God. Real. Right.

Here is an interesting cultural-ethical observation put about as succinctly as I can manage:

Marriage is the establishment, recognition, and sanctioning of a committed relationship between individuals by an external entity (such as God or society—or both, of course, as believers see it).

Individualism generally describes the West’s movement away from communitarian values toward the primacy of the individual (and ultimately toward the satisfaction of that individual’s psyche).

Communitarianism and individualism are at least contrary, if not fully contradictory—that is, they are mutually exclusive.

Marriage is obviously communitarian in the sense that (more…)

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This post is next in a long series on this site attempting to address (1) why it is challenging to understand how there could be a free will, (2) that it is much more theologically, philosophically, and ethically crippling to reject its possibility, and finally both (3) that it is possible that there is a free will, and (4) that commitment to the reality of free will renews access to some of the essentials of a Christian worldview, including teleology. Posts to date are compiled here.

3.2.2 That people should not have the creativity and power of God does not change the possibility that they are free.

The uncomfortable implications of such a freedom include at their head that the will appears to be miraculous in its nature, and that Joe seems to be strangely imbued with divine creativity. There is something right about that assessment and something wrong about it.

It is true that the kind of freedom described in this argument allows humanity to insert into the universe that which cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of prior causes. And it is true that the same insufficiency of explanation applies to God.

But, as with every aspect of humanity bearing God’s image, the image is limited. Compare consciousness as an attribute of humanity and of God. God is conscious. Man is conscious. Saying so does not in any way imply that man is God. In the same way, man partakes of an attribute of God, free will, only because God chooses for man to do so, and only to the extent which God allows. There is no assault on the uniqueness of God. So there is nothing strangely divine about humans imbued with the creativity of free will.

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I highly recommend the recent white paper by the ERLC (Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) as a starting point for a rational discussion about immigration. (Richard Land, the head of the ERLC, has a briefer statement about the issue here.) I believe the statements about immigration coming out of the ERLC right now are the sanest and most transparent of any I hear from either side.

My approach to the issue itself is simple. I believe any real solution to immigration reform must involve three things (which I will get to in just a moment), whether anyone in particular likes them or not. I don’t mean that statement as an arrogant disregard for public or private opinion. Rather, I mean by it that this problem, once properly defined, will neither simply go away because we build a bigger fence or stop offering ballots in Spanish, nor because we grant amnesty to everyone here illegally and open the borders completely. And for the problem to become something other than just that, we are going to have to be smarter than we have been for the past hundred years—on both political sides. Liberals have tried amnesty and other floods of illegal immigration have followed. Some conservatives have at times raised the ugly face of misoxeny. Yet the problem has persisted, partially because each side only acknowledges half of the problem from the outset.

So what is the problem? It is NOT simply that millions of people have entered the country illegally and that many if not most have stayed. And it is NOT simply that the illegal immigrants who are here are taken advantage of as they live on the fringes of society. It is rather BOTH the influx of immigrants who are neither fully accountable to nor fully protected by the law AND the things in our society which attract them and keep them here—basically economic interests. It doesn’t matter how big a fence we build as long as employers are motivated to pay sub-minimum wages to people who regard dirt-cheap work as so much better than what they can do at home that they leave everything else behind to get to it. Both sides of the issue must be addressed in order to effect real improvement. That is, laws must be BOTH enforced and morally and economically sane. The current law is neither enforced nor is it either morally or economically sane.

So here are the three components (more…)

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This post comes from Joseph Wooddell, Ph.D., my friend and colleague at Criswell College.

Editor of American Atheist magazine, David Smalley, made the case in a recent interview with Dr. Barry Creamer (Associate Professor of Humanities, Criswell College), that if Jesus is now with God the Father, then His sacrifice (presumably Jesus’ sacrifice, but perhaps also what Mr. Smalley takes to be some sort of sacrifice on the part of God the Father) doesn’t amount to much of a sacrifice. That is, to be in “heaven” or in the presence of God or whatever, more than makes up for any temporal suffering on the part of God the Son (or perhaps also God the Father). In terms of a propositional argument, it might look something like this:

Premise 1: Temporal, earthly suffering is not all that significant if the sufferer (or those who love him) end up spending eternity in heaven with God.
Premise 2: While Jesus (or perhaps also (more…)

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The pro-life position is not simply anti-abortion. Being against abortion is not sufficient to encompass what it is to be pro-life; there are, after all, still issues like eugenics and euthanasia. On the opposite end of the spectrum, though, trying to define the pro-life position in terms of enmity with abortion fails for a different reason.

Here’s an e-mail I received from a listener after a recent broadcast illustrating precisely this point. My response follows. (Oh, and the “next week” to which he refers is January 18-22, 2010, Sanctity of Life week, in observance of the anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision.)

Subject: Abortion…

I thought that subject line would get your attention. I did want to get your point of view on something, though, and maybe you can comment on it next week when you’ll be on-topic anyway. I would like to note before I begin that I agree with you that abortion for convenience of the parents is wrong without question.

Years ago, my mother (more…)

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Live Action is a youth-led pro-life organization. Here’s a video they created based on a visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin in September. You can view this video and more at their website, http://liveaction.org.

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This post is next in a long series on this site attempting to address (1) why it is challenging to understand how there could be a free will, (2) that it is much more theologically, philosophically, and ethically crippling to reject its possibility, and finally both (3) that it is possible that there is a free will, and (4) that commitment to the reality of free will renews access to some of the essentials of a Christian worldview, including teleology. Posts to date are compiled here.

3.2.1 That people do not appear to be free does not change the possibility that they are free.

The phenomenological objection is that people do not appear to act freely. This objection is as plain as the nose on any observant and thoughtful face and manifests itself in practically every venue of life. On highways drivers are strangely animalistic, running in packs of cars and adjusting and maintaining speeds based on stimuli from, for example, the drivers around them, usually without any awareness of what they are doing and why they are doing it. In homes, parents and children spiral around each other in relational systems governed by hidden but practically omnipotent stases. Because they have no idea why their daughter is running amok, they seek counsel from someone who can explain the invisible system behind their behaviors and inject some new stimulus into the system to make a change. More poignantly, anyone who cares to see it can watch manipulators (from salespersons to politicians and, unfortunately, sometimes even preachers) use psychological tools to motivate automatic behavior in unsuspecting clients or followers. Indeed, the herd mentality so disdained by philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is a frightening and disappointing reality of humanity.

However, the lack of freedom’s exercise is in no way a proof or even evidence of its non-existence. When a person’s will injects creativity into the world that person is active. When, on the other hand, she flows along with the causal chain of events she is passive. Sadly, almost everyone—even this author—lives predominantly in passivity. Some probably spend their entire existence, with one notable exception, in passivity. While it is wise to acknowledge that people often are not aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it (think of the myriad unconscious motions with which everyone is constantly busy) it is both liberating (with the power to do differently) and encumbering (often with the responsibility to do differently) to realize that there is at each person’s disposal a tool for breaking free from many of the behaviors which appear to govern existence within the material world.

It is no wonder, by the way, that people do not appear to be free. Most do not (more…)

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A weakness in my personal study of texts, biblical and otherwise, has always been my reluctance to rely on secondary sources for interpretation. I’m not sure whether my motive is noble in the sense of relying on self-discipline or arrogant in the sense of rejecting any reading other than my own. But either way, or more likely somewhere in between, there my commitment has lain.

And either as a result of that commitment or in spite of it, I have been blessed to learn from texts some interesting things apparently often overlooked.

As a high-schooler, my argument for my approach was simply that it was not my responsibility to find out what everyone else thought—that it was my responsibility actually to think. My experiences and personal characteristics would create a unique intersection with each text I encountered. Why, I reasoned, would it be worth existing just to think other people’s thoughts? (My vocabulary was not the same then, but my argument was.)

The only serious problem with that line of reasoning is that it presumes there (more…)

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Here’s an e-mail I received from a listener troubled by a particular passage in the Old Testament. He says “Leviticus” but means “Exodus”. It’s an interesting e-mail because a slight shift in how one phrase is understood completely changes the implications of the passage for the issue of life in the womb. He takes it a way I have heard it taken on other occasions as well. However, as I mention below the letter, I believe both the context and wording itself point in a different direction.

Hi, Dr. Creamer:
I listen to your show almost every day on my way home, and really enjoyed the Christian perspective on various issues of our time. One of the most frequent topics that have been discussed is abortion. While I am staunchly pro-life, I have doubts whether abortion is tantamount to murder. Here is the verse that causes my doubt:

Leviticus 21:22-25 And if men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart, and yet no harm follow; he shall be surely fined, according as the woman’s husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. But if any harm follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. (ASB)

A couple of things I observe from these few verses:

1. If a man commits murder, he will receive capital punishment.
2. If a man kills a pregnant woman, he will receive capital punishment.
3. If a man kills only the fetus without killing the pregnant woman, he only needs to pay a fine.

So the only conclusion I can (more…)

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President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become a Justice on the United States Supreme Court has drawn attention to a controversial appellate court ruling of hers in Ricci v DeStefano. In that case, the inherently unjust (self-contradictory) nature of Title VII applications is obvious. Essentially, a racially neutral exam was nullified by the fact that a white majority happened to perform better on it than their minority counterparts. Such coincidences occur naturally over any significant statistical sample. In some cases minorities would happen to perform better—not because of their minority status, but because of the relevant skills they would bring to the exam. In other cases, like (more…)

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