Disclaimer

I am neither employed by nor do I speak for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, its administration nor agencies. I'm just one Adventist guy with a studied opinion - more of a watchman on the walls than a voice crying in the wilderness.

Sunday, April 30, 2017

A Response to Calls for the Church to Expand Our Limited Views of Sexuality




I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but I thought I'd go ahead and get it over with
. It has been suggested that it is time for the church to expand our "limited views of sexuality." This idea was greeted enthusiastically by a train of commenters who added things like "...
it appears that so many see the Bible as some kind of rule book" or "They do not have a compelling reason to brand homosexuality a sin."  They call a re-examination of our views on gender, a "search for authenticity."

 The issue is about authenticity for certain. The term "authenticity" is being used as a whip to bring those who disagree with certain progressive notions into line. If we don't accept the "settled science" that there are 32 different "genders" to choose from based upon how one feels, we are apparently inauthentic (which is bad in case you missed the memo). The "science" has huge holes in the argument in favor of multiple genders. What little there is in the way of research is sparse and fragmented. Actually, my own viewpoint on sexuality has some 7000 years of authenticity behind it, so I'm comfortable in claiming to be authentic even though I'm not a "progressive".

Bill Nye the pseudo-science guy just did a show with a woman who says she makes her vagina speak. Bill and the talking vagina tell his audience that there are more than just two genders, in fact claiming gender exists on a spectrum. They even do a song and dance number about it, if you can imagine.  Nye, who has a BA in mechanical engineering and a failed career as a standup comic behind his claim to be a scientist, said flatly that it is "settled science" that gender exists on a spectrum. Unfortunately, for Bill's credibility, there's no such "settled science" and other than a few stray scientists' opinions, not much has been done on this politically driven scientific question.

To give you an idea of how political this type of "science" is, once in a TV interview, Nye suggested "science deniers" be imprisoned as "war criminals". My own field is psychology. In the 80s I watched psychology bow to political pressure and declare homosexuality normal, removing the diagnoses from the DSM-IIIR. I watched the powers that be shut down almost ANY research into the causes of gender displacement and especially into the treatment of gender identity problems. The quickest way to end your career back then was to do research and publish results showing either a genetic or psychological cause. The APA sent a memo out to all therapists that they were not to offer gender reassignment therapy of any sort and threatened their licenses. 


Meanwhile, the gay community celebrated their new unquestionable freedom with a decade-long orgy.  Meanwhile one of their number had sex with an ape of some sort or with someone who had and caught something bad. He flew it back to the states and passed it around the bath houses all over the country (he was an airline steward).  AIDS took hold, sweeping through first the gay, then bi-sexual communities with devastating consequences. Then, of course the disease broke free into the main population. The common denominator for infections was unprotected sex out of marriage. The new moral standard for sexual conduct apparently came with a death toll. Anything goes was the sexual standard and sure enough, it went and with tragic results.

Everybody (if you listen to the sexual propagandists) now wants to gauge gender by "feelings". Having studied the human brain, one thing I do know. Obi-wan Kenobi was wrong to tell Luke to trust his feelings. The only time you can trust your feelings is when you have trained your feelings to do what you want them to do. Almost all "feelings" of the sort the LGBTQ community are talking about are feelings generated by persistent training of the brain stem and limbic system by the forebrain (the part we think with). Feelings are pretty much an automatic reaction we get when we have thought about something enough times to lay down a shortcut between our perceptions and our emotions, triggering emotional responses without you having to think about it.

This ability to bypass thinking allows us to learn and retain everything from swinging a baseball bat to feeling love when we see our mother or spouse to jumping high in the air when we spot a snake at our feet. Such trained emotional responses mean we don't have to think about whether or not we love our child, for instance. We train our minds to feel that love in the months before that child is born or adopted. Or we have trained ourselves to love any child, or puppy or whatever prior to out encounter with them because we've previously thought about children or puppies and decided repeatedly that we are fond of them. In the same way, we have to have a bad encounter or some cognitive lessons from our parents before we recognize that a snake might be a bad thing. If you've ever had your little boy scare you to death by running after some interesting reptile without fear you know what I mean. They have to learn to run way from snakes.

In my 40 years in the mental health business and as a therapist, I found upon drilling down that my gender-identity confused kids all had experienced some kind of traumatic reset of their "feelings" about gender during their early childhood. Some may have had a genetic predisposition that nudged them one way or the other. Others had been molested or abused, but inevitably, something had gone wrong that interfered with their normal sexual development. There was a study done once (quite a cruel one to my way of thinking) where they attempted to influence gender selection in toddlers by swapping their toys. Boys got Barbie dolls and such and girls got building blocks. What they learned from this is that building blocks are useful in building houses for play families and for making tables for tea parties and that if you grab her by the legs, bend Barbie at the waist and pull off her head and arms, she makes a pretty serviceable gun. Gender, it seems, at least in genetically normal kids, is pretty well fixed.

The Bible has some pretty specific things to say about homosexuality, enough to indicate to me that it is not a good thing to encourage. We live in a society raised on "If it feels good do it!" The fact that some gay people are being persecuted isn't a Christian issue. Hey, I'm sorry the Russians are persecuting gay people, but Russian government persecutes everybody. They are also threatening to shut down my church which has nothing to do with the persecution of homosexuals and such. Russia just doesn't like anyone who doesn't toe the government line. Even some of the Christian churches are pretty much government run.




The LGBTQ folk are confusing government persecution with religious persecution. Christ
nowhere encouraged us to treat people other than the way we want to be treated. I know of no Christian church denomination which officially condones persecution of gay people. There may be some outliers in the community, but it's not universal as the LGBQT advocates would have you believe. I notice they picked on Christians in Russia to identify as persecutors. There is far worse persecution happening in the Middle-East where gay folk get thrown off buildings, stoned, beheaded, and burned alive. But in Syria and Palestine, the persecution can't be blamed on Christians, so it doesn't fit the progressive agenda to reduce the influence of Christianity, which ultimately is what all this is about.

I get accused of having conversations in my head when I bring up the concurrent gender identity crisis and the progressive political agenda around it.  The conversation is not in my head, though, it is out in the public square. As a mental health professional, I listened for most of my career as the LGBTQ community shouted down suggestions that the gender displacement was genetic AND that the gender identity was entirely choice.  These explanations were used interchangeably depending on which best met the objections. What they seemed to want was for everyone to shut up about it and let them get on with whatever they were doing and approve of it. I worked a brief time in school as a cab driver. I cannot tell you how many eager teenaged boys I picked up at the downtown Ft. Worth bus station and carried to an Eastside gay bar where they were met by gay men who paid their fare. Predators every one.  I watched kids we treated for gender identity issues who, when they turned 18, had pretty well come to terms with the abuse behind it and even joined a local church. I vividly remember when one young man, who had been serially molested by 3 uncles, turned 18, his caseworker picked him up and took him home. Looking in his record she saw that he had at one time exhibited homosexual behavior and took him straight down and signed him up with a local gay activist group. Their idea of "helping" him was to take him to a gay bar and get him some experience. The kid called us and was in really a bad way by the time they got through with him. They weren't about helping this kid at all. They were about increasing their own opportunities for gay sex by recruiting confused youth.

I've had several friends in the church who were gay or at least had those feelings to deal with. With God's help, they did not practice gay sex. That I can accept. People struggling with sin do not make me uncomfortable. They do not demand I approve of their sin. 

In the interest of fairness, I did once check out the website of a gay Adventist church in California. What brought me up short was that in their online church bulletin, they listed the best local bars for hooking up with gay and lesbian partners. Can you imagine if a mainline SDA church put up a list of singles bars in the church bulletin? The LGBTQ community doesn't appear to be looking for a dialogue. They are looking for everyone to submit to a line of reasoning that doesn't make sense to us and which demands that we all bring our feelings into submission to a kind of absolute truth about gender that they can't even describe in a way that makes logical sense.

Here's the deal; Scripture says "Male and female created He them." It does NOT say, "Male and female, Gay and Lesbian, Bi-sexual and trans-gender, trans-species and trans-racial, created He them."  Had Moses listed all of the (so far) 32 species of gender identity the LGBQTLSMFT community has so far championed.  there should be an entire chapter of Genesis on what sorts of genders God created and how to choose one. Let's look at science then, if Moses is not to be believed. Scientifically, there are two brands of gender determined by DNA. One is boys and the other is girls. There occasionally occur aberrations where there is an extra gender chromosome present in a person's DNA, but such folk tend to go one way or another. Only if you're born with both sets of genitalia, do you get a choice and even then it's better to go with the chromosomes if you want to be healthy.

The point is that SEX ISN'T EVERYTHING. That is utter heresy in the modern world, but there are plenty of Christian folk who have lived long and productive lives without ever "dipping their wicks". Jesus, who fulfilled all righteousness, never had sex. So apparently you won't die if you don't screw something sometime in your life AND it's not required to fulfill all righteousness. Forgive my bluntness, but there it is. There's not a better example than Jesus of righteous behavior. Some LGBTQ apologists have suggested that Jesus was, in fact, gay. If so, that's just another sin he resisted during his life and only supports my point that feelings aren't everything. Like Jesus, we go on principle.

We must not attempt to twist the natural world or the Scriptures into some shape that suits our feelings. The best we can do is emulate the pattern for behavior that we are given in the Word to the best of our ability with the help of Almighty God. We should be submitting to God's will, not the will of a highly organized group of sexual deviants. And you are going to have to give me a valid reason as to why God should create or blind evolutionary chance should pump out a bunch of gay people I have to stick by my judgment that gay six isn't right. You might make a case that Gaea gave us gay people in order to reduce the world's over-crowding by loading it with people who don't reproduce, but then the LGB etc. folk don't want to do that. Myself, I will continue to believe that other than the two basic genders, there are no others that are natural or useful except possibly to relieve a shortage of interior decorators and choreographers.  Barring genetic mutation (which seldom works out well for the mutant) I shall stick to the two identified genders and will avoid any sexual experimentation with numbers or genders as being what Scripture describes as "sin".

I love all my brothers and sisters including those who are gay and lesbian, bipolar, ADHD, schizophrenic, kleptomaniac, and have every other kind of mental disorder, dysfunction and trauma-induced psychological issue. I would never hurt one deliberately. In fact, I made a career of helping those kinds of people. I accept my homosexual friends with all their emotional and psychological struggles in the same way I would accept a brother or sister who struggles with gossip, anger or a lust for power. We are all sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God. The church is a hospital for sinners.

Leviticus is pretty specific about whether or not homosexual behavior is a sin. Notice I did NOT say homosexual "feelings".  Someone called the Scriptural prohibition "flimsy" evidence, but it seemed pretty solid to me. I will, therefore, not change my beliefs about the issue of whether sexual behavior outside of marriage in any form is a sin or not. It's a sin. My church and I are entitled to believe that so long as we don't go round stoning gay people. Just because we've grown past that sort of thing, doesn't mean the sin is any less a sin.


 My worldview is simple on that point. I won't be bullied into changing my belief in order to somehow magically stop the Russians from persecuting homosexuals. Oh, those naughty Russians and those intolerant Christians!  Always it's Christians the progressives demand must water down their beliefs and accept ever more and more sinful behavior as "normal".

It's not just happening around sexual and gender issues in our culture. Christians are being marginalized, ridiculed and downright persecuted unless they adopt the new blended culture in which all beliefs are equally valid, except, of course, for the Christian ones they disagree with. As then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said, "...
deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed." She was talking about abortion, but normalization of alternative sexual identity is also clearly part of the political agenda the left ascribes to. And I, for one, refuse to change my religious belief on either of those points.

Who could be behind such a thing as that here in the last days of Earth's history? Makes you wonder doesn't it? Who could it be? Now who could it be?

© 2017 by Tom King




Saturday, April 15, 2017

Politics and Religion: Is There a Right Side for Christians

20th century Christian author GK Chesterton


Put not your trust in princes. 
Wise words and yet we so seldom keep our skepticism intact when some smooth-tongued demagogue advances ideas we find attractive.  Recently my church has become more divided along political lines.  A recent article in Adventist Today remarked on how divided Adventists were on the issue of famed SDA neurosurgeon Ben Carson's 2016 candidacy for president and appeared to support efforts by Democrat progressives to "keep an eye on Carson."

Oddly enough the same folk who chided me for vocally supporting Carson, telling me Adventists were not supposed to get involved in politics, are posting one political article after another criticizing the new president and his policies and his cabinet picks - even though one of those picks was one of our own. I do not understand this in any other way than to assume that many of our magazine writers and a significant number of our influential SDA administrators and members have declared for the progressive left. If they have not, their writing and commentary certainly makes it sound that way.

So I don't get it. I sat in the same classes, the same Sabbath schools and heard the same sermons and attended the same evangelistic meetings. How does one get from all of that to progressivism?  Let me try and make my point with a little Q&A here.  Dividing the political spectrum into progressive left and conservative right, please tell me which side supports the following political goals. Remember, when I talk about the conservative right that does not mean TV evangelicals, most of whom lean to the left in their core beliefs. Okay, here we go:

POLITICS & RELIGION QUIZ:

Select conservative or liberal (progressive) as the political movement most likely to endorse the following policies:

1.  A single unified world government "with teeth" as proposed by Pope Benedict to be organized by church leaders, trade unions, industrial organizations and international political parties.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

2.  A United Religions organization similar to the United Nations with the Pope as the logical head of the organization as proposed by Shimon Perez last year.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

3. Signing a declaration ending the Protestant Reformation, resolution of all differences and reunification of the Christian Church under Roman Catholic leadership as proposed by Pope Francis.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

4. Government in which individuals draw their rights from and serve the collective state rather than the state drawing its power from and serving the individual citizens as outlined in the US Constitution.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

5. The utilization of fear of climate change, fear of big corporations, fear of not having healthcare, and fear of religion as the ultimate cause of all wars as a tool to rewrite the Constitution and impose a socialist state.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

6.  Abolition of religion from all participation in the public square as proposed by the Freedom from Religion Coalition.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

7. Increased regulation and government power to monitor suspect groups in opposition to the government and creation of a standing domestic army to be used to control the citizenry in the event of riots, civil disobedience or sedition as proposed by former President Obama.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

8. Abolition of the Second Amendment and complete disarming of the citizenry.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

9. The lobbying for and institution of Sunday closing laws as proposed by Pope Paul II and already enacted in European nations like Germany with full support of trade unions and progressive groups.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

10. The deliberate collapsing of the US economy by overloading the welfare system in order to nationalize industry and gain control of economic organizations as outlined by Obama advisor Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in their 1966 paper "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty".
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

11. The use of techniques like unrestricted abortion and euthanasia of the elderly, disabled and sick to clean up the population of nonproductive members.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

12. Control of the content of the curricula of local school districts by the federal government.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

13. Free government day care for working mothers. Free government education at all levels.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

14.  The end of personal ownership of land and property by individuals.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

15. Guaranteed jobs, housing, food and utilities, funded by the government.
                 -  Conservative or Progressive

16. A cashless society in which the government controls whether you buy or sell (as one pundit put it, "It would virtually end crime because there would be no money to steal."

                 -  Conservative or Progressive


Scoring:

Ask yourself, if any of this creeps you out. If it doesn't, you must have slept through those evangelistic meetings, sermons, Bible classes and Sabbath schools. I know it looks like I rigged the quiz and I kinda did. Every single one of those proposed political goals I drew from a card-carrying progressive liberal. That doesn't mean Republicans won't participate in these kinds of shenanigans. Both parties are capable of serious corruption. It's just that, before you assume uncritically that liberalism is what Jesus would do, you might want to re-examine that notion a little more closely.

Just saying,

© 2017 by Tom King

Saturday, April 8, 2017

A Response to "Appetizers and Affairs" in Spectrum



Courtney Ray, a female SDA pastor joined liberal feminists everywhere in piling up a mountain upon the molehill that was Mike Pence's declaration that he didn't do lunch or dinner meetings alone with female colleagues. In an article entitled "Appatizers and Affairs" in Spectrum Magazine, Pastor Ray complains that "This type of thinking impedes women’s ability for upward mobility."  She further warns of dire consequences. asking, "What if by some blessing from God unforeseen event, Donald Trump doesn't complete his entire term?"

Note the crossed out bit. She wants us to know that she believes that the death of the President of the United States would be the act of a beneficent God. It was at that point that Ms. Ray lost me and lost my respect. There is a definite growing segment of our church that holds "progressive" beliefs and sides completely with Democrats. These are the folk who believe that conservative Baptists will one day rise up and pass Sunday laws and send SDAs to jails. They completely ignore prophecies that state quite clearly that there will be a world church and world government with the power to compel people to obey its precepts. Neither of those things are supported by conservative Baptists.

I'm one of those evil conservatives and I beg to differ. The type of government I support would be small, with limited authority over anyone's individual freedom and religious liberty would be held sacrosanct. I don't support the idea, recently proposed by some religious leaders that we should have a United Religions, a sort of shadow United Nations with the pope as its natural leader. Progressives and Democrats do. I know. I've heard them. I know Catholics that are frightened by that idea given that a recent papal bull stated that we need a world government with teeth, organized by industrialists, international political parties, trade unions and church leaders.


Now that scares me.  Mike Pence making sure he's not alone with a woman in a restaurant so some news photographer can whip up a scandal, doesn't generate any fear in me at all. I think it's very wise for a man and a political figure to be careful about such things. One merely has to add a third person to the meeting and everything's hunky dory. Pence is being respectful to his wife by not exposing himself to potential attacks by the very people that are attacking him for his innocuous declaration of faithfulness to his wife.

While I as a private citizen might meet in a restaurant with a female colleague, were I, say a pastor or politician, I probably wouldn't without including, not a chaperone to make sure I control my hormones, but a witness in case someone chooses to turn an innocent meeting into a public scandal for their own purposes. I know of a conference president who lost his job because he accompanied a married woman on a flight to an East Coast clinic where her husband was undergoing cancer treatment. He was headed that way anyway and she was thoroughly traumatized. He did the Christian thing and opponents in the conference used the incident to imply he did something illicit. Just the hint of scandal wrecked his career.

My wife trusts me implicitly and I would never violate that trust. But I do avoid compromising situations as far as possible, even though it's highly unlikely that anyone in the media would ever bother to impugn my character over who I was seen with in public. This is not true for the vice-president.

Pastor Ray's very position as a pastor is ironically threatened by recent moves toward increased authoritarianism on the part of the General Conference administration, which now holds the power to decide whether or not she can work as a paid SDA pastor thanks to the women's ordination vote at the San Antonio GC. That decision is to the SDA church what Obamacare was to the United States - a transfer of power away from the local and state governments and from individuals (conference, unions and local congregations) to the federal authorities in Washington DC (the General Conference at Silver Springs).  It's ironic that I, a small government conservative, support Pastor Ray's ability to be a pastor and yet feel so strongly am at odds with her over her attitude toward Mike Pence. Pence is doing nothing more than being respectful of the reputation of women colleagues and of his own reputation in a world where nasty individuals would attack him with the slightest provocation should they think they could use some innocent lunch meeting to bring Mr. Pence down. Unfortunately, Pence's belief in smaller less powerful government is opposed to the progressive idea/myth of a big kindly government that makes everyone safe and well fed. This puts him in a camp Ms. Ray obviously finds in opposition to her own political views.

Mrs. Ray should logically support the principles Pence stands for in decreasing the authority of Washington over local affairs when the vote at GC rejected that very principle and took power from Unions, conferences and congregations to ordain whoever they feel God has called to ministry in their churches. Big government and big church have consistently led to disastrous results throughout history. There's evidence that God practically had to burn down Battle Creek in order to dislodge an increasingly powerful GC administration which Sister White herself criticized for exercising "kingly authority" as she called it. Ray doesn't seem to make that principled connection, however, steadfastly defending the media and liberal slant.

Ray further opines:

  • If he (Mike Pence) runs in 2020, he's already excluded the possibility of any female running mates. The POTUS and VP spend lots of unsupervised time together. So obviously, a female Vice President for a hypothetical President Pence would be categorically out of the question regardless of qualifications. Men who think like this inadvertently (and sometimes intentionally) block women's upward mobility because of their insecurities.
Ray is wrong, of course. The president and VP are never alone. There are secret service everywhere to protect them.  If Pence were to need a private meeting with a female colleague or world leader, he'd have no problem at all because he'd have secret service with him who could vouch for his behavior. Unlike progressive icon, Bill Clinton, he wouldn't have to invoke secrecy to shut up his Secret Service detail. They could talk all they wanted to and could bear witness under oath that nothing hinky happened.

Pence obviously spoke as a husband and father. None of the straw man arguments offered by Pastor Ray hold up under scrutiny. I am certain Sister White would have approved of the Vice-President's policy. She often counseled ministers and SDA men to avoid the appearance of evil. We live in an evil world let's face it. We're coming down to the end of it now. We as Christians do not advocate creating a human utopia here on this Earth that would allow us to throw off caution in favor of some feminist ideal of how things ought to be. In a sinful world. We must instead tread carefully. In the new Earth we can run around with whoever we want, have lunch with anyone anywhere and not have to worry about appearance of evil. It just won't come up. I applaud Vice President Pence. Given Trump's history of corruption, it's nice to see a little principle in the administrations. We might like to be able to have an innocent meeting with a friend of the opposite sex without consequences and we could were we in the New Earth and sin were a distant memory.

Here on the old Earth, not so much.
Sadly we shall always have to worry about appearances till we go home. The devil our adversary walks about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. Therefore, women can't run around dressed provocatively. Men can't have long meetings alone with women (or vice versa). Scripture says we are not even allowed to provoke our children to wrath. Paul says we shouldn't exercise our freedom to eat what we want if it might cause a weaker brother to stumble. 


While I sympathize with Ms. Ray's desire to remove stumbling blocks to women's "upward mobility", we shouldn't just cut loose from all proprieties, no matter how antiquated they might seem if we then pay the cost in damage to our reputations and our influence for good.  That applies equally to pastors and politicians.

© 2017 by Tom King