18 February 2024
My mission and calling is to bring people closer to God's ways on this earth. A major part has always been shifting from our pagan cultural background to a more biblical perspective. Writers like Pageau, Heiser, and others we will review on this blog have added a strong background to help us move in the right direction. Let me provide an example from my personal journey.
Say what you will about musical tastes, but we all tend to like what we like. Music is an element of decoration that helps us to keep peace between time and space. It's not all good. There is a ton of room to hammer at the sheer marketing schlock of the Contemporary Christian Music industry from the 1980s through today. Jewels are hard to find. Sometimes it's the artists themselves being used by the industry, and sometimes it's just a few songs that seemed to speak to our needs regardless of the artists.
There was a fellow named Rick Cua (pronounced "koo-ah" as one album title notes) who was a truly excellent bass guitar player, and wrote a bunch of songs and recorded a bunch of albums. Most of the time, his singing voice did not come across as solo quality; his best hits included backing vocals from others. Too many of his songs are just a pile of cliches, and very tiresome. He's not a favorite, but a few of his songs did become hits for the simple reason they spoke to the audience.
One of his best songs was "Don't Say Suicide". There's a video version that drowns you in cliches, but the recording itself is a fine example of the musical genre. I like it, despite how it promotes a distinctly western outlook on the problem of suicide in America and tries to pass it off as Christian.
The real issue with suicide is not that life is so precious; it isn't. Nor is life in itself worth living. Rather, the sin in suicide is the cowardice of refusing to face this life as God's mission for you. He put us here for a reason: to glorify His name. There are a lot of ways to fail that, and suicide is just one of them. This life is supposed to suck; handle it.
In the video, a particular emphasis is put on youth suicide. As I've said so many times before, western culture idolizes youth and turns it into a fairy tale. This is a major abomination in western culture. In the Hebrew outlook, youth is a difficult and crippled up time of life in which you hope you can survive and learn enough to become a worthy adult. In general, Hebrew men ignored children. When Jesus called a child to the center of His teaching session with the disciples, that was an exceedingly rare moment.
It's not as if Hebrew men didn't love their own children. Indeed, they were a gift from God and the future of the nation. However, the logic of how they reacted in daily life to children and childhood was fundamentally different from ours primarily because they didn't suffer from our sickening idolatry of youth. It's this fundamental lust for being young again, of ignoring the blessings of aging and maturity, that twists our society and economy into something hideous in God's eyes.
Even the peculiar way westerners seek to discipline youth is part of a schizophrenic, bipolar obsession with youth itself. It's an obsession with drawing excessively detailed boundaries, whether it's restricted or indulgent, because indulgence means protection and vigorous boundaries against those who would intrude on the magical fairy tale.
Folks, the Bible doesn't say anything at all about pedophilia because it simply wasn't an issue in Hebrew society. I'm not saying it didn't happen; I'm saying it was a tiny issue either way. The kind of seriously damaged people that were sexually attracted to children in any specific way was exceedingly rare. Contrast that with our society, in which the majority of men are part pedophile and dare not admit it, even to themselves.
Most child sexual abuse that occurred in biblical times was actually not pedophilia at all, just the broad and filthy idolatry that used sex as a ritual. The child was just an object in the ritual; the sex itself was the thing. It could have just as easily been any receptacle for a man's penis, including animals. It was not pedophilia, but omni-sexuality. We simply have no cultural conception of what it meant in the Ancient Near East.
I would go so far as to say that child sexual abuse is not in itself satanic, but the silly notion that it is satanic is one of Satan's lies. Rather, the whole gamut of improper sexual expression is the real problem, and the molestation of children is simply nothing special in the biblical outlook.
We must cross a vast chasm of space and time to get back to the truth of God's Word.
This document is public domain; spread the message.