Society Determines Morality and Much Biblical Morality is Unacceptable Today

Comment: Do you believe there is an absolute morality? It appears that in the days that we live society determines morality, and it has changed quite a bit from biblical times. There is no commandment against child abuse. Very little is mentioned in the bible that protects children. But, children need special protection because they are vulnerable. There are tribal wars in the bible and ordered killing of women, children, and babies in the bible. And there are many other acts and principles that we do not accept as moral today.

Response: If there is no absolute morality then any moral judgment you make about God or the Bible or others is incoherent. If there is no objective morality, then why is our view wrong? If all morality is relative then no one's morality is better than another's, just different. Better implies an absolute standard you are appealing to. So you cannot consistently say someone else's morality is wrong unless you can show me how you know this? Either it is your personal preference or you are getting it from some ultimate authority?   Continue at John Hendryx

The End of Morality Laws? Not Exactly

Does the legalization of same-sex marriage and polygamy mean the end of all morality laws? George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley thinks so, and he openly celebrates the death of all morals legislation—or, at least he says he does.

Turley was the lead counsel in the “Sister Wives” case in Utah that legalized polygamy in that state last month, a reversal of the very morals legislation that the U. S. government required of Utah for that territory to be admitted as a state in the late nineteenth century.

Here is how Professor Turley explained the case:  Continue at Al Mohler

Lil’ Wayne, Pepsi and Twisted Sexuality

Last month, Pepsi Co. broke ties with the rapper Lil’ Wayne over controversy stemming from a song released on his most recent album titled “Karate Chop.” In the tune Wayne describes beating a woman in a sexual act until part of her body “looks like Emmitt Till.”

Till was a young African American killed in Mississippi in 1955. Originally from Chicago, he was visiting relatives for the summer. At some point, Till allegedly whistled at a white married woman named Carolyn Bryant who proceeded to tell her husband of Till’s actions. Her husband, Roy Bryant and a friend, J.W. Milam proceeded to track Till down, nab him at gun point and drag him to a barn where they beat him mercilessly before shooting him in the head. The men then threw Till’s body in the Tallahatchie river where it was discovered by some boys fishing a few days later.

Till’s mother was so distraught and outraged that she had her son’s body transported to Chicago where she insisted Emmitt be given an open-casket funeral. His mother’s wishes were carried out and Till’s partially decomposed and grossly disfigured face was displayed at the service. The incident was published in the paper along with the photo of Till’s swollen corpse.

The men who murdered Till were later acquitted and the case became one of many that fueled the civil rights movement in America.   Continue at Ryan Rindels

IMAGE

Crucifying Morality

No one could possibly claim that the Beatitudes (see Matthew 5:1-12) are overlooked or underappreciated. They have been the subject of countless books and sermon series. But this is not to say that the Beatitudes have been widely understood and properly taught. As often as not they have suffered from moralization, reduced to the level of the fortune cookie and with all the spiritual power of a fortune cookie.

In Crucifying Morality, R.W. Glenn takes a new look at the Beatitudes saying, Maybe you “were taught that the Beatitudes were the highest form of morality that anyone could live by, and you know now how impossible they are. Or maybe you experienced the flannelgraph version of the Beatitudes.” If that is the case, “maybe it is time to get unfamiliar. Maybe you need to read these verses with fresh eyes for the first time. Whatever your exposure to the Beatitudes has been, you probably think of them as less powerful and captivating and helpful than they are. Take a step back to see how breathtakingly radical their real message is.”

The fact is that:   Continue at Tim Challies

The Millennial Generation's Acceptable Sin

Every human institution and society has its own list of sins and virtues that contradict the law of God. With the rise of the Millennial generation in evangelical churches, a vice is creeping up into the realms of acceptance, indifference, or at least resignation: fornication (i.e. extramarital sex or unchaste living).

A few decades ago, this was one of the main issues that evangelicals hammered in their social witness. The skeptical news cycle and entertainment industry mocked this often; they saw pleas for chastity as a laughable result of pietistic sexual repression and no small bit of hypocrisy. Theological leaders and other influential voices chided their fellow believers for obsessing over a select set of sexual taboos.

Now, however, the exhortations have eased off. Commentary from Tim Keller at the latest Q Conference in New York is quite telling. "We're not doing well on the sex side," he confessed. Talking about his church, Keller said, "We're just like the rest of the city. If I preach like that [on sexual ethics], everybody gets real quiet."

Similarly, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy discovered 80 percent of unmarried evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 29 had engaged in sex. Using a more stringent definition of "evangelical," the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) recently reported that 44 percent of millennial evangelicals had sex outside marriage. Of course, just because Christians oppose sexual immorality does not mean they never struggle with it. Nevertheless, in this sort of moral environment, harping on moral sex lives is analogous to starting an abolitionist church in the antebellum South. Thanks to the public liturgy of Hollywood and our own human inclinations, fornication has been normalized and poses a massive obstacle to effective pastoral ministry.   Continue at Barton Gingerich

Is Morality Real?

There are 4 reasons to believe that Morality is real:

1. All people have a sense of morality.
2. No real truth can be subjective.
3. Everyone responds to injustice.
4. Morality is not unknown.

1. All people have a sense of morality.

-All recorded cultures have standards even though each has their own variations.
-Without even knowing what good and evil is, the individual knows there is something they ought to do and ought not to do. 

As Frank Turek puts it:

“…Why do most human beings seem to have that same intuitive sense that they ought to do good and shun evil? (1)

The fact that everyone has some sense of morality (on the cultural and individual level), leads us to believe there are transcendent ethics which we all pull from.

2. No real truth can be subjective.

If morality were just a set of different beliefs held by each individual, there would inevitably be contradictions between them. The fact there people do get into disagreements about what is right, instead of naturally doing what is right all the time, is evidence of that. Because there are disagreements however, this show one of two things about morality (if indeed it is real):

1) It is either illogical or
 

2) There is an objective standard that is true

The problem with the first is obvious. There is nothing in reality that is shown to follow non-logical patters. No matter what idea is claimed, it has to fit into reality.

With the second however, there is room left for individual error. The faults of individuals have no impact on the objective standard; just as opinion of if a room is 65° or 75° has no impact on the thermometer reading 70°.

Though even when a person denies that logic is real, as Jason Lisle says:   Continue at Shrewd Dove Apologetics

Why Republicans Will Never Win Big Again

I was born during the Carter administration when America's moral was at it's lowest, but remember my childhood during the Reagan years. I grew up believing America was good and descent and that we had a bright future ahead of us. My teen years were lived out during the Clinton years where I figured out that the moral conscience of America had been very corrupted, but there was hope if we could get another Reagan in office again. We thought Bush was that guy. I spent most of my adult years under the Bush Administration that left me disillusioned because a clever politician was able to play us Christians for fools by saying that Jesus was his favorite philosopher and we fell for it. I'm not sure if Bush 43 is really Evangelical or not, but I know that he spent more money than any other Democrat president before him and with his optimistic naive idealism, he got us involved in two wars in Muslim countries thinking that those people were actually capable of self-governing under a free democratic society.

Now, we have a president with worse moral convictions than Carter and worse economic record than Carter and Americans vote to keep him for four more years. I thought that Americans were more motivated by their pocketbooks than anything else, I guess I was wrong. How does a country that has suffered under 12 years of liberal fiscal policies (that includes the Bush years too) vote for four more of them when our economy is on the brink of collapse and total ruin?  Continue at Reforming Baptist

See Also:

I Grieve for the United States

Christians, Let’s Honor the President

In Light of the Election: Live the Gospel

When God Judges A Nation

How I Absorbed Three Punches and Stood Up Anyway

On God’s Election of Obama

The Day After: My Thoughts on the Presidential Election

Post-Election Reflections: One Pastor's Dilemma

The Meaning of the 2012 Election

God gave them over

Sorting Out the Election Aftermath

The People Have Spoken-- What Should Christians Do Now?

Five Responses to President Obama’s Reelection

What conservative surprise about Obama’s re-election says about conservatives

Dear Post-Election Self

Aftermath: Lessons from the 2012 Election

The Only Hope For America

What Christian Modesty Looks Like

We live in a world that is very concerned about how women dress. But we live in a culture that is not at all concerned about immodesty. C. J. Mahaney describes immodesty this way: “Immodesty, then, is much more than wearing a short skirt or low-cut top; it’s the act of drawing undue attention to yourself. It’s pride, on display by what you wear.” And that can be pride in your looks, your taste, or your purchasing power.  

 

Often, Christian women are motivated to modesty by a fear of causing lust and fear of display. But that is an unChristian understanding of modesty. It is so easy for modesty to merely external, and to fall into legalism because our clothing is not an expression of a heart that is in love with Christ and seeks to bring good to other people. Modest clothing is motivated by a desire to bring God glory and to bless others.

John MacArthur asks, “How does a woman discern the sometimes fine line between proper dress and dressing to be the center of attention? The answer starts in the intent of the heart. A woman should examine her motives and goals for the way she dresses. Is her intent to show the grace and beauty of womanhood?…. Is it to reveal a humble heart devoted to worshiping God? Or is it to call attention to herself, and flaunt her…beauty?  Or worse, to attempt to allure men sexually? A woman who focuses on worshiping God will consider carefully how she is dressed, because her heart will dictate her wardrobe and appearance.”   Continue at The Christian Pundit

What is Morality Other Than Harm?

Is morality limited to questions of direct harm? That question is not just a matter of moral theory — it also informs our most urgent political and cultural debates. Back in May, columnist Eric Zorn of The Chicago Tribune asserted: “To me, immoral conduct is that which harms others, period.”

That seems to be a straightforward statement, especially in light of its context. Zorn was writing a column in which he dismissed common arguments against same-sex marriage. I his concluding section he argued, “I will not debate the morality of various forms of private sexual conduct between consenting adults and neither should our lawmakers.” Since no one is harmed, Zorn argues, there is no real moral issue with respect to the sexual activities of consenting adults.

Related Posts

• Assisted Suicide and the “Balance of Harm”
• The Morality of Knowledge
• Morality, Hollywood Style (Audio)
• When Morality Collapses — The Therapeutic Evasion (Audio)
• Methodists, Mascots,and Morality — What’s Going On Here?

In truth, a good many people agree with him. His logic is encapsulated in the 2003 U S. Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas that invalidated all laws against homosexuality. I am fairly confident that the vast majority of Americans would be tempted to accept Zorn’s argument, and younger Americans especially. My guess is that this would include many Christians, especially younger Christians.

Is Zorn right? There is certainly wisdom in his acknowledgment that harm to others, and particularly any intentional harm, is immoral. The problem is the restriction of his definition to others as understood in a radically individualist scheme. If we restrict morality to that which directly causes harm only to specific persons, we will eliminate an absolutely essential moral horizon — the community of which individuals are a part.     Continue at Al Mohler

Orthodoxy Leads to Orthopraxy

Claiming that Scripture is true and complete should preclude evangelicals from turning to other sources for establishing thought and life.  Yet many do just that.  In cosmology, for example, a straightforward reading of Genesis 1-2 is often dismissed on the basis of modern evolutionary theories.  In apologetics, philosophy and human reason frequently take precedence over Scripture.  And in church growth, demographic surveys, marketing techniques, and a man-centered theology with a watered-down gospel override clear biblical truth.

To this list, the subject of morality and ethics must be added.  Instead of looking to the Bible, many professing Christians look to psychology and sociology for supposed solutions to personal needs and social ills.  The rise of postmodern thought has similarly skewed the church’s understanding of right and wrong - as an unbiblical tolerance (in the name of love) has weakened churches to the point where they are as soft on truth as they are on sin.  Popular television shows, from Oprah to The Tonight Show to the average sitcom, have had a tangible effect (and not for the better) on how American Christians think through everyday issues.  The political arena, too, has played a major role in shaping an evangelical understanding of morality, as words such as Republican and Democrat or liberal and conservative have come to redefine the difference between what is good and what is evil.

The fact is the far too many professing Christians live their lives, day in and day out, on the basis of something other than the Bible.  As a result, their priorities reflect the world’s priorities, not God’s.  Their patterns of behavior and their plans for future differ only slightly from those of their unsaved friends and neighbors.  Their expenditures reveal that their perspective is temporal, and that they are vainly pursuing the elusive American Dream.  Continue at John F. MacArthur

Legalism or Obedience?

Try to imagine it. You are playing a game of Monopoly, and your opponent throws a ten with the dice. Then he picks up his player marker and begins counting his steps. Immediately you realize he will land on the corner — “Go to Jail!” Well, he doesn’t want to land there, so he stops just one step short, on New York Avenue. Immediately you cry foul. But he responds indignantly, “I only stopped one step short. What’s the difference? Don’t be such a legalist!”

Will you feel ashamed? Will you now feel that you have been too persnickety and legalistic? Too careful to obey the rules? Or will you feel that you have been cheated?

To make the point another way, I have never yet met a parent who complained that his child was a legalist because he obeyed too much. In fact, it would be impossible for any parent to imagine how his child could obey too much.

Yet, find a Christian who is careful to obey God in everything, and we won’t have to look far to find another Christian to call him a legalist. What do we make of this?

It’s a word we all hate, but exactly what is legalism? Legalism is that attempt to establish or maintain a right standing with God by means of our own efforts. The Jews of Paul’s day, for example, thought they could be saved by keeping the law. Anyone claiming to be Christian knows better than that, but even among believers there is sometimes found that attempt to maintain a right standing with God by means of personal efforts. They seem to think that having been saved by grace they must maintain that salvation by works. Legalism.

Still more broadly the term is also used of those Christians who insist on extra-biblical standards of behavior and judge godliness accordingly. For some it is zippers instead of buttons. No hair touching the ears for men. No jewelry for women. No slacks for women. No movies. No playing cards. And so on it goes. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. Extra-biblical standards of behavior are used to measure godliness. Legalism.   Continue at  Fred G. Zaspel

Pornopoly

By the time the couple made it to my office, their marriage was already chaos. She had cheated on him, he had cheated on her, and neither seemed remorseful. The problem, as they saw it, was that the other was not satisfying them. The problem, as I saw it, was that they had each spent years consuming pornography. Frequently subjecting their minds to perverse pictures had created a pattern of thinking and of arousal. And my counselees are hardly the only ones in this predicament.

The sexual climate of our culture is dominated by the pornographic. The way most people think about sexual expression is tainted by lubricity. True sexual morality is seen as inane and archaic. Sex and sexuality are governed by the immoral, and the pornographic mindset has cornered the market on all sex. In short: we live in a Pornopoly.

This monopoly has affected everything from sex education in schools, to clothing styles for pre-teens, to the expectations of married men and women in their bedrooms. The porn problem is not contained to adolescent boys and their computers in mom and dad's basement. It has spread, like a rapacious plague, across our culture and even into the church. Porn controls much sexual expression and sexual discussion in our culture.

For example: porn has deeply affected the way men relate to women. The average single man watches porn for 40 minutes, three times a week. That's two hours a week, and 104 hours per year. The average male views porn for the first time at age 11, which means by the time he is 30 he will have watched almost 2,000 hours of pornography. For the average man in a relationship it is only slightly different. A married man, or man in a steady dating relationship, will watch porn 1.7 days a week for 20 minutes. Perhaps more alarming, 90 percent of men watch pornography. William Struthers talks about how this prolonged exposure to porn affects relationships. In his book Wired for Intimacy, he writes:   Continue at Dave Dunham

Veggie Tales: “Morality, not Christianity”

VeggieTales “convinced kids to behave Christianly without actually teaching them Christianity.” So says founder Phil Vischer in a new interview.

VeggieTales was a rags-to-riches entrepreneurial success story. Vischer and his counterpart, Mike Nawrocki, left college to pursue their dream of making wildly creative children’s videos. At the height of their success in the late 1990s, VeggieTales videos sold 7 million copies in a single year and generated $40 million in revenue. Though primarily aimed at a Christian market, VeggieTales had a broader cultural influence, pushing forward the boundaries of computer animation and children’s programming.

But success brought failure. Though Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber are still around, they aren’t the same. Big Idea Productions went bankrupt in 2003 and Vischer lost ownership and creative control of the whole enterprise. VeggieTales is no longer VeggieTales. The characters still exist – and in some cases are even voiced by Nawrocki and Vischer as hired talent – but the decisions are now made by studio execs who don’t share the vision or worldview of the original founders.

In a recent issue of WORLD magazine, Vischer acknowledged to interviewer Megan Basham that the bankruptcy and subsequent trials have given him perspective. His words reveal a man who’s beginning to see the difference between moralism and the gospel. And a man humble enough to acknowledge his role in confusing the two:  Continue at Bob Thune

The Problem of Evangelical Biblical Illiteracy

For well over twenty years now, Christian leaders have been lamenting the loss of general biblical literacy in America. No doubt you have read some of the same dire statistics that I have. Study after study demonstrates how nearly everyone in our land owns a Bible (more than one, in fact) but few ever take the time to read it, much less study it closely. Indeed, while the Exploring Religious America Survey of 2002 reports that over 84 percent of Americans consider the Bible to be "very" or "somewhat important" in helping them make decisions in life, recent Gallup polls tell us that only half can name even one of the four Gospels, only a third are able to identify the individual who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and most aren't even able to identify Genesis as the Bible's opening text. 

Upon hearing these figures (and many more are readily available), some among us may be tempted to seek odd solace in the recognition that our culture is increasingly post-Christian. Perhaps these general population studies are misplaced in holding secular people to Christian standards. Much to our embarrassment, however, it has become increasingly clear that the situation is really no better among confessing Christians, even those who claim to hold the Bible in high regard. Again, numerous studies are available for those seeking further reason to be depressed. In a 2004 Gallup study of over one thousand American teens, nearly 60 percent of those who self-identified as evangelical were not able to correctly identify Cain as the one who said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" and over half could not identify either "Blessed are the poor in spirit" as a quote from the Sermon on the Mount or "the road to Damascus" as the place where Saul/Paul's blinding vision occurred. In each of these questions, evangelical teens fared only slightly better than their non-evangelical counterparts. 

These numbers serve to underscore the now widespread recognition that the Bible continues to hold pride of place as "America's favorite unopened text" (to borrow David Gibson's wonderful phrase), even among many Christians. As a professor of New Testament studies at Seattle Pacific University, I know this reality only too well. I often begin my survey of the Christian Scriptures course by asking students to take a short biblical literacy quiz, including questions of the sort mentioned above. The vast majority of my students--around 95 percent of them--are Christians, and half of them typically report that they currently attend nondenominational evangelical churches. Yet the class as a whole consistently averages a score of just over 50 percent, a failing grade. In the most recent survey, only half were able to identify which biblical book begins with the line, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Barely more than half knew where to turn in the Bible to read about the first Passover. Most revealing in my mind is the fact that my students are generally unable to sequence major stories and events from the biblical metanarrative. Only 23 percent were able to order four key events from Israel's history (Israelites enter the promised land; David is made king; Israel is divided in two; and the people of Judah go into exile), and only 32 percent were able to sequence four similarly important events from the New Testament (Jesus was baptized; Peter denies Jesus; the Spirit descends at Pentecost; and John has a vision on the island of Patmos). These students may know isolated Bible trivia (84 percent knew, for instance, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem), but their struggle to locate key stories, and their general inability to place those stories in the Bible's larger plotline, betrays a serious lack of intimacy with the text--even though a full 86 percent of them identified the Bible as their primary source for knowledge about God and faith.   Continue at David R. Nienhuis

Can We Prove the Existence of God?

Can we prove the existence of God? What exactly does it mean to prove something? What would count as a proof of God's existence? To explore these questions, let's consider one popular argument for God's existence and test it against some different criteria for proofs. Here's the argument:

1. If God does not exist, there are no objective, culture-transcending moral duties.
2. There are objective, culture-transcending moral duties.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Is this a proof of God's existence? One suggestion is that any sound argument constitutes a proof. An argument is sound if and only if (a) all its premises are true and (b) it is deductively valid, in the sense that its conclusion follows necessarily from its premises (i.e., it's logically impossible for the premises to be true but the conclusion to be false).

Is our argument sound? It's certainly deductively valid: it has the valid argument form of modus tollens (if P then Q; not Q; therefore, not P). Moreover, both of its premises are true. There are indeed objective, culture-transcending moral duties, such as the duty to care for one's children, and it's very hard to see what would ground such moral obligations if there were no God. At any rate, I believe that both premises are true, and so do many other people. But does everyone believe both premises? Well, no---and therein lies the rub.

Limitations of Sound Arguments

 

There's another obvious problem with the idea that any sound argument amounts to a proof. Consider the following argument for the existence of God:

1. Either the moon is made of green cheese or God exists.
2. The moon is not made of green cheese.
3. Therefore, God exists.   Continue at James Anderson

Can We Judge the Morality of God?

The debate between monergists and synergists has to be fought anew in each generation, for there is nothing more opposed to man's inherent exaltation of his own powers of will than the recognition of the sovereign freedom of grace. While we can, and do, benefit greatly from the efforts of those who have gone before us, the fact remains that each generation of believers is faced with the same question, and must come to grips with the ramifications of the answers given.

When Roger Olson announced he was releasing a book, part of a two-book counter-point effort along with Michael Horton, titled Against Calvinism, there was hope for something that might engage the real strength of Reformed theology—the clear and consistent exegesis of the biblical text that the "young, restless and Reformed" have found so compelling. But even before its release, Dr. Olson gave clear indication that its focus was not going to be exegetical. Instead, as the book substantiated, his argument can be summarized fairly easily: the God of Calvinism is a "moral monster," and Calvinists simply need to think through their beliefs far enough to see what Olson has been able to see. Keep Reading >>>

Should Christians Try to Win Morality Through Legislation?

In our current culture, especially as we are heading into the next election cycle, moral questions are being hotly debated and people are looking to to political leaders to solve these problems. For example, perhaps the two mostly controversial subjects are the definition of marriage and the issue of abortion. 

Everyday, we hear news reports of organizations petitioning political leaders for changes to these laws. Everyday, state governments pass, or attempt to pass, a law that will define marriage as either traditional, being between one man and one woman, or redefining it to include same sex couples. Abortion laws continued to be hotly contested as states pass laws that require women be informed of a baby’s development or the use of ultrasound to show them the child. Yet, efforts to extend personhood rights are being denied due to political machinations. 

As we see cultural diversity, political correctness, pluralism, post-modern and secular humanism spread throughout, and erode, the culture, Christians rightly see the damage this does to the understanding of the word of God. Additionally, because these concepts demand that Christians capitulate their exclusivist position, which we are often unwilling to do, Christians are often seen as obstacles to unity within the culture. We recognize that the culture is moving to a point where Christianity could conceivably be seen as a threat. The further the culture takes this perception, the greater the possibility that one day Christianity could be outlawed. Therefore, Christians are rightly seeing a growing threat to the practice of our faith and, ultimately, the moral degradation of a country in rebellion to God.  Keep Reading >>>

Would You Attend a Same-Sex Wedding?

Would you attend a same-sex wedding ceremony? That question was posed recently to Houston pastor Joel Osteen, and Osteen said that he would attend, if the wedding involved friends. This came just after Osteen indicated that he could not perform a same-sex marriage ceremony, since he believes that homosexuality is a sin.

I recently wrote about this exchange, suggesting that Osteen’s position is morally and theologically incoherent. As I said:

This is beyond mere incoherence. It is moral and theological nonsense. More than that, it is a massive statement of ministerial malpractice. . . .  You cannot celebrate what you say you know to be sin. You cannot honestly say that same-sex marriage defies the law of God, and then join in the celebration of that ceremony.    Keep Reading>>>

Smiting Morality With Gospel Joy

HT: Reformed Stooge

Morality, Hollywood Style

The response of so many Hollywood leading lights to the arrest of filmmaker Roman Polanski now suggests that, at least when it comes to one of their own, sex with children is within the pale. This deserves and demands a closer look.

The cultural left has responded to the arrest a week ago of Polanksi with outrage -- directed not at Polanski but at the arrest.

The facts are not in dispute. Roman Polanski pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977. The girl had been invited to a "photo session" with the famous director but Polanski gave her alcohol and drugs and then twice had sex with her. Polanski entered a guilty plea based on an agreement that he would not be prosecuted for rape or sodomy (crimes for which he had been indicted). He fled the United States before his sentencing and has generally avoided any nation that has an extradition treaty with the United States. His arrest in Switzerland set off international protests. Read it all HERE