Tag Archives: Genesis

Re Barbara Kay’s story “The Problems with Canada’s Bill C-6 and the Gender Affirmation Model

In the National Post, columnist Barbara Kay slammed Canadian Bill C-6, which passed second reading with a majority of the House of Commons and is now under review by the justice committee. This bill seeks to criminalize “conversion therapy.” But in her article, Kay argues that the bill’s proponents are being misleading using a bait-and-switch conflation of sexual orientation with gender dysphoria. In Bill C-6 conversion therapy has been extended to mean “any treatment that slows down or dissuades a youth from early medical gender transition. In reality, sexual orientation and gender dysphoria are separate phenomena.” The balance of Kay’s column argued, “Early affirmation of a teenager’s expressed sexual orientation does no harm. But early affirmation of a teenager’s expressed desire to change his or her sex through chemistry and mutilation can lead to quite serious harm, as becomes ever more clear from public attestations by “detransitioners.” These are former transmen and transwomen who have embraced their natal sex after years of rejection, but are forever stuck with permanent physical changes, often including infertility, that are now a source of anguish.” You can read Kay’s full article at https://nationalpost.com/opinion/barbara-kay-the-problems-with-bill-c-6-and-the-gender-affirmation-model

As you can imagine National Post’s comment section on Kay’s column was pretty lively. One of those comments deprecated the Biblical narrative’s teaching on the origin of human gender by calling it myth. So I added this observation to the conversation:

Interesting article by Barbara Kay. And what is the so-called “Origin myth,” as it was referred to by a previous post, that is relevant to this conversation? “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him. He created them male and female. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’…” (Genesis 1:27-28a). Strange, isn’t it, this statement written some 3,400 years ago purportedly by Moses makes a clear case that gender was “hard-wired” from the very beginning into our biology. And what did science discover in the late 20th Century so many years later? That indeed there is DNA found in every human cell that identifies us from birth as being in reality either male or female. Even secular evolutionists would have to say that anything that subverts the propagation of a species is unhelpful or counter-productive to that species survival and therefore would naturally be “unselected” over the course of time. It ought to be evident that individuals who wholeheartedly buy into transgender ideology and allow the medical profession to make permanent physical changes to their bodies will not be among the “ancestors” of future generations of humanity. Rationally speaking, transgenderism is a dead-end.

 

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Material progress without moral development equals….

Can the network of cellulose veins in a spinach leaf, when stripped of its plant cells and replaced with human heart tissue, someday be used to repair the damage caused by heart-attacks? Or can the cellulose structure of broccoli or cauliflower, when stripped of their plant cells, be used as growing platforms for replacement lungs? Though it sounds like pure science fiction, bioengineers at the Massachusett’s Worchester Polytechnic Institute and at other research centres are working feverishly to make such ideas a reality.

While the idea of repairing or replacing failing human organs by exploiting various species of the plant kingdoms for their tissues sounds infinitely preferable to hurrying the harvest of human organs from various classes of vulnerable people—the sick, the accident victims, the criminal, and the poor—the unanticipated consequences of such technological innovation can never be fully seen at its beginning. Who would have thought that  when our scientists first started studying physics to understand the nature of our physical world that such knowledge would eventually lead to the production of today’s horrific weapons of mass destruction?

The Scriptures recount that the Ultimate Bioengineer of the Universe once intervened in humanity’s technological development to slow us down. Why? Because He understood in observing our material “progress” that “Nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (See Genesis 11:6). Until our moral and ethical development catches up with our materialistic abilities, unanticipated consequences will render our current civilization increasingly subject to problems and disasters.

The news story which is the basis for this commentary is at: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/scientists-convert-spinach-leaves-into-human-heart-tissue-that-beats

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Evil deserves Justice


How do we, as a society, effectively respond to evil? This week the B.C. Supreme Court Justice Robert Johnston sentenced Kruse Hendrik Wellwood, 17, and Cameron Alexander Moffat, 18, to life in prison with no possibility for parole for 10 years. They were convicted by a large amount of grisly evidence and by the testimony of their own mouths.

What was the crime Wellwood and Moffat committed? Judge Johnston said,
“It goes without saying first-degree murder with intent to kill is the most serious of offences. The circumstances of this murder as admitted by the young persons are so horrific that no words can adequately convey the inhumane cruelty these young men show Miss [Kimberly] Proctor. They planned in advance to sexually assault and kill Miss Proctor. They chose her because they thought she would be an easy target, not necessarily because either of them had any ill will towards her.”

After sentencing, outside the courtroom, Fred Proctor, the father of Kimberly Proctor, said of Wellwood and Moffat, “To me they’re just monsters and monsters are not rehabilitatable.” Mr. Proctor disputed the appropriateness of the judge’s sentence arguing that the murderers deserved the death penalty for their actions.

Wellwood and Moffat lured Kimberly Proctor to Wellwood’s home in a Victoria, B.C., suburb where they bound and gagged her, raped her, beat her to the point of breaking bones, strangled her, mutilated her body with a knife, performed necrophilia, put her body in the freezer and then dumped her body in a lonely public park, setting fire to the remains in an effort to destroy any evidence. Victoria’s Times-Colonist, April 5, 2011, reported:

“Psychiatric and psychological reports on the teens—who were 16 and 17 at the time of the murder—show they are at a high risk to re-offend violently and sexually. The reports also show there is little chance they can be rehabilitated.”

These two young men admitted deriving an overwhelming adrenalin rush from inflicting pain, suffering, and death on another human being. They exhibited a complete lack of conscience, empathy, and heart. Doing evil gave them pleasure. In fact, their blood lust was driving them to repeat their monstrous offense. When police finally caught up with them, the sadistic teen murderers had already identified their next victim.

So, ten years from now, should Wellwood and Moffat get their parole and be released at ages 27 and 28, respectively, would you like them living next to you? Talking to your daughter or granddaughter? That’s what our present legal system is planning. Is this justice? Or is this a perversion, a mockery of genuine justice?

What is the just thing to do with our “Wormwood and Malediction?” Well, if our society had not turned its back on the God of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures we would know exactly what to do with these monsters. We would know which laws should to be enacted and enforced to effectively produce a society of increasing peacefulness rather than the one Kimberly Proctor found herself living in.

But, of course, these days our mainstream media, as a general rule, mocks the Creator God and ignores His teachings. Our media’s gatekeepers shutout and marginalize as eccentrics and troglodites those social conservatives who would point us back to humanity’s original instruction book as the source for understanding the nature of justice and its administration.

But instead we see a secular society that is increasingly clueless about how to effectively “weed and feed” the ordinary garden variety type of human dandelions much less how to actually cut off by the roots the noxious giant hogweed sort of evil among us. Consequently what we see is a society where the value of human life is on sale and getting cheaper by the day as we degenerate.

You and I are stuck with a practically unaffordable big government legal system that spawns systemic injustices of all sorts leading inevitably to crowded, revolving door Club Feds from which people like Wormwood and Malediction walk out scot free after a few years of being fed, housed, and supervised at great public expense.

How long will this go on? I would guess until we learn our lessons.

The first lesson is that any society that cuts itself off from its Creator eventually becomes corrupt, filled with violence, brutal, and cruel, engendering many  individuals who lack natural human affection (cf. Genesis 6:11 & 2 Timothy 3:1-4).

The second lesson is that the “Fear of the Lord is the foundation of true knowledge,
but fools despise wisdom and discipline” (Proverbs 1:7 New Living Translation).

Now when it comes to properly rewarding murderers, the Creator has something to say to those charged with administering justice:

And I will require the blood of anyone who takes another person’s life. If a wild animal kills a person, it must die. And anyone who murders a fellow human must die. If anyone takes a human life, that person’s life will also be taken by human hands. For God made human beings in his own image (Genesis 9:5-6 NLT).

As a society, we have a God-given responsibility to administer justice to cold-blooded murderers by executing them. This is the instruction of the Creator God who made man and woman in His image and breathed into them the breath of life. The consequences to our society for its failure to atone for the shedding of innocent blood by executing convicted murderers is to bring some measure of blood guilt upon our entire community (cf. Deuteronomy 19:13 and 21:8-9). As a direct result of our lack of motivation to see justice done as prescribed by the God of Justice, it will not go well with our communities. As it was written so long ago,

Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the LORD your God is giving you (Deuteronomy 16:20 English Standard Version).

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When the Land of the Rising Sun coveted the Sun’s power

They’re called the Fukushima Fifty. This is a relatively small group of lower to mid-level managers, technicians, firemen, and electrical workers who are struggling to stop a nuclear disaster at the earthquake and tsunami-damaged Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant. The Fukushima Fifty were left holding the bag for the political and economic elites who made the decision in the first place to use nuclear power to generate electricity.

However, the designation “Fukushima Fifty” is actually something of a misnomer. In reality there are about 200 men divided into four shifts of 50 who are actually engaged in the round-the-clock struggle to restore human control over four of the six damaged nuclear reactors as well as to re-establish safe storage for a vast quantity of spent reactor cores that are stored at the power plant.

Reliable information is sketchy. But already some of the original Fukushima Fifty, maybe five, have died. Another dozen or so have sustained injuries and have been replaced. Those still desperately trying to fix the Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant realize, however, that they are merely dead men walking due to the enormous quantities of radiation that their bodies are receiving. But in their quiet Japanese stoicism, the Fukushima Fifty carry on. Their duty is clear. Spare their nation and the rest of the world from the worst of the possible consequences of our collective human misjudgement, or die trying.

The self-sacrificing courage of the Fukushima Fifty is worthy of praise. These are brave men. They are heroes. Yet, the ability of some humans to muster great courage in the face of terrible danger is not the issue.

What lead us to believe in the first place: “We can control the Sun’s power of nuclear reaction. We can become rich from the energy that comes by splitting the building blocks of the universe! Indeed, aren’t we Homo sapiens, wise men? If we can think it, we can most certainly do it!” The real issue of our time is our human pride. Far too many of us think we can take to ourselves the prerogatives of God without reaping the awful, horrendous consequences that come from such arrogance.

Still, for some time now people in a variety of nations have argued against the wisdom of employing nuclear energy to fuel our economic growth and comfortable lifestyles. But these voices of caution have been largely ignored and a massive new construction program for greatly enlarging nuclear power generation is being planned in many nations.

Yet for the Land of the Rising Sun in particular, their embrace of nuclear energy to generate massive quantities of electricity was always a bargain with the Devil. They should have known better. After all, they had first experienced the pointy edge of the Sun’s nuclear power at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War. And haven’t the Japanese always known that their homeland composed of islands on the Pacific Rim is a veritable supermarket of natural disasters?

Nevertheless, the Japanese like the Americans, Canadians, Brits, Russians, French, Germans, Indians, Chinese, Iranians, and all the rest have thought they could safely control this power of the Sun.

Humanity has long been disposed to thinking that we can be our own gods and decide for ourselves what is good or evil rather than accept divine revelation as our guide to morality as well as to economics.

“And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life also was in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…. And the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it [guard it, i.e. protect it from despoliation or contamination so that it would continue to be life-supporting]. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden. But you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat of it in dying you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:7-9, 15-17).

From the time of our earliest ancestors we have resisted the instructions given to us by the Creator God of the Universe. The land surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant probably cannot be safely inhabited for 10,000 years after the nuclear meltdown of 1986. While the human death count from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster varies widely according to different analyses (4,000 to 200,000 cancer deaths), the question remains how can the use of nuclear power be reconciled with the divine command to “dress and keep ” our life-sustaining earthly garden of Eden?

And what will be the toll in Japan? How much of Japan will become uninhabitable due to the contamination of nuclear radiation? How many people will die of cancers? The price for presumptuously taking to ourselves the prerogatives of God will be increasingly costly not only in Japan, but throughout the world.

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