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Showing posts from May, 2016

Transgender: the Facts, the Lies, and Our Hope

By now, most Americans are aware of the joint letter issued from the Departments of Education and Justice directing all public schools to ensure “transgender students a supportive and non-discriminatory school environment.” According to the statement issued by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, transgender students must be allowed access to the bathroom and locker room on the basis of the sex with which they identify , not according to their biological sex. She continued, “This guidance gives administrators, teachers, and parents the tools they need to protect transgender students from peer harassment and to identify and address unjust school policies.” She went on to compare separate bathrooms for boys and girls to Jim Crow laws that further legalized racial segregation by creating separate bathrooms for blacks and whites. Consequently, public schools can comply with the new ruling or face forfeiture of federal funding. Although a host of angry responses have followed the ma

Spurgeon Doesn't Help Us With Trump

“ Of two evils, choose neither ." Spurgeon's quote has been posted numerous times on social media by Christians who find themselves in a moral conundrum at the very thought of voting for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Here’s the problem with Spurgeon’s idea. Biblically there is no such thing as a choice between two evils. Let me explain. Moral philosophers and theologians have long spoken of the problem of "tragic moral choice", also known as the “incommensurability in values.” The man on the street simply calls it “choosing between the lesser of two evils.”   The best known example of tragic moral choice is the one about the Nazis during WW II. Do you handover the Jews knowing that your choice makes you complicit in their deaths? Or do you lie and violate the Ninth Commandment? The Lutheran scholar, John Warwick Montgomery, has argued that such choices are unavoidable and of necessity cause us to sin. The Bible, however, takes a dim view of the