There’s No Drive Through Menu For Moral Beliefs, There’s But ONE God

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Let me just break this down for you as I understand it.  Again, this is not my opinion.  I am repeating what I have learned, repeating it, not opinionizing, repeating it.  If you promote or condone an activity that you know to be conducive to the commission of a mortal sin, which homosexuality is, that is called a near occasion of sin, meaning you’re nearly as guilty as the party that is doing the sinning.  And, because you are letting the licentiousness that all of us tend toward, you’re granting it cover.  You’re granting it legitimacy.  You’re giving it your approbation.”  Check out today’s transcript AND Clip Of The Day for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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Mike:  Here’s the headline from a blogger or writer who goes by the name of Benjamin Corey.  This was posted on his blog last Friday, I believe.  Here’s the headline: “Why Nonaffirming Evangelicals Can Still Support Marriage Equality (And Should).”

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Can a conservative [Mike:  The term means nothing, folks, nothing. Conservative, it is meaningless.] evangelical Christian who holds the personal theological conviction that homosexual behavior is sinful, still support civil marriage equality?

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Mike:  I want you to think about that sentence for just a moment.  This is loaded with such theological dynamite.  And you wonder why there’s no clarity on moral issues.  Let me read that to you again.  You wonder why there is no authority, there is no subsidiarity, and no sense that there is one right way and there are 38,000 wrong ways?  This sentence, just the opening sentence of this opinion piece tells you all you need to know about how screwed up, how messed up, how misguided and how misunderstood morality has become.

“Can a conservative evangelical Christian who holds the personal theological conviction that homosexual behavior is sinful, still support civil marriage equality?”  Gee, I didn’t know I got to have a personal theological conviction.  I thought that there was theology, theos – God, ology – study of, and I’m either convicted, a believer, trying not to sin or I’m not.  It’s pretty simple stuff here.  You get to have your own personal — in other words, it’s a menu.  To get to that narrow gate that Christ told us about, it’s a menu.  [mocking] “Yeah, give me a gay marriage.  I’m okay with that.  Give me a gay marriage with a teetotal ban on the consumption of alcohol.  Supersize that if you would, please.”  There’s no menu.  This is the problem.  This is what the last 500 years have wrought.  Personal theology?

You cannot make children with Steve and Adam.  It requires Eve and Adam.  Marriage is not something that is performed so that we can get a tax deduction.

If you’re going to run around saying this, then you have no ground to stand upon to denounce the atheist or to try to convince the atheist, [mocking] “Come on, man, you don’t really mean that.  You’re putting your soul in peril.  You’re putting your soul in jeopardy.”  That’s his personal theological choice.  You have no ground to stand upon to tell the agnostic the same thing.  That’s his personal theology.  I don’t know which theos the ology comes from.  Apparently you get to make those up as you go along, too.  Continuing:

[reading]

That’s what the folks at Evangelicals For Marriage Equality are arguing, and I wholeheartedly agree. If you are a conservative evangelical who is not affirming of same sex marriage theologically, I hope you’ll consider these reasons why it is still possible for you to support civil marriage equality among your fellow citizens:

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Mike:  Let me just break this down for you as I understand it.  Again, this is not my opinion.  I am repeating what I have learned, repeating it, not opinionizing, repeating it.  If you promote or condone an activity that you know to be conducive to the commission of a mortal sin, which homosexuality is, that is called a near occasion of sin, meaning you’re nearly as guilty as the party that is doing the sinning.  And, because you are letting the licentiousness that all of us tend toward, you’re granting it cover.  You’re granting it legitimacy.  You’re giving it your approbation.  It doesn’t matter if it’s just civil.

If you’re wondering, the same would apply to our sons and daughters shacking up.  What if there was a legal way to shack up?  In California, if you’re in college, there basically is a legal way to shack up.  To deny that that is an incorrect use of the marital act, and an incorrect act to obtain use of the marital act is a near occasion of sin.  But, of course, we’ve eliminated the word sin.  In Latin it’s pecatarum.  Some of you may still use the word “He’s got his peccadillos.”  What does that mean?  There are two ways.  There’s virtue, which is a good habit, and vice, a bad habit.  Bad habits lead to sin.  But since we’ve eliminated sin, there is no such thing.  There’s just bad habits now.  [mocking] “Why do you want to avoid a bad habit?  Who cares?  It’s just a bad habit.”  No, bad habits lead to bad sin.  Bad sin leads to souls not passing through the narrow gate.  Where do they go then?  You can figure that out for yourself.  A man named Dante wrote an entire treatise on this.

Here are the reasons you should support homosexual civil unions: “The United States is not a theocracy where the church rules overs society – it is a religious neutral republic.”  Again, ladies and gentlemen, this is a fatal flaw.  He’s actually correct about this, but this is the fatal flaw.  This is why if you read Christopher Ferrara’s Liberty, the God That Failed, you will grudgingly learn this as you go along.  It will take some time.  You won’t get it immediately.  You’ll reject, you’ll yell, scream, holler, call names, probably call Ferrara names, me names, whoever, but this is a correct statement.  This defies the arc of history.  All governments have either been, by definition, irreligious or have been religious, acknowledgement of a God or denouncement or outright non-recognition of God.  Our Constitution is the latter.  Whether we like it or not, it is.

All one has to do to know this, number one, look at the moral state of affairs in our beloved union of states today.  That’s number one.  Number two, read the proceedings of the 1871, 1872, 1873 and 1874 national reform alliance meetings where — the amazing part about the NRA meetings is that these people, by and large, were Northerners.  They were Yanks.  They weren’t Southerners.  They weren’t Bible belters.  This is the amazing part of it.  After the Civil War, so many were so horrified at the carnage that was unleashed by their government and that men were capable of this, and they were capable of performing this kind of violence under the name of the Constitution.  They said: Look, we have to fix this.  We have to put a clause in there that would prevent this from happening again.  It was the purpose of the NRA.  The other purpose of it, we have to make sure that another ghastly procedure like slavery can never happen under our beloved Constitution.  Thus, the NRA met for four years trying to convince the Congress to amend the Constitution to put a God clause in there.  They failed.  We are the product of that failure.

The second reason to support homosexual civil marriage and commit near occasions of mortal sin: “There is a difference between religious marriage and civil marriage.”  Well, once upon a time there was but one, religious, sacramental marriage, as it was called.  Number three: “Supporting civil marriage equality is the option that is most faithful to the biblical imperative of seeking justice.”  Really?  This sounds like this came straight out of one of these thumpers that promotes this insanity.

Four: “Civil marriage equality expands the reach of all the good things we say that marriage brings to society.”  Here’s another part of the problem, again, heresy.  What is the purpose of marriage as God gave it to us?  I will tell you: children.  You cannot make children with Steve and Adam.  It requires Eve and Adam.  Marriage is not something that is performed so that we can get a tax deduction.  Just listen to the way people think today.  [mocking] “I should probably get married and buy a house, get a mortgage, because I get a tax break for it.”  Really?  Now we make our decisions based upon our tax status?

Five: “Civil marriage equality is a mechanisms to help give a family to millions of children who are without one.”  So let me see if I understand this.  There are millions of children that have no foster parent, one man, one woman sacramentally married that desire to adopt them?  Maybe the real problem here is — if there indeed are all these millions out there — is that laws have been written to make the process of adoption almost impossible, nearly impossible for most people.  You have to be of such economic means and so devoted to this these days, it can take a decade.

End Mike Church Show Transcript