Gary at Country Keepers had an intersting post the other day on gay marriage. Gary takes on an article at a pro gay marriage site by someone who claims to be a Christian. While I agree with Gary’s conclusions on the relevance of scripture despite technological advances, I’m not sure I’m with him on how he gets there. But that’s a post for another day. What I’d really like to talk about is the article that Gary refers to. It’s a great example, I think, of the power of what I call Intellectual Inertia.
What I mean by that is we all have convictions and opinions on a variety of things. What comes with that is the desire to believe that we are right in our opinions, intellectual inertia. That’s why once we buy something, it’s the best one available, no matter how good it actually is. If we really want something, we can convince ourselves that we can afford it whether we can or not. A few months before we bought our house, we signed a contract for a new house with a local builder. We had it all worked out; it would be fine even though it was $35,000 more than the house we ultimately bought. We would have been in deep financial doo-doo if it weren’t for some very good, and very persistent, friends who worked through the numbers repeatedly until we ‘got it’. The desire to believe was powerful and blinding.
This desire can apply to our faith as well. We want to believe that our church is the right church and we have a lock on what the Bible says on a subject. But before you spout your opinions or even before you look up the scriptures, ask your self, “What do I want to believe about this?” Be honest, because only when you’ve identified your bias can you begin to honestly read the scriptures to discover the truth. As Jesus said over and over and over and over, “he who has ears, let him hear.” The challenge is to have ears that truly hear and eyes that truly see.
Let’s take the article in question. The writer’s main point is that the current definition of ‘Biblical Marriage’ is contrived to match what is acceptable by modern society and that actual, Biblical Marriage is something that society would reject. He set out to study what biblical marriage really was and came up with the following 12 Biblical ‘Principals’ of marriage:

1 – Marriage consists of one man and one or more women
2 – Nothing prevents a man from taking on concubines in addition to the wife or wives he may already have
3 – A man might chose any woman he wants for his wife – Provided only that she is not already another man’s wife or his [half-]sister, nor the mother or the sister of a woman who is already his wife. The concept of a woman giving her consent to being married is foreign to the Biblical mindset.
4 – If a woman cannot be proven to be a virgin at the time of marriage, she shall be stoned
5 РA rapist must marry his victim РUnless she was already a fianc̩, in which case he should be put to death if he raped her in the country, but both of them killed if he raped her in town
6 – If a man dies childless, his brother must marry the widow
7 – Women marry the man of their father’s choosing
8 – Women are the property of their father until married and their husband after that
9 – The value of a woman might be approximately seven years’ work
10 – Inter-faith marriages are prohibited
11 – Divorce is forbidden
12 – Better to not get married at all – Although marriage is not a sin

To call these Biblical ‘principals’ is a stretch of the term in the very least. Some of them are actual principals, or teachings, of the Bible (#4, #5, #6, #10 and #11, although only #11 is a New testament teaching.) Some are examples of bad, although technically acceptable, ideas (the bigamy mentioned in #1) or just plain sin (#2 – As far as I can tell, God never sanctioned concubines, which would seem to be adultery, although many prominent men of the Bible had them.) Many are examples of differences in the culture of the day and now (#2, #3, #6, #7, #8 and #10). Others are simply his attempt to show that the Bible does not hold marriage in the high regard that it is usually portrayed. (#1 – I don’t think a marriage can be between a single man and multiple women, although a man may have many marriages. I don’t think that women were banned from polygamy, they were just smarter. #9 – At least he put the word ‘might’ in there.) The facts of the Bible show marriage always to be between one man and one woman, sometimes men have multiple marriages and in the past those marriages have been arranged, but that is not a Biblical requirement.
It seems that Mr. Roste went into this study with an end in minds and therefore the truth of the scriptures was of no use to him. What scares me about this is not that there are others like him willing to make the Bible say what they want. No what scares me is that I can be just like him. I get attached to these ideas and I believe that I am right and then I go out looking for scripture to back me up, not really asking the questions that lead to truth but only those that lead to the conclusion that I’ve already made. It scares me because our Lord warns us where that road of pride ultimately leads:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ – Matthew 7:21-23

So I’ve learned to question everything, especially my own motives.

VirusDoc has a post today on the California supreme court decision that catholic charities must include birth control in the health insurance coverage for employees. There are a couple of things that bother me about this story.
The first is the Catholic Charities stance of not allowing birth control prescriptions to be covered under their health plans. Are all of their employees Catholic, or are even all Catholics of the same mind in this? I would imagine not, so they are forcing their agenda on people of other faiths or opinions. The argument goes, and Eric made it in his blog, that they believe it to be offensive to God and it offends them to pay for someone else to use birth control. I find this kind of stance to be unjustifiable. No where in scripture can you point to where God says, unequivocally, that birth control is sin. Can you make an argument for it? Sure. Can you defend a position against birth control with scripture? Yep. But I can defend my position that there is no law against it with scriptures as well. So who’s right? I would say that if it’s important to you and you have deep convictions about it, by all means don’t do it. In fact, the Bible does teach that it would be sin for you to violate your conscience (Romans 14). but in the same chapter it teaches that for you to bind your opinion on me, on disputable matters, would be sin as well. What bothers me here is not that Catholics (assuming they are all of one mind on this) believe that birth control is a sin, it’s that they teach it as factual and force that opinion on others. This goes against the scriptures, Romans 14 specifically, and the spirit of love and freedom that is the New Testament message.
The second thing that bothers me is the idea that birth control is a right, and therefore must be guaranteed in legislation. VirusDoc writes:

The other aspect of this story that I find interesting is that the CA courts seem to be coming from the standpoint that contraceptives are a fundamental human right and a medical necessity. I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, but I’ve started examining the assumptions behind our country’s widespread use of contraceptives a little more carefully since I started exploring Catholicism.
Is birth control really a fundamental human right? Is it really medically necessary?

Perhaps I should clarify my trouble with this. I think that birth control is a fundamental right. We have the right to choose when we have a baby. But we have the most reliable means in and among our selves – abstinence. We don’t need pills, surgery or condoms (BTW – What to Catholics think about condoms?) to control our procreation, they only make it easier. Frankly, the Catholic endorsed rhythm method is reasonably reliable, if you’re disciplined (potentially big if). So to me the right to birth control has nothing to do with health insurance, you can have one without the other.