The GOP Has Been HIJACKED!

[Eric the Green]

(05-23-2016, 11:47 PM)radind Wrote: I have not seen any polls on how the secular group breaks down. My assessment is based on the operational effects that appears to be a working majority. The 10% with a Biblical worldview is based on the barna.org polls. ( I would have guessed this to be ~ 20%).

I have seen many polls on this, but am not sure I want to research them now. I'm sure you know that Evangelicals are a larger proportion of the population than 10%.

Quote:This very long article addresses some of the issues that have been bothering me.
 

This article presents quite a puzzling argument.

I guess, not being from Alabama and the "red state" culture, but from "hip" California, and born near Berkeley, I find it hard to fathom this way of thinking. It is so pervasive in the red states (far more than 10%), that it seems we may be headed for a break-up if the issues like this are pressed too hard. I think the religious right is going to need to let go of its obsession with the traditional family. From my experience, and my point of view, I find no value in it at all. So I am open to alternatives. That doesn't mean I want to impose my views on others who value the institution.

Quote:http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/...ristianity

HOW THE PUBLIC SIGNIFICANCE OF CHRISTIANITY IS CHANGING

… "All notions of justice presuppose ontology and anthropology, and so a revolution in fundamental anthropology will invariably transform the meaning and content of justice and bring about its own morality. We are beginning to feel the force of this transformation in civil society and the political order. Court decisions invalidating traditional marriage law fall from the sky like rain. The regulatory state and ubiquitous new global media throw their ever increasing weight behind the new understanding of marriage and its implicit anthropology, which treats our bodies as raw material to be used as we see fit. Today a rigorous new public morality inverts and supplants the residuum of our Christian moral inheritance.”…

That is quite a leap. I would liken it to a leap to the Moon from both feet on the ground. A new understanding of marriage means treating our bodies as raw materials to use as we see fit? I don't get this. The important thing in human relations is to treat others as we wish to be treated, and to recognize each human (and each living) being as sacred and of value. It is capitalism, materialism and our use of scientific technology that most-often violate this moral precept; not to mention war, discrimination, oppression of human rights, etc.; NOT feminism, gay liberation, liberation from traditional oppressive family authority, etc. If I were you, I would question this kind of authoritarian traditionalism. What is the virtue you see in it?

Quote:… "The line between negative rights and positive entitlements is thus inherently blurry. If I am to have a right to free speech, for example, then I must be empowered to speak and be heard, which means using the power of the state to give me the resources I need and to suppress anything that might disempower me.”…

I don't see how this follows, or that insisting on free speech implies the state giving someone "resources." What sort of "resources"?

Quote:… "For example, virtually absent from our lament over the threats to religious freedom in the juridical sense is any mention of that deeper freedom opened up by the transcendent horizon of Christ’s resurrection, though this was a frequent theme of Pope Benedict’s papacy. If we cannot see beyond the juridical meaning of religious freedom to the freedom that the truth itself gives, how then can we expect to exercise this more fundamental freedom when our juridical freedom is denied? Too often we are content to accept the absolutism of liberal order, which consists in its capacity to establish itself as the ultimate horizon, to remake everything within that horizon in its own image, and to establish itself as the highest good and the condition of possibility for the pursuit of all other goods—including religious freedom.”…

I understand the freedom opened up by Jesus' resurrection very well. I doubt most evangelicals and even most Christians understand it at all. But this is a new age. It is time we moved to a more accurate interpretation of this, free from the obvious need the Church has had to impose its authority with its traditional interpretation (and which I think you subject yourself to, whether you admit this or not).

Quite simply, Jesus demonstrated that a human being could transcend death, if (s)he fully understands that (s) he is an expression and incarnation of God. Jesus presented us with a possibility called ascension which someday more of us can realize. More on our level, he demonstrated the survival of the human soul after death. Jesus asked his followers to believe that if he could do it, they could do it too. That is the obvious meaning of the resurrection. People who don't embrace it, are just lacking in what Jesus called "faith." Ye of little faith, believe on me, and you too will do all that I have done, and more, said Jesus in the John gospel.

The resurrection is no disproof of the liberal social order. It has little to do with it. But liberalism is just the natural application of the Christ's message: to treat others as we wish to be treated, as the scripture says. If you want freedom, then extend freedom to others. It's quite simple, and to complicate it with such elaborate evasion as this article does, is dishonest nonsense.

Quote:… "For in its enforcement of the sexual revolution, the state is effectively codifying ontological and anthropological presuppositions. In redefining marriage and the family, the state not only embarks on an unprecedented expansion of its powers into realms heretofore considered prior to or outside its reach, and not only does it usurp functions and prerogatives once performed by intermediary associations within civil society, it also exercises these powers by tacitly redefining what the human being is and committing the nation to a decidedly post-Christian (and ultimately post-human) anthropology and philosophy of nature.”…

… “  Yet something greater than liberal freedom is at stake. There seems to be a prevailing sense that this moment is something of a kairos for American Christianity, a moment of deep change in the public significance of Christianity and a moment of decision in the life of the Church.”…

… “This is the freedom that the truth itself gives and that the Church in our society will increasingly be called to exercise as the revolution overseen by liberal absolutism proceeds along its present course: the freedom to suffer for the truth of the Gospel.”…

The truth of the gospel is being upheld by the liberal side. And as such, it will continue. The liberal state is not assuming new powers by allowing gays to get married. It is simply upholding the constitution. Some religious believers may assume that the Bible, or at least their limited and outdated interpretation of it, takes precedence over the Constitution. But judges are sworn so help them God to uphold the latter, not the former. So how can any Christian expect otherwise?

Allowing gays to get married does not redefine anthropology or ontology. The definition of male and female does not biologically change by allowing this. Gay relationships have always existed; there is nothing at all new about it anyway. What is new is recognizing reality. Over the past 250 years or so, the Revolutions of our time have moved Humanity in the direction of recognizing reality instead of arbitrary authority as the authority for our lives, and I expect this Revolution to continue.

So, what's the problem with this?

My theory is that gay relationships, just as black-white relationships did (and still do for some), go against the grain of what we are used to and consider "normal." The article is just a long-winded justification for the author's fear of what is novel and unusual to him. Christians just need to get used to this liberation; that's all it amounts to.