Deus Ex Blog

For thousands of years, there was an argument amongst the followers of the Jewish faith. The Torah proscribes over 600 commandments that need to be followed and some of these commands conflict with each other. So people argued over which of the commandments should take precedence. In all the time spent discussing this problem, they only managed to come to agreement on the first commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. The second was not so easy, as the majority, the Pharisees, believed the second should be “Be holy as God is holy.” When Jesus enters the scene, he affirms the greatest commandment but sides with the minority on the second: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” However, being Jesus, he does not leave it there. He takes it a step beyond and declares, “On these two hang all the laws and the prophets.”

So Jesus is saying that all the laws in the Torah can be broken down eventually to these two simple commands. Everything the Prophets were talking about also comes down to this. So the Bible is really a book about Love. Loving God, Loving each other, Loving ourselves. And while that is cool and all, what exactly does it mean? It’s so simple, Love God and Love each other, and yet that simplicity belies a wonderful complexity. By unpacking these two commands, we will eventually reach all the law and the prophets. By living according to these commands, we will fulfill the law. If presented with a moral quandary, the correct answer is whichever one is more loving.

So Love is all you need. Unfortunately, our culture does not readily understand the concept of Love. Love is a feeling, something you fall into. Love is a strong like, something that can as easily refer to a pair of shoes as to a person. Love is a marketing ploy, something full of pink hearts and red balloons, cards and chocolates. Love is an excuse, something to justify leaving a wife and children to run off with someone else. Love is sex, something to make you feel good. Love is temporary insanity, something that afflicts you and then fades away leaving you stuck and miserable. Love is a cliche, something that moves plots along in our literature and movies regardless of its believability: Character A falls in love with Character B because that’s just how stories work. Love is volatile, something that starts off well and then fades away or explodes violently. Love is desire, something that wants this and if it can’t have it nobody will.

So what is love? When we are instructed to love God, do we desire to possess Him? Is it a romantic call? When we are instructed to love each other, is that a call to promiscuity? Obviously not. Scripture must be calling for some other form of Love. The apostle Paul speaks about a love that is patient and kind. A love that is forgiving and welcoming and inviting and trusting and pure. A love that lasts, a love that does not fail. How different this is from the love we think about in our culture. In fact, anyone pushing this kind of love today would be called whipped, a pussy, a wimp.

There is such a difference between the biblical version of love and what we think of when we talk about love in our culture that the two could be called opposites.  I have taken to calling the love our culture encourages “Inlove.”

Love is patient.  Inlove can’t wait.

Love is kind.  Inlove can be completely cruel.

Love does not envy, Inlove is characterized by it.  Can you think of a single romantic comedy that didn’t use “Trying to make the other person jealous” as a plot point?

Love does not boast, inlove yells it from the rooftops and brags about it in the locker room.

Love is not proud, inlove flaunts itself. Inlove bagged a hot one, but would dump them in a second for someone further up the social ladder.

Love is not self-seeking, inlove is trying to get everything it can out of this relationship.

Love is not easily angered, inlove explodes at the least provocation.

Love forgives, inlove keeps a record to take out and beat the other person with when they eventually screw up.

Love is truthful and honest, inlove keeps spinning the web of lies bigger and bigger in a vain attempt to save face.

Love trusts, inlove takes any negative rumor as truth.

Love perseveres, inlove calls it quits at the first sign of trouble.

So what we are talking about here is different kind of love, a kind of love that is counter to our culture’s selfish way of life.  The implications are immense and brings up all sorts of questions.  What does it mean to love God?  What does it mean to Love another as you love yourself?  What does that say about loving yourself?  If being holy is not in Jesus’ top two, where does it fit in?  How does all the murder, adultery, hatred, and general unpleasantness in the Bible relate to Love?  How about all those laws?  How do we behave in our current culture in a way that shows God’s love?  What does the God kind of Love have to do with romantic love or friendship?  What about hate?

Loving God and Loving each other encapsulates the law and the prophets in one easy to swallow sound-bite but it seems to also encompass ever more questions.  If you start to ponder the meanings and the implications, it will work its way into the entirety of your life.  It complicates things.  Pouring a glass of water may suddenly take on a moral component.  You might suddenly find yourself wishing well a person you previously detested.  You might be forced to rethink your political views or join people you previously disagreed with.  If you start down the path, if you start pulling on the threads, you will find the pursuit of Love, God’s kind of Love, a life-changing journey.

[Comments →]

Why is it that so often it is non-Christians who know better than we do what Christians should be doing? Listen to this agnostic, liberal getting it exactly right:

If that wasn’t enough, let this sink in for you: There are people, human beings, picketing churches. I’m sure some self-righteous blow-hards will call it persecution and say we should be glad of it, or that they’re paying the price for “Standing up for righteousness!” However, you don’t have to go very far in the scripture to see that this attitude is flat out wrong. The verse everyone knows, the most famous verse in the Bible, the one they throw up at football games: John 3:16 “For God so loved the world (all people, including homosexuals) that he gave his only begotten son…” John 3:17 “For God did not send his son to condemn the world…” Quite frankly, God loves fags, despite what any website or sign might say.  It is not the homosexuals who are persecuting us, it is the homosexuals protesting our persecution of them.

Not convinced? Let me try this one: Let’s for the sake of argument say that what the fundies believe is true and that Homosexuality is a terrible, terrible sin and that gays are going to hell. Given that, what should the Christian response be? After all, the Bible teaches that all have sinned (save Christ) and fallen short of the glory of God. We have all broken the law and were destined for hellfire before God intervened and saved us. Our response to our fellow sinners should be one of compassion, mercy, humility, and love.

Even given that, I hear some saying that we should “love the sinner, hate the sin” and that just because we have compassion for homosexuals, it doesn’t mean we should open up marriage to them. Putting aside the impossibility of loving the sinner while hating their sin (and the fact it does not appear in the Bible anywhere. If it did, it would be more like “Love the sinner, forgive the sin, pray for those who persecute you or give you the creeps when they’re seen kissing on the nightly news,”) who are we to judge? God tells us point blank: DO NOT JUDGE. If a homosexual, who does not believe in Christ*, wants to get married in the face of all this opposition, who are we to tell them they can’t? The Bible does not tell us to force those who do not believe as we do to live by our standards. (Especially when we can’t seem to live by them very well.)

I’ve heard the arguments about “Oh, this will redefine marriage,” etc. Terry Pratchett defines evil as treating things as if they are more important than people. How much more evil it must be to treat a word as more important than people. Look through the dictionary sometime and see how many words have only one definition. Marriage already has 10 definitions according to dictionary.com. And if gay people getting married puts your marriage in jeopardy, you already have some problems.

Before I conclude this post, I have to come clean. I am a homophobe. Gay people creep me the hell out. Seeing them kissing on television makes me very uncomfortable. But seeing how my religion has treated these people, these fellow human beings, makes me far sicker. Treating your fellow human beings as the abominations you steadfastly perceive them to be makes me ill. (I don’t see Christians protesting outside seafood restaurants even though Leviticus 11:10 says shellfish are an abomination too.) And while the Bible says we should stand up for righteousness, it’s talking about in our own lives, and in the lives of our brothers and sisters (IE: people who share our belief in God that we have an actual relationship with) not people we don’t know that don’t believe the same things we do.

* Note: If a Christian having homosexual urges earnestly believes for himself that homosexuality is a sin, the community should do what they can to help him fight those urges. If a Christian homosexual believes that homosexuality is not a sin, we should let him be unless he is undermining the faith of the first guy. Or did you think that whole eating food offered to idols thing only applied to steak?

[Comments →]