a woman he has pledged loyalty and faithfulness to. It requires that he work to provide for her and the children that they will have.

Pornography does the exact opposite. It requires that a man not be a man. It does not require the man to take any responsibility. It does not require him to be faithful and loyal to anyone. It does not require him to make any effort to provide for a woman or provide children. The woman in pornography is solely there for the gratification of the man. He doesn’t even have to know her name or anything about her. He doesn’t have to risk himself with her at all.

Yet Mills sees these as parallels.

Unbelievable.

This really tells you how Mills sees women.

Pornography causes young men to see women as just bodies and cheapens sex. I am not at all saying women’s bodies are not beautiful. Thank God they are. I am saying you can’t beat the real thing. It is why even as a divorced man I strive to keep myself porn free so that when I remarry, my then wife will know I only have eyes for her and she doesn’t have to compete with a Rolodex of images of nude women in my head.

Another sad fact is that if Mills’s view is true, then yes, there is nothing wrong with any of this. There is nothing wrong with anything. There is also nothing right with anything. Things just are. That’s it.

Thank God the world is not like that.

Thank God women are real and good in their own right and that sex was a gift He created for us to enjoy in the context of a marital relationship.

We don’t want a cheap thing like Mills does.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

 

Femininity is a Good Thing

Is it good for a woman to be a woman? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I read some of a mystery every day. Yesterday morning, I read this in the one I’m going through now where a female detective is wanting to find out how to get close to a male suspect she wants to question.

“Rob Saunders is obviously a bit of a Casanova. You’re a young, pretty girl. You could use that to your advantage.”
“What? You’re not telling me to seduce him, are you?” cried Ellie.
“Oh, don’t look so shocked. I’m not suggesting that you sleep with him,” said Aunt Olive, clicking her tongue. “But a man like Rob… well, now, he’d be easy to interrogate if you know how to play him.” She saw Ellie’s expression. “Oh, come on, poppet! Calculated seduction is a time-honored tradition in intrigue and espionage! I know it’s not politically correct to say this nowadays, but you can achieve a lot with a suggestive smile and a show of cleavage.”
“Aunt Olive! You’ve just set the women’s lib movement back fifty years or something!”
“Rubbish!” snorted her aunt. “A woman who knows how to use her feminine charms to get what she wants is the one who’s truly empowered.”
I realize some people might think the language here is a bit crude and no, this is not a Christian work, but ultimately, as I read this passage, I had to agree with Aunt Olive in her basic point. The empowered woman is not the woman who tries to deny her femininity. It is the one who knows how to use it properly.
The feminist movement has really been very anti-woman. One of the main problems is that they set up a sort of competition between men and women. Men didn’t have this problem. Women did. Women wanted to be able to focus on a career, not worry about children, and not be seen as a piece of eye candy.
I am not against a woman having a career and not every woman will be a mother. Certainly a woman shouldn’t be treated as an object, but the way women went about these goals was wrong. It was not by being better at what they were, being women, but by trying to in essence not be women and be men.
So a man can have sex and not have to worry about carrying a baby for nine months as a result. No problem. Use birth control and if that doesn’t work, get an abortion. Deny your biological clock (Which men don’t have) and just work at your career and you decide when you want to have a baby, if you ever do. If men can walk around topless, women can too!
It hasn’t worked well for women.
Believe it or not women, if you want to get a real man, a man wants a woman who is a woman. He doesn’t want a woman who is trying to act like a man. He likes the things in a woman that set her apart from men.
That includes beauty.
That beauty is a good thing also. Yes. A woman can do a lot of damage to a man if she misuses her beauty and seduces him into doing things that he shouldn’t. However, she can also use that beauty to greatly inspire and motivate a man.
Consider Jacob in the Bible. When he sees Rachel, he’s immediately impressed by her beauty and when asked what his wages will be, he already knows. He wants Rachel! The text says he worked seven years, but they seemed like a short time because of his great love for her. I can imagine him easily out in the fields working hard and here comes Rachel walking by with a cute smile, the breeze blowing through her hair, the grace of her figure, everything, and Jacob just thinking “Soon.”
Then when the seven years is up (Is Jacob counting down the days), Jacob is awfully brazen and just goes to his future father-in-law and says “I’ve done my work. Give me your daughter. I want to sleep with her.”
That’s what the text literally says! I honestly can’t imagine going up to my former father-in-law on the day of the wedding and saying “You ready to give her up? I’m wanting to sleep with her.”
Now in the story, Jacob had to work seven more years for Rachel, but he did it. Why? Because female beauty is highly inspiring to a man. A man can do things he never would have dreamed of doing before just for female beauty. My ex-wife did cause some major good changes in me just because I was motivated by her beauty, something no one else could do.
Ladies. Keep this in mind also. Perhaps a guy who asks you out isn’t a ten in your minds, but consider this. If he is of good character, go out with him and see what changes can be brought about in him just because he wants you. You can inspire a man to be a man in ways he never was before just because your beauty has that effect on him. (Consider how in the Christmas special, Rudolph flies immediately just because Clarice says she thinks he’s cute.)
It’s the way God made the system. Enjoy it. He knew what He was doing.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Book Plunge: Outdated

What do I think about Jonathan Pokluda’s book on dating? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

In many ways, this is an excellent book. It deals with a lot of myths out there not so much about dating, but about marriage. Naturally, I hate that I have to read dating books again, but lo and behold, I do. Pokluda is a minister who didn’t walk the street and narrow before his conversion and so has made many of the mistakes in the book. Each chapter begins with a brief lie about marriage and then what the truth is.

Throughout, there are generally good insights. An example is that if you are just out there dating just to have fun, that’s what you’re going to get. Dating should not be a hobby. It should be done as a means to an end. When you start dating someone, there are going to be two possible outcomes. You get married or you break up.

One myth he deals with is the idea that you have to find the one who is out there and just right for you. It is a lasting myth many people believe and he cites a NASA scientist who said that if the idea of soul mates were true, 1 in 10,000 people would marry theirs, and I really think that’s likely being generous. We are too often expecting a magic fairy tale scenario.

He also says we have an idea that there is supposed to be a magical spark when we meet someone and we just know. It would be something like a movie where you see that person and all of a sudden you just get spellbound. The reality is there are probably plenty of people you have met who would be wonderful matches for you and you have put them in a friend zone for some reason like that. He mentions people looking for a mystical sign, which I think could easily include God saying “This is the one!” The speaking of the friend zone is his wording, but I want to speak on behalf of many single men out there and say “Hear! Hear!”

Instead, real life and real marriage is hard and when you marry someone, you see their flaws and if you went on a spark, that spark fades away. Then you meet someone else who you have the “spark” with and decide that that person must be the real one you were meant to be with. However, you bring all your same problems with you that you never worked on in the original relationship and before too long, history repeats itself.

Speaking about appearances, he has a great saying that if you can’t cherish someone who loves Jesus, but isn’t that physically attractive to you, that says a lot more about your spirituality than anything else. On the other hand, this chapter did seem to be teaching a lot against “Don’t marry for looks” to which I agree with, but said very little on the role physical attraction plays in a relationship. I agree it is not everything and to think so is shallow, but at the same time, the Bible, specifically when speaking about women, regularly talks about their great beauty.

I also understood what he said about men needing to be initiators in relationships, and I agree, but as someone on the spectrum who has a hard time even asking for a divider at WalMart, easier said than done. On this front, ladies, please let us guys know you are interested in us. What you might think is obvious is not obvious to us.

There are many other topics dealt with in this book such as pornography, living together before marriage, and pre-marital sex. This is really a good book for dealing with a lot of myths that people have and the author wants to see good dating because he wants to see good marriages. He wants a great foundation and it starts with proper dating.

If you’re single, I recommend it.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

How Porn Is Destroying Sex

Will pornography help your sex life? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Last night, I was watching the TimCast IRL show and there was talk about pornography. The claim was made that in Japan, families are now hiring strippers and prostitutes for their sons because their sons are so addicted to pornography that that’s all they do. Folks. I try to verify everything, but after a brief web search, I decided to just grant this one and say even if not true, the situation does make sense.

Fortunately, all I saw in my search was links, but it was clear when all I saw about was hiring sex workers, I figured it was best to move on. I have enough information on this here in America. After all, when listening to talk radio often in the Atlanta area, I would regularly hear commercials for ED medication. There are men in their 20’s taking this kind of medication.

I blame it on pornography.

There have been attempts to do studies of men who watch porn regularly compared to those who do not. The problem is they have only been attempts. In our society, there haven’t been enough men found in the latter category to make a significant contribution to the study.

When I worked at a retail job before I came to New Orleans, I remember the word got out that I don’t watch porn and the women who I worked with were stunned. This included teenage girls naturally who were likely working their first job. A man who doesn’t watch porn?

The problem with pornography is that it takes subjects that are beautiful, sex and the human form, especially the female form, and cheapens them. It makes them common. These are both things that should in the most intimate sense remain private, but it makes them public.

I am mainly going to be speaking about men here, seeing as I am a man. I am not ignoring that this is becoming more and more of a female problem as well. Women also have their own version of porn that they deal with. (Think romance novels) Men are presented with a physical fantasy. Women often get an emotional fantasy.

For men, the problem becomes that we get so hooked onto the fake that we want more and more of it and can’t accept reality anymore. Reality loses its appeal for us. This is why real women can’t compete with porn. It’s not that real women aren’t beautiful. They certainly are! It’s that you can make fantasy be whatever you want.

In movies and TV shows, the hero is always a perfect shot, everyone knows just the right thing to say, and love flows naturally and smoothly. In real life, bad guys can get away because heroes can be bad shots, people say hideously wrong things, and love can have constant blunders, and even sex can have embarrassing moments and sometimes, it’s not the case that both the man and the woman are jumping to go at each other.

We also all tend to go down the path of least resistance. If a man thinks that he cannot coax the lover in his life, be it a wife or girlfriend, into a night of passion, well go and turn on the computer or pick up the phone for a little bit. I’ve thought lately of an analogy of this with the gaming world.

When I was growing up, if you made it to the final boss, for the most part, you had to work to get there. You had to take all the steps right and it required skill. Now, you have save states where you can stop at any time and pick up where you left out. In some ways, this is good for those of us who don’t have time like we used to, but it also makes us not take the game as seriously and play as well. I lost? No biggie. I’ll just start from that same spot again.

Over time, we’re not nearly as good at this and I find I don’t play nearly as well as I used to. The same happens in our relationships. If we can take the easy way, we won’t work so much on what is the harder way. That way is the way of discipline. It is learning how to love your wife better and then learning how to control yourself when things don’t work out. I am not at all saying men should love their wives just to get sex, but in a healthy relationship, that should be happening regularly and men should be putting in the effort to love their wives so both people can be satisfied spouses.

Along the same lines, this is also why social media can easily lead to divorces. I talked to a friend after mine who said he did some research into court cases with divorces and noticed that Facebook showed up a large number of times. When you live with someone, you see in person all their faults and failures and those habits you wished weren’t there. When you talk to someone on a computer, you only see their best. You can turn them into whatever you want and again, reality cannot compete with fantasy.

Fairy tales often end with happily ever after as if the wedding of the couple is the end of the story when it’s the beginning. When Cinderella woke up the next morning, Prince Charming had bad breath. When he woke up in the morning, Cinderella was having a bad hair day.

If we take the easy way of porn, we damage ourselves and our relationships and ultimately, our country and world. Pornography is really a tool to destroy the family unit and if the family falls, so does a nation. If you are a married man, pornography is essentially cheating on your spouse. There’s a reason a woman feels betrayed when she catches her husband hiding a porn habit. She feels like she is not good enough or beautiful enough for him, and why shouldn’t she? She wants to be your one and only when you’ve shown she’s your one of many.

Here’s an idea to consider men. Getting rid of pornography will actually enhance your sex life. It will make it so that every time you see her body, it will be because she trusted you and you earned that honor. It will make it all the more special. You also won’t have to think about all these other scenes you have seen in your head. It’s just you and her.

I have said reality cannot compete with fantasy. There is one distinction.

Reality is real.

It is really happening. This is a real woman showing you her body and trusting you in the most intimate way possible. This is a real woman who can really love you and really have your children with you.

The woman on the screen? She doesn’t really care about you. She doesn’t even know you. She is doing this for just any other guy out there too. (Yes. That OnlyFans girl doesn’t care about you.) That real woman does. She really wants you. She really wants to have a future with you.

Also ladies, please cut your men some slack. He’s not going to do everything men in romance novels do. We men try, but honestly a lot of times we just don’t get it. We bumble and make mistakes and if a man tries to do something, don’t tell him what he did wrong. Appreciate what he did. (Believe it or not, a lot of guys won’t bother to try to load the dishwasher again if when they try, their wife comes over and “corrects” everything and shows them what they did wrong.)

So guys, if you are watching pornography, please get help. Try organizations like ProvenMen or Covenant Eyes. Go find a local Celebrate Recovery.

Since these are Christian ministries, it’s important to remember also that if you are watching pornography, you’re not just hurting yourself and your wife, you’re dishonoring God. You’re treating women he made as objects when you could be investing in a real-life woman who loves you or seeking out such a woman.

Be a real man. Get rid of porn. Go for a real woman instead.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Reply To Honestly By Tom Copeland Part 5

Are all relationships sinful? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Paul writing to the church in Corinth.

So guys, I hear you’ve got a case where you have a man who’s sleeping with his stepmother. Gross! Am I right? But hey, all relationships are going to be hard in life. All relationships have struggles. I want to suggest that all of you just show your love and support to them. Don’t judge them by any means! God can redeem any relationship and He will redeem this one!

Or at least that’s what Copeland’s friend would likely say if he was in Paul’s shoes.

Copeland has a friend who grew up very conservative and now is an Anglican with no condemnation of same-sex relationships. This friend is described as someone who takes Scripture very seriously and knows the Bible very well. His proposal is that instead of looking at same-sex relationships as fine and wonderful, just realize all relationships are sinful. All of them have all of us acting in sinful ways. All of them are used to sanctify us.

Copeland uses an example of him being married to his wife for thirty years, and yet he has been a sinful man many times in that relationship. Anyone who is married can attest to that and anyone who has been married can be. Even if Jesus was married, He wouldn’t have had a perfect marriage because He would have been married to a sinful woman.

Except Scripture doesn’t say all relationships are sinful. It says all people in all relationships are sinners, but the relationships themselves are not always the problem. If all relationships are fallen and we just need grace in all of them, Paul would not have written what he wrote in 1 Cor. 5.

Copeland goes on to say to people in a same-sex relationship that:

The good news here is that even if the scripture does condemn your relationship (and as I’ve said, I’m not sure it does), it doesn’t condemn it any more than any other, and God redeems it.

Copeland, Tom. Honestly – A Book About Sex for Christians . Tom Copeland. Kindle Edition.

Because we know of all those passages that condemn opposite-sex relationships.

Now someone could say “Well what about the situation in 1 Cor. 5? Isn’t that such a relationship?

Indeed, it is, but the problem wasn’t it was opposite-sex. The problem was it was highly incestuous. Not all opposite-sex relationships are approved by Scripture, but not a single same-sex romantic relationship is. I would love to see Copeland try to back the statement he has made here.

Ultimately as Christians though, if Scripture condemns it, we have to as well. Now how we could do that could be wrong. We should realize that a person with same-sex attraction is experiencing a real loss and if they are willing to sacrifice this for the good of the kingdom, we should support them in that and praise them and help them with the struggle, just as we help a single person who is not married.

The rest of this section in this chapter is about the scientific research, which I cannot comment on. On the ethical, I find it all weak. Copeland does not interact with the best Scripture and violates on the ways he says liberals violate. It’s a shame because really, much of the rest of the book is quite good.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

 

Three Killers of Romantic Relationships

What are three things that can bring a romantic relationship to its knees? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

A few days ago I was browsing Facebook and came across a post in a group I am in for Louisiana Singles. (Sadly, no luck for me so far.) The question was asked in the OP about why relationships fail. I thought of three things, one of which was said by most people so let’s go for that one first.

#1. Social Media.

Social media has done a killer job to so many relationships. It starts off innocent enough sometimes. You start looking up an old friend of the opposite sex you went to high school with. Then you’re privately catching up in messages. Then you’re talking about all the times you shared and you’re building up a connection. Then lo and behold, that person is in town and you decide to meet up and you wind up in a hotel room together.

I’m not saying it always happens that way, obviously not, but social media relationships can be destructive. One problem with it is the relationship is built on fantasy. The person you are with at the time, they are real, and you can see all their flaws all too clearly. When you meet someone new, you don’t see those flaws. In essence, you have a person who is for all intents and purposes perfect, and here you have a guy who snores loudly at night or a woman who regularly has bad hair days.

Guess which one wins.

Not only that, the other person isn’t really requiring anything of you. In a marriage, you have to give of yourself and sacrifice of yourself. You have to do things you don’t like. In the new relationship, all you do is have fun together. It sounds perfect and well, this person must obviously be your soulmate. Right?

So let’s move on to #2 with that one.

#2. Bad ideology of sex, marriage, and family.

A soulmate is one example of this. If you go through life thinking that there is just one person for you and it is your job to find this one person, you’ll likely be in for a hard time. It’s a shame so many in the church buy into this thinking. The truth is there are plenty of people you could probably be happy with and have a good and working marriage with.

It’s too easy to go into the marriage and think “What is this other person going to do to make me happy?” and then when they stop doing that, well it’s time to move on. Imagine what it would be like if both partners went in asking “What can I do to make this other person happy?” and both partners lived accordingly. If you go into it thinking it’s all about you, you will not last when that suffering comes, and all relationships have suffering.

If you view marriage as less than a lifetime covenant, it won’t be a shock when you treat it like it’s less than that. If you treat it as common instead of sacred, it won’t be a shock when you can discard it like it’s common. A cheap view of marriage will result and often times, this can include a cheap view of sex, which brings us to #3.

#3. Porn.

It’s so strange that in the thread, I didn’t see anyone else saying this is it? Well, no. It’s not. Most of us find it easy to talk about areas that aren’t a struggle for us. Most pastors wouldn’t do a sermon on gluttony because a lot of their congregation would want to oust them. Actually, some pastors won’t do that because they’re guilty themselves.

It used to be that if you wanted to see porn, you had to go to the magazine stand or you had to go to that room at the video store. In doing so, you would out yourself. No more. Shame has been removed. Now you just have to go to your internet. I realize that if I wanted to, I could type something in the search bar of my browser and before long, I would be looking at porn.

I find that disgusting, but unfortunately, a lot of people don’t share my moral sentiments.

It’s not just a man’s problem either. A lot of women are watching porn. Sometimes, the reasons differ. A lot of men watch porn because, hey, naked women. A lot of women want to see naked men sure, but they are also watching because they think this is what their boyfriends and others expect and so they think they need to know how to please them.

Porn is not reality though. It’s fantasy, and it’s a mistake to treat fantasy as reality. In a movie or a TV show, a love scene always comes out perfectly. No one passes gas at an awkward moment and no one has to put a towel on the bed first and there’s no strange positioning or anything.

Most married couples will tell you the reality can be very different.

Not only that, but if you go for more and more hardcore stuff, it will take more and more to turn you on. Generally, I’d say that the sight of a woman disrobing should always get some response out of a man, but what happens if you can just see that anytime with just a click of a mouse? It will lose its power. There are a number of men on medication for ED who are in their 20’s. Real women can’t arouse them anymore. Honestly men, do you want that to be you someday? Do you even want to risk it?

Get rid of all porn from your lives. Make no allowance for it. It is one of the most destructive evils out there.

I am sure there are more killers, but I see these as the big three. Be cautious with #1, refine #2, and avoid at all costs #3.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Can God Care Without Emotions?

If God doesn’t have emotions, can He care about you and me? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Yesterday, I was browsing Facebook and I saw someone make a post asking how God can care about us if He has no emotions? This idea has been known as impassibility where God has no emotions. It has been the teaching of Christians, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox, up until around the 1800’s.

If you want to respond and say “But look at this text where it says God was moved with compassion or was angry or XYZ!”, then I will tell you “Look at this text where it talks about the hand of God or the eyes of the Lord or any other number of bodily references? Most of us know that those bodily references are not to a real physical body, but they are describing God in ways we can understand. I do the same with the passages about emotions.

How about Jesus? Jesus had emotions in the text! Surely you’re not suggesting that those are just figures of speech are you?

Not at all! Jesus definitely has emotions and had them in his earthly journey and I contend He still has them today. However, if you want to say that means God has emotions, then you have the same problem again. Jesus still has a body and if you want to go this route, then you need to say that God has a body as well. If you want to say because of Jesus, God has emotions, but not a body, then you’re just picking and choosing.

Yet the question still remains. If we accept this, how can we say God cares about us or God loves us? It sounds like a difficult question until we do consider that we regularly do the same thing without emotions.

If you are married and think that the degree to which you love your spouse is dependent on your emotions, then you are going to be in for a hard time. There could be times you have a great degree of negative emotions towards them, such as in an argument, and when you do, you can still say that you love them. When you make a promise to love until death do you part, you do not make a promise to have an emotion. No one can make themselves have an emotion or else we would all make ourselves happy all the time. We can make ourselves act, even when a part of us doesn’t want to. Many of us do that when we get out of bed in the morning.

Too often, we start this also with ourselves. “When I have love, I can have emotion. Why not God?” It’s a mistake to look at us and say “God is like that.” God is not really like anything at all. As Scripture says “To whom can you compare me?” No one. It is really that we are like God. God is said to be the Father from whom all fatherhood comes. It’s not that a man can say “I am a father and I can see God is like that.” It’s really “God is a Father, and I am somewhat like Him.”

God loves us and God cares for us and that is not because He has an emotion, but because that is who He is. God is not loving, but rather God is love. God does not act and then develop an emotion, as if He was a changeable being in time. God consistently acts out of His nature.

We can say all day long “I don’t understand how that works,” but why should that matter? We can go to our churches and say that we believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. Is anyone going to stand up and say that you understand entirely how that works? If we think we understand God, then we have a really small God, hardly one worthy of worship.

Also, if one wants to question impassibility and simplicity and other doctrines, that is fine, but we have to ask why. If there is a consistent line that goes from the early church to modern times accepted by all three branches, what did we discover that they did not know? Before we take down a fence, we should see why it was put up in the first place.

God can have love towards us and have compassion towards us without emotion. Is that hard for me to understand? Of course, but what of God is easy to understand?

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Doing No Harm

Is doing no harm a sufficient moral principle? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Often today, we don’t hear about if an action is good or evil. We hear about if it is harmful or not. Now, causing harm is one aspect to consider in morality, but it is not the only. When it comes to the idea of redefining marriage, part of the question asked is “Well who is it hurting?”

For one thing, changing the meaning of marriage for anyone changes it for everyone. Everyone’s marriage is shifted to not a union designed to bring about children for the prolonging of civilization, but rather to a sort of union from two people who are committed to one another. By this standard, we could say that two roommates could be married or a brother and sister who choose to live together are married or a son who brings his mother who is a new widow into his home are married.

However, while those are important situations to bring up, why not go back and question this principle about not harming anyone. Consider the scenario of a peeping Tom for example. he has found a peephole outside of a showering area where he can stand and watch naked women shower. He is never caught and the women never have any idea they are being watched? Are any of them being harmed? If not, then can we say this is wrong?

Consider also a dentist who has a private practice. To keep costs down, he doesn’t even have a secretary. He works alone and makes all his appointments. From time to time, beautiful women come in and he has to put them under for surgical operations. What they don’t know is that sometimes when they are unconscious, he undresses them and fondles them. The women never get pregnant and so never find out about what he’s done. Has he done any harm?

If you’re a Christian or even most any other kind of theist, you could say this man has damaged his standing before God in each case and so he has done harm at least to himself. He has lowered himself from being what a human being ought to be to being something less. If you are a secularist though, you do not have this option.

Not only that, but we know that there are times that causing harm is the good thing to do. I have a friend who just had a quadruple bypass operation. Right now, he is still in a lot of pain. I have told him some about my having scoliosis surgery and how I too was in a lot of pain and understood what that was like. In both cases, our doctors harmed us and left us with tremendous pain. The thing is, we knew this would happen and we went through it willingly and even paid our doctors for it. Why? Because we were not being harmed to be harmed. We were being given some degree of harm in order to get a greater good.

Another example is telling a loved one a hard truth. Sometimes, this is very harmful to the person for the immediate and short-term, but it is good in the long run. Again, consequences are not all that is to be considered, but they are a part of this. Consequences alone are insufficient. We need to look at the action, who is doing it, and why they are doing it.

No one being harmed by itself is insufficient. By this standard, the Peeping Tom and the dentist are both okay. By a Christian standard, they are in the wrong because they are lowering themselves as human beings and actually in the long run making themselves more likely to be the people who will take further steps to do actual visible harm to others.

Our moral thinking needs to go deeper than just utilitarianism. We need to look at who we are and why we do what we do.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)

Divorce And Rejection

On what level is divorce experienced as rejection? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I was talking with a good friend of mine over the weekend about divorce and rejection and I figured this would be something good to write about. Divorce is a form of rejection indeed, but there is a deeper sense of it than any other kind that I know of. Divorce is a rejection that stings every day.

I understand being rejected by the opposite sex. That happens, and it stings, but the worst part of this rejection is that in this case, you have given everything you have to a member of the opposite sex and made a promise to honor them and have been living it out and you still get told it’s not enough. This is not to say there are not times where divorce can be a sad necessity, but this is talking about people like myself who strived every day to honor our vows.

I remember being in DivorceCare and hearing a girl say “Well, when the person who made a promise to you to honor and cherish you always breaks that promise, other rejections really don’t bother you.” Good for her, but I was on the opposite end. For me, every rejection reminds me of that one.

It is something that remains with you every day. I had an interview for a scholarship opportunity here over the weekend and in talking about it since the man wanted my story, and he told me if I wanted to know who all tends to hate divorce the most, the answer is simple. Divorced people. He’s absolutely right. We hate it.

Rejection is painful because you are being told you are not up to quality in some way. It hurts to the degree that the person has a place in your life. If it’s someone you have a crush on and ask out and they say no, it will hurt to the degree that you put a certain amount of hope in that person. If it’s a parent or family member, it will hurt to the degree that you wanted to have a good relationship with that person.

A divorce hurts you to the degree that that relationship meant to you. Considering it’s someone that you, if you’re in a Christian marriage, made a promise to God and man to honor forever, it can hurt all the more since this is the last relationship that should have ended. It was entered in freely with a promise and it has become shattered.

Peter Kreeft has said divorce is like a suicide and a murder at the same time. You take the one-flesh union that has been built and you kill it. It is destroying another person, the other one in the covenant, and yourself as well. Of course, it’s up to the parties involved how they choose to live from that point on.

For all concerned about me, as I said in the interview, I am still playing to win. It’s why I’m still looking to remarry again someday. It hurts every day, but it’s up to me if I am going to have the hurt conquer me or if I am going to conquer it. I have deliberately chosen to do the latter. My writings on this are mainly to let others know what it’s like and to encourage those in this situation.

When you talk to people who are divorced or going through it, remember what you say. The only people who really understand it are the ones who have gone through it. Others can have compassion, but it will be one that doesn’t see what it’s fully like through no fault of their own, and hopefully, they never will see it.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)