Atlas A. Rose's Blog

Introduction

There is no doubt that LGBTQIA+ issues in today’s world are hotly debated, and the issues are no less a hot button issue within the church. People go back and forth with traditionalists claiming it’s a perversion and liberals claiming God loves everyone no matter what their orientation or identification sexually. So what is really said in Scripture about these issues, especially those of homosexual and trans issues? Is the Bible really silent on it as many today claim? Does it openly affirm and embrace it as many atheists within the movement are now trying to claim? In fact, the Bible has quite a lot to say about the issue, but only if the approach to the topic is on the basis of theological fundamentals and principles rather than attempts to cherry pick verses, which is why many on both sides of the argument fail to make a compelling Biblical case on the issue at hand.

What are the Biblical Fundamentals?

In a discussion of theology, it is important to first lay out the framework or worldview from which we will examine the issue. Since the goal is to examine this from a Biblical theological perspective, we have to start there. What theological matters are at hand when dealing with LGBTQIA+ issues? There are three core issues at hand that need to be discussed in order to have a firm foundation to grasp how we should approach these issues if we care about reasoning from a Biblical theology.

First, there is the matter of God’s nature; this is where every theological discussion inevitably starts because what God does or does not affirm is unfailingly bound up in who He is. Second, there is the matter of God’s definition of sex, marriage, and identity. Third, there are the fundamental claims about sex, marriage, and identity that are at the heart of the LGBTQIA+ community. On those three rests the whole of the argument, and from those three, we find our answer in Scriptural principles.

God’s Nature in Relation to the Matter

We begin first with an examination of God’s nature. When asking if God would or would not affirm a movement or belief of any sort, His nature should be where we begin, not just the direct commands. Obviously, if there is a direct command against or for something, we have a clear answer, but when we do not, we have to ask ourselves about what the Bible tells us about God and what He might say about the topic more broadly. This is why I said earlier that His nature as well as His definitions of the three claims at the core of the LGBTQIA+ community matter to this discussion, again, assuming we care at all what God has to say, which as Christians we claim we do.

Holiness and Justice

What aspects of God’s nature are relevant in this case? First, there is His holiness and His justice. This is relevant because He is unable to abide any blot or stain of sin and must, to fulfill His nature as a just God, punish it if the person is not under redeeming grace. While it is true that God is a loving God, it is also true that He says in Scripture that He will not abide evil.

All we need do to know that God is also a God of justice and wrath against sin is look at what He did to Israel to bring about repentance in His own people or how He handled wicked cities like Nineveh or Sodom and Gomorrah. Yes, He gave some of these a chance to repent, but when they insisted on their sin, He punished and judged. In some cases, He wipes out entire nations for their rebellion.

That is not a God who sits up in the clouds like a loving old grandpa and smiles at the sinner and says, “Oh, I love everyone, so it’s okay.” He takes sin seriously. So seriously, in fact, that He sent His own Son to die for His people because if He hadn’t, He could never have let their sins go. There had to be atonement.

In the Biblical worldview, a holy God and the existence of the sin nature that makes us all abhorrent and deserving of wrath in His sight is the whole reason we needed a Savior to begin with. If God were not holy or just, He would not be God, and Christ never would have needed to die at all because He could have shrugged at our sins and let us into paradise anyway.

If God were not holy and set apart, He would be human. His holiness and justice are part of the essence that makes Him God instead of man. We are neither perfectly holy or perfectly just, and therein lies the reason why we needed a Savior to begin with.

Relevancy to the LGBTQIA+ Issue?

This matters, of course, because if the LGBTQIA+ agenda and claims are in fact against God’s word in command or principle, they would be an affront to a holy and just God, which would make them sin. This says nothing, yet, of how He might handle such an issue, but at the very beginning, it is crucial to grasp that if it is sin, God cannot look upon it without judgment forever if there is no repentance for it any more than He could look on the sins of the aforementioned cities and peoples forever without judgement precisely because of His nature as a just and holy God.

He may love His people, but loving His people, as the Israelites and later the New Testament church discovered, doesn’t mean there won’t be punishment and chastisement for evil doing among them. It just means the punishment or chastisement serves a different purpose—that of bringing about reconciliation and repentance—than the judgment of the wicked who are not under His grace.

Inerrancy and Omniscience

The second pair of aspects to God’s nature that are crucial to understand are His inerrancy and His omniscience. God, according to the Biblical worldview, is God because He knows all and never makes any mistake or error in anything. If there were anything He didn’t know or anything that He messed up or sinned in, He would not be God. He cannot run counter to His nature in any aspect, so it is impossible for Him to do that which would violate His essence in any way.

Relevancy to LGBTQIA+ Issue?

This is relevant because if the LGBTQIA+ agenda and claims require things that would run counter to God’s nature should He affirm them, then He cannot affirm them without being no longer God. Since we know from Scripture that He is unchanging from the dawn of time through eternity, we know it is impossible that He would affirm anything that would run counter to the principles or commands He has established.

Objection: The Old Testament Isn’t Relevant

Some would object that I have pulled from the Old Testament mainly so far and that God does change because He shows grace and love in the New Testament and wrath and judgment in the Old, which, such people usually say, we can safely ignore because it isn’t relevant. However, if we believe what the Bible teaches—that God is unchanging—that would mean that the precepts and guidelines and information about His nature that are laid out in the Old Testament should guide us just as much as the New.

There is more that could be said on this, but the article is already quite long enough, and it is enough to remind the believer that if he says he believes the Bible, the Bible teaches in New Testament alone that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Therefore, if God was the same in the days of the Old Testament as He was in the days of the New and today, the same truths of His nature and what He deems wicked are also unchanged. We can, therefore, be certain that if the claims the movement and those within it bank upon to convince us we should agree with them run counter to God’s nature as revealed in Scripture, Old or New alike, it is not something He would ever condone and is therefore not something a Christian should either.

God’s Definitions of the Core Aspects Under Question

Second, we must examine God’s definitions of the core aspects called into question by the LGBTQIA+ movement and the core of the debate going on within the church. This will be a lengthier section because it will deal with more Scripture than it does the theology aspect. The pieces will be put together when we get to the conclusion of the matter, but a thorough examination of the Scripture itself on the three fundamental definitions under fire in this debate should be made by anyone claiming to care about the theology of the matter, so that is what I will do here.

Marriage in the Bible

The first question to ask is what God’s definition of marriage is. In Genesis, we have the very first mention of both marriage and the role that sex (as well as sex in the sense of gender) is meant to play in it. This comes in the form of the well-known story of Eve’s creation:

And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

(KJV, Genesis 2:18-25)

Here, we have the very first man and wife every created and the first precedent, set into place by God Himself for how a marriage works. He says that the reason for marriage is because it is not good for man to be alone. He creates Eve to offer Adam a help meet. So right of the bat, we have some principles we can draw out here about how God defines marriage and how He views it as well as sex within it.

Adam’s Understanding of His Own Gender and of the Lack of a Corresponding Opposite

Of course, from Adam’s perspective, it is equally important to note here that he was looking around at male and female pairings in nature around him and realizing first that he was himself a male and second that he did not have a female as the others did. This further reinforces the concept that God’s institution of marriage—which came long before He ever instituted a human government that would, in our present day, decide to redefine God’s institution—was intended to include only one male and one female. Adam observed this rule of unions first in nature, though we know that today even nature has been changed by the effects of the curse of sin and imperfectly reflects God’s natural order. It was later reaffirmed by God in a passage in Genesis 3, where the famous first glimpse at marriage comes as He inspired Moses to write of marriage that it was the reason for which a man should leave his mother and father and cleave to his wife, the two becoming one flesh.

However, while there is much we can learn about marriage and gender from examining Adam’s understanding of it, which God saw fit to tell us for a reason, (one of the lessons being that Adam understood he was a male and that gender was instituted from the very beginning in the very first of humankind as well as in the animals around that first man), there is more we can learn if we examine why God Himself saw fit to institute marriage and, with it, the family and the authority structure within the home, which He defines clearly after the Fall later in Genesis.

Companionship

First, God instituted it to give man companionship. He determined that it wasn’t good for man to be alone, and while one reason for this was Adam’s biological imperative to continue multiplying the human race—a biological imperative God had given to all creation and had not, yet, given Adam a way to fulfill—the other was the idea of family and companionship, the second of which even animals can be seen to seek out on instinct. He viewed it as essential to give man a helper to come alongside him, just as the animals had one male and one female to work together, keep each other company, and to continue to multiply their species. God’s response to this problem was to give Adam the same sort of companionship He’d given to the rest of creation—a woman. So right at the beginning, God’s definition of marriage is one man, one woman. That already begins to clarify the question of how we ought to view some issues withing the LGBTQIA+ agenda, but we will continue to make it totally clear what Scripture says.

A New Family Unit

Second, we have the understanding that a new family unit must be formed when a marriage happens. Here notice that the passage says, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (KJV, Genesis 2:24). Earlier in the passage, Adam also notes that Eve is “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (KJV, Genesis 2:23) and that she would be called “Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (KJV, Genesis 2:23). Once again, nowhere in here is it implied that it is possible for anyone other than a man and a woman to be married, and directly after Adam points all of this out, we have the comment regarding why this matters. We’re told that because of this—a woman being bone of a man’s bone and flesh of his flesh—a man should leave his parents and unite himself with his wife and, just as importantly, that they will be one flesh. Obviously, after Adam and Eve, there is no woman who is literally taken from a man’s flesh and bone in the way that Eve was from Adam’s, so we know that God didn’t mean one flesh in that sense. The common understanding of this passage—especially as it is in the context of marriage, which has other passages that support this understanding—is that one flesh refers to uniting as husband and wife through sex.

Marriage Instituted by God before Human Government was Instituted and Could Rule on LGBTQIA+ Issues

This is not the only depiction of marriage or sex, though it alone is fairly clear on God’s definition of marriage and sex as it relates to marriage. It is also a very clear and intentional statement that God was instituting it back then, before he instituted the second sphere of authority in human life—human government. Given this, we can understand from this passage alone that it was God’s institution, one He takes very seriously and discusses all throughout Scripture. It is not, and never will be, an institution which human government may supersede with any authority except that of illegitimate force to give those following God’s order (whether intentionally or through subconscious dictate) no choice but to obey. This makes it plain that human government’s edicts that marriage must now include things God never intended to include are illegitimate and should not be acknowledged or followed by the Christian, even if it means accepting punishment for breaking the law should he find himself under tyranny where he has no legal recourse.

God’s View of Sexual Relationships

However, God does not leave us alone with only this short verse to tell us that He has instituted marriage as His institution or that He has defined it as between one man and one woman. The Bible contains an entire book regarding sexuality and relationships between individuals involving it.

Song of Solomon doesn’t get much screen time when people talk about the Bible, but it literally offers us a glimpse into the romantic and then sexual relationship between a man and a woman. Once again, nowhere in the book does it ever indicate God views this sort of relationship as appropriate between anybody but one man and one woman, but it does have quite a lot to share about sex within a marital context.

Paul also shares quite a bit about sex and marriage, noting in I Corinthians 7 that marriage is important if two individuals are unable to refrain from sexual relations with one another. He says, “It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (KJV, 1 Corinthians 7:1-2).  Once again, man and woman. No other unions are considered acceptable, and here Paul tells us that the purpose of marriage is to allow for relations between a man and a woman that are not sin (fornication and adultery are both regarded as sins that God commanded the Israelites to put people to death for). He notes that it is his own observation that it is better to remain unmarried and that it is not a sin to be married.

The Authority Structure of Marriage: The Final Piece of the Definition and a Picture of Christ

Later in I Corinthians, Paul reaffirms the concepts from Genesis and elaborates upon them further, stating that “that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God,” (KJV, 1 Corinthians 11:3) and adding that “For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (KJV, I Corinthians 11:7-9). Here, we see further evidence that marriage as God defines it is intended to be between a man and a woman with a physical as well as emotional relationship and further support for God defining gender as male and female, setting them apart as different, and defining how they operate in marriage, this time with the authority structure in the home.

Paul’s explanation of marriage indicates that God views it as being related to authority and the hierarchy of it He established. He points out that men are different from women in how they should approach their roles and behaviors in church because men are meant to be answerable directly to God as they are the image and glory of God while women are intended to be submitted to the head of their home (husbands in the context Paul has been discussing) as they would submit unto the Lord, which Paul also notes when he says that wives should “submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord” (KJV, Ephesians 5:22) because the husband “is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church…therefore, as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be subject to their own husbands in every thing” (KJV, Ephesians 5:23-24).

This leads us to the final major aspect of marriage in God’s definition of it. So far, we have seen that God defines marriage as between a man and a woman for the purpose of creating a new family unit, a goal in which sex plays a part that God upholds as beautiful, and as a picture of Christ and the church. The final aspect is that of authority within a marriage. Marriage is between a man and a woman for the purpose of creating a new family unit with the man as the head and the wife his partner and help meet who submits to him with love and respect as the church submits to Christ in all things.

That is God’s definition. It doesn’t include anything outside of that definition. Anything inside of it may take many different shapes; not every woman or man are the same, and how they choose to go about handling the submitting of the woman to the man often looks very different, but so long as there is one man and one woman who have become one through sexual union that is kept within the marriage bed to create a new family unit with the man as the head, you have a marriage in God’s eyes. Without that, you do not.

Sex in the Bible

As noted above, sex is hardly a subject God stays silent on in Scripture! We’ve already discussed what He has to say about sex within marriage, which is the only place where He has intended for it to be. He makes it clear in numerous places throughout Scripture that we are not to fornicate (Ephesians 5:3; 1 Corinthians 5; 1 Corinthians 6:18; 1 Thessalonians 4:3; Colossians 3:5; Revelation 2:20; Jude 1:7; Acts 15:20) or to commit adultery (Matthew 5:32; 19:9; James 2:11; Luke 16:18; Leviticus 20:10; Exodus 20:14; Deuteronomy 5:18; Proverbs 6:32; Mark 10:11-12; Galatians 5:19; Revelation 2:22). We are to be faithful to our spouses in the one man and one woman context. Anything else is condemned by nature of the Biblical definition of marriage. It is considered adultery and fornication, for which God often punished His own people.

God’s Ruling on LGBTQIA+ Relationships that Include Homosexuality

What other precedent is there surrounding sex outside of marriage? There are, of course, the complex laws in Leviticus surrounding cases of assault as well as adultery and fornication, but to the point of this article, what does the Bible have to say about sex between men or women rather than a man and a woman?

Sodom and Gomorrah–An Old Testament Example and Jude’s Warning in the New Testament

In Jude, we learn that the reason God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament was because they and the cities around them “in like manner” (Jude 1:7) were “giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh” (Jude 1:7) for which they were punished by “the vengeance of eternal fire” (Jude 1:7).

Notice that this reinforces the earlier point that God is unchanging and that both Old and New Testament are essential to our understanding of Him; Jude, under God’s inspiration, sees fit to explain to his reader that God punished Sodom and Gomorrah for sexual perversions, reminding his reader of what happens when God decides He is done forbearing and begins judgment. So much, then, for the argument that we can have one but throw away the other when it displeases us or seems “outdated” or fails to fit our notion of who God should be.

Note that here, when Jude discusses strange flesh, it encompasses relationships that went beyond adultery or fornication—both of which only applied in the Bible to a woman or man sleeping with an individual of the opposite gender who was not their spouse.

From the story about Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah, we also know that this referred to homosexuality specifically (the original term “sodomy” or “sodomite” came from Sodom because it was known for this in particular) because when the men of the city came after the angels who had come to visit Lot, they wanted him to give them the men who entered the city so that they may know them, a term that is used specifically in the KJV to refer to having sexual relations with another person.

Lot recognizes that this is the intent they held when he goes to them and says “I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof” (KJV, Genesis 19:8). Again, Sodom was well-known for sodomy/homosexuality as well as adultery and fornication. God burned them to the ground for it, and Jude later warns in the New Testament that this was the response to it and that it should not be taken lightly.

Paul’s Warning that Homosexuality is a Judgment on Wicked Peoples and Nations

Lest the Old Testament examples were not enough, God inspires Paul to discuss this particular sin in his sweeping explanation of why no man is without sin and every man is without excuse before God in the book of Romans. In this case, God uses it as punishment and judgment on peoples and nations who refused to acknowledge God or His laws repeatedly and openly rebelled against Him. Paul says:

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.

(KJV, Romans 1:26-28)

Once again, not a single thing God had to say about these sorts of relationships is complimentary.

There are more passages that could be discussed, but these are the plainest examples and passages we could possibly examine, and it should be pretty clear already that things do not match up between God’s view of sex and that of the LGBTQIA+ community. The standard that sex is pleasurable but only able to also be beautiful and good when it is reserved for marriage alone—which is between one man and one woman for the purpose of creating a new family unit and a picture of the union between Christ and the church—is diametrically opposed to the view that sex is for pleasure predominantly and holds no inherent value beyond it with no morality to it at all (excepting in cases of rape or incest, for example).

The second is the only viewpoint that would allow one to come to the conclusion that sex can be had without any moral wrongdoing between any person of any gender at any time they so please. If you hold the first according to the Bible, as everyone who professes to be a Christian should since the Bible is their sole authority, you cannot agree with the second or anything that is born of it.

The Definitions of the LGBTQIA+ Community

Here, we’ll begin with a brief explanation of the philosophical premise the whole reasoning train begins from in this community’s worldview, and that is with sex. Most of us are surrounded by a culture, even ignoring the LGBTQIA+ community specifically, that views both marriage and sex as solely to do with the pleasure of the individuals involved and not inherently moral or immoral so long as consent is given.

Redefining Sex and Marriage to Be Rooted in Pleasure and Gratification is Essential to Normalizing LGBTQIA+ Relations

The definitions and train of logic that lead to “homosexuality and LGBTQIA+ relations are praiseworthy” do not begin with marriage, as they do in Scripture, because in this community (as well as many others who reject a Judeo-Christian worldview), marriage is something you do when you decide you like a person enough to want to live with them and have sex with them exclusively, at least for as long as you both feel like you love one another. In this community, the view of sex is that it is for pleasure predominantly and that so long as both people involved are enjoying what is happening, nothing is immoral about it.

One can quickly grasp how such a view, if accepted, would make the step to “homosexuality is moral and should be accepted” an easy one. If all sex is about is the enjoyment of both parties and, perhaps, whether or not they have feelings of love for one another, then why shouldn’t a man and a man or a woman and a woman engage in such a thing if it makes them happy or brings them pleasure?

This is the whole premise upon which everything else rests! You would not attempt to redefine marriage from centuries of human definition as one man and one woman (a definition which held true even in pagan or non-Christian cultures with no concern for Biblical precepts like that of Rome where many older men and young men frequently engaged in homosexuality openly and with no censure from the culture) unless you believed that marriage was solely about your own pleasure just as sex is.

At the core of the redefinition lies a shift in viewpoint on purpose, which itself requires the redefinition in order to avoid the moral implications behind the original definition and the purpose that required that definition. Pleasure rather than the goal to reflect Christ’s relationship with the church or the goal to create a new family unit to carry on one’s legacy is the modern reason for both sex and marriage, and as a result, anything goes so long as it is pleasurable.

Can LGBTQIA+ Beliefs Co-Exist with Those Presented in Scripture?

Such a principle is obviously in direct defiance against God’s definitions of both, and I would remind the reader here that we have already established earlier that those following the God of the Bible must accept that God alone can define these things because He was the one to institute it long before He ever instituted a human government that could do as ours has and try to redefine His system.

In God’s system, sex is pleasurable, but its purpose is to bring together a man and a woman as husband and wife, not only to carry on the next generation but to bring them together more closely in becoming one unit working in common purpose with love and respect. Sex is intended to achieve those things as one part of the marriage. In any other context, God condemns it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a man and a woman or a woman and a woman/a man and a man. He condemns it all. He burned several cities to the ground for it and inflicted it on others as a judgment for their sin by removing His influence to allow them to run after it with no prick of the conscience to stop them, two things which are mentioned and discussed in both New and Old Testaments.

It is clear the two definitions cannot co-exist, and as Christians, this alone ought to prove to us that if we truly are God’s people, we cannot agree with anyone who seeks to redefine marriage or sex to be solely about pleasure with no concern for God’s ordained order or purposes for each.

How Should Christians Deal with LGBTQIA+ Issues?

The obvious part of the answer is that we do not condone or accept any attempt to redefine marriage or sex to something that is outside of God’s order because we know and understand that it is God’s institution, not man’s, and therefore, where He has called abhorrent the thing another seeks to add to the definition, we must not waver in refusing to allow it.

Homosexuality versus the Bible–You Have to Choose

This gives a clear answer on where we fall about homosexuality, which is mostly why I covered the definitions of marriage and sex in the Bible so closely. At this point, it should be abundantly clear that those two things in a Biblical worldview are contradictory with the same two things from the viewpoint of a society aiming to uphold LGBTQIA+ agendas. You must choose one or the other. You cannot have the Bible and “homosexuality is acceptable in God’s eyes”. It is literally impossible on a fundamental level, as we have shown.

Can the Rest of the LGBTQIA+ Community Be Condoned and Applauded by the Christian who Believes the Bible?

What about the rest of the LGBTQIA+ community though? How do we handle the issue of transgenderism and gender identity in a Biblical way—if that is indeed our concern? Let’s go back to the definitions of God’s nature we discussed and then take a look at Adam and Eve further to bring us full circle.

Transgenderism

The Bible doesn’t have any overt passages that discuss people who think they should’ve been born a boy instead of a girl, so we can’t go to a chapter and verse like we can on homosexuality. The New Testament in particular deals with Christians, and such defiance against God’s order was not one that would ever have been imagined in their day, let alone among God’s own people. It certainly wasn’t an issue known among God’s people in the Old Testament, and we have reason to believe that it was not present among His people in the New either, thereby explaining why we have no explicit instruction on what to do with the matter.

Even the Corinthians, who allowed a man doing horrible sexually perverted deeds, never allowed homosexuality or the ideology of trans/queer society to be present in their church as we do today in modern day America. That alone ought to terrify us considering that the Corinthian church was pretty messed up and gained a very stern, harsh rebuke from Paul on their goings on. Imagine how much greater our rebuke would be!

But does the lack of specific Scripture and open, specific rebuke of such things mean we’re left without any guidance on what our theology should contain regarding this issue and therefore free to decide, as some churches have, that it is acceptable with no further examination or concern for the matter? Absolutely not! As I pointed out in the beginning, an appropriate examination of any issue on a theological level examines God’s nature and the implications that nature has on the matter when there is no precept or principle to guide us.

Return to God’s Nature

So, as I said, let’s go back to the aspects of God’s nature I pointed out in the beginning. In this case, it is God’s inerrancy that we are concerned with. Remember that we said that God cannot be God if He is not both omniscient and incapable of error. Humans are neither, and so if He were neither, He too would be like us and would have no call for claiming a right to set any moral principles to guide us at all.

If God is unable to err, however, and we know from the Bible that He shapes us and ordains our purpose even when we are still in the womb (Galatians 1:15; Psalms 113:9; Psalms 22:10; Psalms 71:6; Psalms 139: 13), then we should also understand that it would be impossible for the claim made by those wishing to be a boy when born a girl to be true. The whole heart of their claim is that they should never have been born a girl because they should have been born a boy. In other words, there was a mistake.

Now, if we believed in random chance as an evolutionary concept or that God set things into motion and has no concern for our goings on now (or at least none with the gender of a baby because we believe that is left up to the laws of nature He set into motion), we could easily agree with this because when random chance is the name of the game, mistakes of such magnitude certainly could happen and should be expected to happen. It would be nothing to bat an eye at.

However, if we claim we believe the Bible and are therefore Christians, then we do not believe in random chance. We believe in a God who creates us and forms us in our mothers’ wombs and ordains our purposes from that point (a claim which He makes through the writers in both Old and New Testament), and we believe in a God who cannot make any mistakes. If that is so, then not only is it impossible that He could make such a mistake as to create a woman who should’ve been a man, but it is in fact blasphemous irrationality to claim such. If God could make such a mistake, He would no longer be God.

Non-Binary?

It is further important to address the issue of those who claim to be non-binary (of both genders or of no gender at all). Here is where we must return to the point I made in brief about Adam’s perspective of the matter of a companion. While God had many purposes for marriage and instituting it, Adam was not thinking of companionship or marriage when he saw the pairings of animals. He could not be thinking of the second, certainly, because it had not yet been instituted, and he walked with God, so he did not lack for companionship either.

He was looking at the animals and seeing that there were pairs of one male and one female. He recognized instinctually that he was male. He was not non-binary. He didn’t need someone to explain the gender “construct” to him in order to know he was supposed to be male. It was built into him that he could look at the differences physically between the two genders God had created and at himself and understand, even from observing animals, that he was a male and that he did not have a female counterpart like the rest of God’s creation did.

His desire for that was not driven by need for companionship either, as he had God to speak with and walk with and didn’t know anything different. It was driven by the understanding first of the command to multiply according to kind and second by the understanding that he did not have what he needed to fulfill that command like the rest of nature did. So, he recognized his gender instinctually, recognized the gender of the rest of creation—male or female—and knew he was missing a female of his kind.

Such a passage, along with the reaffirmation of male and female—a binary system of gender—all throughout Scripture within God’s definition of one of society’s most fundamental units—a marriage—makes it plain that in God’s defining of gender, there is no room for being something other than male or female, being both, or being no gender at all.

By virtue of the fact that God created humans and set that defining characteristic into place biologically, Christians cannot claim it is possible to be that which God has not allowed within His creation. If one is living and breathing, then one can only be either he or she, not both and not neither. It is an inescapable fact, no matter what those confused or reality-defying individuals within the LGBTQIA+ community may claim.

Christians may not waver from the order and definition of gender that God has instituted and imprinted onto the very subconscious minds of humankind. Only a conscious, intentional decision to try to defy reality leads to this claim, and Christians must recognize it as the lie that it is.

Speaking the Truth but with Love

So how do we respond to people within the community? What is the appropriate way to handle this as Christians? First of all, as I said, we do not affirm the immoral or reality-denying viewpoint. We must remain firm on the truth regardless of how much someone may hate us for it. Doing otherwise sacrifices both truth and reason, and then we have no basis at all upon which we can judge anything right or wrong. We never agree with that which is rebellion and sin against God.

However, it would also not be right for us to respond to those in this community with hatred, vitriol, and unkindness! They are as much sinners as we are. The only reason we are not under equal condemnation as Christians is because of the grace and mercy God has shown us, a grace and mercy He will willingly show them as well if they repent.

Whether we are dealing with the one who has embraced all manner of sexual immorality or with the one who believes an outright lie because their fallen nature has manifested in a way that has left them confused and their view of reality destroyed, we must not treat them unkindly or rudely.

We should embrace them with Christ’s love, but we have to remember that Christ’s was not a love that refused to call sin sin. He spoke to the woman who had committed adultery gently, but He still told her to go and sin no more. In cases such as those with the unrepentant Pharisees, He is quite sharp in His condemnations, calling them a brood of vipers and whitewashed sepulchers. So we are not called to dance around the fact that what they are doing and believing in is sinful and immoral.

However, at the same time, we should remember that we are called to behave in a manner that draws people to Christ, and angry, rude, irrational people do not do that! If we are to be successful in being a witness to these individuals as sinners, just as we are called to do with the rest of the world, our approach needs to be one that is firm on truth and reality but also gentle and kind.

Every situation will be a little different in what that means and how we deal with it, but if we offer nothing but condemnation, then we are not offering them the Bible; we are no better than the Pharisees looking down on the adulterous woman while they themselves had their own plethora of sins to address.

So as we use discernment in determining how best to balance telling the truth and loving the lost, we should remember that even as we are called to uphold truth, we are also called to reach the lost, which requires us to know what we believe and why in a way which we can explain rationally and without being combative, rude, or un-Christlike in our approach.

In some cases, there may be no way to uphold the truth and keep the peace; many will not allow it because if we will not applaud their agenda and their beliefs, we are the enemy. However, in many cases, if we will behave in a way that is above reproach as we uphold the truth, living peaceably with all men, as Paul discusses in Romans 12:18 is entirely possible. In so much as it depends on us, we ought to aim for interacting with those from this community in a manner that is peaceable and displays God’s character both in His holiness and in His love.

The post A Theological Examination of the LGBTQIA+ Movement appeared first on Atlas's Island.

Introduction

Abortion is, without a doubt, one of the most controversial issues dealt with in today’s political environment. This week marks an unprecedented landmark in politics and law surrounding the issue within my lifetime, and I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t take the time to discuss the situation and particulars from both a political and philosophical issue, particularly as that is the whole point of this blog.

I want to begin by pointing out that the leak of a draft of a Supreme Court decision actually is illegal and could send the person who leaked it to jail, as it should once we find out who did this. Whatever your position on this issue, it is critical that drafts like this on any issue remain unavailable to the public until the official decision is published in order to maintain the security of the court’s ability to deliberate free from mob pressures and political pressures. They were never intended to be a political apparatus that created legislation on the basis of constituent or lobbyist pressures, and that is the whole point of making them unelected officials. The Founders did this on purpose, and if you leak court documents before a decision is even finalized, the only thing you do is expose the justices to threats and political pressure (both of which are already coming down on the court) and destroy their ability to function as they were intended to–free of the whims of the people or whichever activist group can make the most noise or throw the most money at them. With that out of the way, I want to start by covering the philosophical roots of this issue and then go into the legal implications and some common misunderstandings I’m seeing consistently on social media as average people like you and I are discussing the new turn in the political scene regarding abortion. Legal or illegal, the document’s out, and it seems likely the court will maintain their position as it is, so it’s worthwhile to understand what that position actually means.

Defining Terms Surrounding Abortion

First, in any debate, it is absolutely crucial to define parameters and definitions. That is what I will begin with so that there will be no confusion regarding how I am using terms going forward or what I mean by them.

To begin with, when I discuss abortion, there are a few things that I do not count because they are not, under any state law, considered abortion or illegal. They are simply not on the table as part of this debate, though there may be some religious debates surrounding them within certain communities. From a legal perspective, however, and from the perspective of what is accessible or not, even in states that would ban abortion outright, they are not issues. The first of these would be the matter of an ectopic pregnancy. For those who aren’t aware, an ectopic pregnancy occurs when the baby is growing somewhere outside the uterus, where it will kill both mother and baby if nothing is done. Usually, in about 90% of cases, this happens in the fallopian tube and is extremely dangerous for the mother. It is estimated that about 1 in 5 women in the US end up facing a crisis of this sort. This sort of pregnancy is usually not considered abortion because there is zero chance for the baby to survive, period. It will kill the mother if it is not removed, and there is no choice but to remove it unless you’re for both baby and mother dying for no reason. Maybe someday we will have the science to save both; this sort of situation is tragic for the mother just as much as a traditional miscarriage would be. For now though, we can’t do anything except save the mother. We’re not taking away a life that would survive in this case, so the law usually doesn’t prevent it.

Ohio does have a law under consideration that talks about ectopic pregnancies and nontherapeutic abortion, but even there, they do allow exceptions for procedures in emergency situations to save the mother’s life, and they do state that they do not include procedures to move the egg to the uterus in those cases as nontherapeutic abortion. I’m not sure what the last is doing in there given that medical professionals have made clear we have no way of doing this, so there are questions about this, but there is not broad base support for such a measure that would ban even procedures for such a pregnancy, and given that they do not ban procedures to save the mother’s life, it could well be taken into consideration that failing to perform the procedure to remove the embryo would result in the mother’s death. It’s hard to say how that will play out, but for the purposes of the current situation and this discussion, I do not consider removal of the embryo in such a case to be abortion or in any way morally wrong. It’s a difficult situation, and anyone advocating that we should destroy a life when the one we’re destroying it for will die anyway no matter what we do ought to be ashamed of themselves for suggesting it. That is most certainly not what I am advocating here!

Secondly, we are not discussing procedures to remove a stillborn baby who did not miscarry properly. This situation isn’t one I’ve often heard of, but I’ve heard a few people bring it up in the abortion debate as though we need to keep abortion legal in every case so these few can have a dead baby removed before the mother goes septic and dies. Once again, while I know some Catholic-run or other religious hospitals will not perform such a procedure, I know of no state law or state-run hospital that would refuse to perform this procedure. It falls under life-saving procedure. The baby is already dead, regardless of why. Obviously, I can understand that some of the religious institutions refuse out of the concern that perhaps the mother killed it with aborticides, but at the end of the day, the baby is dead and they didn’t have a hand in it. However it happened, it still needs to be removed to preserve the living human being asking for the procedure. Therefore, it falls under a necessary, life-saving procedure that has to be handled if the mother’s life is to be preserved. I know of no one in this debate who is suggesting that outlawing abortion should include refusing to remove a dead baby before the mother goes septic any more than I know of any who argue that ectopic pregnancy removal should be included under anti-abortion legislation. In fact, I know many intentionally exclude these situations, just as I am, and rightfully so. There is suffering enough to the mother in knowing that her child is dead or will be dead no matter what she has done; it would be a moral wrong to heap more suffering upon her and her family by consigning her to death as well.

So, then, what do I define as abortion? I define abortion, as most pro-life advocates do, as the murder of an unborn child who would otherwise have been carried to term and born. Period. It is the intentional destruction of life at any stage in the process, and it is just as wrong as it would be to allow a mother to die because her baby is dead or dying and cannot be saved. Human life is sacred, end of story. If we consider it murdering the baby in the womb if some random guy beats a pregnant woman up and ends the child’s life, then it is unacceptable for someone to go in and suck that same baby out of the womb, tear it to pieces and then pull it out, destroy it with chemicals, or perform literally any other procedure that would guarantee the death–if it goes to plan–of a baby in the womb who is of no threat to the mother’s life.

Dealing with Sensitive Abortion Issues

Some would bring up the rare cases of pregnancies due to rape or incest, which make up a tiny minority of the abortions that do go on in the US every year, which numbered a little over 629,000 abortions in 2019 per the CDC records. This is a legitimate issue given that in the few cases where this is why a woman is looking for abortion, there has already been a great deal of trauma. However, studies performed on the number of rape victims who chose to keep their babies have shown that 70% or more of those women chose to keep the baby and found that it actually gave them a reason to keep going, rather than impeding their healing. Many kept the baby and raised the child, while others opt for adoption, but 70% is a large number out of a small population of those whom abortion advocates claim abortion needs to be kept legal for. Of the other 30%, many of them report being devastated by their choice and finding that it added to the trauma and the struggle to heal because they felt grief over killing the child even though they’d been told it was best or the right thing to do for themselves. (For those interested, this site has a collection of stories and testimonials from a variety of women as well as some links to other articles with more stories by women who did go through this.) Is this a sensitive situation? Yes, it is. It’s very difficult for everyone involved, but for no one more than the victims. However, the studies indicate that abortion is actually adding to the trauma, not making it better, and that having the baby (even if you don’t keep the child after) can actually help with the healing process.

While I understand that some of those making this argument are trying to come at it from a place of understandable and well-meaning compassion, the evidence simply does not support using abortion as the solution, so I am against it in this case as well. I am for finding better ways to offer support to these victims within the community, educating people to put an end to the harmful mentality that a rape victim asked for it so that there will be less judgment and cruelty, and finding ways to start charitable programs to reach out to young woman in these positions with counseling, supplies, and guidance. Some organizations already do this, and they have had a great deal of success, not just in helping mothers to make informed choices but also in offering them what they need to get through a time that can be difficult when alone, without support, and potentially financially unable to access what is needed to have the baby and/or keep the child after (if that is the choice made). We shouldn’t leave behind those in our community who are suffering through no fault of their own, but let’s find solutions that meet the needs. Taking an innocent life is never the solution. We can and should be finding ways that don’t involve making the situation worse or adding one moral evil on top of another by persuading the victim that killing the child will make it all go away or at least lessen the difficulties. Evidence says that makes it worse, not better, so if our goal is really to help these women rather than using them as a prop in arguing for abortion on the basis of a fringe minority, then we need to start looking for other options and better ways to help. It’s a worthy goal, and I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I know good work is being done and more of it ought to be started instead of sending them straight to an abortion clinic to add to the trauma.

Abortion from a Legal Perspective

So let’s turn our focus to the situation with the Supreme Court as they are poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. I’ve seen a lot of inaccurate claims, hysteria, and anger from the Left over this issue, and I want to start by addressing that. First of all, I find it ridiculous to become so angry over the possibility (yes, only a possibility in most cases, as I’ll explain in a moment) of being denied the ability to murder an unborn child. Seriously, they aren’t even arguing that they’re angry because it might harm the rare person in the situations mentioned above, two of which are usually not even included in the most restrictive laws and which most Americans would be against banning even on the conservative side. They’re angry because women who chose to have sex and either failed to use protection or else had protection fail on them ended up facing the consequences of their decision. Very bluntly put, if you choose to have sex, you do it knowing there’s always the possibility that something could go wrong and an unplanned pregnancy could occur. If you want to take the risk, fine, but you don’t get to turn around and murder a child because you don’t want it. Period. You are responsible for your choices, and the child shouldn’t suffer because you decided you didn’t like the idea of being responsible for that particular one. The Left is up in arms because they believe that abortion is sacred, in the words of numerous lawmakers like AOC. It is no longer that they believe it is a necessary evil. They believe it is a right guaranteed to every woman, and it is evil for anyone to make laws against it. That’s the root of the anger. On a moral level, that’s simply despicable.

However, in watching the debates occurring since the leak of the Supreme Court document, I’ve also noticed that a great deal of the debate is occurring due to patently false notions of what overruling Roe v. Wade does, what the Constitution actually says, and what constitutes abortion. I want to address those people’s concerns on a legal level here. For those who are arguing with the crowd mentioned above, I have nothing to say except that I wonder what god you’re worshipping to make the murder of children at any stage a sacred right. I also wonder what version of the Constitution this crowd’s reading. My version says nothing about your right to take another life anywhere, says nothing about harming a body that is not yours, says nothing about reproductive rights or marriage or anything else even closely relating to this issue on a federal level or state level. What it does say is that what powers are not explicitly granted to the federal government in the Constitution are the states’ or the people’s. So… That would mean since abortion and so-called reproductive rights are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution and, beyond that even, have zero historical basis in natural law, which is where the idea of natural rights as promoted by our Founding documents come from to begin with, the decision on abortion goes to the States and the elected representatives of the people in those States.

But let’s focus on the misunderstandings.

Abortion Law Misunderstanding #1: Roe v Wade Legalized Abortion and Revoking It Will Ban Abortion Everywhere

So, first of all, Roe was partially overturned and thrown out in the subsequent Casey ruling to begin with in a large part. But, allowing that it’s still a major case as was Casey, what people seem not to grasp is that neither case is legislation. The court cannot pass legislation, and when you actually read through Roe and Casey, they were not grounding the argument in any legal analysis or Constitutional analysis. They made things up, crafted vague arguments, and were generally playing the part of legislative body, not judicial body. This in and of itself is reason enough for Alito’s statement that it must be tossed out, though it wasn’t the only reason he gave. I would encourage everyone to read through the leaked draft in its entirety because Alito lays out a superb explanation of why Roe and Casey must be overturned. However, neither legalized abortion. What they did was deny states the right to decide. There are no federal laws on the books forcing all states to comply to a standard. Everything has been done, unconstitutionally, through activist judges who wanted to rule in favor of abortion advocates and found a way to do it. Even many major legal scholars who agree with abortion find the case to be a trashy piece of judicial work, though they would love to see it passed as actual legislation. Law

However, even were it not garbage on a legal and Constitutional level, Roe and Casey don’t actually make abortion legal across the US. All they did was set a standard on how restrictive states could be on the issue, and that standard moved all over the place on no scientific basis at all. Casey muddled those rules even more than Roe did.

So what does it actually do for the court to overturn Roe? It returns the power to the States. It has no power to ban abortion because there’s no federal law that bans it, and as such, the States decide. Some, like California, New York, and Colorado will allow it literally up to the moment of birth. Others like Texas and Florida will ban it outright. A few states have legislation that will kick back into place to ban it entirely if Roe is actually overturned, but note that legislation, unlike court decisions made by unelected judges, can much more easily be changed and reversed if the residents of the state dislike the law. Politicians can be voted out and new ones more receptive to the will of the majority in that state put into power to enact the will of the people. Most states will fall somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, regulating it more heavily or loosely based on what their constituents actually want. As much as, on a moral level, I would like for abortion to be banned (recollecting that I exclude the ectopic pregnancy and removal of a miscarried baby from that mix) in every State, that isn’t what will happen and each State will decide for themselves what to do.

This brings me to my next point: federalism.

Abortion Law Misunderstanding #2: How can banning abortion equal less federal government or smaller federal government?

This one stems directly from a conversation I had with someone on Twitter and from questions I’ve seen people asking those like Shapiro who advocate that overturning Roe v Wade is returning to federalism and less federal government control. It operates on the misunderstanding about Roe that was explained above and an inherent misunderstanding of how federalism works.

Federalism is a system by which certain powers are vested into a central government and the remaining powers are granted to state and local governments. In the US, this is regulated and determined by our Constitution, which states outright what the federal government can do and makes clear a few specific things they cannot while ending with the note that anything not mentioned is power held by the States’ governments, not by the federal government. With that definition, it should be fairly clear how overturning Roe v Wade means a return to federalism in this area. First of all, overturning Roe does not ban abortion country wide as those asking this question presume. Second of all, by overturning Roe, the Supreme Court is saying that it isn’t an issue that the federal government has a right to handle. They are fixing their initial error in weighing in at all and returning the decision to the individual state governments where it rightfully belonged since the Constitution does not give any power over the issue to the federal government, period. When power is removed from the federal government when it has been wrongfully assumed and given back to the States where it belongs, this is a restoration of the federalist system we had originally. It also means less federal government control. For those asking about this issue, state and federal governments are not the same. The state is not meant to be an extension of the will of the federal government. They are meant to answer directly to “We the People” even as the House of Representatives was originally meant to. Senate under the original system did not answer to the people to provide a check on mob or majority tyranny, though that is not how it is anymore, much to the detriment of us all, sadly. Originally, the officials we elected at the State level chose our senators. So we still made the call on who would choose our officials for Senate, but those senators didn’t have to answer to us, which allowed them similar neutrality in weighing new legislation as the Supreme Court is supposed to have in weighing how to handle existing law in light of the Constitution. These days, most State governments go along to get along with the feds, but that isn’t necessarily how it must go, and they do have the right to claim their rights under the Constitution, even if they have surrendered so much of it at this point that every reclaiming of power must land in the Supreme Court as it did here.

That said, the two are still distinct bodies, and the Constitution regulates the federal government, not the State governments. Many State governments have adopted similar protections from the national constitution into their state constitutions, which is good and something that should be the case, but the Constitution regulates federal government, not States. In cases where federal law usurps power that belongs to the States, they can and should be standing up and saying no, as Florida frequently did during the pandemic on matters of how they would run their own State in matters unrelated to the powers enumerated to the federal government. If people dislike how things are being run, then, they have direct control over all but a handful of issues as it is much easier to replace state officials than to replace national ones. This is how federalism was meant to operate, and until Lincoln stepped outside of the powers granted to the federal government and used loose and illegitimate reasoning to justify launching a war because he was unwilling to let the South leave, state rights were strong and alive, just as federalism was. Lincoln’s choice to launch a war because the North didn’t want to lose the benefits of having the South (it became about slavery only after he was losing in the upcoming election and losing support from the Northerners for continued war) began the end of federalism and State rights as the Founders designed them.

Federalism allowed the Founders to pull together a vast array of colonies with differing lifestyles because it allowed New England to live like New England with rules and laws they preferred for everyday life and Virginia to live as Virginia pleased. The polarization then was no less sharp than it is today on a wide variety of issues. The system would afford us the same peace as it would allow California to operate as Californians prefer and Texas to operate as Texans prefer. Those who find it truly unacceptable can move from one state to another, something which has already been occurring in massive numbers both in places like California and New York and in states like mine (Illinois) that share the same sorts of policies but get less of a limelight. Those who like the policies move in. Those who don’t flee in droves. It all sorts out in the end.

There will always be a number of people unhappy with how things are run in their State. No one will ever be happy about everything, and it is impossible to please everyone. But in general, most of us can choose which states we’re willing to live in and whether we want to leave our own state on the basis of its enactment of policies we dislike or find odious. That’s federalism in action, but such liberty is impossible if the federal government steps in and dictates from above what all of us will do. Such a system is untenable for such a large country with so many varying opinions and beliefs, particularly if we wish to maintain liberty for both groups to live in peace with a government they are generally satisfied with. The Founders knew that, and it’s why they didn’t attempt it. If they didn’t attempt it with thirteen little colonies, what makes us think we should with fifty states and millions of people?

Abortion Law Misunderstanding #3: The Court Can’t Reverse a Ruling like This! What about stare decisis?

Wrong. There’s really not a simpler way to put this. This is just wrong. They absolutely can, especially if the decision was a horrible one with zero legal basis as Roe v Wade and Casey were. The court never had the power to weigh in on this issue to begin with, and that would’ve been the correct response to it way back when Roe was decided: sorry, not our problem; make your own decisions, States. That is the appropriate response now, and it was the appropriate response then. Further, while the court usually does honor past precedent, there is no law demanding that they do, and given that they’re an unelected body of officials who are as prone to human error as well as activist games as any other politician, we wouldn’t want them to be unable to reverse a bad decision. Usually, they weigh very carefully whether to do so, especially if it would cause a lot of trouble to do so now.

For example, this is why Alito made it so clear they weren’t going after gay marriage rulings. If they reversed those and gay marriage suddenly became illegal in all but the few states that had legalized it instead of banning it before federal government stepped in, then suddenly all of the individuals holding state certificates would be subject to great legal penalties and difficulties. There is no way to avoid those.

In this case though, as Alito also makes clear, there is no such difficulty. A woman can decide now that she wants to get pregnant just as she can decide now to go to a state where it’s allowed and have an abortion. She could even have one now in states where legislation would prevent it after the court’s decision. It is not like contract law or marriage laws where a great deal of planning and permanency is involved and cannot be easily reversed or ended without severe consequence if laws are changed.

These considerations are looked into carefully when the decision to overturn past precedent is on the table. In this case, there is no such trouble, so overturning it and returning power to the states, while it might create political upheaval for now, will in the long run allow more freedom for each state and its constituents to decide what they want to do, which will ultimately take this issue out of the national limelight just as it should’ve been all the way back when Roe was initially being decided. It is not a federal issue, and stare decisis is not a law, nor should it be applied to cases with zero constitutionality, zero legal basis, and zero rationality for existing.

Wrapping Up

In the end, whatever your personal stance on the morality of abortion, this is not a federal issue. The court is making the right call to reverse Roe and Casey, but doing so doesn’t mean that abortion is suddenly illegal everywhere. It isn’t the apocalypse, those of you on the Left. You’ll still get to keep it in states you run. Lawmakers on the Left just won’t be able to force it on the states who are majorly populated by those opposed to it on the basis of a irrational, dreadful piece of court-made pseudo-legislation. It will become something that We the People actually decide, so we’ll find out if it’s really something so many people support. If it is, those of you whining about it will have your way anyway because the people will remove the lawmakers who try to enact legislation like that in Texas, Florida, and Ohio. They’ve done it before with other issues, and they can do it again. If you’re wrong, then it means you can keep living with your “sacred right of abortion” in your states while the rest of us will ban it or fall somewhere on the spectrum based upon what the state’s constituents actually want. Whether any of us love the outcome in our state or not, it will result in less federal government top-down control and more control for the majority in each state. That cannot fail to offer more peace by allowing each state to decide how they want to live with regards to this issue, and I hope to see the court hold firm on this ruling in the final draft.

If you want to read more on the issue, you can find Alito’s draft of the majority opinion from Politico. I found it extremely informative and an excellent review of the actual precedent outside of Roe and Casey for such a decision. It examines the precedent that Roe and Casey should have looked to and failed to as well as the constitutionality of the abortion debate on a federal level and is well worth your time despite the length.

The post The Abortion Debate and Supreme Court Leaks appeared first on Atlas's Island.

Introduction

Currently, I’m three weeks into my last set of classes for my masters degree. In the non-thesis class, I was asked to answer a series of eight questions from The Universe Next Door by James W. Sire regarding worldview. These questions are pivotal to constructing our own worldviews. Below, I examine these questions, offering my own reasoning and answers to each by way of example, but I would encourage you as my readers to consider these questions closely for yourself as well. What you choose to believe regarding each issue raised here will be pivotal to the way you live your life and how you view the world. Philosophy is essential to every aspect of life; you will either adopt bits and pieces of everyone else’s philosophy subconsciously, resulting in a Frankenstein philosophy riddled with contradictions and monstrous in appearance, or you will consciously and purposefully think through each matter of foundational principles to decide what you will believe to build a coherent, rational philosophy that can stand free of contradictions before the rest of the world. I know my aim is to have the last, but it is up to each of us to decide which we will pursue with all of our energy.

The first is easy; it requires no thought and relies solely on how you feel about things–hence the plethora of contradictions present in those who travel this path. The second is difficult; it will be a life-long pursuit that will drive you to learn, think, pursue, and endlessly discern what does and does not fit with your philosophy as you face new issues in society around you. This second leads one never to be satisfied with simply taking things at surface level or face-value, and it is a commitment that will at times being exhausting, but it is rewarding and grounding, and it gives you the basis needed to judge on each issue that faces you in a manner that is founded on principles rather than the mere emotion or feelings of that day.

Worldview Question 1: What is Objective Reality and How do I Know it to be Reality?

A fundamental question every serious individual seeking to have a coherent worldview or philosophy must answer is this: what is reality and how do I know it to be so? This is a deceptively straightforward question, and people often answer it without much thought or dismiss it entirely. Unfortunately for those who have failed to properly consider it, their answers inform everything that is to follow about their philosophy—whether it is a conscious and internally consistent philosophy built rationally or a chimerical philosophy built subconsciously by picking up bits and pieces of whatever seems good. The more thoughtful individual recognizes this and gives some thought to the question, all it demands he consider to answer it, and the implications of whatever answer he decides upon.

My own answer is as deceptively straightforward as the initial question: objective reality is whatever aligns with God’s order, and we know that it is so because of reason. Of course, the first part of the response is already one heatedly debated, but my reason for it lies in a few key points, points which I must establish now before we can proceed any further in a discussion either of this question or any that follow.

A More Fundamental Premise to Check

First, it must be established that there is a God. That premise must be accepted before we go any further, and I believe it is an a far more fundamental question than “what is reality” because asking that question demands of us the more basic question of what reality is grounded upon. At its heart, this is digging into epistemology, how man constructs his process of thought and why he does so. If we are to understand how to construct our process of thought, we must first establish the primaries, and there is nothing more primary than whether or not there is a Creator because from this answer proceeds every other premise a man may hold.

If a man believes there is a God, his answer to “what is reality” will be much different from that of the man who rejects any notion of a Creator at all. For my part, I turn to reason first to find the answer to the first fundamental question: is there a Creator? In order to reason through this, I begin with what is right in front of me that can be objectively observed without much, or any, dispute.

When I examine the world about me, I find that mankind is undeniably oriented toward some moral order. We know on some instinctual level, if no one indoctrinates us to the contrary, that certain fundamentals are right or wrong. This is true no matter our religious affiliations, societal positions, or situations. Murder, for example, is universally acknowledged as wrong by most on a deeply instinctual level.

However, if we are asking whether there is a Creator or not and are noting this commonality of some basic moral code in mankind, then we must ask, where does this come from? What is it that makes this moral code so engrained in mankind, and why do we instinctually consider it moral? If it is to be moral, that indicates that there is something objectively right and objectively wrong. The difficulty presented then is this: why is objective right and wrong even in existence if all happens by chance and chaos—the only choice if there is no intelligence of design?

Without a higher moral authority beyond ourselves, how can we truly say on any objective basis that is a real fundamental moral code? If there is no higher authority beyond man himself, then that “code” is merely a human construct with no basis in any objective standard. There can be no such thing as right and wrong if every man has an equal right to decide on what is moral; we must admit that no man has more fundamental right than another to decide on matters of morality, God or no God, as all share the same fundamental nature whether they choose to behave better or baser than that nature or not.

Perhaps, even in absence of objective morality, a man constrains himself while murder is harmful to his self in some way, but as soon as it becomes more beneficial to that self to murder another or stand aside while others do so, what is there to demand that his action is wrong or deserves any judgment? Every man must decide what is right or wrong, then, on some non-objective basis; feeling, society, self-determination, or some other person become his only choice for determining good versus evil, and none of those are very solid or rational bases to operate from.

There is, as hinted at earlier, no basis upon which any other can judge another man wrong either, if we agree that no man fundamentally has more authority than another to decide on what is moral as we all share the same nature, regardless of the fact that we may choose to exalt some men to lead us above others. At best, then, we may say that society or the State is the final determiner, but if there is a clash between two sets of societies, which is correct? If there is no Creator, there is no higher principle than might makes right.

This is, at the heart of the philosophy of those who reject any Creator as the final determiner of reality, an evolutionary concept. It is totally consistent with the ideal that random chance created us and that survival of the fittest is the only way to continue forward. The only “moral” principle under such an ideology is that the stronger is the one in the right because he is the one who will ultimately survive, and if he survived, evolutionary ideology dictates he must have done so to perpetrate what was best for the further evolving of his kind.

It is on this principle that tyranny operates, no matter what form on the political spectrum it takes. On this same basis, we also receive Hegelian arguments that the State is the only moral principle and the individual must gladly sacrifice even his very life if the State demands. From the same fountain originates the principle that Marx forwarded that in some way, use of force in the form of a proletariat dictatorship would eventually lead to a utopia of everyone giving according to his ability and receiving according to his need.

Of course, Marx’s philosophy tries to remove the “might makes right” argument, but when acted out in reality, his philosophy boils down to much the same argument: one group has something no one else does and should not be allowed to possess it, so a greater force must make right by robbing them of it to give it to others. Ultimately, force exercised in his system always leads to “might makes right”, even if he himself was truly delusional enough to believe it would not. Certainly, this can be seen in the way that men like Lenin, Stalin, and Putin have acted on the basis of his philosophical system. They wholeheartedly adopt his ideas, but as they demonstrated time and again, his system is based on a flawed principle that leads to the devastation, ironically, of everyone Marx claimed his system would help. After all, these men proudly say, who cares if a few people die for the cause? Lives are not sacred, and if they didn’t survive it is because they were too weak. Echoing others who caused many deaths for the sake of a cause, these men tell us that it is impossible to make an omelet without cracking eggs. What a euphemistic way to say that people must die for the tyrant’s aim to be achieved!

Every system predicated on such a principle leads to the destruction of the individual, society, and any sure moral code except that having the superior force makes you the right one in the scenario. Such systems are obsessed with who has power and who does not for precisely this reason; if one does not have the force the system in question has defined as the one necessary to be the one setting the rules, then one is likely a victim. Some present it in more complex forms than others, but all become entirely obsessed with survival of the fittest and who has the most might. Not a single person can be trusted in such a world because at any moment, a friend might become an enemy seeking to force you to bend to their will.

Such a principle is an abhorrent one when faced bluntly and rationally, and yet it undergirds any belief that there is no Creator. A view that treats life as so meaningless and ugly does not fit with the world I see around me, even with all the suffering that is plainly in existence. I do not accept the premise that man is no better than any other animal, nor do even most animals treat each other with the same flippant disregard to life that humans with such a repulsive belief do. Such a view I cannot accept, but if I reject a Creator, it is the only logically consistent belief, for a life brought about by mere happenstance has no great value or purpose and it cannot matter very greatly if it is ended because it was not strong enough to survive. I cannot argue for the great and beautiful in man if it is a mere struggle for survival where might make right, nothing else matters morally, and man is little better than an animal (and often worse than any animal).

Further, such a view gives no reason at all for me to hold to an innate moral code. Chance does not make morals, so any inclination I have to avoid certain things as “immoral” and do others because they are moral must come only from my own feelings and sensitivities or from societal conditioning. There is nothing truly right about them, making their existence arbitrary. I simply cannot accept that an innate sense of morality in man is an accident with no purpose or that might makes right, the two things which I must accept if I say that there is no Creator.

Reason also gives me further reason to accept a Creator. I can look around me and, using my mind, state that it is impossible that anything I am seeing could possibly exist in such complexity by random chance. Whatever else I may conclude after, I must first start with that fundamental: there is a Creator because it defies reason and logic to argue otherwise given the complex nature of the world around me. I would never look at my car and exclaim, “Look, how wonderful! Random chance made these parts and then somehow managed to assemble them into a working vehicle that not only runs but runs well.”

Should I say such a thing, any sane and reasonable individual ought to recommend me to a good psychologist because I am not operating in the realm of reason any longer. No one could ever look at such a thing with such an obvious intellect behind the design and argue that it has no creator. Neither should anyone of a rational constitution look at the world around us, which is far more complex, intricate, and delicately balanced than any car we drive, and believe that it was the result of random chance. From that conclusion, I can further study nature and say that there are certain things I must believe about its Creator. I must believe He is logical, ordered, rational, because all these things are evident in His design and work.

It is beyond the scope of this discussion to delve into all of the specifics on how one may ascertain from here that the Bible is the Word of God, but I will give, in short, the two proofs I consider key. People claim all sorts of religious texts are the revelation of God or the gods, but the first key proof I consider evidence that the Bible is the only true Word of God is that only the Bible’s prophecies can claim the status of having all been fulfilled in Scripture, sometimes thousands of years after the original prophecy. The second proof is that only the Bible can claim to be as internally consistent as it is over thousands of years with many different people of a variety of backgrounds writing it. This would be unheard of anywhere else, and when coupled with the vast number of texts we have with the same message, the authenticity and reliability of the piece should not be in question.

Therefore, reason alone demands I accept a Creator if I reject the principles that go along with denying Him and if my own ability to examine the world around me leaves me either to accept a Creator or embrace the inanity of believing something so complex could occur through random chance with no intelligent design.

Reason as the Method

This brings me to the second point on which I said we must determine what is truly real. Anything that we can objectively observe using either our own eyes or our minds to ascertain is, by definition, reality. If we have any question as to the clarity of our own reasoning, which is admittedly flawed at times, we look back to that first fundamental: there is a Creator who has revealed Himself in His creation at the very least. If our reasoning defies natural law as it reveals the Creator’s design, we know one of our premises must be fundamentally wrong, which leads us to a conclusion that is not synonymous with reality.

Reason is fundamental to any attempt to define reality objectively; without reason, we are unable to ground our thoughts in anything rational, real, or substantial. Even those who accept that God is the ultimate definer of what is real in a moral and true sense must accept it on some reason; if they believe it only on blind faith, they are neither rational nor discerning people and have no right to expect anyone to agree with their defense of such a position.

I believe God is the ultimate definer of what is real on a moral and objective level, and I believe, for many observable, factually-based reasons, that the Bible is His revelation of Himself and creation’s reality in relation to Him. With the combination of a belief in God as the definer of reality, the Bible as His explicit definition of reality, and nature as the implicit definition of His order and definition of reality, mankind can explore every facet of reality. As a finite being, he may never himself achieve all knowledge possible, but there is nothing integral to life about reality he cannot discover by studying either the law of nature or the law of nature’s God.

Based on all I have already laid out regarding why a Creator is necessary and reasonable, I must also say that God and His Word are the definers of reality. Reason dictates that there must be a God. If there is a Creator, then He is the one who defines how that creation ought to be used and the actual parameters of what it is and how it exists and functions. The creation does not decide such things; only the creator can decide this about what he has created. So then, it is rational to conclude that not only is there a Creator, but that He is the one who has the final say on what is true, moral, and real. We may use our reason to observe, through the things He has created, the nature and facts of what is real, but we may not define for ourselves what is objectively real. We may only choose whether we will accept or deny that which is objective truth and reality.

Worldview Question #2: What is the nature of reality?

This question proceeds directly from the first, as does our answer to it. As James Sire points out in his book The Universe Next Door, “[O]ur answers point to whether we see the world as created or autonomous, as chaotic or orderly, as matter or spirit; or whether we emphasize our subjective, personal relationship to the world or its objectivity apart from us” (Sire, p. 8).

My answer to the first question perhaps prematurely indicates my answer to this second, given my emphasis on reason as the basis through which we can determine the nature of reality, but here the question is not how we determine that nature but what that nature might be. To this question, if I am to be consistent with my first premise, I can only conclude that reality’s nature is to be orderly and rational as it is defined by the God who is order and reason itself.

While it is true that there are many things we still do not understand and may, therefore, view as separate from reason or rationality—matters of faith, as some would deem them—I disagree with labeling areas we do not understand a matter of faith. Or rather, I reject this label if by faith we mean what most people usually mean in saying they just have faith that it is so, which is that we are incapable of knowing or understanding that thing at all and must blindly accept a given position because reason cannot guide us. Many things which had an objective reality and were rational were once obscure and taken on faith, sometimes with the opposite of reality being believed. The truth is that there will always be some subset of unexplored or unexplained that we will have to take on faith. Our basic premises about reality, ourselves, Creator, and nature should not be among those things when we can reason them out by what we can easily observe.

The particulars of reality may need to be further explored to explain a particular area, and in those areas, we may be required to make an educated hypothesis based on the premises we have already accepted, but we should not consider these areas outside of reason simply because we cannot yet entirely prove our own conclusions in those areas. When we have made an exploration and have an answer based in reality, we may then determine whether our conclusions were in fact in accordance with that reality or not and should adopt whatever the objective answer may be.

Reality is Objective and Independent from Man

In the end, reality is reality whether we know it or not. Its nature is objective, factual, and discoverable to us, but it is wholly separate from our whims and desires, standing apart and on its own with God’s definition no matter how anyone may seek to pervert it.

We can discover it, we can agree with it, we can deny it, but reality does not cease to be reality. It is an objective standard we will either accept or reject based on the premises we have chosen, and the reliability of those premises in accurately judging reality will be directly determined by whether we have chosen to believe something that defies directly observable reality or something that is in accord with it. How well we adjust our conclusions and premises to fit with objective reality will determine how well things go with us. Those who deny objective reality when it has been proven out do not often end well.

From a Biblical perspective, we may consider that there are some blinded to reality by their own decision to twist it or deny it. Paul clearly states this in Romans 1:18-32.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;

Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.

KJV, Romans 1: 18-21 and 28

This ought to strike caution and respect for an almighty God into all of us as a harsh reminder of what happens to those who choose to deny what they rationally know to be reality. Defying God and His definition of reality—morally or factually—never ends well, and our refusal to accept reality certainly does not constitute a restriction on God’s ability to confirm us in our rebellion against reality and Him by removing His revelation and the chance to return to reason and morality.

This ought to instill in us a strong desire to seek after the parameters which define reality, to “buy the truth and sell it not” (KJV, Proverbs 23:23) in our quest to determine the nature of reality. If we do not do our utmost to ensure we do this in our quest for the nature of reality, we are at dire risk of becoming among those who refused to retain a right view of God and reality and thereby had God’s judgment placed on them in the form of having their understanding permanently darkened and locked into the foolishness they insisted upon.

I would not like this to be true of me, so I strive in every attempt at defining the nature of reality or reality itself to ensure my definition aligns with God’s and with what I may observe rationally and objectively around me. Rather than trying to define reality’s nature and principles by my own desires, I seek to define it by what God says it is and align my desires accordingly. Reality may be a harsh mistress at times, but she is far kinder than the master of deception, which always leads to destruction and betrayal in the end.

Worldview Question #3: Why is it Possible to Know Anything At All?

This was, in part, encompassed in the initial discussion of the two premises I take to define all the rest of reality. However, I will make a more complete examination here in brief. It is possible to know anything objectively for two reasons.

A God of Reason

The first is that there is a God of reason who has revealed Himself to us. Without that first premise, it would not be reasonable to believe we could know anything at all. After all, without a God of reason to order things, there could be no way to rationally ascertain anything for certain. Whether we believe in no God at all or believe in many gods, all of whom are capricious and much like we ourselves may be in our worst forms, we must consign ourselves to a world without order, at the whim either of the god of chance or the whim of gods with a capricious and whimsical nature. Neither is conducive to knowing anything; therefore, to know anything objectively, it is imperative that there be a God of reason who gave an order and logic to the universe that is possible for us to see and reason out. Otherwise, there should be no law whatsoever to guide our attempts at discovery and no certain, unchanging principles on which to operate.

Reason in Man

The second is that God created us in His image. While not every attribute of God was granted to man and all that have been granted are impacted in any number of ways by the Fall, the Bible places clear emphasis on the command to us to be a wise and discerning people who buys the truth at any price and will not sell it. Such a command is fundamentally impossible—whether in part after the Fall or in full completion before the Fall and after our perfection in Christ following the Resurrection of the saints—if we have not been granted the reason with which to learn the fear of the Lord, which Proverbs calls the fountain of all knowledge and wisdom, or to utilize either knowledge or wisdom once we have gained them. Reason is fundamental to this command, and by creating us in His image, God—who is reason itself—granted us precisely what was needed for us to order our thoughts and our observations in such a way that it is possible to know the truth with certainty.

Worldview Question #4: How do we know what is moral?

This, again, goes back to the fundamental premise that there is a God, one argument for which was that man has a common tendency to search for morality and to either allow God to define it as the creator of reality or to try to define it himself by creating constructs to stand in the place of God’s law. One way or another—and there is no other way which we may go about it—we will define morality. If we wish to know what is moral from an objective standpoint, we must immerse ourselves in both the law of nature and the revealed law of nature’s God as seen in Scripture. Nature reveals the moral law of God only imperfectly, though we may observe certain rules—such as the rule toward authority as displayed by the pecking order nearly every animal follows—with great clarity if we are honest. Because of the imperfection of nature’s revelation, we still must look to Scripture for further definition of God’s law. There, we find His moral commandments, which are as binding on us today as they were on the men who came before us to whom the commands were initially given.

Precepts and Principles First

In our study of these laws, it is critical that we look first for precepts and principles in God’s law—direct commands that tell us “this is right and this is wrong” or concepts that would offer us insight into what God considers good or evil. These precepts and principles define for us the exact parameters of what is moral, though a principle may have a limitation to the extent or circumstance in which it applies where a precept is always an unlimited requirement. So long as it does not go against a clear precept and does not contradict principles in their appropriate parameter from God’s law, which will be in accord with nature’s as both flow from the same mind, the action may be considered moral.

Unadvisable versus Immoral

Now, here we do have to acknowledge the fact that something may be moral and still not be the best or most advisable action to take in that circumstance. To this end, as we are trying to determine not only what is moral, but how to apply moral principles, we must look to the patterns of God’s law for wisdom and pray that He will make what is best plain to us in our attempt to discern how to apply the patterns to our circumstances. He has not left us without guidance in areas that contain numerous moral choices we must choose between, and we must look to Him for that guidance in deciding between our choices. However, it must be stressed that no matter how unadvisable a decision, so long as the choice is not in defiance of a command to do the opposite or not to act in that way, the decision is still a moral one. Knowing morality itself is straightforward: it is either moral or not; there is nothing that is amoral, though there may be a great many things that are unethical or unwise in a particular circumstance. Just because it is allowed does not mean we ought to pursue that course of action.

Worldview Question #5: What is a Human Being?

With the answers to the first fundamentals given, everything else can then flow from our first premises. If there is any disagreement on this question or any that follow after the first two we have asked, we must check our premises to determine the true nature of the disagreement; it will always lead back to some point of disagreement as to the answer of the first two questions and, perhaps in some instances, from the question of how we know anything and, more particularly, how we know what is moral.

It is possible, in some instances, for both people to agree to the points in the first two questions and yet still go separate ways in answering the second two questions. This is, however, usually the result of one or both individuals contradicting the first premises they claimed to agree upon. If there is a conflict on the two secondary premises, look still to the first two premises and ask how you or the other person reasoned from them to conclude as you did regarding the secondary premises. By doing so, you will discover the error or contradiction in your own reasoning or theirs and can then proceed from there, assuming you are both rational individuals and will alter your perspective to fit reality once it has been shown.

Man as a Rational Being and Reflection of the Creator

What, then, is the correct answer to this philosophical question assuming the premises already established? It is that man is a rational being in possession of his own will and created in the image of God to be in accord and fellowship with Him and to reflect and glorify his Creator as is the proper duty of the creation. God created him for companionship with both God Himself and with other men, and He created man as the highest being in creation and the only one with His image.

This may be seen first in Genesis, where Moses writes under God’s direction, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (KJV, Genesis 1:26). It may also be seen in other places where Scripture talks about mankind ruling even over angels, beings who are certainly superior to man in force and might.

Why, then, is man considered special and higher than even beings who—according to an evolutionary perspective, at least—would be higher than him in pecking order? It is because only man was created with a will and for the sole purpose of fellowship and harmony with God.

The angels, as mighty as they may be, do not have a will separate from whichever master they follow—whether God or Satan—and they do not have the relational purpose that God gave to man to be the friends of God. They are there to do His bidding solely as servants with no will of their own and no goal but to carry out His will and to glorify Him. Man certainly was created for and to the glory of God, but he was also given the ability to choose which way to go. The Fall broke that choice by condemning all men with a sin nature that demands they choose their own whims and desires over God, but salvation returns to man that choice if it is accepted, and he may then choose either to align his will with God’s for the sake of harmony and friendship with the Creator who loved him enough to die for him or to go his own way at the expense of such a relationship.

So then, given our earlier premises, we must define man as a rational creature created in God’s image with his own will and the original purpose to delight in fellowship with God for his own good and God’s glory. He may, if unregenerate, be unable to fulfill that original purpose or may, even when regenerated, choose to walk away from that purpose to his own detriment or destruction, but that is what he was intended to be: a wonderful reflection of God in as many different expressions as is suitable to reflect the unending depths of God Himself. It is to this purpose that man, even when he denies such a purpose, strives, and when this purpose is achieved, man is at the highest pinnacle he can reach in this sin-cursed world.

Worldview Question #6: What follows after death?

On the premise of Scripture, the answer to this question is clear: judgment either to vindication under the blood of Christ or to condemnation under the sin nature. There is no other choice. As Hebrews puts it, “…it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation” (KJV, Hebrews 9:27-28).

If we accept Christ’s death on the cross for us and place our belief in His death and resurrection for our salvation, then we will spend an eternity with God in communion and fellowship with Him as well as in praising and glorifying Him. We will be restored to what we were intended to be, the effects of sin utterly wiped away. If we reject that sacrifice, then we will be paid the just wages for the sin nature and the breaking of God’s law: judgment and eternal separation from God. This separation is one of unending torment, not simply because of the hellfire endured but also because it will be the final and permanent severing of the connection to the Creator that is so essential to man’s being.

The removal of that connection alone is torment. Perhaps we do not recognize it in this life, busy as we are filling the hole with whatever appeals to us in the moment, but when we are faced with reality and are forced to admit to and accept it in the final judgment, we will know there is no substitute for that relationship and will regret our choices at that final moment when it is too late. The truth will be revealed, and those who rejected it will certainly come to wish they had not.

This is the fate of every man when death comes; he will either spend eternity reigning in heaven alongside Christ and glorifying His Creator as he was intended to do or he will be consigned to an eternity of darkness far from the holy, just God he denied. There is no other option if we accept the initial premise that God and His Word define reality in every matter, including the question of what happens to us after death.

Worldview Question #7: What is the purpose of history in the picture?

How, then, does history fit into the discussion? If we are considering how reality is understood and revealed, we must first turn to Scripture and reason and then to history. History is the picture that reveals God at work in the world. We can trace His work to turn bad events to good, to fulfill prophecies He has given, or to demonstrate to rebellious man his need for a Savior by looking at history. Much of the Bible itself is history. The entire Old Testament could rightly be overviewed as God’s argument for and revelation of man’s need for a Savior.

A Record of Man’s Need for Salvation

Historically, we see that after the Fall, God made certain there would be no excuse whatsoever for mankind to claim He didn’t give them a chance to solve their problem without a Savior. He made sure that if man opened his eyes, he could clearly see God’s existence and presence. This is the reason Paul can claim in Romans that He has been revealed to mankind and they are left without excuse for refusing to acknowledge Him to worship the creation—whether themselves or some other part of it. How did He achieve this? By progressively offering man more and more strict ways of controlling himself and restraining himself from sin without a Creator.

First, prior to and during the days of Noah, He gave man free reign to self-govern. They were close enough to the Fall and the days when Adam and Eve had walked with Him to know what was right and to follow the only command He had given, which was there only to temporarily cover their sin nature since the Savior had yet to come. They could not even follow that one, simple command properly, nor could they self-govern. They became so wicked God wiped out all but Noah and his family to start all over. Clearly, self-governance alone did not keep man from sinning and turning his back on God’s law.

Then, after the flood in his covenant with Noah, God first gave them a few more commands, including the order not to shed human blood, which came with God’s institution of government in Genesis 9:6 to punish any who disobeyed that command with capital punishment. Then He commanded them to replenish the earth by spreading out and having children. This too they failed in, resulting in the Tower of Babel, and human government was proven a failure at removing sin from society repeatedly.

History shows us through Scripture and the historical record, that He then chose for Himself a specific people. Perhaps with God directly ruling and giving them His commands, they could manage to avoid sin. This too was proven ineffective; the Jews did whatever they believed was right in their own minds and forsook God repeatedly.

Then the record is silent. Everything from self-governance to God’s direct government to restrain man from sin had been tried. He waited until the time was right, and then He sent His solution: a Savior who would redeem His chosen people by covering their sins with His righteousness. Human history up until that point showed the necessity of a Savior. Human history in all that follows points back to God, His providential care, and His Son as our only means of salvation.

All of it is intended to show us either God’s power or our need for Him so that by means of history as well as the nature that surrounds us, we will have no excuse for denying God or His existence. Having been given every opportunity to do it our own way with varying degrees of outside restraints, we have been irrevocably proven incapable of defeating the sin nature that condemns us without a Savior and now can have no cause to claim God was unjust in not allowing us the chance to remain righteous on our own merits.

Taking It Further: What personal philosophical stances are demanded by and consistent with this worldview?

There are many philosophical stances that this worldview demands, but there are six commitments or personal, life-altering values that are essential to it and must define us if we would behave and think in a manner consistent with what we claim we believe.

First, this worldview demands that we commit to loving and glorifying the Creator. If we accept that He exists and is the reason for our own existence, we ought to be most thankful that we exist at all. However, if we go further and accept the premise that history shows our need for a Savior—God’s own Son—and that He sent such a savior to die and rise from the dead for us, we ought to be more thankful. The only proper response to such unearned goodwill from our Creator, particularly when we had earned the opposite, is devotion, love, and praise. To deny those three is to spit on the sacrifice He made to win us and to behave in a manner most unreasonable, ungrateful, and immoral.

Second, the worldview demands a commitment to reason and objective truth. Whatever else is required of anyone who adopts the views detailed above, this is the core of it. Everything else rests on possessing reason and having—or searching out—the truth at any cost. From this commitment, the man who holds this worldview must never waver if he wishes to be deemed a consistent and rational man.

Third, this worldview demands that the first place a man go when uncertain of the truth or unable to establish it with the known facts of the day is Scripture. It is the foundation of truth, though its pages may not give us all answers to every single question we can ask. If we cannot find the answer there or principles that will help to shape our question more precisely so we can search for the answer elsewhere with the right premises, we may take it on good authority that if God did not tell us and we have not yet discovered it, the truth will still be in line with the laws He has set in order, moral or natural. Thereby, we may admit our ignorance of the answer to any given issue while still maintaining that we know the answer will turn out to be consistent with God because He is the definer of reality.

Should we find an answer that does not match this basic premise, to remain consistent with this worldview demands that we reject the answer as false and search for an explanation that does match the premises we hold. Otherwise, we must throw away the whole worldview in favor of some other, as is true of any worldview when confronted with answers that do not fit. Either they will abandon the answer in search of a better-suited one or they will abandon their premises in favor of some other that seems to fit the answer. The position of a Christian who believes what I have given must be that because they know God is real and defines reality without a shadow of a doubt, and because they know that the Bible is His revealed Word without any doubt, they must then conclude that any answer to a question that contradicts reality or the Bible must be false.

Fourth, such a view also demands a commitment to morality as God defines it. We must acknowledge our daily need for His strength to achieve this goal, but our worldview demands it of us even though we may at times find ourselves utterly unable by our own will to do what is moral. Even though we must receive help toward this end, it is a commitment we make as it regards our own lifestyle: we must denounce evil and do all in our power to stand firm in and to defend what is right. 

Fifth, such a philosophy demands a commitment to the respect of others on a basic level. If we believe that man is the image-bearer of God, a reflection of the God we love, and we also believe that the Bible is the Word of God, then with the two together, we must conclude that man as God’s image-bearer demands the most basic of respect, if nothing more. We are required by this worldview not to deface that image through intentional harm and violence to another. Except in the case of self-defense, intentional harm to another in any other situation is in violation of the premises we hold if we believe God’s image is sacred and the lives of His image-bearers therefore to be respected.

Finally, such a worldview demands that we earnestly seek to share the truth with others. It does not necessitate that we never do anything except share the truth about God, reality, ourselves, and history, but it does mean we must pay the highest attention to the commitment in daily life to pray for and reach out to others. Man is God’s image-bearer. He was intended to be in fellowship with God forever, and it would be the highest degree of immorality—knowing the truth ourselves—to deny others the opportunity to hear what that truth entails, particularly when that truth might cost them an eternity of separation from God and eternal torment. Denying others an objective view of reality through our silence on crucial matters or through actions that themselves deny that reality is one of the worst sorts of deception we can perpetrate on another.

Conclusion

It is not our job, of course, to convince the person into believing us; the Holy Spirit is the one that must woo and save the soul. However, if a fellow image-bearer is to go into eternal damnation through separation from our God, let it not be because we as believers failed to warn them. It is their decision to make, and if they do reject Him, it is on their heads, but if we hold to this worldview, we will have to answer to a holy, just God for refusing to do what His commandments and reasoning from these premises demands of us. This is a demand of this worldview, then, that we should take most seriously, both by living in a way that testifies consistently to our philosophical stances and by spreading the word of the truth when any opportunity is given by God to do so.

References

Bible Hub. (2012). Genesis 1:26 KJV. Retrieved March 16, 2022, from https://biblehub.com/kjv/genesis/1.htm

Bible Hub. (2012). Hebrews 9:27-28 KJV. Retrieved March 16, 2022, from https://biblehub.com/kjv/hebrews/9.htm

Bible Hub. (2012). Proverbs 23:23 KJV. Retrieved March 16, 2022, from https://biblehub.com/kjv/proverbs/23.htm

Bible Hub. (2012). Romans 1:18-21 and 28 KJV. Retrieved March 16, 2022, from https://biblehub.com/kjv/romans/1.htm

Sire, J. W., Hoover, J., & Sire, J. W. (2020). A World of Difference: Introduction. In The universe next door: A basic worldview catalog (pp. 1–11). essay, IVP Academic, an imprint of Intervarsity Press.

The post Examining Worldview: A Summary appeared first on Atlas's Island.

Introduction

I don’t usually share my own private Bible studies, but Psalm 119: 57-64 and 73-80 really hit home for me, and I wanted to share what I gained from reading it closely because I know I’m not the only one in my immediate circle or even my extended circle on here going through an extended period of difficulty and in need of encouragement. Hopefully, this will be encouraging to others too.

The last three to three-and-a-half months have been particularly rough for me. I’ve been sick with everything under the sun, including a suspected case of the Delta variant of COVID, which made its rounds through my whole family. I’ve been fortunate if I’ve managed to go a week of feeling semi-healthy between bouts of colds/flus/COVID. It has really been a depressing and discouraging time, and as I’m writing this, I’m recovering from Omicron. While I haven’t been deathly ill with either case of COVID and this one is much more like a cross between flu and an obnoxious cold, I can definitely say that I’m not feeling like a happy camper right now with the symptoms! I’ve barely had time to recover from one blow to my health before I’m being hit with the next, and it has left me utterly exhausted and wrung out.

Not Exactly the Paragon of Faith

In all of this, I’ll admit I haven’t exactly been the paragon of faith. At first, it was easy to brush it off and just say “I’ll get better soon and then I’ll be fine”. But as weeks turned into months and every time I thought there was a light at the end of the tunnel I caught the next thing, that false hope quickly petered out, and I began to ask God why He would let me keep getting sick.

Why did He allow me to get ill when He knew that my boss begrudged me my sick time, the holidays were on us, and I couldn’t take any time off because my boss was off for the holidays? Why wouldn’t He answer my prayers for health? It didn’t seem like very much to ask; it still seems pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

Those questions then morphed into a deepening sense of defeat, bitterness, and despair. I have continually struggled with the question “Does God even care, because it sure doesn’t feel like it, and what difference does my health even make to His glory? If I’m sick, He can still be glorified, and if I’m healthy, again, He still gets His glory, so why would it matter to Him either way?” This isn’t the first time I’ve struggled with such questions. Seven years ago, when I was first diagnosed with IBS, I asked many of the same questions as the illness ravaged my physical health and left me with what was then a life-sentence of physical pain.

Satan didn’t even need to step in to tempt or draw me away; my own depression and choice not to make time in God’s word during this difficult time of late did all the work for him. I really don’t believe this has been an attack of the devil so much as it has been a test of my faith that I have been, regrettably, failing.

I’m not proud of where my thoughts have been, and if ever there was a starker example of why God tells His people not to forsake the gathering together of the saints regularly, I am it. I didn’t realize how big of a difference just being around other believers made or how much it encouraged me and bolstered my faith. For the last three months, I’ve made it to church maybe three or four times, if I was fortunate enough not to be sick on the weeks when I didn’t have to stay home to be available for work right after the service.

The first service I made it to in a month, I sat there and almost burst into tears when someone simply said that they’d been praying and that I wasn’t alone in the struggle because many others were dealing with the same thing. It was a much needed reminder that I did matter to people and that God wasn’t somehow singling me out or punishing me; in other words, other believers were the reality check I needed. But then I became ill again and missed more church, and the sense of despair returned as I kept catching things.

Looking at Psalm 119

As I felt the most recent illness hit on Saturday evening and Sunday morning, I felt like I should just give up because I’d been doing everything right to boost my immune system and stay healthy but was now sick again. I was coming down off the stress from my sister’s wedding, though I’m very happy for my sister and was glad that the wedding turned out beautifully for her happy day, and feeling wrung out. After that and dealing with work and personal struggles continually over the last three months, I was at my rope’s end and couldn’t take anymore.

So in desperation for some encouragement and light at the end of the tunnel, something my family was too exhausted themselves to offer anymore, I opened my Bible, which is something I certainly should’ve pushed myself to do sooner. I didn’t have a specific place I was reading, so I kind of just opened it (not a method I’d usually commend for Bible studies, but it works fine for reading if you’re not reading on a plan). I landed near the end of Psalm 119. This is the passage in Psalm 119 that I read:

“Thou art my portion, O Lord: I have said that I would keep thy words.

I intreated they favour with my whole heart: be merciful unto me according to thy word.

I thought on my ways, and turned my feet unto thy testimonies.

I made haste, and delayed not to keep thy commandments.

The bands of the wicked have robbed me: but I have not forgotten thy law.

At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee because of thy righteous judgments.

I am a companion of all them that fear thee, and of them that keep thy precepts.

The earth, O Lord, is full of thy mercy; teach me thy statutes.

Thy hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding, that I may learn thy commandments.

They that fear thee will be glad when they see me; because I have hoped in thy word.

I know, O Lord, that thy judgments are right, and that thou in faithfulness has afflicted me.

Let, I pray thee, thy merciful kindness be my comfort, according to thy word unto thy servant.

Let thy tender mercies come unto me, that I may live: for thy law is my delight.

Let the proud be ashamed; for they dealt perversely with me without a cause: but I will meditate in thy precepts.

Let those that fear thee turn unto me, and those that have known thy testimonies.

Let my heart be sound in thy statutes; that I be not ashamed.

Psalm 119:57-64, 73-80, KJV

Learning from Psalm 119

There are a few things I want to draw attention to in this portion of Psalm 119 as a comfort to all of us struggling with seasons of difficulty. First and foremost, notice what the author says he’s done: he said he would keep God’s words, he intreated God’s favor, he thought on his ways and turned his feet where needed, he made haste to obey God’s commands, he didn’t forget God’s law, he rose to thank God, he kept company with those that were godly, he had hope, and he asked God for more than relief from his temporary struggle.

But more important even than what he did are the reasons why and the ways in which he did these things. Consider that he didn’t just intreat God’s favour half-heartedly. He says he did so with his whole heart. What was the basis for his intreating? Not his emotions! Based on what we know from the rest of Psalm 119, it’s pretty clear that he had every reason to be depressed and wonder where God was. Other places in the Psalms, the author does ask God if He has forsaken him or His people. But here, he asks God for things with his whole heart and calls on God to fulfill His promises. Notice that he prays for God to “be merciful unto me according to thy word”, “let…thy merciful kindness be for my comfort, according to thy word unto thy servant”.

Notice then what he does in his own time of suffering. He does intreat God to be merciful, but he also looks at himself to be certain that he isn’t doing anything he shouldn’t be to warrant God’s loving correction, and he admits that God afflicts in faithfulness to him, not out of a desire to simply cause pain. So he determines to learn what it is he can learn out of the trial.

He trusts that God will fulfill His promises, both conditional and unconditional, and then he strives to do what has been required of him for those promises that are conditional to be fulfilled. In this portion of Psalm 119, he seeks to make sure nothing is in the way of God’s desire to bless him or of drawing close to his God. He says he “thought on” his paths and “turned [his] feet unto [God’s] testimonies”. He’s making sure he continues to head the right direction even in the midst of the suffering, and he is placing his hope only in God’s promises and God’s laws, not on a transient emotion of hope or defeat.

He also takes time to praise God for who He is, not just His promises and the comfort that he has asked for on the basis of those promises. He tells God the things he genuinely loves about God: “I will rise to give thanks unto thee because of thy righteous judgments”, “the earth, O Lord, is full of thy mercy”, “I know, O Lord, that thy judgments are right, and that thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me”, “thy law is my delight”.

Encouragement from Psalm 119

So what encouragement can those of us currently dealing with difficulty and trials–with health or otherwise–draw from this? Well, here’s what I personally found encouraging.

I am an individual who prizes reason and reality, and I have been that way for a very long time. Even on the best of days, I sometimes struggle when it comes to accepting and processing my own emotions because I tend to view them as a hindrance to dealing with things rationally, but I particularly struggle when I start to lose my grip on reality because stress or illness have been crumbling my emotional and mental energy for too long of a period. I have always said that reality is a cruel mistress, but I would rather have reality than the master of deception, who speaks kindly and then stabs you in the back.

But even as I prize reason and reality, the truth is that both can be really hard to swallow and can also be really easy to lose sight of in times of seemingly unending difficulty. That’s where I’ve been sitting the last three months, and it certainly didn’t help that I was either wallowing in it, giving up, or too sick to read my Bible while also being mostly unable to meet with believers I could’ve spoken to and found encouragement from.

What a difference it makes to have someone who loves you and God step in to be that reality check! But people can’t always be there, and I am so glad that I opened my Bible when I did because I needed a serious reality check to pull me out of the depths of depression, stress, and despair to remind me that this is temporary and that my hope isn’t in how I feel that day. My hope isn’t flimsy nor is it an irrational emotion; it is rational and reality, based in tangible promises that God has made to every believer. He has fulfilled them time and time and time again for the men and women who have chosen to place their whole heart on the line with those promises.

I haven’t been doing that, so as I was reading a few nights ago, I stopped and looked at the situation rationally. I did what the Psalmist said he did; I thought on my ways, and turned my feet back to God’s testimonies in the way that they should’ve been going the whole time. I’m certainly asking for quick recovery from this newest bout of illness and renewed health, but I am also trusting that God will do what is best, both for me and for His glory, because the two are not at odds as He promises that ultimately He loves us and seeks to glorify Himself through transforming us to become more like His Son. That growth is always to our benefit even as it is to His glory, and no hardship we go through cannot be used to teach us and perfect us if we respond to it properly. (So not in the way I’ve responded for the last three months!)

The Conclusion on the Matter

Even though my response hasn’t been very good for the last three months, I have grown through this struggle. I am trying to bring to constant remembrance His precepts and His Word instead of allowing despair to rob me of reality and of the reason to know that God loves me a great deal, something I can prove by pointing to instance after instance where He was gracious and merciful (sometimes when I truly did not deserve it). It would be easy to forget those in the midst of all the seemingly negative things happening, but that isn’t the right or the reasonable response.

So, I am going to praise even if my heart isn’t totally on board at the moment because I have thought on my ways and I know that my emotions are the caboose, not the engine, of my life. If I place my mind and faith where they belong, the rest will follow.

I know it doesn’t mean that everything will be easy or rosy all the time. The last three months are ample evidence of that! I’m definitely feeling buffeted by the storms of life! But it does mean that I can objectively state with the Psalmist that I know that the Lord’s judgments are right and that He in faithfulness has afflicted me. I hope that this will provide others with encouragement like it did for me so that other believers will be able to say the same of themselves!

The post Reflections on Psalm 119:57-64, 73-80 appeared first on Atlas's Island.

Introduction

The last two years provide us with a stark example of manufactured fear and division within COVID-19 responses and politics. Across America, people on both sides wonder how we came to the point where we are unable to agree on anything regardless of how non-controversial an issue seems. Unfortunately, few question the nature of the hysteria on both sides or where it started.

We are so focused on fighting or fearing each other that we never stop to ask why we’re told to fear and fight. We don’t ask if the argument for that fear is rational or supported by reality. Nor do we ask if the solution presented by government to address that concern is the best one.

The Fear Responses

To begin with, some level of concern about COVID is rational and expected if based in the individual’s risk factors. However, the level of fear on both sides over the situation is hardly rational or driven by reality. Here in America, we have two fear responses: liberal and conservative.

On the liberal side of the aisle, there is broad support for forced vaccination that government and media figures generate by warping the data they present. By ignoring deaths to showcase a rising case load, they convince the liberal crowd that the disease is so serious it necessitates immediate action on their part and the government’s for humanity’s survival.

Looking only at what the CDC, the president, and media outlets’ talking heads like CNN’s Don Lemon have told them about COVID, liberals conclude the disease poses severe risk to everyone across the board. Never once do they stop to listen to the plethora of doctors and scientists these groups refuse to platform or hear out before they make a judgment call on the nature of the pandemic. Instead, they take what they have heard without questioning and move straight to crippling fear and compliance to avoid the presumed danger.

The next step in such a mental process is always to fear anyone who refuses to comply. This is only rational if you believe the only way we can all survive is to comply. Anyone who doesn’t comply then becomes a danger. As this fear and the idea that compliance is the “moral” or “decent” thing to do are regularly reinforced, a misplaced moral superiority begins to develop. This is demonstrated by the “Karen” who invades someone else’s personal space publicly to yell at them for non-compliance.

On the conservative side, there is a lack of fear toward the disease itself—often to a degree equally unwarranted by evidence. Instead, many are terrified that the push for vaccination is a government conspiracy to kill conservatives or a method to separate them from those who will comply for future retaliation. The more reserved individuals fear that the government will use this to grasp power they will never relinquish again, thereby costing them their individual liberties. While this is a rational concern, where they take the concern is often irrational and ends in conspiracy theories.

These fears lead them to jump to conclusions about motivations with little to no evidence. Those seeking for power encourage—and seemingly instigate—this by refusing to release information that would leave reason free to combat the falsehoods on both sides. This serves to further convince conservatives that conspiracy theories are warranted.

Further, the religious side of conservatism adds an additional layer of contradictions and irrationalities in the form of concerns about the use of aborted fetal tissue. This adds the fear of immorality to their communities, turning a legitimate medical decision into a moral evil.

When you combine fear of government collusion with big pharma to control population, a general paranoia that the government wants them gone, and religiously guided debates on the ethics of using a medication developed with aborted fetal tissue, you end up with the conservatives’ intransigent refusal to admit that there is any case in which vaccination might be warranted.

In the end, it is a moral choice. “Complying” by vaccinating makes you misguided or even evil. It is no longer a medical choice weighed carefully and made to protect you as an individual. It is a sin against morality, perhaps even against God.

Fear—The Totalitarian Toolkit

Before examining America’s modern version of fear tactics to rob a people of their individual rights, let’s position those tactics squarely in the long history they possess. Germany and Russia are two excellent modern examples of totalitarian regimes’ use of fear to gain power. Despite differences in tactics, both used fear to encourage people to ignore the loss of their freedoms, give them up freely, or else capitulate when force was applied.

Germany began instilling fear based on a legitimate economic crisis and a fabricated threat. First, Hitler pointed to the legitimate economic crisis that Germany was experiencing after WW1. Then he pointed to a fabricated threat—those who had made decisions that made them wealthy while others suffered. In this case, that class of people was the Jews.

When he began stripping them of their rights and branding them as second-class citizens, he had already stirred up such resentment against them that the majority of the German people supported the abuse. To tip the hesitant ones over the edge, he then set fire to his own capital and blamed political rivals—the Dutch communists.

With that, he had generated all the fear he needed. The German people were too busy fighting each other or invisible threats to recognize the true threat—Hitler’s steady removal of their rights until they descended into a police state.

In Russia, the fears and concerns of the people were well-founded in the abuses occurring under the Tzar. When Lenin came in, he touted himself as the savior they had prayed for. Once he seized power, it became apparent that was not the case. To keep the people compliant, he, and Stalin after him, employed force and created fear of other citizens.

Their method was much different from Hitler’s. They encouraged neighbors to report each other’s “misdeeds” from the beginning, creating a justifiable paranoia within every individual. Anyone could be a Russian spy or the secret police, and you couldn’t trust that your neighbor wouldn’t report you for a meager amount of bread, money, or social favor. People were too busy eyeing their neighbors to focus on the ongoing destruction of their rights.

Modern day American government relies mainly on Hitler’s tactics. They brand one group the enemy and convince another that group is a mortal danger through inflammatory rhetoric and constant reversal of “facts”. In some states with more extreme policies, they have encouraged tattling on anyone breaking COVID rules. By using lies, refusing to release information, and playing the blame game, the government instills fear in one side and suspicion in the other. As a result, those trying to get the truth find it increasingly difficult due to the political grandstanding.

In the process, neither side objects to the persistent destruction of individual freedoms until it is too late. One gives it up for illusory safety and blind faith in government. The other argues about peripheral issues, ignoring that their earlier surrender of other rights and failing to see that they are now reaping the consequences. Neither side will unite with the other due to false senses of superiority.

For totalitarians, regardless of the method utilized to destroy reason and set citizens at one another’s throats, this is the perfect outcome of  irrational fear. Once citizens cease to be informed, rational members of society, they no longer constrain government. They become government’s property instead of being owners of it. This spells the death of individual rights, freedom, and reason on both sides.

The Rational, Fear-Free Response

If we want to come through this crisis with freedom intact, we must start with a response predicated on reason. It is not enough to shun the bad responses outlined above; we must replace them with the good and the ideal. If we want a world we’ve been longing for when this is all over, we must fight before it is too late. To do this, we must combat fear by finding the truth and seeking to address prevailing either-or fallacies by presenting rational alternatives and evidence.

However, in our fight to preserve freedom, the correct, moral principle that should guide us is that government’s purpose is to protect individual rights. Their agendas do not trump individual rights to pursue life, liberty, property, and happiness if the individual does not violate anyone else’s right to the same. Any exercise of government authority against this principle is outside the purview of government’s purpose. This response to COVID removes the hysteria and improper moral superiority, freeing everyone to make rational choices regarding their own health.

It also allows us to avoid the false dichotomy that supporting medicine and science demand support of totalitarian edicts for those who refuse to act as we think best. Reason will allow us to establish what course of action is best for us while leaving others free to do the same and to choose differently. We can come together with reason because it shows us that science and respect of individual rights can shake hands when we destroy government-generated hysteria. Through reason and respect for others, both sides stop fighting and turn to destroying the thief in their midst to regain rights for everyone and freedom to live in peace.

Interested in reading more about totalitarianism or in learning more about the historical examples in this article? Consider starting your list with one of the listed resources below.

The Herald of Totalitarianism by Atlas Rose

The Cause of Hitler’s Germany by Leonard Peikoff

The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff

The Rise of Hitler’s Germany Explained by The New Ideal

The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro

The post Fear and Division: The Totalitarian’s Ultimate Weapons appeared first on Atlas's Island.

Well, it’s the last of our interviews with authors from Iron Walls tonight, everyone! I have with me Amanda Wrights, the author of “Defiant Flame”. Welcome to Atlas’s Island, Amanda. We’re thrilled to have you! Amanda is a first time author, so “Defiant Flame” is her debut into the author world, and I certainly hope we’ll see more from her in the future. Let’s dive right into the interview.

To start with, can you tell us a bit about why you chose to participate in this dystopian anthology?

Originally, I wasn’t sure I would even have time. But when I heard the group was still looking for authors, I remembered a story I had tucked away in the back of my mind to write later, and realized that the overall theme of that story would fit the dystopian theme of the anthology. Since I wanted to write it anyway, I figured I would take advantage of the opportunity to both write the story and publish it, and I made time to work on it.

I think quite a few of the authors in the group felt that way, so you’re not alone. I think both James and I learned we needed to allow more time for authors to join before closing our call for chapters! Now, I think everyone is eager to hear about the story, but before we get into the themes and philosophical messaging of your story, would you share with my readers what your story is about to offer some context for the rest of the discussion?

So, this story takes place in a world that is about half a century past what was nearly a world ending event. The population has been drastically cut down and people are struggling to get by. In the wake of all this, a tyrannical group of people have taken advantage of the situation and stolen power. The main character of the story is a man named Nathaniel, who is acting as a leader within a rebel group looking to take power away from these tyrants. In the process, he and his group meet a young girl that this government is looking to train and use as a weapon against their enemies. The story follows Nate and this girl as he tries to rescue her from the government and get her to a safe place where she can lead a more normal life.

It sounds like you picked some interesting characters to focus on. Now that everyone knows the basic premise of the story, let’s dive into the rest of the interview! What is the overarching theme or message of your story?

The overarching theme behind the story is the question of how far someone would go to protect their home and the people they care about.

An excellent question. I’m not sure most of us have thought much about that, but hopefully by the end of your story, people will. Can you tell us why you chose that theme or message?

I don’t typically go through an extensive planning process to pick themes or messages for my stories. This one just kind of happened as I built up the story and struggles that the characters had to go through to get to the end of the main character’s story. I believe it’s very important to the story itself, though. When you’re writing any character with a cause like Nathaniel’s, it’s impossible for them to continue to fight for that cause without first knowing exactly how much they believe in it and what lengths they will go to in order to succeed.

All excellent points. It’s obvious you thought through the motivations of the characters, and that shows in a theme that grows out of their motivations and desires. Moving past the theme, though, can you share with us the philosophical message behind your story?

Yeah. So the underlying philosophical message here is really just a simple question. How far will you go to fight for what you believe in?

Okay, so the theme is an extension of the philosophical ideal behind the story. It seems like you really did a good job of integrating the two together. So how does the story’s message extend from your own philosophy, and why do you feel it’s so important to share with the reader? In other words, what is it you want people to learn from this or hope they will reconsider about their own worldview/philosophy?

I hope that the readers who see this message will be able to consider their beliefs and ideals in life, and through that consideration come to a better understanding of how committed they are to those beliefs. I’ve learned more recently in my life that one of the most important things about any philosophy a person has is that they understand two things about it. The first is why they believe that thing. But the second is the one that I have connected to this story, because I believe that while many people understand why they believe something, they may not necessarily understand how strong those beliefs are. Often we go through life without having our philosophical lens challenged, and it makes for a significant event in our lives when something tries to crack it and we’re unprepared. My hope is that people will ask themselves “would I be willing to stake my life on something I believed in?” and perhaps begin to understand themselves a little more through that.

Yeah, knowing why we believe what we do is certainly an important aspect of life. I don’t think most of us take the time to think about it nearly as much as we should, so it’s good to see reminders to do so in fiction. The characters’ fight for what they truly believe and their understanding of why they’re fighting are a real inspiration to us to carry that admirable trait over into our own lives. Speaking of characters, can you share some of the points or scenes that were your favorites because of how they highlighted that philosophical message or aim in your story?

I think my favorite part of the story is the end, because when Nate and the little girl are trying to escape, the other rebels cover them. Though the story doesn’t say one way or the other if they lived or not, this battle was different from some of the others they would have faced, because they were caught off guard and weren’t able to go into it with odds in their favor. But despite that, they stood their ground to ensure the government couldn’t turn a child into a deadly weapon and gain even more power.

It was certainly an emotional ending! It closed out a chapter for these characters while opening a new one, and it really left a sense both of hopeful looking to the future and determination not to abandon the fight. I thought it was a very natural ending for the story. Now before you go, if you could ensure readers learned just one thing from your story, what would it be?

That no matter how insignificant a belief might seem, you should never compromise it for something else without very careful consideration. Our philosophical lens defines how we see the world, and while change to that can be good, it shouldn’t come on a whim. We should always be sure that we understand what we believe and how strongly we believe it before we decide to change those beliefs.

An excellent note to end on! Thank you so much for joining me tonight, and I wish you the best with future writing and publication endeavors. Readers, if you haven’t already purchased a copy of Iron Walls, head over to Amazon to do that and give Amanda’s story a read. I’ve read it myself, and it was a solid story. The characterization was well integrated with the plot, the characters themselves were natural and admirable, and the theme of family and homeland was really the core of the story. I particularly appreciated the contrast between the orphaned girl they rescue from the government at the beginning of the story and Nate, who has family and has experienced that close bond, which he’s fighting to protect. It was the perfect way to demonstrate the importance of connection with family and the need for home and community we all have. If you like stories that remain on track with everything revolving around one key idea and strong, admirable characters, you’ll probably enjoy Amanda’s story “Defiant Flame”. That’s it for now, everyone!

The post Author’s Interview with Amanda Wrights, Author of “Defiant Flame” appeared first on Atlas's Island.

Hello again, everyone! Today, I have Joanna White, author of “The Ones Who Endured” in Iron Walls, with me. She is the second to last author in the group to interview with me, and we’ll hear from the last on the list later this week. Today is our release date, so what better way to kick it off than with an interview? So let’s dive right in.

First, Joanna, can you tell us a bit about why you chose to participate in this dystopian anthology?

My main reason is that I love dystopian but the secondary and likely the more important reason is that I feel its important to explore the consequences of what happens when governments become totalitarian governments. Today, I feel the message is important to get out of how good people are hurt when the government oversteps their bounds of what they should and shouldn’t do.  

Yours is a more standard message for the genre then! The anthology has a good blend of traditional and non traditional focuses, and I think readers will appreciate the blend. So, before we get into the themes and philosophical messaging of your story, would you share with my readers what your story is about to offer some context for the rest of the discussion?

My story is about a future earth where the government started to believe and teach the people that strength is everything. Creativity and religion and love are considered weaknesses, so in a society where you aren’t supposed to love or have religion, my main character Talon was raised religiously, and he loves his wife. It’s about his struggle as he tries to survive in a world that’s been trying to indoctrinate him since he was a teen. 

That’s definitely a different take on the usual tropes. Given that, what do you feel is the overarching theme or message in your story? 

The theme is that strength takes all forms and can mean more than physical prowess. Sometimes, knowing when not to fight can be a strength. Love can be a form of strength, as well as enduring persecution when you believe in a certain religion that is widely disliked around the world. 

Okay, so pretty straightforward. What led you to choose that theme or message, and why did you want to write it?

Because I feel that today’s world has been oppressing the basic rights of people and that we are slowly heading toward a society of complete government control where they tell the people what they can and can do, say, think, and believe. Strength doesn’t really have anything to do with it, but I wanted to use a theme that readers would see as more oppressive. Such as telling someone that loving or creativity is weakness. I felt like that was an idea readers could understand and really feel for, to help bring them into the idea that any type of government telling people what to believe in is wrong, regardless of what they’re telling the people. 

So you’ve sort of hinted at the message in your prior answer, but let’s talk about it explicitly. Can you share with us the philosophical message behind your story?

Behind the themes of “strength is everything” there is the concept of a government that oppresses their people. They want the people to live a certain way, and the people have been conditioned to believe in strength—that love, creativity, religion, are all forms of weaknesses and all weaknesses are to be eradicated to survive. In today’s society, we are told to do certain things in order to “survive.” We can’t pretend that the governments do that, in reality or fiction, for the good of the people. Survival is simply the excuse that the government uses in order to take control of the people. By creating a fear mentality—telling people: do this or we won’t survive, it is naturally going to cause people to flock to the government’s side. They’ll lay down and do as the government asks. Then, it also allows for an even more dangerous thought to fester—that anyone who doesn’t do this thing is literally hindering our survival, which isn’t true. 

So, as I ask every author I spotlight here, how does that message extend from your own philosophy. Why do you feel it’s so important to share with the reader? In other words, what is it you want people to learn from this or hope they will reconsider about their own worldview/philosophy?

My own philosophy is that the government is meant to serve the people, not the other way around. Creating and inciting fear on a disease that has a high survivability rate, for example, is an excuse to gain control of the populace. You get them to wear what you ask, to inject themselves with what you ask, and I paralleled that with the idea that in the past of my story, the government took control of the people and taught that weaknesses must be eradicated because of some terrorists attacks. The people who died in the event is tragic, just as it is with real life. But that doesn’t justify the government coming in and telling the people what to do, especially when its dangerous and risky. 

Certainly a very present issue on people’s minds with everything happening of late, at least in America! So, can you share some of the points or scenes that were your favorites because of how they highlighted that philosophical message or aim in your story?

I actually really loved a prologue that was in the original version of the story. It was a summary of the back history behind how the world in my story came to be what it is and it really highlighted the theme that I wanted to convey—the parallels between what the government did in the past of my story and what I feel they’re trying to do now. It was taken out in editing to keep the flow of the story correct, but it’s still one of my favorite aspects. 

Now, to close out the interview, let’s discuss takeaways. If you could ensure readers learned just one thing from your story, what would it be?

People in power will always want to be in power. That’s why the United States created a checks and balances system, where one branch of the government could keep the others in check—so we never again had to face a situation of anyone or any sort of council becoming a dictator to the people. We are losing that in today’s society and it may not happen for another few  years, but when good people stand by and do nothing, evil prevails. 

Well, everyone, that wraps up today’s interview! If you’d like to read Joanna’s story, you can find Iron Walls on Kindle and KU! As I mentioned, it released today! We will have a paperback out soon but have had some delays in its release, unfortunately. Tune back in on Thursday for the final interview in the blitz of interviews with authors in the new release! We’ll have Amanda Wrights with us to discuss her short story, both here and over on The Fantasy Nook, where we’ll take a look more at the writing side. Until then, everyone!

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This week’s interview is a bit later than planned, but we’re back today with another author from the Burning Embers dystopian anthology Iron Walls. Today, I have Steven Scribner here to talk about the philosophy and ideas behind his short story, “Scapekite”. So let’s dive right in!

First, Steven, can you tell us a bit about why you chose to participate in this dystopian anthology?

It wasn’t anything profound. I had written some short stories and I thought one of them would be good in a dystopian anthology.

A fairly common answer for this anthology, I think. We’ve had a lot of authors who already had pieces in the works, and it seems that the anthology offered a perfect opportunity to showcase it. We’re glad you joined! Now, before we get into the themes and philosophical messaging of your story, would you share with my readers what your story is about to offer some context for the rest of the discussion?

There’s a corporate dystopia. Omnibusco has bought everything. They own all housing, all schooling, all production. They have even attempted to replace nature, and to reform religion so it reflects their agenda. The narrator, known only as Tim, believes them to be benevolent until he meets a mysterious man who has a kite, memories of the old times, and an imagination. If I were to tell anything more, it would be a spoiler; however, I can say that the story is more “magic realist” than fantasy or sci-fi in any strict sense.

Interesting. You don’t see many dystopian novels focusing on what happens when giant corporations essentially take on the role of government. I think when you start seeing government and corporations merging into one, there’s a disaster looming. It sounds like your story focuses on the aftermath in society if that happens. Definitely a great concept to focus on. So given that, what is the overarching theme or message of your story?

It’s symbolic. Probably nobody is less threatening than an elderly man flying a kite, but he manages to take on the corporate Powers That Be, and he lets the world start again.

So basically, the most unlikely among us are capable of being heroes if we stand up for what’s right. That’s an interesting message for the story itself. I’m curious to know; why did you choose that theme or message?

There wasn’t really a “why”; I just wanted to write about the small person making a difference. (Actually, I wasn’t consciously thinking about that; several years ago, when I wrote the first version of this story, it was merely because I’d gone for a walk in a park and happened to see an elderly man flying a kite. The rest of the story is pure imagination but came from that ordinary scene. Maybe it’s an example of what I’m talking about: something humble leading in an unexpected direction.)

I think that’s an excellent example of your subconscious integrating prior experiences with your conscious intent for the story to give you something that would be interesting to write and to read. It’s always neat when that happens without a lot of conscious effort! I can’t say it happens a lot, but it’s nice when it does. Moving to the philosophy of the work, can you share with us the philosophical message behind your story?

The small person can make a difference. The Hobbit can destroy the ring of doom. The weird girl with a strange name can reform the overly conformist culture of the school. The Maker of the Universe, in the guise of a humble man, took on the sins of the world.

Very well connected to the theme, certainly. Now, I’ve said numerous times in different articles that no one writes something without some connection to their own philosophies and principles. Every author is saying something about their view of the world and people when they write. So, tell us, how does that message extend from your own philosophy, and why do you feel it’s so important to share with the reader? In other words, what is it you want people to learn from this or hope they will reconsider about their own worldview/philosophy?

Again, I wasn’t really thinking about “my own” philosophy or what others would take away from it; I merely wanted to tell the story. Maybe that’s another “philosophical” point: The universe is a story; add your own story to it (no matter how humble).

Okay, a fairly straightforward philosophical point to people, I think. Now, to add some fun to the discussion, let’s talk about the story content and the connection it has to what we’ve been discussing. Can you share some of the points or scenes that were your favorites because of how they highlighted that philosophical message or aim in your story?

The kite is red, taking the idea of the “scapegoat” seriously. Also, Omnibusco wants to make everything monochrome (not red); this is symbolic of how colors (creativity) fade under totalitarianism. And I like the spiderbots.

I like that. I didn’t make the connection between the red kite and the scapegoat idea, but I think it is a great image, particularly given that you’re discussing the dystopia that results from a corporate world that runs everything, which usually entails finding scapegoats to blame when things go wrong. That’s the case with a lot of totalitarian regimes, but it’s especially true in regimes based heavily on bureaucracy, red tape, and corporatist blame shifting. To close out the interview, if you could ensure readers learned just one thing from your story, what would it be?

You are not too old, too young, too this or too that, to make a difference.

Certainly an empowering message. I think we all need to be reminded of that, especially in a world where we increasingly hear from media that one group or another is the victim, one group or another the aggressor, neither can do anything to make a difference on which they are, and we should all just give up. We’re definitely living in difficult times ourselves, and I think we can all be encouraged by these sorts of messages that when we each do what we can to push for a difference, we can make a change. There is power in the individual to make a difference regardless of who that individual may be.

Well, thank you for joining us on the blog today, Steven! It was wonderful to have you. Readers, if you want to check out Steven’s work, you can find him over on Amazon under the name Steven E. Scribner. He’s the author of the Tond series and blogs over at Soundscroll.blogspot.com and BookWords Blogg. To read Steven’s story when it comes out, you can pre-order a copy of Iron Walls here! It releases on the 26th of this month. That’s it for this time, everyone! I’ll be back next week with at least one final author. I’m waiting to see if a second is also available to join for release week, and if they are, expect an interview on both Tuesday and Thursday that week as we close out the weekly interviews on the week of the book’s release!

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This week, we have Joshua Reid with us. He is the author of Unbound, a short story in the anthology Iron Walls. He’s here today to share about his short story. Welcome, Joshua, and thank you for joining us! To start off, can you tell us why you chose to participate in this anthology?

I chose to participate in this dystopian anthology because I enjoy a dystopian story that causes me to think. That causes me to reflect on the history of our world and what we can do now to possibly prevent what a dystopian story portrays. In addition, I chose to participate in this dystopian anthology because I wanted to see how faith could be woven into a “dystopian” story where there wasn’t a dictatorial government involved.

Wonderful! That’s quite an ambitious goal. So before we get into the themes and philosophical messaging of your story, would you share with my readers what your story is about to offer some context for the rest of the discussion?

What my story is about a young man, who, having escaped from a prison is on the run only to find himself now caught in a war that has been raging for millennia. On top of all that, this young man also has to be face that fact that he is somehow different from his people. 

Okay, so now that people know what your story is about plot wise, we’re going to move into discussing the philosophical side of the story. Let’s start with the plot theme. What would you say is the overarching theme or message of your story?

The overarching theme or message of my story is about the bondage that everyone is in, whether they know it or not; specifically spiritual bondage.

That’s an interesting angle to take. It’s certainly different from what you normally see in most dystopian these days. So, why did you choose that theme or message?

I chose this theme for my story because it just seemed to fit the whole idea of a “dystopian” for me. Unlike the standard flare of dystopian story with a powerful and dictatorial government, this theme I chose spoke to a lot about how I’ve come to understand the world and history. In addition, I’ve grown tired of the dictatorial government angle when it comes to dystopian stories so I wanted to create a story that didn’t have anything like it.

I can certainly appreciate telling a unique story and telling the story you want to tell. Those are sometimes the best stories because they’re new and fresh. Now, could you share the philosophical message behind your story with my readers?

The philosophical message or worldview behind my story is the understanding that we as “rational” human beings don’t realize that there is more to this world than what we can physically see. So, with that, I asked the question: What would happen in a world that was caused by humanity’s relentless wars and the inhabitation of angelic and demonic forces on the now desolate Earth?

A great question to start with, certainly. Since this blog mostly focuses on philosophy and history, I’m sure my readers are curious about how that message extends from your own philosophy. Could you share about that with us? Why do you feel it’s so important to share with the reader? In other words, what is it you want people to learn from this or hope they will reconsider about their own worldview/philosophy?

What I want people to learn from the message of the story or hope they’ll consider regarding their worldview is the senselessness of needless wars. What I hope the message from the story also shows is that we are all in need of a Saviour. That we are all in spiritual bondage until we accept Christ.

As a fellow believer, I appreciated seeing that theme in the story when I read it. It was a fresh take on the dystopia genre, and I thought it was really creative. Now for a fun question. Can you share some of the points or scenes that were your favorites because of how they highlighted that philosophical message or aim in your story?

Some of the scenes that were my favorites that I feel highlighted the message or aim of my story were ones that focused a lot on the character trying to come to grips with the fact that the “Commander” chose him to begin leading his people out of the bondage they are in. It really hit for me that this is something that we are all in unless we have Christ so I really wanted to incorporate it into the fabric of the story. One of my other favorite scenes were the scenes that touched on what exactly happened prior to the desolate world they lived in. How different people have similar and different stories surrounding what exactly happened.

Those were certainly some good scenes in the piece. I enjoyed reading them when I was beta-reading the piece. Before we close, I want to give you a minute to offer some closing words. If you could ensure readers learned just one thing from your story, what would it be?

One thing from my story that I hope readers learn is that, as I mentioned, is that we are all in need a Savior and that we as human beings don’t even realize that we are in spiritual bondage.

Great! The story definitely communicates that idea in my opinion. Well, thank you for taking the time to be here with us today, Joshua! I’m sure you’re excited to see the story in print. Readers, be sure to check the anthology out and give Joshua’s story a read when the ebook comes out on October 26th. His story is a refreshing take on the dystopian genre, but he keeps the story interesting in engaging. The faith elements are well-woven into the story such that it feels like a natural part of the story, so I feel Joshua did an excellent job with that, and I’d definitely recommend the story. It isn’t your usual dystopian, so you should expect a bit more of a fantasy-style feel to the story, but it’s certainly worth the read. Until next time!

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Today I’m back with more about the upcoming release of Iron Walls. Last week I answered the questions I’m asking other authors in the group, and this week I have Astrid V.J., the author of “In Pursuit of Independence”, a short story with a powerful message about not living with contradicting beliefs and desires. Astrid, thank you for joining me today! Let’s jump right into the questions. To start of with, can you tell us a bit about why you chose to participate in this dystopian anthology?

I already had a story written when I saw the call for stories. It came at an opportune moment and being part of this anthology definitely feels like it was meant to be.

Sounds like it was timed perfectly, then! Before we get into the themes and philosophical messaging of your story, would you share with my readers what your story is about to offer some context for the rest of the discussion?

In Pursuit of Independence is set in my fictionalized future in a galactic empire much like the scope of the one in Star Wars. Misubuki is the capital city’s leading economist and she is tasked with averting a war when one of the founding planets makes a move to withdraw from the Haldrian Empire.

It sounds like an interesting world with a lot of thought behind it. Having read the story myself, I can say from personal experience that the story world definitely feels like a real place. It’s very well done. But now that you’ve shared the basic idea with my readers, could you share the overarching theme or message of your story?

Our thoughts can keep us trapped more surely than any cage or system. When we believe certain things that are opposed to our inner truths, we mire ourselves in an inescapable quicksand.

That’s an excellent point to make. Living in contradictions will make even the most stable people unhappy. Again, speaking from personal experience, I know exactly how much damage that can do. It’s a message lots of people need to hear. So why did you choose that theme or message?

In Pursuit of Independence came about as a simple exercise in putting on a particular mindset. In recent years I’ve come across a lot of statements made by hardcore feminists that I cannot relate to at all because they do not reflect my unique experiences as a woman and run counter to certain desires I’ve always had (like wanting to have children, for example). One day, I wondered what it might be like to truly believe these postulations and internalize them, superimposing them on my personal wants and needs, and relegating those to the subconscious. This short story is the result of that exploration and my examination of what would become of me if I were subjected to such a contrast of “conscious thoughts” versus “subconscious dreams”.

Intriguing! I wouldn’t have guessed that from reading the story. If anything, the story does seem pretty anti-feminist. But I think it’s a fair point that it’s more anti-hardcore or modern feminist than it is anti-empowering of women. So you’ve shared the plot theme, but can you share with us the philosophical message behind your story?

No ideology can contain the full truth of human experience. Ideologies only offer us facets of the whole, not the diamond in its entirety. But in focusing only on one aspect, ideological postulations can end up focusing on perceived flaws and turn them into something that is “bad” and needs to be “removed”. Ideologies of all kinds often end up fostering extreme intolerance and this is one of the main focuses of all my writing: fostering tolerance for difference, no matter what that difference might look like.

That’s often true, especially if we improperly integrate that ideology with our own experiences and lives. Now, how does that message extend from your own philosophy, and why do you feel it’s so important to share with the reader? In other words, what is it you want people to learn from this or hope they will reconsider about their own worldview/philosophy?

From my own experience and through my work as a transformational life coach, I have often been faced with mindsets that hold people back. As a teenager, I saddled myself with the belief that “since writers don’t tend to make a decent living, it isn’t worthwhile to pursue my dream of publishing my writing.” That belief held me back for over a decade while I battled depression. As soon as I learned to embrace my writing for what it is—an integral part of who I am—then suddenly my earlier reservations became meaningless. I write because that is what makes my soul sing and my heart soar, and that is all that is important. When our thoughts and actions align with our true selves, we are able to achieve so much, but when we live in dissonance, we end up living the kind of dystopia that Misubuki has allowed her society to build around her by saddling her with certain beliefs that she embraces with her mind, while her body rejects it vehemently.

It seems like you’ve certainly had a lot of experience with this struggle both in your life and in your work with others. So switching gears just a little bit, can you share some of the points or scenes that were your favorites because of how they highlighted that philosophical message or aim in your story?

I loved writing the love at first sight scene with Sergeant Amq’i because Misubuki’s vehement denial and absolute refusal to believe it possible is an important lynchpin for the message of the story. It’s through that scene that we are introduced to her beliefs about men and relationships, and her friend’s romantic comments that rile up Misubuki were so much fun to write. The ending scene is another really powerful one. I can’t say I enjoyed writing it, because this is a dystopian story, but it does move me, and I hope that means it’s sufficiently poignant.

Okay, so wrapping this up, if you could ensure readers learned just one thing from your story, what would it be?

To trust in themselves. Only you know what it is that will bring meaning into your life and only you can choose to pursue that activity. Meaningful pursuits and a deep belief in the self and our capacity to achieve what we dream of, that is the cornerstone of a good life and it is everything I want to convey through my writing.

Well, that’s a great message to leave people with. Thanks for sharing the philosophy behind your story, Astrid! It was wonderful to have you here with us on Atlas’s Island today. The story was an excellent one. I’m not exactly your target audience, per se, since I’m extremely anti-feminist–at least per the modern definition of feminism–but we’re definitely on the same page about extreme feminism, and despite being deeply unsettled by Misubuki’s adherence to extreme feminism, I actually really enjoyed the story. I think that speaks to the power of the message because even though I started out disliking Misubuki because of her irrational fanatical adherence to an ideology that clearly harmed her, I ended the story feeling sad for her and hoping she’d learn from the experience. To my readers, I’d definitely recommend Astrid’s story. It’s coming out in Iron Walls along with mine and many other authors whom I hope to showcase in the upcoming days to give you all an inside glimpse on what you can expect from the anthology. Thanks for joining us today, and I hope you’ll come back next Tuesday for the upcoming interview with Joshua Reid, a Christian author from the anthology, who will be sharing the message behind his story with us. Until next week!

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