Do you wonder what’s going on in organized religion these days? Or, as Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself put it, “When the son of man returns, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8)
Maybe He’d better hurry, if He wants to find it.
Exhibit A: The latest conform-to-this-world howler by an alleged biblical scholar. “Dr. Dershowitz is a biblical scholar,” prates The New York Times—like they would know. So they published this piece by this guy named Dershowitz—yeah, but he’s from Harvard!—who asks us to believe that the Book of Leviticus “originally” permitted homosexual sex. The Leviticus we’ve got in our Bibles is just some Johnny-come-lately’s party-pooping rewrite.
How does he know this? Has he seen this lost grand-daddy of Leviticus? Found a scrap of parchment with a fragment of writing that so much as hints that God is cool with gay sex? And therefore we can go right ahead with turning our whole culture upside-down, because we have permission from on high.
Well, not exactly. Mr. Scholar hasn’t gotten around to offering us any evidence as yet. You see, the only Leviticus we have, going back to the Dead Sea scrolls, says no: in fact, it enjoins a death penalty on any pair of simpletons who get it on in front of two or more witnesses—although anyone that stupid would probably not survive toddlerhood. Our biblical scholar just wants a permissive Leviticus, so he declares that some such Leviticus must have existed in the distant past, is now unfortunately lost, but can be reconstructed by wiz kids like himself.
It beats unloading freight cars for a living.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, a Catholic priest has been punished by his diocese… for preaching Catholic teachings.
Ireland, which St. Patrick left a Christian country, has, by a vote, legalized abortion. The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is a sin: you could look it up. So the priest told his Dublin congregation that anyone who voted for abortion needs to go to confession, because he or she has consented to as mortal sin.
The higher-ups swiftly yanked him out of his parish and reassigned him to a convent where he’s not allowed to preach. They can’t have Catholic priests preaching Catholic doctrine. Some atheist might get mad at them: might even make fun of them. Horrors.
We are not told whether the diocese has, so far, hired any biblical scholars to discover that a lot copy of the Ten Commandments makes it okay to butcher unborn babies. But give them time. If they can’t find one in Ireland, they can always borrow Dr. Dershowitz from Harvard.
It would be nice to see the churches standing for the things they’re supposed to stand for—like the sacredness of human life, real marriage, real family, the real Bible. But then they’d have to choose to be un-hip, un-cool, and risk losing the approval of The New York Times. That’s way too much to ask: the Western world’s modern equivalent to martyrdom. Think of the trouble the early Christians could have saved themselves, if only they could have found a biblical scholar to tell them it was all right to offer sacrifices to the Roman emperor. St. Peter could have retired to a nice villa in Davos, and maybe made some real money. St. Paul could have become a fixture on the Roman talk show circuit, if they’d had one.
If the churches will not stand for truth, the rest of us will have to stand for it without them.
I have discussed these and other topics throughout the week on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/. Why not stop in for a visit? A single click will take you there.
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