Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Three Topics: Representatives of what/whom? Can We be God? Flawed Messaging?

Representatives of the People or the Constitution?
I fail to understand why some people get upset when their representative or representatives in the US congress or their state legislator or legislators, etc., disregard what appears to be the majority of the people's wishes in that particular district or state.  I agree that most representative things should be, you know, representative of whatever they are supposed to be representative of.. But, politicians should not actually be proper representatives.  Last time I checked, politicians do not make an oath to carry out their duties as a politician along the same lines as what the majority of the populace in their representative area wish for them to support. Simply being a representative representative leads to mob rule, which does not quite happen to be what the Founding Fathers intended..  

Instead, I have this silly thought that the representatives should not be representative to the people whom they are representing, unless there is a completely gray area that is being discussed, and should actually be carrying out what the Constitution says they should be doing.  Politicians do not swear to defend the people and all of their many wishes, but to defend the Constitution.  Of course the number of politicians that actually believe that they should defend the Constitution and then carry that out with their actions are few and far between, but I still think that you have to begin with one of the root symptoms of the problem instead of simply attacking politicians with the flawed Constitutional premise that politicians are not truly 'representing' the people by not carrying out whatever the majority of people desire.

Do We Get to be God?
(Here's an even quicker thought, though it grabbed some other flawed premises to make it about the same length as the first discussion point..) I do not understand why some people say that Christians need to BE THE GOSPEL.  How does that even make sense?  I cannot be the Gospel. How can I be God?  We can spread the Gospel certainly, but in no sense of the term can we actually BE the Gospel.

The 'Be The Gospel' kind of thinking tends to run alongside other great beliefs such as, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual, or Jesus is above religion, etc.  In regards to the I'm not religious, I'm spiritual comment, while I would be tempted to just flippantly say to these fine folks that indeed they are not religious and are consequently not actually Christians, that would probably be the wrong thing to do.  While some of them are indeed not Christians, certainly this is not the case for all of them.  This may actually be one of the rare times where improperly judging others may actually apply, and, as such, since we do not get to be the final arbitrate we should not come out and say that those people are not Christians..  However, that obviously still does not at all mean that we should not attempt to convince them that their statement is contrary to the Bible, and attempt to convince them that both 'spirituality' and religion are quite important in Christianity. 

(In general I'm not actually a big fan of 'spirituality'.. Partially because of the lack of common definition, for instance it can mean such things as, relating to ecclesiastical law belonging to the church, attachment to religious values, or, the most common meaning, relating to a person's spirit.  Which leads me to my second main reason as why I think 'spirituality' or being 'spiritual' happen to be silly terms.  What does it even mean for something to 'relate' to a person's spirit?  It doesn't really mean anything.  What it means for one person could be almost entirely different to another person.  The terms that I find which define spirituality and spiritual provide definitions that either do not help an argument for Christians to be more spiritual than religious or provide amorphous definitions that do not truly define anything.)

I find the Jesus is above religion comment to be just a bit pretentious, among other things anyways.  This statement is much like saying that Jesus is above grace or above belief...  Is the Lord above all things?  Certainly, but this is an argument on a different level (I'm not even certain if I nail down the proper level here, since I really think that statements such as Jesus is above religion are just one of the Devil's ways to attempt for Christianity and Christ to lose their proper definitions, so that even so called Christians will not truly be Christians.).  What this Jesus is above religion saying may really be trying to get at is a difference of semantics, with the consequences of those redefinitions being a weakening of a person's faith.  

While it is definitely possible to define religion a bit differently, religion may effectively be simply defined as the following:  Religion is a belief in some sort of deity.  The statement that Jesus is above religion simply does not make any coherent sense.  Are you trying to say that it is not necessary to believe in Christ?  Are you trying to say that Christ is not a deity (much less THE Deity)?  Your logical framework is fundamentally flawed and makes no sense.  While obviously the vast majority of religions do not lead to Heaven (maybe this is the point of the saying?), Christianity does point the true way to Heaven. Christianity is a means to Heaven, a means to spending eternity with Christ.  

Last I checked, Christ said that He alone is the narrow path to Heaven. Trying to unwind the intertwining of religion and Christ simply does not work. We need to believe in Christ's death on the cross, His resurrection, His 100% Godness, etc., to be Christians.  How is it possible to have an ocean yet no water within it?  How is it possible to be with Christ come Judgment Day and yet be saved without faith?  While Christ and Christianity are, or course, not of the same essence, there are plenty of interweaving parts wherein it is impossible to have Christianity without Christ and it is impossible to reach Christ without Christianity, without belief in Christ and God giving us saving grace.  There are no other means by which a person may be saved, Christ has laid out the only path to heaven.  We are saved by God's grace through faith in Christ given to us by the Holy Spirit.

The Flawed Messaging of Pro-Marriage and Pro-Life Groups
Why do pro-marriage groups tend to brand themselves as being against 'gay' marriage and pro traditional marriage? There is only one kind of marriage: marriage between a man and a woman. God set the standard, mankind cannot redefine it. You are either pro marriage or you are for redefining it, there is no middle ground where you should defend marriage on the basis of it being 'traditional'.

While pro-lifers tend to get more of their branding right, I certainly have plenty of problems with their messaging as well. For instance, occasionally you may see billboards that say something along the lines of, “My heart beat 30 days from conception.” I am guessing that the point that Pro-Lifers of America and other groups are trying to propose is that babies are in fact humans, so through the advertisement's messaging they are trying to humanize the babies. While I think that this is a somewhat decent idea and all, I think that it still misses the, uh, heart of the issue.

If we were to all accept that babies are alive once their heart starts beating, then what? If a person 'sheart stops for an instant, can they be killed in that instant? Or does the heart have to stop beating for longer than an instant? Can a person be killed if they have numerous heart palpitations in a day? Or does the line for killing a person begin 'legally' if that person is under cardiac arrest? Why set premises that give your opponent the means they need to murder children? If you say that murdering children is legal at any point beyond conception, then there will still be a vast number of abortions  (see that as murders of little children) that will take place in that 'murder legal' zone. And if for some reason you think that there will not be any doctors who would be willing to perform murders even if a child is only a few days from being delivered and there are pragmatic laws against said murders, then I have some children in Pennsylvania to show you. NO, WAIT, I cannot show you those children because those children happen to be DEAD.

Knowing that there are billions of people going to Hell should probably be the saddest thing in my life.  But, for whatever reason, a fair amount of the time, I tend to be the most saddened and angered by all of the abortions which take place in America and across the world.  I get extremely frustrated with the ticky-tack, go along to get along, pragmatic policies of the pro-lifers who, while they may save a few kids here and there, in general, those who want to murder children will find a way to keep the murder factories running and accept the human sacrifices before the pragmatic regulations would take effect anyways. In conceding that life beings at some point after conception, pro-lifers may as well be waving the white flag.
.
Pro-lifers need to have some sort of higher standard.  If everyone simply went basing their decisions on what science proves, then I've got some news for you, we would all be liable to be killed at any instant. Even when there is some sort of general consensus about an issue there will still almost always be plenty of dissenters who do not see that issue in that particular light. Science can prove nothing. Science can set no true lasting standard.  There is always more potential knowledge which could be learned that would put things into an entirely new perspective. Only lasting things get to set the lasting standards.  If only there would just be some sort of truly lasting thing, some sort of eternal deity that laid down the standards.  If only there would be some sort of eternal deity who would have happened  to step into history at some point and put into place the proper definitions of laws that humans should follow.  If only...

No comments:

Post a Comment