Thinking Christian

Evolution—the naturalistic kind—is dangerous. I’ve never seen that danger exposed so clearly as in Jesse Bering’s article today at Scientific American’s website, Polyamory chic, gay jealousy, and the evolution of a broken heart [caution: crude language]. He writes,

There’s a strange whiff in the media air, a sort of polyamory chic in which liberally minded journalists, an aggregate mass of antireligious pundits and even scientists themselves have begun encouraging readers and viewers to use evolutionary theory to revisit and revise their sexual attitudes and, more importantly, their behaviors in ways that fit their animal libidos more happily.

… the basic logic is that, because human beings are not naturally monogamous but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out ‘extra-pair copulatory partners’—having sex with someone other than your partner or spouse for the replicating sake of one’s mindless genes—then suppressing these deep mammalian instincts is futile and, worse, is an inevitable death knell for an otherwise honest and healthy relationship.

If you believe, as I do, that we live in a natural rather than a supernatural world, then there is no inherent, divinely inspired reason to be sexually exclusive to one’s partner. If you and your partner want to … [multiple suggested acts, omitted for reasons of decency] … then by all means do so (and take pictures). … Right is irrelevant. There is only what works and what doesn’t work, within context, in biologically adaptive terms….

This is bound to provoke revulsion in any decent reader, and rightly so. Anger, too—rightly so. Even fear—rightly so. But not the kind of fear that some have mistakenly ascribed to some of us, like Stuart Kauffman, who wrote earlier this year,

I suspect the fear of evolution is also based in the view of many that God is the author of our moral laws. Then if the Bible is God’s literal word, and yet evolution is true, the Bible, the very word of God, is false, and our morality falls to the ground….

But evolution, in fact, is no enemy of morality.

Or Michael Shermer, who wrote in the blurb for his book, Why Darwin Matters,

Evolution happened, and the theory describing it is one of the most well founded in all of science. Then why do half of all Americans reject it? There are religious reasons, such as the fear of atheism and the perceived loss of ultimate meaning; there are psychological reasons, such as the ego-deflating realization that we are mere animals; and there are political reasons, such as the equation of evolution with moral relativism on the right, and the connection of evolution to eugenics and social Darwinism on the left.

No, this is not “I’m-afraid-of-evolution-therefore-I-can’t-accept-it’s-true.” In fact I reject naturalistic evolution because I believe it is incoherent, impossible, and contradictory to other things I know to be true. The fear of evolution of which I speak is based on a reasoned knowledge of its actual dangers.

Some readers will jump in and say it’s weak for me to be motivated by fear. I have a story about that. Last summer my wife and I encountered rattlesnakes on three consecutive hikes. It’s never happened to me before. The first one was just off the path, it was a little one, and we stopped and took the picture you see here. The second one was stretched out fully across the path in our way. I chucked some stones toward it and waited till it slithered out of the way; then we walked on by. The third one we heard but did not see. Some other hikers were ahead of us in the trail, and they were on the same side of the shrub it was on. We heard it rattling. I asked, “is it coiled?” They said it was. Now, that was intriguing to me. I’ve never seen a coiled-up rattler in the wild. But we got out of there anyway.

Fear of the second snake caused us to move slowly. Fear of the third one, coiled and ready to strike, drove us away completely. To act based on fear of genuine danger is both good and wise. Ideas have consequences, and in the case of evolution, one of those consequences is that (as Bering said), “Right is irrelevant.” That’s a perfectly sound conclusion from naturalistic evolutionary premises. Do you think that idea has no consequences? Would you marry someone who believes right is irrelevant? Would you let your daughter date someone like that? If so, your lack of fear is a morally and intellectually reprehensible lack of wisdom.

Bering thinks he can get past all that. In spite of the “polyamory chic” of which he speaks at first, he goes on to say evolution gives us something to hold relationships together in something like sexual faithfulness:

And that is simply the fact that we’ve evolved to empathize with other people’s suffering, including the suffering of the people we’d betray by putting our affable genitals to their evolved promiscuous use.

Heartbreak is every bit as much a psychological adaptation as is the compulsion to have sex with those other than our partners, and it throws a monster of a monkey wrench into the evolutionists’ otherwise practical polyamory.

“Practical polyamory”?! Do I fear sexuality being taught that way? Of course I do. What kind of idiot wouldn’t? It’s a coiled snake—even if there’s empathy in the evolutionary mix, as you’ll see as we continue. Bering goes on to describe heartbreak in both social and chemical detail, include his own despair after being rejected by his gay lover.

All this is to say that I reacted the way I did because, at an unconscious level, I didn’t want my testiculared partner getting impregnated by another man. I don’t consciously think of him as a woman, mind you; in fact, if I did, I assure you I wouldn’t be with him. But tell that to my gonads and amygdalae.

HIs heart was broken. There’s only one reason we don’t do that to each other every chance we get: empathy. That’s what Bering says holds human morality together.

By no means would I diminish the value of empathy. It certainly does guide and restrain human behavior. When I wash the dishes or fold laundry at home, it’s not because I love those jobs, but because I love my wife, and out of empathy I prefer that she not have to do them. Obviously empathy informs much larger decisions as well. Of course empathy is better explained on theism than naturalism.

For Bering and other naturalistic evolutionists, empathy is a chimera, genetic self-interest masquerading as selflessness. Empathy dances a dialectical pas de deux with promiscuous sexuality, a duet with (pardon the anthropomorphism) just one purpose: to produce multiple generations of babies. They’re equal partners in their evolutionary art, says Bering, and together they perform very well.

There is no right or wrong in that. It is what it is. It propagates genes. There’s no logically defensible way to identify one partner in this dance as morally better than the other. They’re both behaviors adapted for species survival, and neither could do it without the other. If you label empathy more respectable or praiseworthy than rape or wanton promiscuity, your labeling it so is just another behavior evolution has cooked up to join the dance. (It’s more of a pas de trois.) Oh, and one more thing: it’s not your dance. “Tell that to my gonads and amygdalae,” Bering says. He knows that evolution means he’s a puppet on their string. If you think it’s your dance—that you’re anything but a puppet toy in the propagation game—that’s another labeling behavior that evolution has found effective to get us all to reproduce.

I despise that teaching—even though it makes perfectly good sense on naturalistic assumptions. Because even though Bering thinks nothing can speak to his gonads and amygdalae, I know that people actually can think about their behaviors, and based on thinking they can actually make choices. I can see that if young people are taught a pervasive philosophical system that denies the roots of right and wrong, and that glorifies procreation, they’ll decide to do exactly what they’re doing. Hooking up at every chance they get. Cohabiting. Practicing serial marriage, divorcing right and left. Glorifying immorality of all sorts, both hetero- and homosexual.

And killing themselves emotionally, physically, and spiritually in the process.

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Don Lemon of CNN Weekend Primetime asked Dr. Sujatha Reddy, OB/GYN

Would you recommend this new emergency contraception to your patients?

She replied,

You know, I would. I think it’s great that women have one more option if there is, you know, an unintended event that occurs, you have have one more option.

The new “emergency contraception,” just approved by the FDA, is EllaOne, a “morning-after” pill that is actually an abortifacient.

Other than cases of rape (including those involving date rape drugs), no woman is pregnant on account of an unintended event. If Reddy were recommending EllaOne just for those instances, I would still have significant problems with it, but I’ll let others write on that. She isn’t just recommending it for those cases, though; and what I want to draw your attention to here is the way she stated it. Reddy was apparently searching for some euphemism for unwanted pregnancy. She came up with a telling one: “unintended events.”

Undeniably the vast majority of pregnancies result from intended events. The man and the woman intend to remove their clothes and they intend to do the sort of thing that can make babies. To call it an unintended event is to dehumanize the participants, to count their actions on the same level as those of irrational beasts. Sure, there are “animal” passions involved—I’m very well aware of that, thank you. But that’s not all there is to it. Rational thinking may be stressed under the pressure of the moment, but it is not erased.

To treat it as unintended is both to brute-alize it and to trivialize it horribly. It could be so much more than that; it was intended to be.

I was in a news stand at the old John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California many years ago. A man dressed in what I call “California Creative” style (think Hollywood director) came up to me and directed my attention to a rack of magazines whose covers were mostly hidden: Playboy, Playmate, etc. He said I really ought to buy one. (Strange, but true.) I told him I wasn’t interested. He said, “You don’t know what you’re missing.”

I wish I had answered him better than I did, because I missed a real opportunity. What I said was, “No thanks, I’m happily married.” What I should have said was, “No, you don’t know what you’re missing! You don’t know what it’s like to be with a woman who loves you fully and forever, total commitment, with no regrets from past relationships, no hiding, no pretending. You don’t know what it’s like to give yourself to someone fully that way. You don’t know how empty your idea of sex really is!”

I had a different kind of encounter on this topic about six or seven years ago. I was teaching a group of teenagers in our church about moral purity. A girl about fourteen years old said, “Well, I don’t get what’s the big deal about just a kiss.” I couldn’t believe my ears. “What?!” I shot back. “Not a big deal? I’ve been married sixteen years now, and every kiss I’ve shared with my wife has been a big deal! I like that it’s a big deal! Why on earth would you want it not to be a big deal?”

It’s supposed to be a big deal, not an “unintended event.” Our culture has lost track of that. Intimacy between a man and woman has meaning just in proportion to the meaning invested in it; and there is only one investment with the capacity to carry that full meaning: the lifelong commitment we call marriage. Anything less is, well, less.

But that’s what we’ve come to expect. Since the 1960s sex has been openly exalted, yet its exaltation has become its emptying. What was intended as a glorious expression of deep commitment, joy, life, and oneness, has been reduced to “an unintended event” with “options.”

Those who purvey this drained-out version of sex commit a detestable and horrific crime against humanness, against life, joy, intimacy, and even genuine pleasure—a crime that has victimized an entire generation.

I grieve for those who don’t know what they’re missing.

Also posted at First Things: Evangel

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Reposted from June 23, 2006. It seems timely in view of the alarmingly elastic view of marriage in California these days.

Alexandra Gill tells why she is marrying herself, along with six other women who are doing the same:

a celebration of womanhood and a toast to our independence…. In our minds, it is essential to find happiness and fulfilment on your own before committing to another.

This absolutely begs for commentary, some of it in the category of easy pickings. The most obvious, which I will not spend much time on, is that it’s another example of the slippery slope from the homosexuals’ drive to re-define marriage. Gill wrote:

We are not opposed to the institution of marriage or trying to make a mockery of it. But let’s face it. Traditions are changing — for the better…. We are fortunate for the opportunity, which many of our mothers never had, to live life to the fullest and not feel compelled to define ourselves by a man. But let’s not get too serious. For the most part, this is also a good excuse to throw a fabulous party.

Note the trivialization of a once-sacred ceremony. But I have a different question to pursue. If one of these women decides later to marry a man, will she have to divorce herself first? In a very practical sense, the answer is yes.

Thankfully this is (for now, at least) not a legal issue. Symbolically, though, this is a powerful solemnization of self-centeredness. This is exactly what marriage was never meant to be.

Marriage is most successful when it is more about the other than about the self. Real marriage is about mutual self-sacrifice, about finding the joy in giving that is far deeper than what comes from seeking one’s own. The Bible tells men to lay down their lives for their wives as Christ did for the church (Ephesians 5:25-28). Elsewhere (1 Corinthians 13:4-7) it says,

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Marriage is an antidote to self. (Raising children is a multiplied dose of the same.) As such it is increasingly counter-cultural, which is one of the reasons it needs defending so vigorously. You can research the tenor of our culture in a moment at a supermarket checkout stand. Scan the magazine covers there and observe how often the word “you” is used. “You can have better sex!” “How you can make more in investments.” “Doctors’ mistakes put you at risk!” This is not a sign of editors’ caring for you. It’s the result of research that shows they sell more magazines by getting us to focus on ourselves.

Nothing could be more foreign to Christ’s call to love one another, to give ourselves up for one another, to find our life by not seeking it. Ms. Gill believes “it is essential to find happiness and fulfillment on your own before committing to another.” Jesus Christ says the one who seeks his own life will lose it.

So it’s unlikely these women could live happily in a real marriage, without divorcing themselves from what they are entering now. And without a change of heart, even on their own, they are not destined to live Happily Ever After.

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From Judge Vaughn Walker’s opinion on the Proposition 8 case:

Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate. (p. 132)

California’s obligation is to treat its citizens equally, not to “mandate [its] own moral code.” (p. 133)

The evidence at trial regarding the campaign to pass Proposition 8 uncloaks the most likely explanation for its passage a desire to advance the belief that opposite-sex couples are morally superior to same-sex couples. (pp. 133-134)

Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians. The evidence shows conclusively that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples. (p. 135)

Is there now a wall of separation between morality and state? Where in the Constitution (or even in Jefferson’s letters) do you find that?

Also posted and open for discussion at First Things: Evangel.

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Related to the Keeton case: Freedom of Religion? No, Freedom of Sexuality.

Discussion will be held on the linked page.

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Based on events alleged to have taken place at Augusta State University, Augusta, Georgia.

DISGUSTA, Ga. — Attorneys with the National Uncivil Liberties League (NULL) filed suit against Disgusta State University Wednesday on behalf of a counseling professor told that her beliefs are unethical and incompatible with the prevailing views of the counseling profession. The professor, Dr. Julia Charrington, has been told to stop sharing her beliefs with others and that she must change her beliefs to remain on the counseling program’s faculty.

NULL senior attorneys underlined the seriousness of the situation: “Our dearest American liberties are at risk if we won’t let professors impose their anti-religiousness and pro-homosexuality on students against their will.”

Disgusta State ordered Charrington to undergo a re-education plan, in which she must attend “diversity sensitivity training,” complete additional remedial reading, and write papers to describe their impact on her beliefs. If she does not change her beliefs or agree to the plan, the university says it will remove her from the Counselor Education faculty.

Other professors learned of Charrington’s views on religion and homosexual conduct, specifically that:

• Homosexuality is an unrestricted good
• Freedom of sexuality trumps freedom of religion
• Sexual behavior is by no means a matter of accountable choice
• Persons are not born male or female; they become that way by of social conditioning; and especially
• Persons who disagree, especially those who disagree for religious reasons, must not be allowed to enter the counseling profession.

“A public university professor shouldn’t be threatened with termination just for insisting that students drop all their moral values and religious beliefs, but that’s exactly what’s happening here. Simply put, the university is imposing thought reform,” said NULL, through a spokesman-woman-person-whose-gender-had-not-been-quite-socially-settled-yet. “Allowing students to hold their own religious beliefs should not be a precondition for employment at a public university. This type of zero-tolerance policy is in place at far too many universities, and it must stop.”

The re-education plan assails Charrington’s beliefs as inconsistent with the counseling profession and expresses suspicion over her  “ability to demonstrate multicultural competence in counseling, particularly with regard to working with non-gay, non-lesbian, non-bisexual, non-transgender, and non-queer/questioning (nGnLnBnTnQ) populations, as well as religious populations.” The plan requires her to take steps to change her beliefs through additional assignments and additional “diversity sensitivity training.” It also orders her to “work to increase exposure and interactions with non-gay populations. One such activity could be attending the Non-Gay Pride Parade in Disgusta.”

In her defense, Charrington offered the example of Augusta State University, also in Georgia, where—allegedly—her beliefs are not only tolerated but actually required. “If what I’ve been hearing is true, Augusta State has a grand tradition of believing what I believe, and even requiring students to believe the same,” she said. “It sounds to me like they’ve set the standard for barring students’ freedom of religion. If it’s true they can do that, then it’s manifestly unfair for Disgusta State not to let me insist that all students here think only the things I say they must think!”

In case you missed it: yes, if reports linked here are true, there is what appears to be a real story behind this satire. Jennifer Keeton’s alleged experience is too similar and yet quite the opposite of the fictional Dr. Charrington’s.

Also at First Things: Evangel

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Trend-watching, from today’s NY Times, “When the Bride Takes a Bride:” how same-sex couples are finding ways to celebrate without being forced into a straight couples’ mold. The piece opens with a pair of lesbians who didn’t like how their “wedding” and “honeymoon” went.

“On every level there was something lacking,” said Kirsten Palladino, who took Maria’s surname after their wedding in June 2009. “We didn’t see any couples like us. The language was all he and she, bride and groom, please your man.”

The Times (which, like another national paper, clearly wants this to be true) tells us same-sex weddings are on the increase, and the rest of the world is adapting.

But as more states legalize same-sex marriage, and the weddings take root in American culture, the marketplace is responding with a growing number of new companies, services and publications aimed directly at gay grooms and lesbian brides. Equally Wed, published in a state where same-sex marriage is outlawed, is among a crop of Web sites that are filling the void left by conventional bridal publications

Are same-sex “weddings” really taking root in our culture? To some extent, yes. While legal battles continue, this article tells us that 70% of daily papers “now carry same-sex wedding announcements.” The source for that was the not-terribly-objective Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Though the Times links only to GLAAD’s home page, supporting data (or something like it) can be found: a list of papers that say they would accept homosexual announcements. On the same page, though, with a bit of digging (and using recent figures on the total number of papers in America), one can also discover that 77% of newspapers have never done so. Is that a sign of a new movement “taking root”? Not much, but some. The Times has overplayed it, as usual, but still we ought to recognize it for what it is.

The article goes on to mention same-sex couples being featured on the Today show, “under pressure from gay rights groups.” Is something taking root or is it being forced upon us? Two bride’s magazines have recognized same-sex couples as part of their market, but

Both magazines played it straight, focusing on menus and decorations, with no mention beyond the obvious of the couples’ orientations…. because it must appeal to a broad base, Brides does not plan to spotlight same-sex weddings in any deliberate way or to document their sociological evolution.

That “broad base” represents that large part of American culture where SSM is not taking root, evidenced by most of the country’s opposition to it. The Times’s language on that is interesting, to say the least:

Equally Wed, published in a state where same-sex marriage is outlawed, is among a crop of Web sites that are filling the void left by conventional bridal publications.

“Outlawed,” it says. Where I live in Virginia, bank robbery and kidnapping and burglary are outlawed. You can go to jail for those kinds of things. SSM is simply not recognized; it doesn’t happen. “Outlawed” is inaccurate and tendentious. Once again, our “paper of record” shows us how it’s done. (This is not the first time this has come up.)

Part of what seems to be taking root, though, is a kind of outlaw mentality.

It is not lost on the Palladinos that despite the assertion in their publication’s name, they were wed and continue to live in one of the 41 states that prohibit same-sex marriage. But it is the very absence of state approval, they said, that made their own vows so meaningful and inspired the spirit of their magazine….

Equally Wed can seem driven by conflicting impulses. On the one hand, it is devoted to making same-sex weddings seem ordinary, providing the same obsessive attention to floral arrangement and cake design as bridal magazines. On the other, it celebrates the distinctive, norm-flouting nature of gay unions and guides participants through their specific challenges….

“There are no rules,” Kirsten Palladino said. “We can look to the history of straight weddings and take what we want and leave what we don’t.”

No rules? I want to take that and run with that a bit, since it has to do with the subtext coursing through this and most other reporting on SSM. What about the rule that tells the rest of us we need to accept all this as right and proper? There are rules we’re expected to follow, though they come out of a no-rules relativistic culture; the main one being that we must toe GLAAD’s and the Times’s line on this. SSM is on the rise, and if in moral relativism there are no rules, it follows that there are no rules against SSM. But because there are no rules, and thus there are no rules against SSM, apparently they think it follows that there is a rule against believing there’s a rule against it.

These are some of the recent trends.

Cross-posted at First Things: Evangel

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