On April 2, 2012, the Australian Senate closes invitations from the public on their opinion regarding the legalisation of same-sex ‘marriage’. This is not the first time the Senate has been requested to do so; the last time was back in 2009. Yet the political climate in Australia is markedly different now. In 2009, the Labor Government had as it’s official party policy to support marriage as man-woman only; likewise the Opposition Government. The Bill put forward to redefine marriage to “any two persons”, the Marriage Equality Amendment Act 2009, by the Greens (a progressive left party) was resoundly dismissed. Yet this time round, we have a Labor Government who altered their party platform late last year to support same-sex ‘marriage’ and we have three bills being reviewed by the Senate to amend the Marriage Act 1961. One of the those bills is again from the Greens: the Marriage Equality Amendment Act 2010. It’s the latter bill that presents the most radical of change to the current definition of marriage in Australia. And its to that bill that I’ve composed the following submission:

Senate
Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600

Dear Senate,

Re: Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2010

I write to the Senate Inquiry Committee to voice my opposition to the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2010 and to lend my support of traditional man-woman marriage. I note my reasons in the following paragraphs, providing supporting references where appropriate.

Full equality already exists under current law

Marriage, for all Australian constituents, is an institution in which there already exists a full equality under the law; there is none to whom the Marriage Act 1961 unjustly discriminates. In order for anyone to marry, all must pass the prescribed criteria: 1. Be of marriageable age; 2. Be not already married; 3. Must not marry a close blood relative, and; 4. Must marry a member of the opposite sex. All Australians, irrespective of their sexual identity, are expected to meet these criterions; there is no inequality of law in their application to either the homosexual or the heterosexual. Both the homosexual and the heterosexual have the same restrictions.

While this response may be unsatisfactory to many homosexuals, it must be noted that the existing criterion for marriage in Australia does not require desire or love between the two being married. Although love and desire are important to the marital union, it is not required by law, but assumed. Government does not regard desire as key to the marital union because such unions encompass not only love but also provide a unique social good¹.
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An interesting newspaper headline caught my eye this morning on my daily commute regarding a family court ruling where the Judge ordered that a five year old boy be enrolled in a ‘religiously neutral’ school. The case came about as the two – divorced – parents involved could not come to an agreement as to how the boy was to be raised. As the brief article describes it, the mother is a ‘church-goer’ and wants her son to be sent to a (presumably) Christian school, while the father is a self-described humanist who is adamantly opposed.

It is an unfortunate dilemma (all custody cases are) as the court was essentially asked to adjudicate between two conflicting convictions. The articles I could find on the case were limited in depth and presented mainly the arguments put forth by the father – perhaps to skew the story in his favor? – so it is on his points that I will respond to individually below.

The father states:

“I now have strong humanist views, but do not hold religious beliefs. In fact, I have become opposed to religious dogma and organised religion.”

Or it could just be that, given this case is just one of the consequences of a divorce involving children (which typically are not cordial affairs), he is more interested in just opposing his ex-wife’s wishes. As a side note, it would be interesting to know if the opposing views within the marriage toward Christianity had any part to play in the parent’s separation, especially considering the ex-husband’s terse humanist convictions.

“I oppose religious dogmas being thrust on young minds.”

But apparently it is quite ok for the father to thrust his humanist dogmas on his own son. Presumably, he believes that his position is one of neutrality, but in reality there is no such position. There is simply a religious position and a non-religious (or anti-religious) position and the father obviously favors the latter.

He also weights the debate by assuming that all religious ‘teaching’ is not teaching at all, but a form of brain-washing. He assumes too much; he is actually trying, in effect, to thrust his religiously ‘neutral’ dogma onto his son by name-calling his ex-wife’s preference out of the debate. There is no real substance here.

“I have seen the evidence of people who profess to be Christian and then act in a manner which can best be described as un-Christian.”

Obviously, the father knows of Christians who aren’t Christians. (I wonder if he thought that argument through?) I would be interested in knowing by what standard he judges who is a Christian and who is not, but we are not privvy to this information. In any case, while it may be true that some people who profess to be Christians aren’t in practice, it does not mean that Christianity as a religion is a bad thing. That he raises this as a line of argument tells me that he is fearful of his son turning into a religious hypocrite. A fair enough fear, easily countered – I dare say – by: 1) understanding what Christianity deems is appropriate behavior, and; 2) working with his ex-wife to ensure his son taught accordingly, especially since he is unintentionally implying that proper Christians have favorable behaviors. But I’d simply wager he does not have interest in working with his ex on this – paint me skeptical.

I think the Judge, Magistrate Stewart Brown, thought he was likewise taking a “cautious approach” when he ruled that the boy be enrolled in a non-religious school. In actuality it was a ruling in favor of the father’s position which, as I’ve argued, is not at all neutral. The mother now needs to prayerfully work harder on instructing her son regarding her Christian faith – frankly, that’s not a bad thing (even if the ruling went her way she should be doing this anyway as that is an appropriate Christian behaviour) and I’d encourage her to do so.

Read the full article below and do share your thoughts.

References:

• Judge forced to decide for parents warring over son’s religion

Some time ago I was working through CS Lewis’s classic, The Problem of Pain. In it there is one line that I lifted out of its pages and plugged into my Twitter timeline – and shortly after that there started some dialogue with a fellow (we’ll call him Pete) who believed that the statement I offered was contradictory and he subsequently mocked it as such.

Well, either this Pete is a very intelligent man and CS Lewis was an idiotic fool or, quite probably, the quote I tweeted was most likely misunderstood.

Speaking on the necessity of God’s love for us and of the characteristic of God’s love for us, I echoed Lewis’s sentiment and tweeted:

[It is because God] already loves us [that] He must labour to make us lovable.

Moments after I shared this on Twitter, I received this reply from Pete: “lol contradiction is faith”.

When I inquired as to how the statement was contradictory, Pete wrote back that “If you’re lovable, you don’t need to be made lovable. You already are”.

Now that might sound reasonable, but I believe it misses the point entirely, let alone misreads what was actually tweeted (which was that God’s love for us compels him to make us even more lovable). Lewis was not stating that God already saw us as lovable. In an effort to correct Pete and to point this out, I tweeted: “Love seeks to perfect the object of its love”.

What did I mean by this? Parents know this all too well. When your child is born you love your child not for anything that your child has done, nor even for how adorable your child may be. I should think that you love your child simply because you choose to love your child – the word “lovable” doesn’t really come into it at this point. When your child wakes crying at 1am in the morning, then again at 2.30am, and yet again an hour later, as a parent, the word “lovable” isn’t the exact word that enters your head. But as a parent you do attend to your child out of the love you have for him / her – again, not for anything your child has done to deserve it.

Where I believe Pete erred is that he equated the term “lovable” to be a prerequisite in order to love. In other words, on his view, you cannot love someone unless that someone has a quality that you find lovable. Another problem in defining the term “lovable” in this fashion is that the definition is purely arbitrary – what I find lovable might well be unlovable to you.

God does not see us as “lovable” in this sense at all. In fact, God has some pretty strong words for how He does view us: He hates the sinner; we are far from being lovable (Psalm 5:5, Psalm 11:5, Leviticus 20:23).

Paradoxically, God loves us immensely (John 3:16, John 15:13). He cannot love us for what we are – rebellious, wanton, unruly, sinful – for God is holy and his holiness will not tolerate what is impure. So what does Lewis’s statement, it “[is because God already] loves us [that] He must labour to make us lovable” then actually mean?

Part of the implication of Lewis’s statement is that discipline is involved in the act of love. It has to be: without discipline, love is not love at all. Without discipline, love morphs into an act of, as Lewis says elsewhere in The Problem of Pain, a Benevolent Grandfather who’s sole intent is to please his grandchildren; this type of love leaves unruly behaviour unchecked; and unruly behaviour left unchecked leads to the development of selfish and self-centred adults.

God’s love for us is far removed from that of the Benevolent Grandfather’s; God’s love is richer and purer. God’s holy love entails discipline. As the writer of Hebrews writes:

It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he [God] disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:7-11, emphasis mine.)

So this is what Lewis means when he says that it is out of God’s love for us – his desire to see us develop into an upright and holy people – that God must work at making us lovable, more perfect, more like his son Jesus. This is why I responded to Pete that Love seeks to perfect the object of its love, to desire the very best – God requires that we be perfect for he is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Yet the only way we can be perfect is for God to work on us to become so and it is out of his love for us that he “labours” to achieve this (Heb 12:5-8).

God so loved us that he sacrificed his only son, Jesus Christ, so that through Jesus’ cleansing blood we become perfect in his eyes and, as a result, become truly, purely, lovable through and through.

In the lead up to the Australian Labor Party’s (ALP) National Conference this coming weekend, at which will be tabled a discussion to change the Party’s official policy from supporting traditional one-man, one-woman marriage, this exhortation from preacher John Piper is a stirring reminder for Christians to weep with sorrow and compassion over the sins of their cities. No less ought we in Australia weep if God’s natural law of traditional, monogamous marriage is ever legislated out of existence.

Jesus died so that heterosexual and homosexual sinners might be saved. Jesus created sexuality, and has a clear will for how it is to be experienced in holiness and joy.

His will is that a man might leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and that the two become one flesh (Mark 10:6-9). In this union, sexuality finds its God-appointed meaning, whether in personal-physical unification, symbolic representation, sensual jubilation, or fruitful procreation.

For those who have forsaken God’s path of sexual fulfillment, and walked into homosexual intercourse or heterosexual extramarital fornication or adultery, Jesus offers astonishing mercy.

Such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Corinthians 6:11).

But last weekend {at a gay pride event held in Minneapolis last June} this salvation from sinful sexual acts was not embraced. Instead there was massive celebration of sin …

The Bible is not silent about such parades. Alongside its clearest explanation of the sin of homosexual intercourse (Romans 1:24-27) stands the indictment of the celebration of it. Though people know intuitively that homosexual acts (along with gossip, slander, insolence, haughtiness, boasting, faithlessness, heartlessness, ruthlessness) are sin, “they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:29-32). “I tell you even with tears, that many glory in their shame” (Philippians 3:18–19) …

Not only that, we are moving from celebration to institutionalization. On June 24 the New York legislature approved a Marriage Equality Act. This makes New York the sixth state where so-called homosexual marriages will be institutionalized: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, (and the District of Columbia).

My sense is that we do not realize what a calamity is happening around us. The new thing—new for America, and new for history—is not homosexuality. That brokenness has been here since we were all broken in the fall of man. (And there is a great distinction between the orientation and the act—just like there is a great difference between my orientation to pride and the act of boasting.)

What’s new is not even the celebration of homosexual sin. Homosexual behavior has been exploited, and reveled in, and celebrated in art, for millennia. What’s new is normalization and institutionalization. This is the new calamity.

My main reason for writing is not to mount a political counter-assault. I don’t think that is the calling of the church as such. My reason for writing is to help the church feel the sorrow of these days. And the magnitude of the assault on God and his image in man.

Christians, more clearly than others, can see the tidal wave of pain that is on the way. Sin carries in it its own misery: “Men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:27).

And on top of sin’s self-destructive power comes, eventually, the wrath of God: “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming” (Colossians 3:5–6).

Christians know what is coming, not only because we see it in the Bible, but because we have tasted the sorrowful fruit of our own sins. We do not escape the truth that we reap what we sow. Our marriages, our children, our churches, our institutions—they are all troubled because of our sins.

The difference is: We weep over our sins. We don’t celebrate them. We turn to Jesus for forgiveness and help. We cry to Jesus, “who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10).

And in our best moments, we weep for the world. In the days of Ezekiel God put a mark of hope “on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in Jerusalem” (Ezekiel 9:4).

This is what I am writing for. Not political action, but love for the name of God and compassion for the city of destruction.

“My eyes shed streams of tears, because people do not keep your law.” (Psalm 119:136)

Taken from John Piper’s blog, Desiring God: “My Eyes Shed Streams of tears” – Thoughts on the new Calamity

This resonates strongly with my love of Psalm 51 and serves as a reminder that we are all of us in good company.

“The bows of the warriors are broken, but those who stumbled are armed with strength.” – 1 Samuel 2:4

There is an oxymoron throughout the Bible. It says that brokenness is strength. How can this be? How can brokenness be strength? In order to use men and women to their fullest extent, the Lord has to break His servants so that they might have a new kind of strength that is not human in origin. It is strength in spirit that is born only through brokenness.

Paul was broken on the Damascus road. Peter was broken after Jesus was taken prisoner. Jacob was broken at Peniel. David was broken after his sin with Bathsheba. The list could go on of those the Lord had to break in different ways before they could be used in the Kingdom.

When we are broken, we see the frailty of human strength and come to grips with the reality that we can do nothing in our own strength. Then, new strength emerges that God uses mightily. God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Do not fear brokenness, for it may be the missing ingredient to a life that emerges with a new kind of strength and experience not known before. Pray for a broken and contrite heart that God can bless.

by Os Hillman

On Valentine’s Day, 2011, gay lobby group Australian Marriage Equality, in partnership with the progressive activist group, GetUp!, released a short video advertisement¹ promoting gay “marriage” in Australia. Predictably, they used the standard term employed by gay “marriage” advocates, “marriage equality”, serving the perception that there is nothing equal about the current legal status of marriage. While intentionally innocuous, the term “marriage equality” is nevertheless stuffed with worn-out and rebadged rhetoric: why oughtn’t two people who love each other be allowed to marry?; gender has nothing to do with marriage; its not fair that John and Jim can’t marry each other, but that Dean and Denise can.

Yawn. I’m getting sleepy already.

Yet the proud tag line on Australian Marriage Equality’s website² follows that same hum-drum line: “Marriage is about love and commitment, not your partner’s gender.”

Further, GetUp!³ state on their website for this campaign that “all love is equal and all relationships deserve recognition.”

Well, no. Not all (romantic) love is equal, and neither is marriage founded on love and commitment alone. Marriage is very much a gender-based institution no matter how much organizations like Australian Marriage Equality or GetUp! espouse the “love is all” card. Read the rest of this entry

We at The Aristophrenium are always looking out for ways in which our readership community can remain in touch. While the majority of our readership remain connected to our content via the RSS Feed, we also publish to our Twitter account, Facebook page and allow readers to receive our articles direct to their email Inbox. More recently, we’ve started posting a few videos to our YouTube channel as well.

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These feeds were made available under the Subscriber Feeds panel to the far right of the page, but we have since removed them to clear up unnecessary clutter.

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How Deep The Father’s Love For Us ~ Phillips, Craig and Dean

How deep the Father’s love for us
How vast beyond all measure
That He should give His only Son
And make a wretch His treasure
How great the pain of searing loss
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which marr the Chosen One
Bring many sons to glory

Behold the man upon the cross
My sin upon His shoulders
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers
It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I know that it is finished

I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection
Why should I gain from His reward
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom

Why should I gain from His reward
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom

We all need our thinking to be renewed and reversed before we can come to accept the majesty and power and saving grace of the Gospel of Christ and before we realize the folly and meaninglessness of the atheistic worldview.

H/Tip: Active Christian Media

It’s twelve months to the day that myself, Ryft and Duane embarked on this joint-venture under The Aristophrenium brand to proclaim the truth of the gospel and centrality of Christ in all things. One year on and I think we’ve achieved a number of milestones along the way that, humble though they may be, surprised even us to have reached. We’d like to share a few of the milestones with you here:

• 26 posts in our first month
• 190 posts in the first year
• breaking 80+ subscribers to our RSS feed
• enjoying some attention and kudos thrown our way from other, more well-established Christian bloggers
• attracting some great regular readers who engage / challenge us and others in our community in the comments sections of the blog
• the addition of two new staff writers during the course of the year – Adam and Fisher
• and we’ve learned a few new ways in which to build effectual networks for the sharing of the gospel message of our Lord Jesus Christ

This is our opportunity to say “thanks”. Thanks to you, our readers and community members, for making this past year an especially rewarding experience.

We hope that you will not only encourage us by your ongoing participation in The Aristophrenium community but that you would also hold us accountable to our Mission & Beliefs. If we at all lose sight of these we have ceased to perform that to which the Apostle Paul in 2 Cor 10:5 exhorts us to do: demolish the foolishness of the world and hold every thought captive and obedient to Christ.

Following is a handful of the thought-provoking pieces from us here at The Aristophrenium that summarizes our official “first year in review”. We are very pleased to have you celebrating the year with us.

Read the rest of this entry