I've avoided this topic for far too long. It's not because I am not clear about my understanding, or try to live a world where I avoid conflict. I've been a little convicted after listening and watching a presentation concerning the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, where his understanding about hot topics of the day require action and not passivity. German churches went with passivity and things got twisted.
Duck calls have brought us to a point of discussion, but as usual we don't get to the heart of discussion, we just flirt with issues that are not the real issues.
We begin to have a discussion about freedom of speech, it's really not about that. Phil's not in jail for what he said. We move to how Phil spoke about it, like a guy from the woods down south HAS to speak about these matters in a way that validates us, it's not about that. To me this whole thing is about faulty views concerning tolerance.
A free society allows things to be up for discussion. Nazi Germany didn't allow for that, dissenting voices were murdered by the state(that's different than losing money for a TV show by the way). All of the discussion here centers on love, acceptance, tolerance. Tolerance seems to be redefined as every opinion about every subject is valid. There are a lot of opinions out there. If there is a God, and if His opinion matters, it would be a priority to come in line with how he views things. How he views things has been made pretty clear…Romans 1:21-27
21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Christians have to get over the idea of getting everyone to see things the way they do. Understand that first century Christians had no delusion that they were the majority in any moral discussion. The offense that people feel comes from the idea of tolerance that comes our way. It claims to extol the virtue of every opinion, true and valid. Christians then get excluded as having a position on a subject that stands opposed to the current stream of thought. Our struggle here isn't really a freedom of speech issue, it's a definition of tolerance issue.
For mean tolerance is a pretty low value anyway. Imagine…"I tolerate you." God asks us to love, which is different than accept every idea. Honor one another. I can treat you with great respect and disagree with you. To me, this is the core of our problem right now. I don't have to dehumanize people that look at something different than me. In the end, if we believe in God, know that He is our judge, we can just leave it at that. For those who care nothing about God or His expectations, our opinions(what they perceive as simply our opinions) won't matter to them. Jesus had a saying for that, he who has ears, let them hear.
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