Recently the facilities in several British cities canceled evangelistic meetings with Franklin Graham because his statements against homosexual practice showed him to be a homophobe.  I have written about this before, but one of the schemes of the left is to change the meaning of words and then to intimidate on the basis of these incendiary words and sentences. In this regard let us analyze the word homophobia or LBBTQ phobia.  The meaning of phobia is often an irrational fear. So aquaphobia is a fear of water, or there is claustrophobia, a fear of closed small spaces, or fear of spiders, heights and even crossing bridges over water. So how might believers in the Bible be homophobes?

 

1. Do they fear that homosexuals will convince them to become homosexuals?
2. Do they fear that homosexuals will attack and rape them?
3. Do they fear that homosexuals will sexually abuse their children?  Some do fear this. There are both heterosexual and homosexual pedofiles. 
4. Do they fear homosexuals will come after them and kill them?
5. Do they fear that the agenda will hurt the institutions of marriage and family and damage many people?  Yes, I think some fear that. 

 

The term is really an incoherent misnomer.   Those who use cannot claim that believers want to take away their civil rights for work, services, and accommodations. That time is long past. Maybe the real issue is not that we fear homosexuals but that believes fear for homosexuals and the LGBTQ community, including fearing for them on the dangers of  God’s judgment, the tragic results of sex-change surgery and hormonal therapy (well documented).  We especially fear for children who are being raised with hormones and sex change encouragement. 

 

Isn’t it really that the homosexuals and LGBTQ community fear traditional morality and communities that promote it and any idea of the judgment of God for sexual aberrations?  But we have so far lost the language battle becasue the word homophobia has been given great social power.  I propose that believers fight back and use the term morality-phobia for those in our society who fear and hate those who promote traditional morality and warn about God’s judgment. 

 

Let’s start using this term.  When accused, say, “No I am not” or  “No we are not?” You are the one with a phobia, morality-phobia.  Maybe in the back of their mind, they know it is wrong and they fear the judgment of God.  They don’t want to be reminded. 

A contingent of men and one woman gathered in Jerusalem to watch the Superbowl on Monday Morning Israel time.  We make a pledge that all who come to watch with us, do not look at the score and be with us for the suspense. As the time difference in Miami is 7 hours later, we would have to be up most of the night to see it live.  We had a lovely large screen to see it together. We had a wonderful time and saw a wonderful game. We keep a home in Kansas City so I was pleased with the results. 

 

We also saw some of the advertisements for the half time show and decided that we would completely skip it.  So the game resumed. Then we saw the responses on the internet that parents were upset with the sexual display, pole dancing, and scant dress.  But what did we expect? This has been going on for years. Then Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson and the wardrobe malfunction. Some think it was intentional.  There has been much sexuality and sexuality attracts an audience. It was so sad that our children are being taught sexuality in this way.  

 

One puzzlement is how this fits the #MeToo movement.  This movement stands against the sexual harassment of women.  While the sensual culture is not an excuse for men, the sexual messages do create a culture where men are more likely to be abusive.  Studies on the influence of pornography show this to be the case as well. Why don’t women stand against their being portrayed as sexual objects?  The culture is now self-contradictory. It is so sad to see sexuality debased, demeaning women, and robbing us of the great gift of love and sexual fidelity in marriage.  We maintain a high view and value for human sexuality.  

 

We ask the question of how we can ever see a reversal in the culture, leftist in political orientation for the young and hedonistic as a right for everyone.  I recommend the great book on this by the late jurist Robert Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah.  I believe in our responsibility to influence society.  However, it is difficult to see how this will happen in the long haul without a massive revival and an evangelistic explosion followed by a discipleship that does teach the importance of our culture formation roles.  We pray for that revival. The destruction and suffering in our culture is a terrible thing.

 

Large studies have been done showing the terrible damage done to our children from the Internet.  I will not reference them here. Anyone can find them from a search engine. Some of the leaders in Hi-Tech are now forbidding their children and teens from unsupervised internet use and strictly limiting the time.   There are two primary concerns. 

 

The first is that the use of the Internet is addicting.  This addiction actually alters the brain and limits the ability for normal human interactions.  In this, it undercuts the ability for human intimacy. It also hinders the attention span for normal reading instead of quick snippets.  As such it undercuts the development of the ability to weigh evidence and come to the truth on many subjects. The evidence of destructive brain alteration is now quite strong.  The children become merely conditioned organisms.  

 

The second reason is pornography.  This also alters the brain and eventually makes true sexual intimacy impossible.  Pornography works like heroin in this alteration. Since pornography is only a click away, most teens have or will access it; and many pre-teen children have accessed it as well.  This is a far distance from my days in high school. A rare classmate would bring a black and white pornographic story with black and white pictures of intercourse. The cost was $10, a lot in those days.  You could hardly see the black and white pictures but strained to see what they contained. Playboy pictures were bad, but not nearly so graphic.  

 

How does this affect the children of disciples of Yeshua?   There are several alarming effects. One is that it terribly dulls spiritual sensitivity.  There is a loss of a desire for the truth or an ability to worship. The world is the internet and truth beyond it becomes irrelevant.  Secondly, in some, there is a loss of interest in life. Gaining greater depth and appreciation of life through reading, art, great music, sports is abandoned.  There is a decline in interest in general. In addition, the internet teaches our children to accept every bizarre approach to life, every kind of sexual orientation.  The young person becomes disinterested so much of what gives joy to life. Sadly, the children of Yeshua/disciples are accessing pornography as well. 

 

I plea for parents to take these radical steps. 

 

1. Either preclude all use of the internet or strictly limit it to times when you are there with the child.  Make these times very limited if at all. Be especially careful that your children do not sneak and use your devices. 
2. If you buy your child a phone, buy one that has no internet access. 
3. If your children go to friends’ homes, only allow it if the parents will enforce your internet standards. 
4. Require your children to read books and continue this into teen years until they are drawn to reading.  This will replace internet entertainment. Require them to report on them. Great stories, including biographies of great people including spiritual leaders, is key.  Make a goal that your children will be readers. 
5. Do not let them play video games beyond strict limits. 
6. Take your children to hear great music, great musicals and more.  Explain these art forms so they grow in appreciation.
7. Have your children take music lessons and learn to play one or more instruments. 
8. Have your children participate in team sports.  Relationships and comradery are great teachers. Learning the joy of victory and graciousness in defeat are great lessons.  We call this sportsmanship. 
9. Take them to see sporting events and explain why sports are a great thing.   
10. Read the Bible together regularly.   Have the children read. Read spiritual books together. 
11. Play old fashioned board games as a family where you interact together. 
12. Take hikes, camping trips and more to enjoy nature. Teach your children the wonders of nature, plants, animals, mountains, lakes, and seashores.  Learn to use plant classification guides and bird guides.
13. Of course, I assume that you are limiting your internet use to fruitful purposes. 

 

If you have already lost your children to the internet, there is hope through prayer and the breaking through of the Holy Spirit.  Take your children to meetings where there are miracles and the manifest presence of the Spirit so they can break the habit. This is the key. Seeing them born again and baptized in the Spirit can bring deliverance.  It is never too late. Don’t give up. Pray, pray and pray some more. Fast and pray. You are fasting and praying for their deliverance.  

 

If you have younger children, you can begin the disciplines above, some of which are greatly enjoyable when they acquire the taste.  Actually the internet robs children from the joys of living. If you have seen the negative evidence in your older children, do not go down the same route that you allowed to your older children. Don’t allow the excuse that there is nothing to do. There is much to do in all the things I listed above. 

My previous post on Narratives did not get my usual response.  My media team thought that maybe it was too intellectual.  I am a university Apologetics professor and do gravitate to such analysis.  But I want to simplify.

 

One of the great ways that the Devil destroys is to get people to accept interpretive narratives that will lead to social breakdown and the personal destruction of those that buy into them.   We have many such narratives today. Through media, they gain traction in ways beyond any other past age. It is an age of shallow interpretive narratives, not based on the evidence, and fostered by propaganda. 

 

1. That the problems of the world are due to white males.  White males are more evil than other people. Believing this will set racial and cultural groups against one another.  All people are equally evil and need redemption. Some white Europeans were for a time dominant in the world, but the same white Europeans who were influenced by the Bible brought us all progress on the foundational ideas and implementation of human rights.  Today’s toxic masculinity narrative is a corollary. All people are sinners, potential toxic unless discipled through the Bible. 
2. That the primary problem in the Black community is police discrimination, shaming and brutality.  Believing this will impede progress in solving the biggest problems; the breakdown of the black family, the bankruptcy of Black schools (private schools and charters are needed) and black on black crime which requires massive policing.  As the police now withdraw, more blacks are killed and the Devil loves it. 
3. That the reason for poverty is the capitalist system and the greedy business people ripping off the poor.  Yes, crony capitalism, where some large corporations are unfairly dominating the market, is a problem. But only free enterprise creates the wealth that lifts millions out of poverty.  Incentives for business investment is one of the most important programs to address poverty. 
4. That Israel occupies Palestinian Land and is the oppressor, creating an apartheid state.  Israel is a white colonial power. However, there was never a Palestinian state. The reason there is not one is that the Palestinians refused a state three times when offered in preference to keep the fight against the existence of Israel (1948, 2000, 2006).  
5. That Christianity is the white man’s religion that brought oppression.  Not so, it is the liberating religion that delivers from bondage. 

 

These narratives are shallow, not based on looking at all the evidence and supported by massive propaganda through media.  Only immersion in the Bible which brings us a Biblical world view and the power of discerning by the Spirit can give us an orientation so we do not succumb to these false narratives.  There may be some aspects of truth in them, but they are generally inspired by the realm of the demonic whose goal is always destruction. The Bible is God’s ultimate narrative about existence and human life. 

We live in a time of many narratives about many aspects of life.  The very word narrative, as the story or description that is how we see reality in various realms, has become ubiquitous.  Fifty years ago, we hardly ever heard the term narrative except in literature. Postmodern Philosophy constantly tells us that there is no true meta-narrative.  What does that mean? It means there is no ultimately true story or view of the nature of existence or no ultimately true world view. Of course, that is just their assertion.  Do those who assert this conclude this after rigorous searching and comparing world views and taking into account all the relevant evidence to come to this conclusion? Maybe some think they did so, but I think most just are asserting this position.  It is their preference. I have yet known of a post-modernist who has really sorted the evidence for the Biblical world view. There is the evidence of design that follows from the details of the forces of the universe stemming from the big bang. There is the amazing integrated complex order of a cell that is as complex as New York City.  Then there is the evidence from the Biblical material itself. For example, the credibility of the accounts of Luke in the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts are amazing. The day of Pentecost itself amazes. So does the testimony in I Cor. 15 on the resurrection of Yeshua. The evidence of continuing miracles today done in the name of Yeshua (Jesus) should astonish and cause wonder.  Craig Keener’s massive two-volume scholarly study is only a small sample! This is dishonesty and shallowness in the postmodern assertion.   

 

Meta Narratives provide the organizational key to tying together all the various aspects of existence.  The Biblical world view is the true truth narrative.  Without it, we are adrift on a sea of subjective assertions.  Commitment to the truths of the Bible should make us careful about quickly buying into the shifting narratives of our day, many based on subjective prejudice.   Here are a few. The narrative that the problems of the world all are rooted in the evil of white people from Europe who spread colonialism and oppressed non-white peoples in slavery and massacred the native Americans and stole their land is now constantly asserted by the radical left.  There is a degree of truth in this narrative, but it fails to deal with the fallenness of human nature and the universal reality of power and abuse. Did the Mongol invaders colonize nations and oppress and abuse? Did the dominant Chinese and Indians tribes slaughter whole villages in their conquering and wipe out their enemies?  How did China become an empire? Did some African tribes slaughter and oppress other tribes? Did some native Americans do the same? The Biblical world view has been the greatest influence in overcoming this corruption. This narrative leads to many other skewed conclusions. Should the founding fathers of the United States be totally rejected because the Virginia founders held slaves?  Is that the end of the story? Did they make human rights progress that was an advancement in the era in which they lived? Who were the people who eliminated slavery after fighting against it tooth and nail? It was mostly white English people. It was their understanding of the Bible that motivated them. And we can go on and on. People will oppress others for their advantage when they have the power or capability to do so and only biblical transformation can mitigate against it. 

 

Then there is the black lives matter movement.  Yes, blacks are often not treated fairly by white policemen. But in this narrative, the idea is that the biggest problem of the loss of life in the black community is from the police.  There is little loss of black lives from the police. This is not a true narrative. Rather, creating a barrier between police and the black community will lead to a much greater loss of life.  The drug gangs and the slaughters from this can only be addressed in part by a police presence that is far beyond what is yet contemplated. Just after the assassination of the Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani, Colin Kaepernick made the statement that America only kills non-white people.  I think he is not becoming absurd in his comments. The last world wars saw white against white and yellow against yellow in the East. But his comments arise out of being captured by the last two narratives we mentioned. 

The narrative about toxic men and the new despising of men by some feminists is another case in point.  A biblical world view would tell us that men and women can be evil, both can be toxic. Unless men and women are discipled in biblical values, there will be a social decline on many levels.  Who was that woman who procured the young women for the infamous sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein?  Oh? A toxic woman? When men are trained in biblical values they honor and treasure women and treat them with special regard. The men in my family did so. 

 

Then there is the narrative about capitalism being only about greed and unfair wealth distribution.  Of course, crony capitalism where the government favors some corporations and does not incentives investments that lift the general population are a problem.  However, socialism just does not expand wealth and life people of poverty. This has been proven again and again. This does not mean that there should not be social safety net programs.  Again, there is a narrative that is not based on evidence but on emotional preferences. 

 

Then there are sexual narratives about homosexuals, bi-sexual and transsexual people.   Generalizations are plentiful. These narratives have some truth in that people were not treated in loving ways as created in the image of God, but the interpretations of sexuality are subjective narratives. 

 

We even see simplistic narratives about war.   Removing the Baathist rulers in Iraq (though Saddam had to go) was a great mistake.  Some, including myself, predicted an Iranian controlled Shiite Iraq. Yet the narrative is pervasive that George Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and that that the reason for the war was oil.  Bush did not lie, but the Clinton appointed head of the CIA told him it was certain they were there and that it was a “slam dunk.”  

 

Then there are simplistic narratives on global warming and the environment.  The folks pushing these narratives will not face the fact that the U. S. has lowered its emissions more than European nations.  They will not face the issue of China, India and how Africa will develop without fossil fuel. It is a prejudice against the old white countries which must be the problem!

 

Simplistic narratives now define our American and our Israel political discourse. In America, the narrative about President Trump from the left is simply a gross oversimplification though there are grounds for concern.  In Israel, Netanyahu lies and calls the Blue and White party leftist. They are probably right of center. But that is now the narrative among some of the right in Israel. 

 

How do we deliver ourselves from being corrupted by the narratives that swirl about and constantly bombard us on the internet?  Narratives that are exaggerations and so out of balance Here are my recommendations. 

 

1.  Be immersed in the Word of God and see all of life through biblical rooting.
2.  Note that all people are corrupt.  They need to be saved. As such, when the going gets tough, many will do evil to save themselves.  Witness Hitler’s power in the Holocaust. Don’t ever conclude that one group is good and another bad or that all the oppressed are good (identity politics and intersectionality).   All have sinned, are corrupt and need salvation.    
3. Be skeptical about all sub-meta-narratives that do not square with biblical perspectives on human life. 
4. Prayerfully seek the Holy Spirit.  He can alert you to know that something is wrong with a narrative. 
5. Pursue competing narratives and compare their basis in research and evidence.  
6. For any issue pursue the standard of comprehensiveness; taking into account all the relevant information about the issues at hand. 
7. Recognize that we are limited and it is fine to say that you do not know and have not studied the issue sufficiently.  You are only responsible to pursue knowledge in areas as led by the Spirit. 

 

I was reflecting three events and in doing so I see a connection.  The first was the recent decision of Chick Fil A to not donate to the Salvation Army, which is perhaps the greatest humanitarian organization in America.  The second was Hallmark reversing its decision to not advertise gay and lesbian displays of affection in ads. They also committed to work with the LGBT organizations to increase LGBT positive programming.  The final matter was a smaller issue, but this was an animal rights protest against the supermodel Kate Upton for promoting the company Canada Goose which uses goose down in their products and also uses Cayote fur.  They called her a murderer for this. Animal rights activists wrongly elevate animals to a status equal or almost equal to human beings, though animals are important and the Bible does give guidelines on animal treatment.  Using animals for food and fur is acceptable in Biblical law. I don’t know what will happen in the future, but if it continues Upton might give in. I would not be surprised. The activists might very well dog her every event.  They will take away her freedom to support legal products. 

 

Some Christians are despairing.  They committed to support Chick Fil A after the leftist LGBT attacks on them.  The came out in droves to Chick Fil A. They saw Hallmark as one channel where they did not have to face an assault on their belief system.  Certainly, the number of Christians who are offended is much greater than the radical protestors. So why do these corporations, one a business and one a charity, give in?  It is because of the intimidation tactics that were developed by Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals.  But Alinsky used these tactics to give power to the truly poor and disposed, not for breaking down the Judeo-Christian consensus of society.  Alinsky thought that the Judeo Christian consensus gave the society the conscience by which organized efforts could succeed. Now the radical protest is to marginalize and demonize all who don’t agree with the radical agendas that seek to destroy the Judeo Christian orientation.   The reason they win is that the corporations make a pragmatic money calculation. They want these protests to go away. They think in the long run that Christians will eventually get over it. They do not intimidate. What will they do; leave their Chick Fil A restaurants and go to McDonalds or Berger King instead?  So the calculation is that it is better to give in for the long term bottom line. The smaller groups of leftists seem to be winning battle after battle in the corporate sphere against those supporting classical Judeo Christian values. The freedom of Christians is also being attacked and in some jeopardy. We note that the cake baker who did not want to use his artistic talent to support a homosexual wedding.  The battle continues to this day. 

 

We are to depend on prayer.  Yes, the weapons of our warfare are not carnal.  But note that in this famous text in II Cor. 10:4 passage, Paul described the public presentation of the truth, not just silent prayer in a closet.  Christians are quiescent compared to the radicals. Sometimes I think, what if Christians organized and intimidated corporations for refusing to support moral organizations like the Salvation Army?  What if there was a demand for greater fairness? What if they really showed up in mass at Hallmark’s offices and would not go away? What if they acted like Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel who protest in huge numbers when they think they see their rights threatened? I wonder.  But this will only happen where there is stronger leadership, prophetic leadership. Yeshua was not only the meek and mild one, but the one who turned over the tables of the money changers and was accused of being a revolutionary. It was a false charge, but one that was based on some behaviors that were pretty intimidating.  I think that God could raise prophets to lead us to engage culture at a whole different level. He could bring revival as well. I don’t have the answers, but things are doing downhill in the culture and fast. Remember it was only a few years ago that President Obama said he did not support homosexual marriage. Today that stand is dubbed hatred. 

On a recent night, I was driving home from a discipleship class in Tel Aviv.  The program is for recent Army grads and some who can get off from the Army for a few days.  The administrator is a young woman of great spiritual quality. As a group of us rode home, I mentioned my concern that young adults do not seem concerned to seek and find the truth.  Or they don’t think there is the truth to be found. What difference from my generation! Just before the Jesus movement, I recall that philosophy classes in universities were packed. Students had to be turned away.  This was true at Wheaton. The Philosophy of Religion class of Dr. Stuart Hacket was full every semester. Wheaton was and is an Evangelical Christian Liberal Arts and Science School, but many students had become skeptical. Some took the course to bolster their faith and others to engage a fresh search for truth.  What has happened to this generation?  

 

My young friend pointed to devices and the internet as part of the problem. In her view, there is something about the constant focus on devices that deadens people.  They cannot give attention to serious reading, conversation. There is a self-focus in their Facebook engagements that does not pursue the outside realities that give meaning.  Yes, there is something wrong when we see people not able to walk down the street without being on their devices. It is certainly an addiction.  

 

But that is not all.  Many are not capable of discerning when they use the internet.  It can become a conduit of demons. How so? It seeds ideas that young people would never have thought of it.  For example. Homosexuals have argued that their orientation is a genetic given. This was a reasonable argument though wrong.  It has largely been given up since no scientific foundation can be found for it after years of seeking. However, transgenderism is even more far out. At least homosexuals claimed their normal genders of male and female and claimed to be attracted to the same sex.  Every cell of one’s body is either an xx for a woman and xy for a man. A transgender cannot experience foundational experiences of the gender they choose in contradiction to their birth gender. The born male cannot become pregnant, have periods, nurse and have other foundational experiences of womanhood and vice versa.  He can never have a female sexual experience. Now we also see some sectors of women’s sports destroyed as born men dominate the competition. (In reverse, no problem for the NFL!!). How has this spread? Where do young people get the idea that they are a woman in a man’s body or a man in a woman’s body if they did not have a teacher in school tell them this.  The answer is that the internet speaks to young people who are not happy about their identity as men and women. One couple we had known for years had a daughter that was a born female, married and had children. She decided to be a male and is in a sexual relationship with a born male who wants to be a female. He did not get the castration surgery so they do have intercourse.  You cannot make this up. I have shared on the philosophical roots of this radical gender choice theory (Frankfort School) But how does this spread so widely? And now it is politically correct to support it. Think of the child abuse when parents give drugs to pre-pubescent children to turn them into the opposite. The physical cost is high according to some leading doctors. In my view the internet should be off-limits to children and then only used with supervision and training on how to avoid sites and discern false information.  What a challenge! We are also producing a population that is woefully ignorant. Some surveys in America show that many high school graduates do not know the three branches of the government in the United States. This is a population that can be easily controlled by tyranny. It is given to pleasure and dangerously cut off from truth. 

I am not speaking here about a biblical approach to the issues raised by the LGBTQ movement.  I think my readers know that my basic stand is that God sets sexual direction for human beings as part of his creation order and intent.  However, the issue of sexual orientation has a long history in psychology and psychiatry. There has been a progression in the history of the arguments concerning how to understand and approach gay and LGBTQ orientations. 

 

Historic psychiatry and behavioral psychology (two opposing approaches) both saw gay and lesbian orientations as from environmental influences.   It was considered a behavior problem to be corrected, healed or straightened out. Psychiatry would look into the family dynamics and the wrong relationship between the parents and the child growing up.  They pointed to unhealthy patterns that could produce gay orientations. The analysis would enable understanding and overcoming. Behavioral theory interpreted all behavior as rooted in the conditioning of the subject.  The reward/ punishment system produces a right or wrong orientation. This tends to be more deterministic than psychiatry. Generally, people are determined to be how they are due to the conditioning in their growing up years.  As one practitioner said, sexual orientation is very flexible, and one can be conditioned to get sexually excited by a lamp post. Of course, there is in behaviorism a biological basis for attraction to the opposite sex, but sufficient conditioning can stifle this and create the aberrant orientation.  The answer is to place the person who is wrongly oriented into a course of re-conditioning. The basic biological realities would give the behaviorist the view that heterosexuality was normative. Due to much political pressure associations of both Psychologists and Psychiatrists in counseling gave up these views and voted to accept gay orientations as normal variations to be accepted.  Counseling should be to enable one to adjust and live a good life within a gay lifestyle. This is now the consensus of counseling.  

 

Following this previous dominant history, the argument was put forth that gays and lesbians were determined to be according to their orientations by their physical makeup.  It is a genetic matter or a brain issue. After many studies failed to prove any such basis for the orientations, many gay writers gave up on this. Within their own counsels they admitted that, though physical determination is a good argument to get straights to accept their gay orientation, it really is a  proclivity they could not explain, is partly chosen and should be accepted never the less.

 

Post-modernism, based in existentialism has a totally different approach.  Going back to some in the Frankfurt Germany school of Philosophy, a doctrine of radical freedom and self-definition is taught.  There is a rejection of any essence of a person as given by God (since His existence is denied) or given by nature or biology. Once the conscious ego arises, radical freedom to choose becomes understood.  One can, therefore, choose any orientation sexually. The one value maintained is that sexual involvement has to be with consenting adults. The one absolute is that one must not do violence to others. So not only can one be gay or lesbian, but one can be transsexual or consider themselves a man in a woman’s body or a woman in a man’s body.  One can be bi-sexual or polyamorous (multiple partners). It is of the highest ethical stand in such a philosophy that sexual self-definition is an absolute right of human freedom.  Any assertion of traditional morality as incumbent upon human beings is a rejection of the right of self-definition and therefore is hate speech.  This yields such new orientations as a pregnant man (woman’s body) or a man in a woman’s body marrying a woman in a man’s body and having normal intercourse while thinking they are the opposite sex.  It also opens up the choice of surgery to make the body on the outside more like what one thinks of oneself on the inside. The woman in a man’s body will cut off the male sexual organs and create a woman like vagina, or the women will cut off breasts and as much as possible create male organs.  Such surgery is terribly partial since the surgically changed male to a woman can never bear a baby, nurse a baby, or have the kind of sexual pleasure that a woman would have. The women who changes to a male can never have a real male erection or experience of male orgasm (there is no prostate gland).  In addition, every cell of the body will still be xx for a biologically born woman and xy for a man. Hormonal therapy can cause a male to develop breasts and can give a woman a deeper male voice. The evidence is that surgery and hormonal therapy can be very damaging physically. It contradicts the body’s total cellular being. The recent leader from Johns Hopkins University and chief of the Psychiatry department and expert on sexual dysfunctions, Dr. Paul McHugh, argued and still argues that hormonal and surgical re-assignment are health-threatening.  But the LGBTQ movement is a full-blown world view ideology. The right to choose must override health concerns. However, some argue that to practice these things with children who have not the maturity to choose and before puberty have no certainty on an orientation, is child abuse. 

 

The new ideology is based on the idea of radical freedom, not as much on determined proclivities.  It is also said that people may change and choose differently in the future. Surgical and hormonal treatment might preclude later choices.  One can assert a personal preference for a traditional sexual orientation in marriage but any assertion of right and wrong in orientation is hate speech since it contradicts the absolute radical freedom of each person to choose.  It should be noted that post-modern ethics is not rooted in anything. The ethic itself is actually an anti-ethic since its foundation is a raw choice of what will count as their foundational ethical ideas. It is not a norm outside of ourselves to which we are to conform since there are no objective norms outside ourselves.  Hence it is an anti-ethic ethic.  

 

There has been a battle between Mexico and the  United States over who to blame for the Drug problem that is wreaking havoc in both countries. The United States wants to go after the drug cartels, but despite many years of effort, it seems that the battle against the supply side is not working well. Mexico claims that the real problem is the demand side. The huge demand for drugs in the United States makes this a most lucrative temptation for crime. Huge amounts of money are made. Supplying drugs that will kill and destroy many lives is a serious gross sin and will land people who do not repent into eternal Hell judgment.  However, I want to speak on the other side, the side of demand. 

 

First, I want to exclude those who are addicted through pain and post-traumatic stress from war. Such folks need help and empathy. I am personally very connected to this issue due to a close relative who due to great physical pain became addicted. Managing pain medication is a major issue that needs addressing. There are no easy answers. 

 

However, the big problem with demand is due in large part of the departure from the Judea Christian consensus and its concomitant beliefs and values, including the fear of God, the commands of God and the sacred worth of each individual.  When these values are firmly established in a person’s life they live on the basis of their own worth before God and do not seek to demean that worth by abusing their bodies through drugs or seeking destructive pleasures. Secondly, they believe in the judgment of God and knowing God’s commands against abusing the body and seeking destructive pleasures, there is a fear of God that checks destructive behavior. This is a matter of a robust conscience. This is before attaining to the higher motivation of loving God and seeking to please God. 

 

The rush to legalize pot for recreation is a case in point. We know that its usage is bad for health, yet the drug is politically correct and the consensus of it being bad for human beings is just not having its warranted effect. What are people being raised to believe in regard to their worth before God, self-respect, and respect for others?   The issue of the demand side is world view conviction and without the self-respect that comes from those convictions, people can not seem to resist pleasures that destroy them. Mexico has a point. Border security is a good and important thing, but no amount of border security will be enough when the demand is so high. The poor in our cities that are dying due to drug wars can be won to faith and discipled to a Biblical world view. 

 

We could give the same analysis of the claim by feminist claim of toxic masculinity. Maleness is not toxic when young people are discipled in respect for women and themselves.  I know of no young person raised in our high school youth group who sexually abused women. We were taught to respect and even revere women. It was called being a gentleman. So much of our culture is sick due to rejecting the God of the Bible and the Biblical world view that so influenced our culture. No, we were not an explicitly Bible-based nation, but the influence of that world view on our culture was amazing.